CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Earl was seated in his recliner when they walked into the immaculate living room. And when they went to sit on the plastic-covered sofa, JJ wasn’t surprised when Tish sat so close to him that she was almost in his lap. Mainly because her father was a very dignified, elegant, but stern-looking man. So stern looking that it seemed unnatural. As if he’d never smiled a day in his life. He had to be a terror for his children growing up. But if you asked Tish, he was sunlight itself. Both of her parents were to her. JJ still didn’t understand why.
But JJ did understand that her father was a man who got to the point. And he didn’t hesitate. “What do you want?” he asked JJ.
Even JJ felt some hesitation around the older man. He reeked of authority. “My name is James Brant.”
“I didn’t ask you what your name was.”
JJ returned the older man’s stare as if he was sizing him up just as he was sizing up JJ. “I realize I don’t know your name. What’s your name?” he asked him.
Tish and Viola both looked at JJ. And Tish was annoyed. Why wouldn’t he just answer her father’s question? Didn’t he realize how easily her father could throw them both out of his house for good? Because she knew that when her father made up his mind, there was no changing it.
But JJ didn’t know all that. He continued to stare at Earl.
But his tactic seemed to work. As if Tish’s father respected a man who didn’t back down from him. Or felt threatened by him. “My name is Earl Payton,” he said, to Tish’s relief. “That’s my wife Viola. What y’all doing here?”
“My name is James Joseph Brant, but everybody calls me JJ. I’m here to ask for your blessing.”
Tish could tell that neither one of her parents expected to hear JJ say those words. They probably thought she was in more trouble. She even saw them glance at each other.
“I love your daughter, deeply, and I wish to marry her. I’m here for your blessing, sir.”
Earl did something nobody expected. He pulled out his Android flip phone, snapped a photo of JJ, and then sent it to Google for recognition. When the search results appeared, he then sat there, his legs crossed, and read JJ’s entire Wikipedia bio. The son of a wealthy investment banker. K Street attorney and lobbyist. Judge. But when he read that JJ had risen to Chief Judge of the Fourth Judicial circuit, he glanced over at him. Read the bad stuff too: how his sister and nephew were murdered in a restaurant with him in attendance. Read how he was married once and divorced, and childless. He seemed to be everything Earl despised: Greedy, immoral, and with bad luck. When his daughter, other than the bad luck part that she brought on herself, was none of those things. He closed his phone and put it away.
And it was only then did Tish speak up. “He asked you a question, Daddy. He wants your blessing to marry me.”
Earl finally looked at his child. And his sternness, JJ noticed, did not waver. “Do you want my blessing?” he asked her.
Finally they were getting somewhere, JJ thought. But Tish knew her father. They weren’t getting anywhere at all. There was always method in his madness. “Yes, sir,” she said, and waited for the onslaught.
It came immediately. “You didn’t want my blessing when you ran out of this house with Terrell,” Earl began railing. “I told you he wasn’t worth a damn, but you didn’t want my blessing then. You had this whole world at your feet. You could have went to college, or to the military like Ricky did. But what did you do? You find the worst human being in Coal, a man that even a child would know to stay away from. Of all these good, successful, moral black men in this town, you fall in love with the absolute worst one from the absolute worst family. And what good did it do you? He ended up dead before he was thirty, trying to rob somebody, and you ended up in prison. Now you have the nerve to step up into my house and demand that I bless your union with some white boy that claim to love you just like Terrell claimed, and you expect me to go along with that? Get out of my house,” he said, rising to his feet. “Get out!”
Tish was so hurt by her father and so overwhelmed by his seeming hatred of her that she jumped up and ran out of that house. Viola, devastated and looking bitterly at her husband, got up and ran after her.
JJ stood up too. But he didn’t run. He, instead, looked hard at Earl. “LaTisha is the greatest woman I have ever known in my entire life. She has integrity. She has a moral compass second to none. She is a wonderful, beautiful, kind and caring person with her entire life ahead of her. But all you can see is what she did when she was seventeen years old. She had nothing to do with that robbery Shake pulled off. And I know what I’m talking about: I was the judge on the case. You’re going to regret this day for the rest of your life. Your daughter is a precious diamond. You treat her like trash.” Then JJ walked out of the house.
Earl stood there as that feeling of lost and hurt and pain overtook him the way it always did when he thought about his children. Neither one of them had a relationship with him or his wife, and he knew it was because of him. Ricky had children, his grandchildren, that he’d never seen. He even broke down five years ago, during a phone conversation, and asked Ricky to bring the children by the house since Ricky was back stateside at that time and was going to be deployed in North Carolina for a couple years. But he said with his schedule that would be impossible. Which, Earl translated, meant he didn’t want his children to have anything to do with him. And that was that.
Earl walked over to his open front door and walked out onto the porch. To his surprised, JJ was still standing on the porch watching as Viola comforted Tish as the two women stood in the yard. But JJ’s attention had been diverted to something he thought he saw in the field to the right of the house. And that was when he saw a figure, moving in the hide weeds. “Somebody’s out there,” he said.
Earl looked where JJ was looking, and that was when he saw movement too. And Earl didn’t hesitate. He hurried back inside his house and grabbed his loaded rifle that he kept behind his sofa.
But before he could come back out, JJ saw that the man in those woods had a rifle too. And as quickly as he saw it, he realized it was no fluke. It was no trespasser. It was an assassin!
“Tish!” JJ cried out as he jumped down from that porch and ran as fast as he could to Tish. He jumped on top of her, even as he was pushing her mother down too, just as the bullets started sailing.
Earl had just run outside when he saw JJ fall on top of Tish, shielding her, and push Viola out of the line of fire at the same time as gunshots from those woods suddenly rang out. He started firing his rifle at the assailant, which caused the assailant to duck and dodge bullets, but also to stop firing toward the house. But the assailant was able to hop into his car even as Earl kept shooting. But he got away.
But Earl was too worried about his wife and daughter to be concerned about anything or anybody else. He ran down the steps to the lawn where Tish was screaming in uncontrollably anguish as she cupped an unconscious JJ and laid his head on her lap. His wife was on her cellphone calling 911 as Earl saw that she was okay, and that his daughter was okay, too. But the judge was down. He had been shot. And shot repeatedly if the blood was any indication.
And Earl was so outdone that he sat his rifle down and got down next to his daughter. He didn’t know what to make of all of this. This strange man he’d only just met had saved his daughter’s life, and his wife’s life, by willfully risking his own.