Chapter 10 #2
"But I am going to stop being funny for one second, because there is one thing on this tape I actually need you to hear.
I am recording this on an ordinary afternoon with a glass of wine and my whole life in front of me, and I am praying to God you never have to watch it.
But I have a daughter — and the worst thought I have ever had, the one that finds me when I am tucking Imari into bed or playing a board game she is cheating at, is the thought of her growing up on this earth without her mother in it.
She is so young. And if you are watching this, then the thing I could not let myself think about has happened, and I am not there, I am never going to be there again, and there is nothing left that I can do about it except this.
Except the two of you. So I am asking you.
Aurora — be her mother. Not her aunt, not her godmother, not the nice lady who visits.
Her mother. Braid her hair and learn her teachers' names and know which stuffed animal is the one she cannot sleep without.
Halston — be the father she should get a whole life of.
Show up. Stay. Be the man who is in the room.
One day she is going to ask about me, and when she does, I need you to tell her that her mama and father love her so much that she sat down one perfectly ordinary afternoon, healthy and whole and not planning on going anywhere, and arranged her little girl's entire future, just in case, because that is exactly how much.
She is the best thing I have ever done. She is the only thing I was ever afraid to leave.
Take care of my baby. Take care of my baby. Please.
"Take care of each other. I love you both. Stop being cowards. I am dead. So just live life to the fullest, love each other like there is no tomorrow and give my baby girl the best life full of love."
She lifted the wine glass.
"That is the end of my speech. I would like to add that, by the time you are watching this, I have hopefully also been forgiven for arranging your life from beyond the grave, because, frankly, you deserved it. Goodbye, my loves. I am going to go drink the rest of this bottle now."
She blew a kiss at the camera.
The picture went black.
The library was so quiet Aurora could hear the soft electric hum of the camcorder on the coffee table.
Neither of them moved for a long time.
Then Halston lifted Aurora's hand to his mouth and pressed his lips to the back of her ring finger, and he said, very quietly, into the gold band:
“She always was a bully.”
Aurora laughed.
It was not the kind of laugh she had expected to come out of her. It was a wet, shaking, half-choked, fully delighted laugh, and it came out of the center of her chest like a small wild animal that had been kept in a cage too long.
She laughed into Halston's shoulder. He laughed too. They sat there laughing into each other for several minutes, a small ragged hysterical laugh on the leather couch of the gold sitting room in front of a frozen-black camcorder screen.
After several minutes the laughter slid sideways into crying without changing tone. Halston wrapped his arms around her and pulled her into his lap holding her against his chest. Aurora cried into the front of his shirt without trying to stop.
“She was a bully,” Aurora whispered against the soft cotton.
“She was a bully.”
“She loved us.”
“She loved us, baby.”
“Halston.”
“Mm.”
“She is going to be insufferable in the afterlife.”
“Aurora. Maeve has been insufferable in this life. The afterlife will not change her.”
They laughed again.
Halston smoothed his palm slowly down her back, his hand brushing the back of her natural curls without disturbing them. Aurora pressed her face into the warm cedar smell of his collarbone and let her shoulders go slack.
After a long time Rhett tapped softly on the doorframe of the gold sitting room with the back of his knuckles.
“Yvette is asking if you want bourbon or food.”
“Both,” Halston said into Aurora's hair.
“Right answer.”
Rhett came in. He looked at the two of them on the couch, then at the dead screen of the old camcorder. He nodded, very small, to himself.
"I still don't know what's on it," he said quietly. "But I'm glad she made me bring it."
“Me too,” Aurora said.
“For what it's worth,” Rhett said, sitting down on the arm of the couch opposite, “I have never seen him sit on a couch like that with anyone in his life.”
He let the moment sit.
Then he picked up the bourbon Yvette had sent him in with and poured three small glasses. Halston, holding Aurora in his lap on the couch with his arm around her waist, took his with his free hand, and they sat and drank in a comfortable silence.
The room was warm. The estate was quiet. Aurora went to check on Imari who was upstairs asleep.
"Rhett," Halston said after a while.
"Mm."
"I have to tell you something." He kept his eyes on the dead screen.
"Aurora didn't take my father's money fifteen years ago.
My father went to her mother — Ayanna, the woman who cleaned our house for thirty years — and he dangled two hundred thousand dollars in front of her while her mother-in-law was dying at Ben Taub and her family was about to lose their home.
He made her choose. Take the money, or watch the old woman die and watch Aurora drop out of school.
Then he came to me, and he sat me down on the couch in his study, and he told me Aurora took it.
That she came to him and asked for it. That she didn't want to be tied to me.
" He finally looked at Rhett. "I was nineteen.
He'd buried my mother three years before.
He was the only person left who told me he loved me.
So I believed him. I believed him for fifteen years, Rhett.
I built my entire life on top of believing him. "
Rhett did not say anything for a moment. Then, very quietly: "Jesus, Halston."
"Errol didn't know either. He found out the same time I did." Halston finally looked at him. "So I'm driving out to see him in the morning. He hasn't asked me to come, and Aurora's not coming with me. This one is between him and me."
Rhett studied his friend's face for a long moment. "He might shut the door on you."
"I know."
"What'll you do if he does?"
"Knock again."
*****
The next morning Halston drove himself, alone, in a plain black sedan, down the long Pinewood Hollow coast road into the city and west into the Third Ward of Houston.
He pulled up to the curb on Andrews Street. He did not knock on the front door of the Akande house. He walked, instead, around the side of the house, through the small wooden gate, into the back yard, and stopped at the open door of Errol's workshop.
The smell of cedar and tung oil rolled out at him.
Errol was at his workbench in his work pants and his white undershirt, his forearms bare to the elbow, sanding the leg of a chair. He did not look up.
“Mr. Akande.”
“Mr. Iverson.”
“Sir. May I come in.”
“You're a grown man with feet.”
Halston stepped into the workshop. He stopped just inside the door and folded his hands in front of him. He did not approach the workbench.
Errol kept sanding.
For a long minute neither of them said anything. The rasp of sandpaper on cedar was the only sound in the workshop. The morning sun came in slanted through the high windows.
Halston let him work.
He had not come to interrupt. He had come to wait until Errol was ready to listen.
After a long time, Errol set the sandpaper down but did not turn around. He took a soft cloth from a hook over the bench and ran it slowly down the chair leg. He hung the cloth back up.
He looked, finally, at Halston.
“Speak,” he said.
Halston, who had not rehearsed this speech because he had known any rehearsed speech would sound rehearsed, took a slow breath, and spoke.
“Sir. I was lied to. I did not know about the money. I learned about it the night before last. I was led to believe your daughter chose two hundred thousand dollars over me and I held so much anger towards her. I have apologized to her profusely for the way I treated her all those years ago but you see sir, I didn’t know this was all a lie.
I have loved your daughter, sir, since I was twelve years old.
I intend to be her husband for the rest of my life.
I intend to be Imari Larkin's father. I am not here to ask your forgiveness, because that is not forgiveness I have any claim to. Your wife and my late father owe you that, and that is between you and them. I am here, sir, to ask for the chance to earn standing in this family. That is all I am asking for. That is all I will ever ask for.”
He stopped.
He waited.
Errol did not move for a long time.
Then he picked up the sandpaper again, turned around to face the chair leg, and went back to sanding.
He sanded for two long passes.
Then he spoke, without turning around.
“My wife,” Errol said quietly, “is upstairs in our bed crying.
She has been crying, on and off, for two days.
She has been carrying this for fifteen years and now she has to carry me being disappointed in her too.
You did not do that. Your father did. But you are not your father.
So, you come back here next Sunday for dinner.
Bring the little girl. Don't bring flowers.
Don't bring wine. Don't bring anything but yourself and that child. We will start there.”
The workshop went still.
Halston, the second wealthiest man in the State of Texas, stood very straight in the doorway of the carpentry workshop with his hands folded in front of him and tears he refused to let fall pressing the backs of his eyes.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
Errol sanded another pass of the chair leg.
“Get on home now,” he said. “Your wife is waiting.”
Halston turned around and walked back through the wooden gate, around the side of the small clapboard house, to his black sedan at the curb. He sat behind the wheel for a long minute. He set his forehead against the steering wheel.
He had not, in five years of being a billionaire, been called son by another man one single time. It moved something in him and hearing that word from Errol meant more than he could have possibly imagined. A small smile spread across his face, one full of happiness.
He started the engine and drove home to his wife.