Granddaddy raised his eyebrows and his glass. He took a sip and so did she, wincing. She’d had a taste of bourbon here and there—the house was full of the stuff—but she hadn’t had nearly enough to get used to it yet. She hadn’t even figured out coffee yet.
“Your mother claims she caught you two rolling in the hay.”
She flushed crimson. Bad enough talking about Levi with her mother. If she had a shovel, she would dig her own grave with it right now.
“There was hay, but no rolling,” she said. “I asked him to kiss me on my birthday, and he kissed me on my birthday. Tomorrow’s not my birthday, so he won’t kiss me tomorrow.”
“You sound a little disappointed about that.”
She shrugged and sat back, her arms clutching her pillow. When she exhaled through her nose, the window turned into a cloud.
“You like him?” her granddaddy asked her. He reached out and pinched her toe. How drunk was he? Very, she guessed. Very very. “Tamara, answer me?”
She laughed at the toe pinch. “Yes, I like him.”
“How much do you like him?”
“I don’t know. A lot?” She finally met her grandfather’s eyes. He was smiling, but the smile didn’t make her feel any better. This was the last conversation in the history of conversations she wanted to be having with her grandfather.
“A lot, huh?” Granddaddy sat back and kicked his boots off. They landed on the little pink rug by her rocking chair and left a boot polish stain. She didn’t care. She was so sick of pink she was ready to burn the house down to get rid of it all.
“A lot. More than a lot, whatever that is.”
“I’ve noticed you and him talking before.”
“Only talking.”
“He dotes on you.”
“He does not. He’s mean to me. He tells me I’m lazy and he makes me muck the stalls and he says I’m spoiled rotten. He even calls me Rotten. I don’t think he’s ever called me by my name.”
“I used to call your grandmother Ornery because she was the orneriest woman I ever met. Drove me crazy when she was younger. I couldn’t keep my hands off her.”
“Granddaddy, really. I don’t want to hear any of that at all, now or ever.”
“You’re old enough now to hear about things you don’t want to hear about.”
“I still don’t want to hear about them.”
He sighed and nodded.
“Such a pretty girl you’ve turned into,” he said. “I’m surprised Levi’s the only boy we’ve had trouble with over you.”
“Y’all send me to an all-girls school, remember?”
“It’s a good school.”
“It’s an all-girls school,” she said again.
“I went to an all-boys school, Millersburg Military. Best school in the state.”
“Great. Can I go there instead?”
“And you wonder why we try to keep a close eye on you,” he said, giving her a smile. “Maybe we should have kept a closer eye.”
“Momma’s only mad because she hates Levi for no good reason.”
“She has good reason.”
“I know he’s older than me, but he’s not that much older. And he’s good with the horses. And Momma said either I had to let her fire Levi or she’d give Kermit to the glue factory. I can’t live without Levi. I can’t live without Kermit. Is she trying to kill me?”
“You won’t die without Levi.”
“Maybe I will,” she said. She might. Stranger things had happened. “I don’t get why Momma hates him anyway, other than I think she hates everybody.”
Granddaddy sighed another one of his Granddaddy sighs. She smelled cigar and bourbon in that sigh. She wanted to open the window.
“There’s something you don’t know about Levi you need to know. Long time ago, Levi’s mother used to work for me. She cleaned the Red Thread offices.”
“She was a janitor?”
“Cleaning lady.”
Tamara felt a stab of pity for Levi. Growing up the son of a cleaning lady must not have been easy. She knew his mother was already dead, but he’d never mentioned that she used to clean for Granddaddy. “Momma hates him because his mother used to be a cleaning lady?”
“Tamara, honey, his mother was black. You didn’t know that?”
Tamara narrowed her eyes at her grandfather.
“What?”
“She was.”
“But he’s—”
“He’s light skinned. But he’s not white.”
There wasn’t a word to express Tamara’s shock.
“But how—”
“His daddy was white,” Granddaddy said with a shrug. “Happens sometimes. And you never know which way the baby will go—light or dark or a mix of both.”
“But he’s got blue eyes. That’s a recessive trait. We learned about it in biology. I had to do a Mendel chart on eye color. He’d have to be white on both sides to have blue eyes.”
Granddaddy chuckled again and she didn’t know what he found so funny. She didn’t find this a bit funny at all. Her mother hated Levi because his mother was black? That was the worst thing she’d ever heard in her life.
The worst thing.
Ever.
In her life.
“Most of them have a little white way back. Our doing, of course. That doesn’t make him white, though. My parents were both right-handed and here I am, a lefty. You think my momma was stepping out with the milkman?”
Tamara ignored the question. Her mother had called Levi “boy” and Levi had seemed to take more offense at that than Tamara thought made sense. She got called “girl” all the time, but even she knew there was a big difference between calling a white boy “boy” and a black boy “boy.”
“That’s why Momma hates Levi?”
“She is not very happy about his parentage, we’ll say that.”
“I don’t care if he’s part black or part red or part green. I don’t care who his mother was, or his father. If his father was Hitler and his mother was Diana Ross, I wouldn’t care at all.”
She might care, but only because she really liked Diana Ross.
“But I care who your mother is. And who your father is.”
“I don’t.”
“You do and you know you do. You’re a Maddox and that means something. You’re special, Tamara.”
“I don’t see why. Not like I had any choice in it.”
“Doesn’t matter. The Queen of England was born the Queen of England. She can’t change being queen, but she can decide what kind of queen she’s going to be—a good queen or a bad queen. And you have the same choice.”
“Okay, I’ll be the Queen of England, then.”
“You’ll be something better than that. You’ll be my queen. And you will run the whole kingdom of Red Thread. You and me, Tamara, we’re special. We’re the only two people on this earth with Jacob