Aileen would not remember Mr. Stanley, and because of this Ida had never seen a reason to tell her about him. In fact, very few people would know anything about Mr. Stanley, and so very few people were informed about those days of wine and hashish when she burnt the ties to the old life if not, geographically, then at least sexually. The man with the yellow Volkswagen van painted with flowers, the sheepskin coat, the sheepskin condoms, and the Ted Coppell hair and a handle bar moustache was a private chapter in the book of Ida’s life. She hid it away for only the truly determined to find.
They drove all over the Midwest, and then into the south. They had adventure. Aileen was usually with them. They saw Arizona. Saw the sun rise up and paint the cliffs of New Mexico. They had marvelous sex in Utah, mind shattering orgasms in Colorado. They smoked their way through Mendecino County. Ida knew that a good Catholic was supposed to repent of these things once they were over, and feel wretched while they went on. But she didn’t and she didn’t. So she didn’t tell anyone about them. Sometimes she smiled to herself and then one of the sisters would say, “What are you smiling at?” And she would murmur, “Nothing,” and light another cigarette.
But she knew how Meghan felt years later, when she was running around with Harv Berghen, and she knew how Allyn felt now. Neither of her sisters knew there had been a time of delectable sin in her past. This is why Ida felt sorry for Aileen a great deal, and Ashley as well. Their sins were never delectable. No one ever taught in Sunday school that some things that were supposed to be wrong never felt wrong at all. You never repented of them. That some confessions could make you laugh your way out of the little cramped rooms where you whispered through the lattice to the man in his white robe. They never taught at Saint Mary’s that real sins were not sexy and glamourous, but sad, and pathetic, and wearisome.
In early April of 1969, they had come back from Louisiana of all places, and Wallace-- that had been his name-- was swatting her ass, and threatening to take her on the kitchen table when Ida began going through her mail. Once a week Evelyn-- the only person in Jamnia she trusted-- came by the house, and took the mail out of the mailbox placing it on the kitchen table. There was a blue note stuck to one envelope, and Evelyn had written, “READ AND CALL ME RIGHT AWAY IDA! ! !-- EV.”
It read:

Mr. Cedric Fitzgerald
Sorin College
Notre Dame, IN


Ida opened it immediately, telling Wallace to “Stop!” as he nibbled on her ear.


Ida!
This was the worst mistake I ever made in my life. Ralph is throwing his life down the tubes. He’s miserable. I can’t make him happy. I’m miserable. Hate this place! Cannot wait till the semester is over. I thought college was supposed to be FUN. I want to have fun....

Ida had called Evelyn up immediately. Not Gladys, whom she had never thought of as Cedric’s mother.
They discussed the letter for some time. Then Ida said, “Well, that’s all there is to it. We’re going up there.”
“It sounds like a serious little place,” Evelyn said over the phone.
“I think it is,” said Ida.
“That’s not for Cedric. Some people like seriousness. Cedric was never meant for it.”

So they showed up a few days later. There was a yellow van covered in butterflies parked in front of Sorin College, and a white woman in a yellow headband and blue bellbottoms came out—breast feeding, and wearing fabulous yellow framed shades. She was followed by her Southern lover, and fine looking-- though very mature-- Black woman.
Ralph was in Cedric’s room, looking miserable, and Cedric jumped up from his bed where he’d been smoking too much and looking resigned to his fate.
“Well, let’s go,” said Ida.
“Where are we going?” Cedric said.
“I don’t know.”
Ralph had to be dragged along. It was the middle of the week. They were missing classes. Didn’t they know how serious this was? Cedric didn’t give a shit.
“I think I’ll give up on this whole college thing, “ he said. “Maybe I’ll just go back to being Cedric DuFreshne and be a jazz singer. Or I can take up the trumpet, and go back to New Orleans.”
“Or you could go to school,” Ida said one night in a Friendly’s, over the last of a float.
“Hum?”
“Notre Dame isn’t the only school. There are fun places. Like, I never got much out of Saint Clare’s because my cousins and all. But we could look at it.”
They were only-- Wallace reasoned-- about five hundred miles away, and so it wouldn’t hurt to visit.

To make a very long story short, when they returned on Monday morning, Cedric went to get his midterm grades, laughed at how remarkably low they were, and said to Ralph, “This place is wretched!”
“Some people like it.”
“Some people like Spam. Don’t make it good,” Cedric shook his head. “Naw, baby, I gotta fly. I like that Saint Clare place. I think it’s calling my name.” Cedric cupped his hands around his mouth: “Cedric! Cedric! Cedric!”


i i i

Cedric did not take a backwards glance toward South Bend. He spent the summer with his mother and his detestable sister. This time only reminded him how much he didn’t like Louise.
“How can you not like her “ Gladys said, wounded. “She’s only five.”
“You can tell even at five, Mama.” Cedric had said.

It was useless to attempt to give up bad habits. The more you fought them the more you wanted them. Ida had heard this once from a Zen mystic, and then another time a Catholic nun had said the same thing. Don’t stop smoking for anyone else. Don’t stop doing something because you think you should. Just fix what’s in your life, the real stuff, and if the smoking really wants to go it will when you want it too.
One day Wallace just had no place in her life anymore, and when he didn’t, he dropped out. Ida could not remember the specific day, but she did remember missing having a man in her bed. She got over the missing, and set to this business of being a single mother.





That fall Cedric started-- not really trusting it-- Saint Clare’s College. He was shocked when he actually enjoyed it. He enjoyed the coffee shop, and the blow out afros, the white people with their ironed hair and joints, and soulful guitars and medieval clothing. He enjoyed the fact that everyone on campus was reading The Lord of the Rings and when Aretha wasn’t wailing out of someone’s dorm window, Cat Stevens and Simon and Garfunkel were floating out, and when they weren’t then marijuana was. Cedric loved the little lake near the front of campus. He was in love with the red brick buildings and the poetry sessions. He was in love with the music clubs and the literary meetings. The little town of Rhodes, Ohio spoke to him.
One night, a Black girl surprised him by singing “Wild World”. She wore braids down her back, and beads with hemp jewelry. She wasn’t ritzy or bourgeois. She was weird. Her clothing didn’t really match up, but it matched her. Cedric wanted to know her
He was reading a poem-- he was emoting a poem that night. He went on stage after her. She said, “I liked that!”
“Thank you.”
“No,” she slapped his hand, “Really, I did! What’s your name again?”
“Cedric DuFresne.”
She frowned. “It doesn’t sound like a poet name.”
“Well, I have another one.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“My parents were never married, you see? So I use both names. Whichever one suits me. Sometimes I’m Cedric Fitzgerald.”
The girl nodded sagely, and said, “Oh, you must keep that one. I like that. That’s distinguished. You with your glasses and everything being Cedric Fitzgerald. I like that. I’d marry a Cedric Fitzgerald.”
For once in his life, Cedric felt himself going hot and almost stammering. He had never really been hit on. Not even indirectly.
“This--” she said pointing to the guitar, “is Jeane.”
“Jeane?”
She shrugged. “I like the name. And I--” she said, thumping her chest and then extending her hand, “Am Marilyn Alexander.”
Cedric took her hand.
“Pleased to meet you.”
“You should be,” she said. And smiled.


The Christmas break before 1970, snow fell covered Jamnia, but it was never really that cold. Meghan was staying the night at Ida’s house when there was a knock at the door. Ida went to answer it, and was perplexed to see her ex-husband standing there, smiling goofily as his glasses fogged up.
“Well, don’t just stand there,” she said. “Get in the damn house.”

Ralph was at 1133 Crawford a lot that winter. Cedric was babysitting Evelyn’s granddaughter Eunice-- “What an ugly name for a child.”
“I know, Ced,” Evelyn shrugged. “But Dempsey was insistent on it. Eunice DuFresne. Ugly name for such a cute phenomenon.”
Ralph was unable to be caught up in the child naming drama. He had his own troubles to deal with.
“I don’t know if I want to be a priest. Not there, at least.”
“What about the monastery up the hill?”
Ralph shuddered. “Oh, God, no. It’s a monastery.”
“That’s what I just said,” Cedric said. And for the first time realized that in the religious world, as well as outside of it, there were differing levels of devotion, and the same way that a boy with a healthy sexual appetite shuddered at the priesthood, a seminarian with an appetite for the world might shudder at the idea of Holy Spirit just right outside of town.
“I’m going,” Cedric said.
“What?”
“Oh, not today,” Cedric said mildly. “But I will go to Holy Spirit someday. See what goes on. Why it’s there. I think I should give myself to the monastery... At least for a little while.”
But Ralph was back on the subject of Notre Dame, and how he hated it. Cedric had already simply said, “Then why don’t you leave!”
Ralph-- who was beginning to get on his friend’s nerves-- said that he probably would, but that he wanted to get a full two years in before transferring.
Cedric, with the lack of compassion and sentiment characteristic of those who in the past have learned how useless and damaging an excess of compassion and sentiment can be, simply shrugged and lit another cigarette. If he was going to transfer at the end of sophomore year, then Ralph only had another semester in that awful place. As for Cedric, his life was good. He was going to work on the college poetry magazine next year, and there was always Marilyn. As for Ralph, it was all really too goddamned bad, and he hoped that the Jeremy Tosca boy was keeping him good company.

The day after Christmas, the sun came in white and bright through Ida’s bedroom window. David Lawry’s arm was draped over her. This was the first Christmas Aileen could remember. In her mind it was why David was married to Ida for much longer than the actuality. There was so much Aileen would never know. She remembered her father being there for Christmas. She did not remember-- it could have made no difference to her-- the intensity with which her parents made love now that Ida knew how to work her body, and work her husband.
They lay in bed on Saint John’s day, David tracing circles on Ida’s shoulder.
“Do you ever think...” he murmured to her, “about us getting back together?”
Much to David’s surprise, Ida sat up in bed, and laughed.
“Hell no!” she told her ex-husband.

“HEY LOOK AT THAT!”
Mackenzie took Ian’s hand, and pulled him through the damp, dead leaves of last year to the thin, black trunk of a baby tree.
“What?”
“This.” Mackenzie pointed to the little green leaf. “See, Easter’s almost here.”
“That’s a big deal to Catholics. Isn’t it?” Ian said a little dully.
“It’s... It’s hope,” Mackenzie said. “New things starting. It’s all the bad stuff passing away. No matter how bad winter was, spring and summer are on their way.”
“And no matter how nice spring and summer are, winter’s gonna come back.”
“God, E, you know how to take the joy out of a spring leaf.” Mackenzie told him.
“Remember Florida?” said Ian. “Remember the beach, and the sun, and how hot and wonderful it was? Remember our hotel and being out on the balcony with Simon and Drew? Remember the two of us, for the first time?”
They walked through the woods quietly, Mackenzie wrapping an around around Ian’s waist.
“Of course I remember it.”
“Sometimes I think that that was our summer. It was a dream. I feel like that’s all over. Like we discovered something great, and now it’s over, and we’ll never get back to summer again.”
“Ian. L-et me assure you, my friend: it was winter. It was winter in Florida too. We haven’t even gotten to our spring yet. Forget summer.”
“I’m talking metaphorically,” said Ian. “I’m not talking about real seasons.”
“I’m not either,” Mackenzie suddenly positioned the dark haired boy, who was a little taller than in him, directly in front of him. He said, sternly, “You gotta believe me, Ian. This shit will all blow over. What you said to all of us last night about sticking together... You gotta believe that. We gotta stick together. We’re gonna be happy. I swear. I’m going to be happy. I’ve never been happier in my life. I’ve been tired. I’m tired of fighting. I’ve been haggard, losing sleep. I cry a lot now. No one knows it, but I do. But you know what? I feel tough as fuck. I feel like I could shout, and knock down a mountain. I-- all through Catholic school I was a nice guy. I was what everyone wanted me to be. I was that last year. Now I’m me. Now, I’m finding out who I am and if someone can’t deal with it-- fuck it. And who I am is in love with you. I’ve been in love with you since the first time I saw you in band, and was afraid to talk to you. I used to wonder about what you did in your spare time. If you ever thought of me. I used to fantasize about losing my virginity to you, When it happened I thought I’d die, screw heaven and screw hell! And now you’re here with me.... And now I’m out of breath.”
A little wind was picking up. It attempted to make Ian’s spiky hair move. The young man with the bit of beard under his lower lip colored a little.
“You never told me all that, Kenzie.”
Mackenzie didn’t tell him anything else. The serious looking blond boy just kept looking at him. He looked like a model. He looked to Ian like an angel should look.
“You never told me that,” Ian repeated. “I don’t know who I am anymore. It scared the hell out of me... Last night. When your dad shut that door in my face. I remembered being at one of Kirk Berghen’s party’s and-- you’re gonna think this is a stupid allusion-- illusion? --but someone dropped a bong. All this smoke was swirling in it, right? And then the fucking thing breaks, and all the smoke just spreads till its gone. You can smell it. You’re getting high off the smoke, but you can’t see it anymore. You can’t say, “There it is.”
“I felt last night-- I think I’ve felt every since I met you, or was with you that first time... like that bong. I keep feeling like I’m cracked up, and somebody killed me. But then why aren’t I dead? If I wasn’t that bong, or that jar, then who am I? That’s what it’s like when I’m with you. Or last night when I got kept from being with you. You see what I’m saying?”
Mackenzie’s lips were parted. His brow was furrowed. He nodded faintly.
“I think,” he said. “A little.”
“I feel,” Ian went on, “like Ian Cane doesn’t exist anymore. Well who the fuck am I? But everyone says I’m Ian Cane. Must be that I was faking him up until... Now.”
“Like you’re the smoke, and not the bong after all?” Mackenzie chuckled.
Ian grinned at him in delight, and then looked serious again.
“That’s what I was trying to say, I think.”

Vaughan and Paul were startled by a voice speaking out of its own reverie. They had been looking down from the balcony, into the woods, where Vaughan first saw his two friends walking before Lake Clare. They turned around on the porch where they stood and Julian, swathed in the black of his habit, came out.
“I turn sixty-six this year,” the monk said. “Before I came here I was at another house. Before that I was in minor seminary. For my diocese. I was ordained before I wanted to be a monk. It seems like I just kept on having to get up and get up, came to all these places and every time I was like Abraham. Knew God didn’t want me here. Not here. Not here. Not here. Move on...
“But when I was fifteen-- same age as Vaughan here-- I didn’t think about all that. I knew. I knew so much. I knew the Church was always right, but I’m not sure I even knew what the Church was. I remember being in minor seminary, and hearing about impure thoughts, and falling into sin, and pollution. All these words you weren’t really sure you knew what they meant.”
Julian stuck out his lower lip, and gave a little shake of the hand.
“You were pretty sure, sure enough. But things were never said, and it was like not saying those things let you know just how bad they were.
“Well, there was Damian... And Philip, older boys. Nice, gentle, everyone liked them. Damian I sort of looked up to. He had a kind soul, and for a long time afterwards I always wondered what became of him, always hoped that one day I’d see a man in black who would be him, that maybe I’d look up and learn he was a bishop or something but... Anyway...
“One morning I woke up, and Damian and Philip were gone. No one said anything about it. We just kept on going about our own business.
“Now, my confessor-- and he was a distant cousin-- Father Andrew. He asked me what was troubling me, and finally I asked him what had happened to Damian and Philip. He looked at me. He only said one word, ‘Sodomy.’ It was 1950. He didn’t need to say anything else.”
Vaughan began to pick at his fingernails. They were all silent for awhile, and then Vaughan said, “Well, it’s 2002. I think it’s time for there to be something else to say.”
Brother Paul chuckled, and the homely young monk said, “I think we might need a better word.”
Julian, looking down into the wood, said, “I think you’re both right. What’s this we say? What’s the Bible say? God is love. He never says what kind of love. God is love, and it’s so goddamned hard to find love of any sort... or for a man to love another man especially. when it happens, and you try to quelsh it, I wonder if it’s not like trying to smack the Almighty in the face.”
The old man sighed and said with a wave of his hand, “Let ‘em love.”

i v

“Can I have a cigarette?” Roy said.
Out on the porch, Luke and Madeleine raised eyebrows at him, and Tina threw back her head, laughing
“What?” Roy demanded.
“Absolutely not.”
The glass doors were opening, a few burnouts were heading to the base of the stairs in one weed smelling clump.
“Why not?”
“Don’t you have a class to get to?” Luke shifted that subject quickly.
“It’s gym. I don’t want to go.”
“Oh, humor the old ogre. He likes you, Roy.”
“Well,” Roy said, scowling and feeling childish, “I don’t want him to like me.”
“You didn’t even go to school yesterday,” Madeleine remarked. “If you’re going to come, I think you should at least go to classes.”
“What are you all, my parents?” Roy said. But he just turned around, and went back into the lobby. The bell was buzzing as he did.
Coach Foster-- Mr. Foster-- had made going to gym almost a pleasant experience because, Roy hated to admit-- he liked the man. He was nice to him. There had been no grown ups who had taken an interest in him, and now Mr. Foster did. Or so it seemed. It actually seemed like he cared, which was stupid because he was only the gym teacher, the one teacher voted most likely to be a moron. And he was a complete moron. Just look at him out there. Just look at him with those kids. Just look at him with his kids!
“Come on, Roy, get changed. You’re late,” Mr. Foster said.
“I’m not feeling well,” Roy, in his jeans and black tee shirt, folded his arms over his chest and made no pretense at being sick. He walked toward the bleachers.
“I’m sitting out today,” he said.
Kevin Foster opened his mouth to say something, then shut it.
Today the only other person on the bleachers was Rachel DuFresne. He had never bothered to talk to her chiefly because she was Black, and he had to acknowledge that this scared him. White guys did not initiate chit chat with Black girls. It just wasn’t done. She might slap him, or cuss him out or do something Black like that. Besides, he had never had anything to say. So while she did her homework, and ignored him, Roy tied and retied his shoes, watching the other freshmen playing on free day.
Finally he said, “DuFresne?”
“Yes?” she raised an eyebrow. She had not been about to slap him. She looked like she might be the kind of Black girl who would not slap you at all.
“That’s a French name, right?”
She smiled. “That’s right. Creole,” she said. “We came from Louisiana a long time ago.”
“Are you related to Vaughan and Madeleine?”
“That’s right,” she said again, nodding. This time she put her books down. “You’re friends with them, right?”
“Sort of?”
“Sort of?” Rachel grinned. “That’s why you’re always with them.”
“Ah, I’m kind of a tag along, like a friend of a friend. They don’t think about me. Except, Madeleine did just make me go to class. I was gonna try and skip.”
“I try and skip as much as possible,” Rachel told him, frankly. “I always tell him--” she pointed down at Kevin Foster, who’s hands were on his hips while he blew his whistle to break up a fight, “that I’m on my period.”
“That works?”
“My period comes three times a month,” Rachel said. And then when Roy looked at her in amazement, she explained, “I don’t mean for real. And I’m also a hemophiliac. But just for this class.”
Roy began laughing, and said, “I wish I’d pulled that stuff off.”
“Do you ever play tricks on people?”
“Not really,” Roy said. “I’m either chicken about everything, or I’m just mad and mean. Sometimes I wish I could be cooler. Like Black people.”
“Cooler-like-Black-people?” Rachel said it all in one incredulous word.
“I mean-- I didn’t mean-- ”Roy started to blush.
Rachel just chuckled and said, “Look at them down there. Tyrell with the pick in his head, and Lamont-- can you believe somebody named their baby Lamont in this day and age?-- with his pants all the way down to his ass. You know what that is, Roy? It is an act. It’s them being what their supposed to be. But it’s just an act. I can’t act like that. I think that’s one way my whole family is pretty much the same. We can’t pretend and sit around listening to... whatever Black people are supposed to listen too. And dressing the way we’re supposed to dress. I’m almost fifteen, and the longer I’m here, the more I’m unimpressed by this bullshit that gets called Blackness.”
“Well, I’m impressed by you,” Roy blurted out with enthusiasm. Then he colored. “I’m sorry, That sounded like a com’on.... Or a bad commercial... Or something.”
“Roy Cane, you’re so red!” Rachel said.
“I’m Lebanese!” He threw out all of a sudden. “I’m not really white.”
“You’re nuts!” Rachel told him. But she smiled when she said it. “How come you never talked to me before?”
Now Roy went so red Rachel was a little scared for him.
“Roy?”
Roy lifted a finger, and rasped, “In a minute.” he paled a little, then said, sheepishly, “I was afraid you might... you know... like on T.V.... Be one of those Black girls who would walk up and slap someone or cuss someone out.”
Rachel picked up her geography book, her notepad, and her pen. She set to work. Roy was afraid he might have offended her, but then she said, “Oh, silly Roy... Every Black girl is the kind of girl who would slap you or cuss you out.”

“Did you kiss her?
“Ryan, it was at school!” Roy said, later on, that afternoon in his house. “Plus, she said that all Black girls will cuss you out or slap you. Who knows what she would have done?”
Ryan sat up straight on the bed, and said, knowledgeably, “In the movies people always have a good matchmaker. Especially the high school movies. Or like, the people that wanna get together go to a dance. That’s where the girl becomes a knockout, and the guy sweeps her off her feet.”
“Well,” said Roy. “I don’t think I’ll be sweeping anyone off their feet anytime soon. And Rachel’s already a knockout.”
“Then why talk about it?” Ryan said.
“What?”
With an uncommon amount of sense, Ryan said, “If you’re not going to do anything, why talk about the girl you like?”
“Did I say I like her?”
“Do you like her?” the eighth grader demanded.
“She’s a real nice girl.”
“But, do you like her?”
“She’s good to talk to.”
“You wanna kiss her?”
“Stop!” Roy said, going red again.
“You wanna hold her and hug her?”
“That’s enough.”
“Do you want to sex her?”
But there was a look in Roy’s eyes that made Ryan say, “Maybe I’ll shut up.”
“Maybe you should, you’re a pain in my ass today.” Then he said, “I didn’t really mean that. I just meant... Don’t make fun of me. I don’t think I’ve ever liked a girl before.”
“You DO like her!” Ryan crowed. “Roy’s got a girlfriend!”
“Roy’s got a crush,” Roy said. “And it’s unquited.”
“What?”
“You know... When someone doesn’t love you back.”
“Unre-quited you mean,” Ryan corrected him.
“Oh,” Roy smirked. “Well, whatever it is, I’m it.”

THERE WAS A KNOCK ON the door. Madeleine, who was finishing up homework with Vaughan, asked Rodder to get it, and when he did, he looked down and saw--
“Rachel DuFresne,” she stuck out her hand to be shook. “Friend of the family.”
Rodder, at an almost loss, took her hand, and said, “Rodder Gonzales.”
“Oh, I know,” Rachel moved past him. “Everyone knows who you are. Thank God we finally won a championship this year.”
She went into Cedric’s office long enough to say, “Hey, Uncle Ced,” and then came into the kitchen.
“What took you off Crawford Street?” Vaughan said, while Madeleine waved at her cousin.
“Roy Cane,” she said simply as Rodder returned to the kitchen.
“Hum?”
“I think he’s fine, and I need to get hooked up with him.”
“Are you serious?” Vaughan said to his cousin.
“Vaughan, only you can engineer this, I’m not talking about a love potion to make him love me. He already likes me. He’s just tongue tied and even if he did say we should go on a date, where would we go?” I’m talking about you setting up something. Fixing us up.”
Madeleine blurted out: “But Roy’s white.”
Scathingly, Rachel looked from her older cousin to Rodder.
“I’m Mexican,” Rodder said.
“Sure you are,” Rachel said, sounding unconvinced. “And Vaughan’s best friend is white. And he’s gay, isn’t he?”
“I’m not sleeping with my best friend,” Vaughan said.
“And I’m not sleeping with Roy Cane. Yet. Please, Cousin, help me.”
“I said I would, didn’t I?”
“Actually,” Rodder told him. “You didn’t.”
“Well,” Vaughan shrugged. “I will. I’m saying it now.”
Rachel shrieked, and threw her arms around Vaughan. She kissed him on the the forehead.
“You’re like Merlin or something. I love you.”
“Are you staying for dinner?”
“Naw, I need to find something to wear.”
“For Roy?”
“Of course.”
“But I haven’t even planned the date.
“Vaughan,” said Rachel, her voice full of emotion. “I’m anticipating!”
“Oh,” said Vaughan. “Well... all right then.”



A BLOCK UP FROM THE little corner that made the center of town, where Windmill Cereals was across the street from the gas station and across the street from them was the public library, and the red brick Presbyterian church was the Hasty Tasty Diner on Main Street.
When Kevin Foster walked in, Race was pouring a trucker cup of coffee, and she said, “Kevin, I’ve been meaning to apologize for slapping the shit out of you.”
“You never did that,” Kevin said.
Race reached across the counter and slapped the shit out of him.
“Yes, I did.” she said seriously. And went back into the kitchen.
Kevin thought twice before deciding to follow her.
“I’m so pissed off with you, right now Kevin Foster. I want to spill this whole pot of coffee on you.”
“Please don’t!”
“Race, you alright?” said one of the cooks.
“Yeah, Tommy,” she said. “I need to talk to--”she gestured to Kevin, “Jackass for a minute.”
“Take five in the back room,” Tommy said.
Kevin followed Race beyond the kitchen, past a shower curtain to a room that smelled like old cigarettes.
“You have insulted my blood,” Race said, slapping him again. “I ought to cut your sorry balls off, you know that? Ian’s the only thing I had close to a son for years. He’s practically Roy’s brother.”
“How ironic.”
Shut up, Kevin! You don’t get to be cute. Not today.”
“Roy won’t talk to me.”
“Good. There’s no reason he should.”
“I’m his-- ”
“You’re his nothing. You’re not a goddamn thing, Kevin. Alright? You’re his best friend’s dad is what you are. And Ryan and your other kids, the ones I know, thank God, are nothing like you.”
“I just thought you could talk to Roy for me.”
“About what?”
“Or Ian.”
“Again... About what, Kevin? I heard Aileen walked out on you. Is it true?”
“Now you’re talking crazy.”
“No, I’m not. It’s a small town.”
“She went to stay with her ma for a few days.”
“Man, Kevin,” Race took out her cigarettes. “You don’t know how to keep a damn thing, do you? And don’t give me that look.”
“What look?”
“The look you always used,” Race bammed her hand down on the table, “when you thought life was so fucking unfair to you. The ‘No one understands look.’ --that makes women take you into their arms. But you know what, dearest? It doesn’t work now. Not for me. Obviously not for Aileen either. And you know who doesn’t understand? You don’t understand!”
Kevin was quiet for a little space, and then he said, “I know I don’t understand. I don’t understand anything. And I want to, Race. I want to understand what the hell’s going on in my house. I didn’t mean to shut the door in Ian’s face. I didn’t mean to piss Roy off or you off or my daughter-- ”
“Tina too!” Race commented.
“I... I just want you to talk to Roy and Ian--”
Race put down her cigarette, made a slashing motion in the air with her hand, and said, “This meeting is adjourned. You might try telling them all of these things yourself, Kevin. In fact, you’d better because Roy loves his cousin, you know that. And until you accept Ian, he’ll never talk to you again. Incidentally... Mackenzie probably won’t either. Now please, get out of my way. I gotta get back to work.”


Later on, Race always thought that if she’d had a bosom friend, then maybe it all wouldn’t have happened. But she hadn’t and, in the end, a great good came out of it all. She always thought that perhaps if she’d had a girlfriend to talk to, not necessarily the girlfriend’s advice-- women were forever giving bad advice-- but if she’d had the sound of her own voice telling her own story to someone else, then it might have made her think twice.
On her way home that evening from the diner she’d been waitressing at as long as she could remember, Race went to fill up at the little gas station Kirk Berghen worked at. That Luke Madeary boy she only kind of sort of knew was working the register, and Kirk was under a car in his grey, oil covered jumpsuit. Race admitted to herself that a jumpsuit and an auto mechanic could still turned her on after all these years.
Fifteen, almost sixteen years ago, (it was hard to measure time) she had come here everyday. Yes, that Tina Foster girl was with this Luke boy, wasn’t she? Race didn’t see her. And she was Aileen Foster’s daughter, so she probably wouldn’t come here everyday for a man. Not the way Race had. But then Tina already had Luke, so she wouldn’t come by in the vague hope of snagging him from somebody else.
Race went in to pay for the gas.
“That’ll be ten dollars ma’am,” said Luke.
“Not great, but not as bad as last year. Could I get a pack of Camels?- Turkish Blend.”
“Um hum. Soft pack or hard.”
“Hard. Never saw the use in the soft pack. “
“Me neither. Unless you want to sit on all your cigarettes, and crush ‘em before you get home.”
“Yeah, really,” Race said, smiling. “Have a nice evening.”
“You too, ma’am.” The place was cold and air conditioned now. It had the almost unpleasant smell of refrigerated deli sandwiches, reheated sausages twirling in a broiler on display under too much fluorescent light.
Fifteen years ago she would stop in here, flirting. It took her awhile to realize she was flirting. At first it simply pissed her off to be flirting because this-- after all-- was the man who had broken her heart. But then there was something beautiful about Kevin Foster even in a jumpsuit. If no one said he was a beautiful man, she would. When he came in today she slapped him because six kids, sixteen years of marriage, and a broken home later he was still a beautiful man. Everything about him that ought of have been laughable, the slightly pointed ears, the too sharp Cherokee nose, all gave way and became beautiful under the influence of a ready smile, the wide blue eyes, the shoulders. Yes, it was the shoulders too.
And back then it had pissed her off that they were both only twenty, and the son-of -a- bitch had managed to strap himself with a bitch of a wife, and four squawling, screaming kids.
Everyday the silent ritual of pumping her gas, washing her windows, and smiling down at her through the windshield was celebrated. Him turning away the tip with a brush of his hand, or a little smile, sometimes sending her off without paying.
It was a little painful when the hand he shooed her away with was his left, and she could see the gold of his wedding band.
She began going to church again. The Canes had always fought over Anglicanism and Catholicism. Race’s father had been a Lebanese fresh off the boat. Her mother was half Lebanese, half Scots-Irish, born from a very daring marriage. Her parents had left their families as well as their churches, but both Cane children had been educated at Our Lady of Jamnia, and taken through all of the Sacraments. After this it was public school. Race only went to church with Kevin, when she dated him. She remembered him from Catholic school, quiet, like her from one of those families that fought over who worshipped Jesus the right way. She had already decided all her kids would be Fosters, and all of them would be Catholic.
Going to Sunday Mass at the age of twenty, she saw how fanciful her idea at the age of fifteen had been. Every time she saw Kevin with his wife she hated it, and every time she saw those nasty brats crying and whining and howling through Mass she didn’t know to be happy or angry as Aileen had to shush one of them.
Seeing the Fosters in church shattered Race’s illusions of Kevin’s marriage. The crying children, the harried wife made things all too real. That the marriage was not real. At the gas station Race could pretend it wasn’t that serious. That since Kevin was only twenty it wasn’t a real marriage, and so she wasn’t hanging around in the hopes of committing real adultery.
But in the end it was Kevin who had come to commit the adultery. He had shown up at her apartment a week after she’d stopped coming to the gas station.
“Where’ve you been?” he asked her.
“My car’s been on the fritz,” she said, which-- conveniently-- was true.
He smiled down at her and said, “I’ll be right back.”
Twenty minutes later he was as good as his word, out under her car in the parking lot, behind her apartment building, in the famous grey jump suit.
Kevin hopped up from under the car and said, “Jump in. Try it out.” He made maniacal turning signs with his hands. “Drive around the parking lot a few times.”
When she had, she parked and honked the horn.
“It’s good as new. Better than new. How much do I owe you?” she said, turning off the car and climbing out.
“Ah,” Kevin wiped the sweat from his brow with the battered edge of his blue feed cap. “I think a really big glass of ice water is what you owe me.”
“Come on up,” she told him.
There was no need to rehearse what had happen. Everything that led up to it was a huge act. The whole, “Aileen doesn’t understand me.” “I’m sorry I hurt you back then.” Race’s “What about the kids?” “We shouldn’t be doing this.” “Just this once. Just once. We owe it to ourselves.” the usual lies which knit the genesis of an affair together. Years later Race was surprised when she learned these lies were usual, and that there really was no new sin under the sun.
But it hadn’t felt like a sin then. Or a lie. It was summer. There was no air condition- ing, and so they’d left the windows open to get a fresh breeze. It was about five thirty when Kevin fixed the car. By seven o’clock they were naked and making love in her bed. By eight o’clock she had the prize. Kevin Foster was asleep. Six feet, one hundred eighty-five pounds of him, naked and radiating heat, holding her in his sleeping arms, a gentle breeze coming in from the window as the sun set, the gentle buzz saw of his breathing the only music.

AILEEN FOSTER HAD NOT SPOKEN to Kevin since the evening things had fallen apart on Logan Street. She knew she had to. But perhaps, for the first time in her life, she had the beginnings of the intimation that she could do things in her own time, and they would still be done. That she didn’t have to run to Kevin right now. She wasn’t making him stew. She just didn’t want to be bothered right now. And she needed to know how to come to her children’s rescue, how to be an advocate and an ally. She counted that at least four of her children needed an ally.
“Give me a break, children. Your ma’s only thirty-four. I can’t help that when I’m still new at this you all are almost grown.”
She stopped by Cedric’s on her way home from classes, or from Windmill. Home was the house on Windham Street.
Rodder was in the Fitzgerald house when he got there.
“Evening, Mrs. Foster.”
“Rod!” she smiled. How much did he know?
Everyday she came to see Mackenzie, visit with her son a little bit. She realized she’d never actually known him before.
It was Ian who was in the kitchen, talking to Vaughan and Madeleine, and when they all stopped, he looked up. After they’d said hello, he said, “Hello, Mrs. Foster.” It was as if he expected her to walk up and slap him in the face, but was taking his chances.
“Hello, Ian.” she pressed on. “How are you?”
“Fine, ma’am.” It sounded unnatural. Which, of course, it was.
But God, Aileen reflected, he was handsome. Not conventionally. It was something about the openness of his face, the light blush in his cheek, his dark hair. It was his eyes. This was the second time a Cane had taken a Foster man. Race was all over her nephew’s face. She’d been beautiful too. Aileen didn’t know how to compete at the time, and back then was too tired to bother.
When Mackenzie came downstairs, he wrapped his arms about his mother and stood beside Ian. Aileen looked from him to Ian a few times.
“What’s up, ma?” Mackenzie said. Aileen had tried to be discreet.
“I’m just tired,” she said, shaking her head. She felt around in her purse. “My damn cigarettes aren’t with me.”
Before Vaughan or Madeleine could get theirs, Ian slid his across the table, and then instantly colored.
“Thank, Ian,” Aileen said, taking one out. Then, “Do you mind if I have one for the road?”
“Uh,” Ian was turning truly red as he shook his head, “No ma’am.”
She had the power to smile at this boy and relieve him. So she did. He was a good kid. She could not tell Mackenzie how she really felt. She looked from him to the other boy, and they looked like a couple, like they fit. Like they should be together. Thinking this made her feel completely strange. That was how she felt. Treacherous to herself and everything she knew for thinking that her son should be with someone else’s son.
Cedric asked Aileen if she was staying for dinner.
“You might as well. Ida’ll be here soon anyway. She’s not cooking.”
Aileen did stay. She left with her mother. On her way out she asked her son, “Does it make you happy? Are you happy being with Ian?”
“Are you happy being with Dad?” he asked her.
Aileen gave a bitter little smile and said, “I don’t really know.”

Aileen and her mother sat up smoking cigarettes and eating a thick not quite delicious bread made of apples. They drank coffee and Aileen said, “I gotta go back to Kevin.”
“When you feel like it,” Ida said. “You’ve been with him since you were fourteen. Sometimes a man needs to be left.”
“Thanks for sticking by me, Mama.”
“You said it,” Ida blew a gush of smoke out of her nostrils. “I’m your Mama. I will always stick by you.”
Ida wasn’t sure how she felt about Kevin. He’d only fucked up a few times, and for a man, especially a man that young, this was to his credit. The first time was when he’d gotten Aileen knocked up in the first place. Only a real man could have handled that the way Kevin did. The second time was right after Lindsay and Mackenzie were born, when Aileen had suspected him of cheating, and Ida had dug around and found out the truth. The third time was now.
Not a bad record, but I could still shoot you and laugh while I did it.

Sam Cane was tired of his wife crying. He was- -or so he thought-- a man of action. So he got in his car that Friday night, and drove over to the Fitzgerald house.
Cedric came out of his study when he heard shouting, and was surprised, but only mildly, to see Sam Cane shouting at his son.
“Look, you little ungrateful faggot, I don’t give a damn if you come home or mooch off these people forever. But your ma wants you, so you’re coming home.”
Ian had already shouted a hundred times that he wasn’t coming home. He just said it in a gentler voice because he was tired of shouting, and didn’t know how to throw his father out of the house.
They both shut up when Cedric came into his living room. Cedric saw Vaughan coming down the stairs and, out of the corner of his eye, Mackenzie coming from the spare room.
Mackenzie and Ian are sharing a room, Cedirc realized. There was no time to moralize though.
“I think you kids should go back to your various places,” Cedric said to the boys. “Now.”
Ian turned around, and Sam Cane said, “You’re not going any--”
“Go upstairs, Ian,” Cedric said quietly. “Now.”
Ian looked from his father to Cedric, and then went upstairs quickly. Mackenzie followed him.
When the last of the boys footsteps had died, Cedric said, “I believe you’re in my house.”
“Sir, listen. I just--”
“You just had the discourtesy,” Cedric went on, not raising his voice, “to walk into my house with not so much as a hello or a bouquet of flowers, and attempt to start something with someone who lives with me.”
“He is my son.”
“He is my border. You’re in my house. I really think you need to leave.”
Cedric came closer and closer and Sam Cane went closer and closer to the door. Cedric opened the door, and Sam Cane stepped out. And then Cedric said, “One more thing: ”
With his little finger he beckoned for the taller man to bend down and meet him face to face.
Then he rolled up his fifty year old fist, and knocked him down the porch.
Without raising his voice, Cedric said, “That’s for what I saw on your boy’s face when he first came here. I only wish I’d hit your harder. Oh, and please, don’t come back if you value your life. I’m related to half the criminals on Crawford Street, and a third of the inmates at Bashan Penitentary. Most of them are due for parole, and all of them would just love to beat a white man’s ass. Good night,” Cedric said, and then shut the door.

Sam Cane was doing what he had done well for over thirty years, which was annoying the hell out of his sister. Race reflected that if she’d been the older then there would have been at least a few years in her life when Sam Cane did not exist, but as it was, he had always been around and always in the way.
“All I’m saying,” he was saying over the phone, “is call Ian, and tell him to come home for spring break.”
Race had the guarantee that if she lived long enough then one day her menstrual cycle would stop. But Sam Cane might be forever.

She could not thinking about that right now, because she was thinking about her son. Roy was nosing around asking questions. Not to her face, but he had said a few things to Ian, and set Ian to asking questions. Race wondered if she could find a way to clean up the story. The story was already a little cleaned up. After all, not long ago hadn’t Aileen come by and thanked her for giving Kevin back? That was a cleaning of the story.
That summer in the apartment on Case Street: people said that adultery was bitter. But it wans’t. It was very sweet. Race did not even want Kevin to leave his wife. It was good to send him home when it was time for him to leave, and she picked up on the fact that Aileen was not exactly a jealous wife. Maybe she thought she was too beautiful to lose her husband, or maybe she was just too busy. Which was really too bad. She still filled her car up at the gas station every few days. Kevin still looked at her through the windshield as he soaped it down. He still sent her away without paying. But now she had dinner waiting for him on Wednesdays and Thursdays when he told Aileen he would be at class. Now she could tell him to get in the shower and clean up. Now they could make love until the bedstead hit the wall and she shouted. Now they could lay together, curled in a ball. Now he could taste her toes, the wet mossy cave land between her thighs, suck on her breasts with fury, and her throat as well. Now she could savor the smell of his sweat, the brown hair up Kevin’s legs and over his thighs and ass. Now she could run her hands down his chest, and get her fill of his eyes.
It hadn’t been hard to leave him when they were dating, because she had never possessed his body or been possessed by him. Kevin Foster had never been inside her, and moved across her. She had never made him groan, and stiffen, and come, and collapse. She’d never held him in her arms after sex.
When Race clearly reflected on the adultery it was not bad at all. Things had not started to get bad until she told him, “I’m pregnant.”
Kevin hadn’t said anything for a few days. At Mass he pretended not to see her. He came to the apartment near the end of summer, and said, “I’ll divorce her. We can get married.”
“Nope,” Race said offhanded. “Apparently you didn’t do so hot in that department the first time.”
Apropos to nothing, Kevin said, “You and Aileen are the only women I’ve ever been with.”
Race believed him. She just didn’t know what difference it made.
“I’m going to work twice as hard now,” Kevin said. “We got a baby coming.”

The affair went on. It wasn’t as fun now that Race was pregnant. Affairs were supposed to be escapes from reality, and here there was more reality than either of them felt like. Only once was she afraid, and that was when she told her mother who had told her in a level voice, “Your father will disown you and the bastard.”
“Don’t call my child a--”
“He’s a bastard. You had better marry that man. Or I would ask you not to bring that child anywhere near Eleventh Street.”
“Oh, God, Mother! Like anyone would want to come near Eleventh Street!”
“Don’t sass me.”
“Go to hell,” Race said, and hung up the phone.
That was the last time she heard from her mother.

A few days later she heard from someone else’s though.
There was a knock at the door. She did not know this woman.
“Are you Race Cane?”
“Yes,” Race said cautiously. “You are...?”
“Ida Lawry,” the woman smiled.
Lawry... Lawry... That name.
“I’m Aileen Foster’s mother.”
Yes, that’s right, she had been Aileen Lawry. Race said, “Can I help you?”
“You can stay the hell away from my daughter’s husband,” Ida said plainly. “Now, I have to tell you, my girl doesn’t cry. She hasn’t cried. She works hard to raise those kids and keep a part time job, and I know they say a woman’s supposed to make herself beautiful for a man, and give herself for a man, and work a little harder for a man. Aileen told me, ‘Mama, I’ve lost him and I can’t fight for him. I’m grown. I’m too tired to fight. I’m twenty with four kids, and a house note. I don’t have the time to fight if he wants to leave let him leave.’
“But I’ll fight,” Ida said. “I’ll fight for my daughter cause Kevin’s good for her, and he’s been acting like a damn fool. And I’ve got to tell you, if he does it to Aileen, what makes you think one day he won’t do it to you?”
Race only said, “I’m pregnant.”
Ida looked down at the her fingers for a moment, then back at Race.
“I’m not sure that changes too much,” Ida said at last.
“My parents are going to... They have disowned me,” Race said. “I’m not looking for Kevin Foster to support me or save my soul cause frankly I don’t think he can do either. But I don’t know where I’m going to get help from.”
Ida looked down again. Then up. She was frowning, and her face was very serious. “I never knew my father. None of my sisters had the same one. My mother raised all of us in turn on her own. Except for Alice. Mother died. I did the bulk of raising Ally-- who by the way is your Kevin’s half sister. Send Kevin back to his wife, and I promise you that your child will never want for anything.”
Race looked at the woman strangely.
“He’s my grandkids’ brother... or sister,” said Ida. “I’d better look after him. He’ll sort of be mine too. Won’t he? And you just said your own parents had disowned you.”
Race nodded.
“What if he doesn’t stay with Aileen?”
“That’s not your problem,” Ida told her. “And by the way, I’m not threatening you. The child needs to be cared for no matter what happens. I don’t want to hold money over your head, and I don’t want anyone to know about it. But I’m just saying give him a chance to come back to my daughter. Alright?”

So this was part of the history that had to be revised. Kevin had not left her. There was bitterness because sometimes she felt he had. Technically she had sent him away, and coldly. She resented that he had given up so easily. But how easy had it been? Aileen accepted him out of habit. Race turned him off with a vengeance. She never even told him when she went into labor. She’d cried through the whole thing. They thought it was the pain. It was her aloneness, and the fact that she’d shut Kevin out. It was knowing how much it had hurt him not to be there. When he sent gifts she kept those, but she always sent money back. She gave the baby her last name. When Kevin suggested Samir for a first name, Race had said absolutely not, and named the baby Charles Royce in honor of Kevin, since Charles was his middle name, and Charles Royce had been Colonel’s name. But this honor had been hidden too, because it didn’t take long for Ian to lop his cousin’s name off to Roy. The original stigma of being a bastard did not last. The grandparents were dead. This was a new world, and Ian, an only child, adopted the only child his aunt would have as a brother.
Every two weeks checks would come. Ida would call, and ask if anything was needed. Race would lie and say no. Ida detected the lie and sent things anyway. Always Christmas presents. She took a strange, but welcome delight in her son-in-law’s child.
Race had only seen Aileen at church, and she never went to church now accept to baptize Roy, and make sure he got First Communion. Otherwise he was bundled off and sent with Ian and his parents to Trinity Episcopalian.
And he had been good about never asking where his father was. He had been good at being quiet until now, when he had practically stumbled into his family. Damn all small towns!

The phone rang, Roy was looking at himself in the mirror again. Race wondered what her son-- Kevin’s son-- saw.

Coming into her room with the cordless, Roy startled her. For nearly fifteen years she had prided herself on two things. There was a certain way a Cane looked. Roy looked it. Except for his blue eyes-- there had never been a blue eyed Cane to her knowledge-- he looked like his last name. He was weedy, and bony. Destined to be a little tall, like Ian, with wide eyes of a different color, and Ian’s same sort of quiet look. Roy had the straight, dark, almost black hair of a Cane.
When Roy came toward her with the cordless, she realized that he had a Foster walk, though. His arms and legs were loose and rolling. His head was cocked with Kevin’s smile. It scared the hell out of her. What had shocked her was seeing Roy sitting between Mackenzie and Tina the other night when they’d come searching for Ian, all three of them looking nothing alike and looking up to regard her with those same eyes.
Seeing Ian (his cousin) and Mackenzie -- yes, his brother- -together always made her flinch a little. How could anyone not see the ghost of Roy flitting between them? How could Roy play with Ryan and not realize that except for the fact that Ryan had Kevin’s nose and ears, the two boys looked a like? But then, nose and ears made a great deal of difference....
“Mom, the phone’s for you,” Roy said. He handed it to her.
“Hello?”
“Aunt Race?”
“Ian.”
“Dad’s called me. He wants me to come on a trip during spring break. I asked if we could all go? Please go. I don’t think I could take Mom and Dad by myself.”
“I don’t know if I can go.” she said, truly regretful. She wasn’t sure if Ian should go.
“Then Roy or Ryan... Maybe you could... call Mr. Foster or Mrs. Foster, ask if Ryan could come or something.”
“Yes,” that was definitely better. “I’ll work it out.”
“The Fosters listen to you,” Ian said over the phone. “It’s like they owe you something.”