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A frown appeared on Mr. O’s face. He opened the folder in his hand and riffled through it. “Hannah Bennett? That’s her name right? Got her folder here.”
“Her mama named her after my mama. She’s not a James, but she’s close enough.”
“Hannah’s not seven. She’s nine—according to these records here. Yes, Hannah Bennett. Born March 21, 1943. She’s nine. Unless there’s some discrepancy about it. Maybe you better go get the mother and have her explain…”
A flood of blood filled his ears. Hannah was nine? The vision of her pretzel-stick thin legs and arms invaded his mind and he couldn’t think or hear. “Nine?” Nine. Nine. The word for no in German as well as a number. No. No. No.
He turned and ran as fast as he could out of Mr. O’s office, hating he had sent Cat away from her daughter. Her daughter? His daughter? Named for his mother? As dark as he was? How else was it possible for light tan Cat to have such a dark child herself if it weren’t for a dark father?
He just assumed, so wrong to think it, that Cat had moved on without him, just as the little girl said, that there were some other men to fill the void in her life. What man would be able to resist Cat of the long legs and the throaty voice that sounded like an angel when she sang? There had to have been someone else.
Times like these, when he was pressed to go fast, was when the pain came the most intensely and threatened to cut him into two. He wanted to stop, and take a breath, but she had left, probably for the streetcar stop and he had to find her, get her to explain this messed up math. Rounding the corner, he saw her, reach one of those gorgeous legs onto the platform of the street car.
“Cat! Wait!” He called out, and every breath was a ragged agony. The dirty air and soot from the steel mills just about a mile away didn’t make things any easier.
Cat turned her beautiful face to him, but started up the steps.
How could she?
She saw him running to her as fast as he could. Would she pay the car fare and watch him struggle to reach her from the back window of the trolley? Would she be so cruel?
He had been that cruel to her once. It would serve him right if she left him, just as he had left her, emotionally spent. But, she came down off of the street car and stood back on the corner watching the car go past her, continuing on to its destination, well past her just as he reached her.
“What do you want? I’m going to have to wait another whole hour to get back now and they won’t hold my job.”
He laid his hands on her shoulders, not sure if she would twist herself away from him and his touch, but he had to know. “Cat, look, I need to know. Is Hannah mine?”
She tossed head back and laughed at him. She would have done better to hit him. Laughing at him just made him feel foolish. The pain of a hit would go away faster.
“Isn’t that what you told your precious Mr. O so she could stay in there, where they don’t want Negro children? Where I’m forced to leave my child and go back to work so she can be where people don’t want her?”
“Woman I said, is she mine?”
“Of course, she’s yours. She looks just like you. Same color as you, black as the ace of spades.”
He had thought his heart was going as fast as it could go, but he was wrong. Looking down at his hands his pulse lived and became visible in his hands. “Dear God. Cat, why didn’t you tell me?”
The look on her face was of stark terror. “I waited. I waited and waited. You said you were going to write me, so I could know how to get in touch with you. You were going to come back to Pittsburgh and you didn’t. You never even introduced me to your family, so I could tell them. I was just someone off with you, wasn’t I?”
“No!” Unexpected energy ripped the words from him. “No, nothing like that.”
Cat stood there, a little smirk crossing her lips. “Well, you sure have a funny way of showing it, Myron.”
“I always loved you, Cat, I wanted you. But the war. The war did things. Things you don’t want to know about. Things that changed me. I couldn’t come back to you. Not the way I was. Never that for you. It was better that you find someone else, someone to be strong for you. When I saw you, I thought you did and I was happy for you. Sad for me, but happy for you.”
She tossed her head and her hat shifted a bit. “I tried to move on. It didn’t work out.”
“What was Andie talking about someone being mean to you?”
“I got married two years ago. He liked to use his hands on me and so I left him. Divorce came through a few months ago.”
Praise God. Even though the knowledge lit a new fire in his belly. He would kill this man who dared put his hands on Cat. “Who was he?”
“No one you know. Why would you care anyway? If it wasn’t for the grace of God, you would have never known, never cared about us.”
He couldn’t deny what she said was true.
What a mess of things he had made.
