The house on Habersham Road had eleven bathrooms, and Caroline Ashworth had told Dre about every one of them the first time he came, like a woman reading him a menu of places she’d been lonely.
Tonight she didn’t give the tour. She opened the front door herself before he could ring, barefoot on the marble, an emerald silk dress poured over her like something expensive spilled on purpose, and said, “He’s in Charlotte till Sunday. The staff’s off. I made the tea myself, so if it’s terrible, you lie to me.”
“Yes ma’am,” Dre said.
“Don’t you dare ma’am me in my own foyer.”
He smiled. He was twenty-six, six-one, a little thicker through the chest than he’d been when he was carrying a football for Ashby County High, and he’d learned two things in the last few years that mattered more than anything they ever taught him in school. One: rich women in Buckhead are no different from anybody else’s mama, they just have more rooms to be sad in. Two: you never, ever hurry.
The tea was terrible. Too sweet even for Georgia. He drank the whole glass on the back terrace while the sun went down over the golf course, and told her it was the best he’d had, and she laughed, a real laugh with her head back, and touched his arm. Her fingers rested on the ink there, the old crown on his left forearm with the letters underneath.
“You never told me what this one means,” she said.
“No ma’am, I didn’t.”
“Andre.”
“Caroline.” He set the glass down. “You want to talk about my tattoos, or you want me to take you upstairs?”
She was forty-six. She had a husband who bought her a new car every Christmas and hadn’t touched her since the Obama administration. She had two grown sons at Vanderbilt and Sewanee and a tennis partner who was, Caroline swore, sleeping with the pro. She had a body she’d spent a lot of money and a lot of mornings keeping, and nobody who looked at it anymore.
“Library,” she said, a little breathless. “I like the library.”
The library was all dark wood and green lamps and books nobody in that house had read. She leaned against the shelves and watched him come to her, and he took his time doing it. That was the thing they paid for, if you wanted to know. Not the rest of it. The time.
He kissed her slow. Her mouth tasted like sugar and lime. He found the zipper at the back of the silk and drew it down an inch at a time, and the dress slid off her shoulders and pooled at her feet, and she stood there in nothing but pearl earrings with her chin up, daring him to look away.
He didn’t look away. “Lord have mercy,” he said, and meant it, and watched her go pink from her collarbone to her cheeks.
He went to his knees on her Persian rug. Kissed the soft inside of her knee, her thigh, the crease of her hip, while her fingers went into his hair and held on. When he finally put his mouth on her she made a sound that bounced off the coffered ceiling, and he held her hips against the shelves and took her apart slowly, his tongue patient, unhurried, reading her the way you read a defense, until her thighs shook against his shoulders and a row of leather-bound Faulkner went over like dominoes.
“Leave them,” she gasped, when he started to laugh. “Leave them, leave them, don’t you stop—”
He didn’t stop.
After, he stood and lifted her like she weighed nothing, which was not true and which she loved, and carried her to the leather sofa. She pulled at his belt with hands that weren’t steady. When she got him free she went still, her lips parted, the way they all did the first time and Caroline, God love her, still did every time.
“I keep thinking I remembered wrong,” she whispered.
“You didn’t.”
He eased into her inch by inch, her nails in his back, her breath catching at each one, her eyes wide on his. He waited when she needed him to wait. He moved when she pulled at him to move. Long and deep and slow, then not slow at all, the leather creaking under them, the green lamp swaying a little on its table, Caroline saying his name like she was trying to hold onto it, Andre, Andre, oh, until she came again around him with her heels locked at the small of his back, and he followed her over with his face in her neck, breathing in a perfume that cost more than his first car.
Later, wrapped in a throw blanket, her head on his chest, she traced the crown again.
“Tell me,” she said. “Just this once.”
He looked up at the ceiling. At all those books nobody read.
“Alright,” he said. “But it’s not a pretty story.”
Ashby, Georgia, population four thousand and change, is two stoplights, a Dollar General, a Waffle House that never closes, and a high school football stadium that holds more people than live in the town. On Friday nights in the fall, that’s not a contradiction. People drive in from three counties. Old men who haven’t stood up for anything since Vietnam stand up for the kickoff.
Andre Lamar Wilkes was the reason they stood up for four years.
His mama, Loretta, cleaned rooms at the Hampton Inn out by the interstate during the day and worked the register at the Piggly Wiggly three nights a week. She never missed a game. She sat on the forty-yard line, top row, in the same purple seat cushion, and when he broke one loose she didn’t scream like the other mothers. She stood up and put her hand over her heart and stayed that way till he crossed the goal line, like somebody was playing the anthem only she could hear.
He ran a 4.4. By junior year he had letters from Georgia, Auburn, Clemson. Coach Pruitt kept them in a binder in his office and showed them to Dre like they were scripture. “This is your ticket, son. This is the way out. You keep your nose clean and your knees healthy and you’ll never see the inside of that Hampton Inn again.”
Dre kept his nose clean. He couldn’t do anything about his knee.
Fourth quarter, homecoming, senior year. A linebacker from Dublin came in low and late and Dre heard it before he felt it, a sound like a wet branch breaking. He remembers lying on the grass under the lights and looking up into the stands for the purple cushion, and seeing his mama standing with her hand over her heart, and realizing she was waiting for him to get up, and he couldn’t.
The binder got thinner after that. Then it went away.
He wasn’t a bad kid. That’s the thing nobody understood afterward, the people at church, the teachers who’d loved him on Fridays. He didn’t wake up one day and decide to be trouble. Trouble was just the only thing in Ashby still returning his calls.
His cousin Terrell had a crew. They called themselves the Southside Kings, which sounded grander than five guys with a Monte Carlo and a back room behind a tire shop, but they had money, and they had each other, and for a nineteen-year-old with a bad knee and a mama working double shifts, that looked a lot like a future. Terrell never asked him to do much at first. Drive. Sit in the car. Stand next to the door looking large, which he was good at.
The crown came first. Terrell’s guy did it in the back of the tire shop with a homemade machine, and it hurt like hell, and the letters under it said LORETTA, because Dre was still enough of himself to put his mama’s name on it. Then the sleeve on the right arm. Then the vines climbing up his neck, which Loretta looked at across the dinner table for a long time without saying a word, and then said, “Well. Hope you like that, ’cause you can’t take it off for a job interview.”
He told himself it was temporary. Two years, maybe three. Save some money. Get his knee fixed right. Walk on somewhere.
That’s what everybody tells themselves. That’s the trick of it.
The night it ended was a Tuesday in March, and he was twenty-one.
He was driving Terrell’s Monte Carlo on Highway 15 with Terrell in the passenger seat and a gym bag in the trunk that Dre had been told not to ask about and had not asked about. It was raining. A Johnson County deputy lit them up for a busted taillight two miles outside of town, and Dre’s heart came up into his throat and stayed there.
He did everything right. Hands on the wheel. Window down. Yes sir, no sir. The deputy was young and white and nervous, his flashlight shaking a little, and when he asked them to step out of the car, Terrell looked at Dre with a face Dre had never seen on him before. It wasn’t fear. It was calculation.
“That bag’s yours, cuz,” Terrell said quietly. “You got no record. They’ll go easy on you.”
Dre stood in the rain with his palms flat on the roof of the car and felt his whole life tilt like a plate on a table edge.
What saved him wasn’t anything he did. The deputy’s radio crackled, a wreck with injuries on 80, all units, and the kid looked at the two of them, looked at the trunk, looked at the rain, and made the fastest decision of his career. He wrote the taillight ticket, told them to get it fixed, and drove off with his lights going.
They stood there in the rain a long time.
“You were gonna let me take it,” Dre said.
Terrell shrugged. “You’d have done a year. Maybe less. You’d have been fine.”
He drove home without Terrell. Left him on the side of the highway and drove the Monte Carlo back to the tire shop and left the keys on the seat and walked the last three miles in the rain on a knee that screamed every step.
Loretta was sitting at the kitchen table when he came in at two in the morning, still in her Piggly Wiggly smock, a cup of coffee gone cold in front of her. She didn’t ask where he’d been. She’d stopped asking about a year before. She just looked at him, soaked through, shaking, and said, “Sit down, baby.”
He sat. And for the first time since he was eight years old, he cried in front of his mother.
She let him. She didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she reached across the table and put her hand on his forearm, right over her own name.
“I put that cushion on the forty every Friday for four years,” she said. “You know why I sat up top?”
He shook his head.
“So I could see the whole field. So I could see the hole open up before you did. Every time, I saw it a half second before you got there, and every time, you found it.” She squeezed his arm. “There’s a hole open right now, Andre. I can see it from up here. You gonna find it or not?”
He moved to Atlanta two weeks later with four hundred dollars and a duffel bag and his mama’s phone number written on the inside of his wrist in Sharpie, like he might forget it.
Atlanta didn’t care that he’d run a 4.4. Atlanta wanted to know if he could detail a car.
He could, it turned out. He got on at a high-end shop in Sandy Springs, the kind of place where men brought Porsches to get waxed and their wives brought Range Rovers to get the Goldfish crackers vacuumed out of the third row. He was good at it. He was careful and patient and he didn’t rush, and he had a way of talking to the wives while he worked that made them hang around longer than they needed to. He made them laugh. He asked about their kids, and remembered.
“You’ve got a gift,” the owner told him once, not entirely as a compliment. “Half these women come back to see you, not the car.”
Dre laughed it off. He sent money home every two weeks. He got his knee looked at by a real doctor, finally, who told him it was too late to play but not too late to walk right. He went to church once a month to keep his mama off his back. He didn’t call Terrell. Terrell didn’t call him.
He was twenty-two, and his life was small and clean and quiet, and he figured that’s what it would be from then on.
Then came the night of the storm.
He was driving home late on a back road in north Fulton, the kind that winds past horse farms and gated drives and mailboxes the size of his apartment. Rain coming down in sheets. He came around a bend and saw hazard lights blinking in a ditch, a silver sedan nose-down in the red mud, and a woman standing next to it in the downpour with her phone held up like she was begging God for one bar of signal.
He pulled over. Grabbed the umbrella off his back seat. Walked over slow with his hands where she could see them, because he was a big Black man with neck tattoos on a dark road in the rain, and he wasn’t a fool.
“Ma’am? You alright? You hurt?”
She turned. Blonde, mid-forties, a cardigan soaked over a black dress, mascara running, pearls. She looked at his face, then at his neck, then at his face again, and he watched her decide.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m—no. I’m not fine. I hit a deer. Or I swerved for a deer, I don’t know if I hit it, and my husband’s in Zurich, and my phone is—” She held it up. “It’s useless. It’s a two-thousand-dollar flashlight.”
“Well.” He held the umbrella over her. Rain drummed on it. “Good news is, I don’t think you hit the deer. Bad news is, you hit Georgia, and Georgia always wins.”
She stared at him. Then she laughed, a startled, waterlogged laugh, and put her hand on his arm to steady herself.
“Diane,” she said. “Diane Mercer.”
“Andre. Dre.”
“Well, Dre.” She wiped her face with her sleeve, smearing the mascara worse. “I live two miles up the road. If you could get me home, I would be grateful in ways I can’t possibly describe.”
He drove her home. Her house was at the end of a long gravel drive lined with live oaks, white columns lit up in the rain like a wedding cake. He walked her to the door, still holding the umbrella. She fumbled with the keys. Dropped them. He picked them up.
She didn’t take them right away. She looked up at him, rain dripping off the porch, a strange expression on her face, like a woman standing at the edge of something with her toes over the side.
“You should come in,” she said. “Dry off. I’ll make you something warm. It’s the least I can do.”
“I’m alright, ma’am. I should get on.”
“Dre.” She closed her hand over his, the one holding her keys. Her fingers were cold. Her voice wasn’t. “My husband’s in Zurich until the fifteenth. The house has nine bedrooms. And I haven’t been this grateful to anybody in a very, very long time.”
He stood there in the rain, the porch light on his face, his mama’s name on his arm.
And somewhere in the back of his head, from the top row of the stands, on the forty, he heard Loretta Wilkes say, There’s a hole open right now, baby. You gonna find it or not?
On the leather sofa in the library on Habersham Road, Caroline Ashworth lifted her head off his chest.
“Diane Mercer?” she said. “Diane Mercer? From the Magnolia Club?”
Dre smiled at the ceiling.
“She’s the one who gave me your number,” Caroline whispered.
“Yes ma’am,” Dre said. “She’s the one who gave me everybody’s.”
