In the parking lot the driver, an elderly black man named Theodore, gave them keys with little yellow tags that identified their room numbers.
“You can get us tomorrow morning at seven, Theodore,” Eddie said.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Drum.”
The rooms to the single-story motel, the El Dorado, all faced the asphalt lot. Eddie went to his door at the far corner, while Sovereign was assigned to a center room.
Sovereign’s room was a simple boxlike space with pitted green linoleum floors and small frames containing photographs of paintings of flowers hanging on the faded salmon-colored walls. The digital alarm clock was chained to the night table, and there sat an automatic coffeemaker on a ledge opposite the queen-size bed.
Sovereign took out his cell phone and saw that he’d received a series of calls from Toni. He pressed a button, wondering at his ability to see her call.
“Where are you?” were her first words.
“Down South.”
“Are you running?”
“No. I’m down here visiting my mother. She’s been worried about the trial and wants to see me.”
For a long moment there was silence.
“Are you leaving me, Sovereign?”
“Never. I’m down here for one day. I’ll probably have dinner with her tomorrow night and fly back in the morning.”
“We have a meeting with the judge on Monday morning.”
“I’ll be back way before then.”
“Okay.”
“You sound mad, Miss Loam.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you were goin’?”
“It came up all of a sudden. You know I really should do this. I haven’t even called my mother for over twenty years.”
“Why not?”
“If I knew the answer to that, baby, I’d be living in my own skin, laughing at people who thought they knew me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I love you, Toni Loam.”
“I got to go, Sovereign. I’ll come by your place day after tomorrow.”
In the morning Theodore took Eddie and Sovereign twenty-seven miles to a small hamlet nestled in a pine-and-dogwood forest in the middle of a sweltering plain of swamps and tobacco farms.
On the solitary main street there were quite a few two-story buildings, the bottoms of which were stores and businesses, with the upper floors either for storage or apartments. Up a rickety set of unpainted wood stairs, over a store called Capman’s Dry Goods, was a large apartment.
When Eddie threw the door open he yelled, “Mama!”
They were standing in a nondescript room that might have been called an entrance hall but it seemed unfinished. There was a sod-encrusted shovel leaning in a far corner and a red rocking chair by a door in the wall opposite the entrance.
An old woman came through this door. She was very thin and wore a loose dress that was once bright blue but now well on its way to turning gray. The hem went almost all the way down to her bony ankles, and her bristly hair was white.
“Mama?” Sovereign said.
It wasn’t until she smiled that he actually recognized her.
“Baby.” Her steps were slow and considered, but it was clear that she didn’t want help.
Zenith appeared at the door behind her in a pink dress suit, the cost of which would have probably paid his mother’s rent for a year.
Winifred James approached her middle child and put her arms around his neck as Toni often did. She rested her forehead against his jaw and he embraced her, ever so gently.
The hug was so tender as to feel insubstantial. Sovereign had the impression that he had gathered in his arms a parcel of smoke that had once been his mother: a fleeting moment before an expected ending.
“I missed you, baby,” she whispered. “I missed you.”
“Mama,” he said, unable to put together any other thought or concept.
“Come on, Mama,” Zenith said after a couple of minutes of this sober, sorrowful embrace. “Let’s bring Sovereign in and let him sit down.”
“Oh, yes,” Winifred James said. But she didn’t let go. “Yes, we should give him some a’ that hard lemonade you made.”
Sovereign stood there with his frail mother in his arms. It was an odd feeling, a solitary incident that was out of the range of any experience he had known.
“Mama,” Eddie said, and she raised her head from Sovy’s jaw. “Mama, come on in the dining room and we’ll all sit down and talk.”
While saying these words Drum-Eddie took his mother by the hand, disentangled her from Sovereign, and led her from the unfinished room into the interior of the apartment.
“Sit down and talk,” she said, repeating the words gratefully.
The dining room was a shock.
It was a comparable size to the dining room they had in the cylindrical San Diego home. It was laid out with the same furniture, and even the carpet looked similar to the one Sovereign and Drum rolled on as children.
“Mama took everything from the old house and brought it out here,” Eddie said in answer to the bewilderment on Sovereign’s face. “She wanted to be back home in South Carolina, but she didn’t want to leave our San Diego place either.”
Zenith, now older, even more stern-looking than she had been as a precocious child, helped Eddie settle Winifred in the chair she had sat in at every meal that Sovereign could remember.
“Go on to your seat, Sovy — I mean Sovereign,” Zenith said.
The children seated themselves around their mother, leaving a chair empty for Solar James, who had been dead for sixteen years. There was also an empty place for Eagle James’s wheelchair, and a guest seat that was rarely used.
With everyone seated a pall of early-morning silence fell over the long-lost family. It dawned on Sovereign that for the first time in many days the expectation of state retribution for his brutal attack on Lemuel Johnson had fallen away — completely. The people he had known best and longest were seated around him in a space displaced by thousands of miles.
An amber-colored woman of middle age strode into the room just before Sovereign was about to ask why they were sitting so passively. She was a chubby woman who looked to be strong. Her garrulous smile showed off one gold-capped tooth.
“Hello, Mr. Sovereign,” the short bundle of strength and ebullience exclaimed. “I’m Mary Klay and I work for your mother when she needs it.”
“Are we related?” Sovereign asked as the woman stopped maybe a foot from his chair.
“Heavens, no, my love. The Handlys are the oldest family around here. They have people working for them.”
While Sovereign tried to tease out the logic of deep roots and wealth, Mary Klay asked the assembled family, “Pancakes or hash scramble for breakfast?”
“Can we have both, Aunt Mary?” Eddie said.
“Of course you can, Mr. Drum-Eddie. Of course you can.”
A jagged twitch of energy crossed the inside of Sovereign’s chest. He understood that this was jealousy, that his family had gone on without him, eating off the same table and bringing new members into the fold.
What had he been doing all those years when Christmases and Thanksgivings were celebrated and he was in the apartment plotting revolution like a child playing with tiny dark green plastic soldiers?
“Sovereign?” Winifred Handly-James said.
“Yes, Mama?”
“Are you in trouble, son?”
“I am,” he said. “I mean, I am, but maybe not in the way people are saying.”
The old woman’s face was doll-size but not rigid. Her eyes seemed to change with each idea he espoused.
“I mean, there’s a man I beat terribly. I went blind there for a couple of months.”
“That must have been awful,” Winifred uttered softly but clearly.
“You would have thought so, Mama, but really it made me understand so much. You know there’s people runnin’ around with eyes wide open but seeing only what they think they see.”