The Color of Family (43 page)

T
hat the boys were still asleep in this early morning was a mercy. Because if they were hearing what their mother was saying right now, they'd most assuredly be even more indelibly marked than they were going to be by the changes in their family history. Clayton could barely believe what he was hearing, even though Susan was doing her best to make him believe it.

“What I can't understand, even in the light of a new day,” Susan said to her mother-in law, “is how you could be so completely and utterly inconsiderate of the people who would be affected by this elaborate charade of yours.”

Clayton had never known his mother to be contrite and it was not so much contrition that he saw on her face now as resignation to the consequences of being found out. “Susan, dear, as a mother you have to know that I was doing what I truly, in my heart, believed was best for my son.”

Susan glanced over at Clayton then with the first expression in their years of marriage that he'd been completely unable to read. He could swear he saw contempt in her eyes, but he couldn't fathom anything he'd done that might be considered contemptible. “This isn't only about
your son
,” she said.

“Yes, of course there is the Jackson family. I'm going to need to make amends to them, but…”

“
Or
the Jacksons,” Susan said with an intensity that Clayton was certain he'd never heard before. “Do you have any idea what this means to me?”

Clayton had kept quiet until now, allowing his wife to blow off a little steam and certainly feeling like his mother had it coming. But this was altogether different and in his mind more than a little bit unwarranted. “What are you saying, Susan?” he asked, crossing the room to stand between the two women.

“I'm saying that my entire world caved in on me yesterday afternoon.”

“In exactly what way does this affect you?” Clayton said, trying to keep from his voice the rising sense that his life was about to shift a little farther off its center.

“I'm saying…” Susan paused to gather herself. “I'm saying that because of your mother's lies, I have been stunned to discover that I have been married to a black man without my knowledge.”

As sucker-punched as Clayton felt by DeWitt's actions in the parking lot the night before, he was entirely unprepared to hear these words from his wife's mouth. “Susan, you can't possibly—”

“
You
can't possibly understand what this is like, Clayton.”

“I think I might be able to. After all, just yesterday I learned that half of the blood in my veins is black.”

“Which you seem to have embraced as proudly as if you'd just discovered that you were the bastard son to royalty. I, on the other hand, see no such cause for celebration. This changes everything. It changes the way our children will be raised. It changes the way society perceives us. And most importantly, it changes the way
I
perceive us.”

“Are you saying that this information changes what we have between us? What we are to each other?”

“I'm saying that it changes everything. I never imagined myself married to a black man.” She hesitated, looked down at the floor and then up again at Clayton. “And I don't want to be. I can't be.”

“What are you saying, Susan?”

“I'm saying that I'm going back to New Orleans.”

Clayton's eye caught his mother standing across from them, absolutely dumbfounded. This image of his mother, who always had something to say and never had any qualms about saying it, would have struck him as comical if the conversation he was in the middle of wasn't so tragic.

He turned his attention completely toward his wife. She looked entirely different to him now. In the past minute she had become a foreigner, someone from a land a million miles away.

“I'm not letting you take my boys away from me,” he said firmly.

And then Susan said something that topped everything else she'd already said. “I'm not planning to.”

“You intend to abandon your marriage
and
your children?”

Susan's lips quivered and her eyes began to fill. Relying on a strength that might have been grossly misdirected but was nonetheless powerful, she regained her composure. “I don't know how to raise two black boys in this world.”

“You raise them the same way you have been raising them.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head briskly. “That way isn't possible any longer.”

“What are you going to say to them?”

“I'm not going to say anything to them right now.”

She retreated to the bedroom and returned a minute later with a suitcase. She must have packed it while he was having a drink with Aaron last night. Clayton was still finding it hard to believe that this wasn't some kind of elaborate and unfortunate joke.

“You can tell them I've gone to visit my family,” Susan said when she came back. “We'll decide on a more permanent story later. I'll send for the rest of my things once I'm settled.”

Clayton thought about fighting her, maybe even doing something that would wake up the children. Once she saw them, surely her resolve would break. But he realized in that moment that he didn't want her resolve to break. He had no real complaints about their marriage, nothing that amounted to a desire to escape it. But if Susan could even think about ending it over something like this, it couldn't have been much of one.

“You can make whatever arrangements you need to make through my lawyer,” he said.

Susan nodded. How could he possibly do something so casual at a time like this? “Good luck with all of this, Clayton.”

Then she picked up her suitcase, opened the door, and exited his life.

T
he first complication that Aaron found himself faced with after they picked Thyme up from the airport had to do with the seating in the car. Aaron certainly didn't want Thyme sitting up front with his father while he and Tawna were stuck in the back. But at the same time, he couldn't very well make Tawna sit with Thyme; and having the three of them in back while his father drove alone up front like a chauffeur wasn't even worth considering. So Thyme sat in the front seat, proudly perched—or so Aaron imagined—next to a father that he knew in a completely different way than Aaron knew him.
Welcome to the rest of your life, Aaron Jackson. The compromises have only just begun.
In his late-thirties, Aaron had only a short time ago believed that most of the major adjustments in life were ones he had already made. This thinking now seemed to him like a tired and not particularly funny joke.

Aaron didn't know much about Thyme's mother, and what he did know was from his mother and therefore highly suspect, but he could certainly see a whole lot of Junior in his new brother's expressions. Their eyes wrinkled up in the same way and there was a strong similarity around the mouth. But what reminded Aaron most of his father was Thyme's easy, talkative manner. Aaron had every expectation that there would be a series of awkward silences on the drive to Ellen's baby-naming ceremony. The way he figured it, after hello just about everything else was shaky ground. But if Thyme had any such concerns, he had a foolproof way of covering them up. He had talked practically nonstop since
they got into the car—about the flight, about Baltimore, about the road they were driving on—a whole lot of nothing, but it certainly filled in the spaces. Even the loquacious Junior Jackson couldn't get much of a word in edgewise. After about ten minutes, Aaron just turned to Tawna and she reached for his hand and melted him with a smile. If she was going to look at him that way, Thyme could just prattle on the entire day for all Aaron would care.

For a moment, Thyme stopped talking and Aaron wondered if perhaps he'd exhausted himself. Maybe he'd used up his store of nervous energy. But then he turned nearly completely around in his seat and said, “Baby-naming ceremony, huh? This whole day is just one first after another. Dad told me about it, but I'm still not sure I understand what goes on at one of these things.”

Aaron felt a little twinge when Thyme referred to his father that way. It wasn't like he assumed that he was going to call him “Mr. Jackson,” but it still felt strange to have someone use that term when they were talking about the man who raised him. It must have shown on his face because Thyme tilted his head and said, “Does it make you feel a little weird to hear me call him ‘Dad'?”

Junior was shaking his head and chuckling to himself in the front seat and even Aaron had to laugh a little at Thyme's boldness. “No,” Aaron said. “I guess it could, or maybe should, but it doesn't. I'll admit that hearing it come out of your mouth that first time, and so casually, seemed a little odd. But I'm pretty sure that it was just a one-time thing.”

Thyme nodded, and it looked less like he was acknowledging what Aaron was saying than that he was offering his approval over what Aaron said. His body still swiveled toward the back, Thyme looked off at the traffic for a moment and then made eye contact with Aaron again. “Well, if I'm being honest here, I have to tell you that it makes me feel odd, kind of left out and jealous, hearing you call him ‘Poppa.' It's like you've called him that your whole life knowing for sure you were the only son calling him that, while I was down in New Orleans and from the time I was ten I knew that some other boy called him something like Dad, or Daddy—or Poppa.”

Aaron wasn't sure how to react to this and he could feel Tawna squeezing his hand, though he wasn't sure what she meant by
that.
Was Thyme trying to suggest that he had some kind of prior
claim on sibling jealousy? But as much as he wanted to get riled up by this, and maybe deliver a little sharply worded speech that made it entirely clear whose world had been more shaken by this situation and how, he had to admit to himself that Thyme probably did have a point. While Aaron had an enormous adjustment to make in getting used to sharing his father with another son, in Thyme's eyes he'd been enjoying a privileged position all along. For the first time, Aaron made himself think about the value associated with being the first son rather than the only son.

“Thyme, that's the nature of this thing, you know?” he said. “And neither one of us had a say in deciding it. So we either live with it and pretend we don't feel it, or feel it completely and make it help us bond as brothers. I don't know which will work.”

Junior, who had been silent for some time now, chose that moment to speak up. “I have some thoughts about that.”

“And I'm sure they're good thoughts, Poppa,” Aaron said. “But they're not very relevant to this discussion. The only thoughts on this subject that matter are Thyme's and mine.”

Thyme smiled at him then. Through the glance he caught of his father from the rearview mirror, he could tell that he was smiling as well. And when Tawna squeezed his hand this time, he was pretty sure he knew exactly what she meant by it.

Aaron had never really been opposed to change in his life, though there were plenty of times when he thought he was. The simple fact was that he'd always handled change well, maybe even thrived on it. If he was going to be entirely honest with himself, he might even say that his mother, who constantly dangled the name of Clayton Cannon in front of him, had made him perpetually prepared for change. He would never have invited this latest change into his life, but now that it was here and it had a face and a name and a body full of kinetic energy, Aaron knew that he'd find a way to incorporate it into his life and maybe even enjoy it.

Thyme turned to face forward. “This baby-naming thing, it's kind of a bourgeois thing, huh? 'Cause we don't do nothing like that down where I'm from. Never even heard of it.”

Aaron laughed out loud. There was no one in the family who talked like Thyme, and he had a feeling that he was going to be continually surprised by him. “Well, it's not exactly meant to be
bourgeois, or anything like that. It's just my sister's big idea of trying to get some kind of tradition going in this family. She feels we have no tradition, though I have a feeling this is the first of many she's going to introduce in the coming years.”

Totally spontaneously, Aaron reached forward and clapped his brother on the shoulder. “And now you're a part of it.”

 

Antonia needed to stand back for a moment, just to observe this family of hers. It certainly had grown recently, both in ways she knew in her heart it would and in ways that she would never have expected in her entire life.

She was so glad that Clayton had come with his boys. He had been dealt some surprising blows in the last few days, and though she didn't know the boys as well as she was going to in the future, she was pretty sure she saw a bit of confusion in their eyes. She would never understand Susan as long as she lived. How any mother could turn her back on her children, no matter what she discovered about the blood that ran through their veins, was far, far beyond her comprehension and happily so.

They were such handsome boys. Smart, too. And if the way they gurgled and cooed over the baby was any indication, there was real warmth and kindness in them as well. It wouldn't be easy for them to have only one parent to truly care for and nurture them, but they would be surrounded by family. Antonia would make sure of it, even if it meant spending more time with Agnes Cannon than anyone should ever have to.

And then there was Thyme. He certainly had a lot of Junior in him. The young Junior, especially. This impression of him was a little bit disconcerting when Antonia first caught sight of him, but then again just about everything about him was likely to be a little disconcerting for a while. Junior seemed hesitant about bringing him over to meet her—how ridiculous to think there should be any hesitancy between them after all these years—so she'd walked right over and introduced herself.

“I'm not sure who on earth I am to you,” she said to Thyme, “but I'll welcome you to my daughter's house all the same.”

“Well, ma'am, you've been the woman who's kept my dad happy all these years, so I would say that makes you a terribly important person to me.”

Antonia laughed. “I see your father has taught you some of his tricks over the years.” She took him by the arm. “How come no one has gotten you anything to eat yet? You do like catfish, don't you?”

Now Thyme was chatting it up with Rick, though she couldn't imagine what it was that the two of them had to say to one another. Antonia hadn't been able to look Rick squarely in the eye since Ellen told her about his indiscretion, but she figured she'd come around eventually. He certainly seemed to love that baby. And whatever it was that had caused him to stray on her daughter when he did, he seemed to love Ellen an awful lot now. Probably always had.

Aaron had come out of his car ride with his new brother without a mark. She'd been worried about her son and how the news flashes of the last few weeks were affecting him. He'd had a lot of assumptions turned around, and she wouldn't have blamed him at all if he'd done some serious acting out as a result. But other than that episode at the television station—and who could really blame him for that?—he seemed to be bearing up surprisingly well. He'd even managed to mend fences at his job, though Antonia had a feeling it required much more humility than Aaron had ever intended to express in his life. Times like these tested a man, but it seemed that Aaron was more than up to it. It had to have a lot to do with that new woman of his.

Tawna was about as different from Maggie as Antonia could imagine. Certainly not as homespun and settled. And nowhere near as easy to get a fix on. From the moment she'd met Maggie, Antonia knew who she was and knew what she wanted and knew that she'd treat her son with respect and make him feel needed. These were important things, but they weren't the only important things. And while Aaron had never really explained his reasons for leaving Maggie behind, Antonia had a feeling that the thing she couldn't give him was first and foremost a sense of wanting a future together. That was probably more important to her son now than it had ever been in his life. Whether Tawna could provide it or not, and whether she could provide all of the other things that were important in making two people work together, Antonia didn't know. But one thing that was absolutely certain was that she had never once seen her son look at a woman the way he looked at Tawna. That had to account for something.

Aaron must have seen her looking at him because he got up from where he was sitting, kissed Tawna on the side of her head, and walked over to her.

“Have you decided to be a bystander rather than a participant?” he asked when he stood next to her.

“Now when have you ever known me to be a bystander?”

“I thought maybe you were thinking about turning over a new leaf. This would be the day to do such a thing, wouldn't it?”

“That might very well be the case, but I'm not turning over anything. I was just giving myself a little time to behold my family, that's all.”

“It was a nice thing you did with Thyme.”

Antonia took Aaron's hand and held it with both of hers. “He'd traveled a long distance. He didn't need some crazy lady getting up in his face an hour after he set foot in Baltimore.”

“No, he certainly didn't need that.”

“You know, I must tell you honestly that it feels so strange looking over there and not seeing Maggie. She was such a presence here. Belonged right away.”

Antonia could feel Aaron's hand tightening around hers and she looked up at him. He was getting ready to defend his position, to state his case, to declare his independence for the thousandth time in his adult life.

“But things change, huh?” she said softly. “They have to. And families change. Even with this whole thing with your sister's need for tradition, things eventually have to change in some way.”

She felt her son's hand relax and the warmth return to his eyes. He didn't usually settle down so quickly after he got his back up.

“Have you thought of a name for the baby?” he asked.

“Nothing that's good enough for him.”

“Well, I certainly hope someone has a good one, because I've drawn a complete blank. You won't believe the most ordinary names that have come into my head.” He shot her a sideways glance and said, “I guess we could always name him after an herb. Or maybe Ellen could start a new family tradition and name him after some kind of leafy vegetable. Do you think Turnip Green is too much of a mouthful?”

Antonia punched him playfully on the arm. “I think you might
want to keep that one to yourself.” She looked over at the crowd gathered around the tiny boy. “He'll have a fine name. No matter what it is, it'll be a fine one.”

Aaron leaned down and kissed her on the cheek. “I should get back. Will you be joining us or are you still beholding?”

“I'll be over in a minute.”

Aaron moved to let go of her hands and she pulled him back for one more moment. “Tawna is lovely and elegant and smart. She'll fit right in.”

She watched Aaron head back toward the couch and noted the smile he received from his girlfriend upon his arrival. Right then Clayton's twins ran past her in the middle of some game they were playing and she smiled down at them.

This was a ceremony, all right. Much more of one than Ellen could possibly have imagined when she came up with the idea. It was time for Antonia to join it.