At this point, the edges of the room go a little dark. I’d like to take a sip of coffee—poor thing’s getting cold, sitting there in my lap like that—but I’m afraid my hand will tremble. So I just clench the handle with my right thumb and forefinger, while I clench the saucer with the left. Sew my lips into a smile. Focus my vision on the tip of Anson’s oversized nose. The cleft at the tip of his damned chin, chipped from ice.
He moves. Picks up his coffee with a steady hand. Sips, savors. Savors what, I don’t know. It’s just black coffee, nothing else. You have to be a brute to drink coffee like that, a brute as bitter as the brew you’re swallowing.
“Tell me, Miss Kelly,” he says, setting down the cup in the saucer and resuming his pose against the desk, legs crossed at the ankles, not a care in the world, “when was the last time you saw your stepfather?”
AS IT so happens, I can name the exact hour I last saw my stepfather, though I’m not going to inform Special Agent Oliver Anson of the Bureau of Internal Revenue of that fact. I’m not going to inform Anson of anything, see, because the word informer, where I come from, carries about the same ugly weight of blasphemy as the word for a man who engages in a certain intimate act with his nearest maternal relation, from time to time. (Yes, that word.) So what I’m about to say remains right here betwixt you and me, understand? Nobody likes a rat.
The hour was dawn. End of August, nineteen hundred and twenty. Hot as the dickens. Yours truly was up early, gathering the eggs from the miserable henhouse out back, while the sunlight crept down the mountainside and the warm mist coated the grass. In another week, I was supposed to be heading back to college, and by God I should have been counting down the seconds. Not that I especially loved college and the sneering razor-nosed girls who inhabited the joint, oh no. You see, by the time of that burning August of 1920, River Junction had taken on all the aspects of an earthly perdition for me. That’s why I woke up early—not because the eggs needed gathering, although they did, but because nobody else was up. You could stand there in the middle of the chicken coop and watch the creeping of the sun, the stir of the mist, the slow, deliberate greening of the landscape, and your only company was the hens. The birds whistling good morning from the branches of a nearby birch. The damp earth smelling of loam and chicken shit. You know the feeling. Your feet planted firm in the center of all Creation.
Until he turned up, anyway.
He. Him. My mother’s husband. Name of Dennis, but everybody calls him Duke. Duke Kelly. The dear soul was so kind as to bequeath me his surname when he married my mother, and I do believe he’s been aiming to collect the debt in installments ever since.
Now, first and foremost, you have to understand that everybody in River Junction loves Duke. Loves him! He’s not the mayor, but he’s the next closest thing: the mayor’s best pal. Friendly fellow, every brick of him mortared with charm. Dresses in clean, neat clothes; brushes back his dark, curling mane with just the right dollop of peppermint hair oil. You’d like him too, if you happened to be stopping in River Junction for a cup of coffee at the depot café, and he happened to be sitting at the next table drinking his own cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette he’d rolled himself right then. He would strike up a conversation with you, ask you where you were headed, tell you that’s a right nice-looking car you got out there, or else if your car’s a jalopy, remark on your right nice-looking wife. Offer you a cigarette and a light. If you needed directions, say, he would sit down with you and your map and show you the exact best route to your destination, where to pick up a couple gallons of gas if you need them, and you would leave town thinking that River Junction was an awful nice place, nice people, that’s what’s grand about America, don’t you think, small towns like River Junction and the folks who live there. Salt of the earth. And I’m not saying you’d be wrong.
So I was standing in the chicken coop, as I said, basket of eggs hooked over my elbow, armpits a little damp already even though the sun hadn’t yet touched us, there in the holler of two mountains that constitutes the geographic boundaries of River Junction. I heard the soft tread of footsteps on wet grass, the wiry squeak of the chicken coop door. My stomach fell.
“Hello there, Geneva Rose,” he said. “You’s up awful early this morning.”
“Eggs wanted gathering.”
“That so?”
“Every morning.”
“You need a hand, maybe?”
“No, thanks.”
“Lemme give you a hand.”
“I said no thanks. I like to stand out by myself, in the morning.”
“Well, now. That ain’t too friendly, honey.”
I shrugged.
“Why don’t you just turn about and look at me, Geneva Rose? Turn about and say good morning to your old daddy.”
“You ain’t my daddy,” I said, but I turned around anyway, kind of slow, so I might fix my face in just the right expression as I went. Stiff and stony, so he couldn’t see what I was thinking. Couldn’t tell the revulsion coiling around my guts at the sight of his shining hair, his smooth, tanned skin, his blue eyes like the color of summer. His full lips stretched in a smile, just wide enough that you could see the tips of his teeth, golden with tobacco, right upper incisor chipped at the corner from a fall out the saloon door four years back. Or that was the story, anyway. I never was there when it happened.
“You ain’t got no call to speak to me like that, Geneva Rose Kelly. When I reared you up like you was my own. Sent you off to school like your mama wanted. Never asked no questions. Never treated you no different.”
Well, I could dissect the falsehoods in that speech one by one, the way they taught me in college: how to disassemble somebody’s argument like you might disassemble a chicken for frying. Not that any of the other girls at college had ever fried a chicken, my goodness no, let alone plucked it and pieced it and dipped it in flour. But I didn’t pick those words apart. Not out loud. Dear reader, I am no idiot.
“And I appreciate that kindness, Duke. I really do. But I’m not your daughter, and that’s a fact. And I never was any good at pretending things that aren’t true.”
“Just listen to you, baby girl. Sounding like some kind-a lady. Like one-a them grammar books or something. You learn to talk that way at college? You set to thinking you’re too good for your old daddy?”
“Course not.”
“Because that’s how it sounds to me, Geneva Rose.”
“Well, that ain’t how it is.”
“Now, that’s better.” He nodded and reached for my cheek. “That’s more like my baby girl. You was but two years old when I laid eyes on you. When your mama come back home from New York City. Prettiest baby I ever seen.”
I turned my head away. Took a step back. The smell of his hair oil stung my nostrils. The smell of his shaving soap. He wore a blue checked shirt, same color as his eyes, tucked into dungarees held high by plain black suspenders. Sweat already beading at his temples. Lips red and damp.
“Don’t you go a-larking off, baby girl,” he crooned. “Ain’t nobody up around here excepting you and me. Your mama’s still abed.”
“She won’t be long.”
“Sure she will, sugar. She don’t rise herself up till noon sometimes. Just a-drinking and a-staring at the ceiling, your mama.”
His breath smelled like cigarettes. Wee dram of brown skee, too, if I wasn’t mistaken. Liquid courage, to use another word for it, which maybe explained what he was doing there in that chicken coop, in the thick August dawn while my mother slept in her bed, one week less a day before I should