CHAPTER 1 Jewell Thompson nosed her sedan into the narrow Philadelphia street. She had directions on the seat next to her, and also the letter. In her mind, a voice from the past, her grandmother''s, shouted: "We home!" which was ridiculous, since she''d never been on this street, or even in this section of the city, before. Outside her noisy mind, rows of identical two-story brick houses squatted beside Cobbs Creek Park, muffled by heavy fog and a cold, early-spring, early-Sunday-morning quiet. She had to drive cautiously. No more than four or five inches separated her driver''s side from the curb or her passenger''s side from the parked cars, whose owners had carefully folded in their side-view mirrors. She slowed nearly to a stop when she saw house numbers that matched the return address on the letter. They were gold and white, painted onto a glossy black brick face.
Prim white sills and lintels, like shirt cuffs, shone through the drizzle, and white lines traced the mortar. When she''d left her house, Jewell had told her husband that she might, depending on the way things looked, knock on the door. Now, presented with the reality of this shiny black cookie jar of a building on the misty working-class West Philadelphia street, she doubted she''d have the courage. In front of the house grew a large sycamore that had buckled the sidewalk. At the level of the second floor, mottled limbs reached out over the street and twinkled with tiny white Christmas lights. An extension cord connected them to the second-floor window. She couldn''t quite see, but it looked as if they''d drilled a hole in the storm-window trim for the cord, so as not to have to leave the window open. Jewell smiled to herself.
Clever. She imagined that the lights made the little street feel inviting at night. A parking space under the tree beckoned, but it seemed too close and obvious, so she let her car roll forward one car length to the stop sign. Some bright, false part of herself congratulated her on the trip: There, done. Now I can go home. Instead, she sat motionless at the stop sign. She did not even notice the large red pickup truck behind her, until the driver touched his horn. In her rearview mirror, she could see a man of about thirty, who seemed to fill the cab.
He indicated the parking space under the tree, which he could not maneuver into with her car in the way. The truck would have to swing out very wide. Jewell crossed the intersection, put her foot onto the brake, and checked her rearview mirror again. The big, ocher-colored man was unfolding himself from the cab of the truck and stepping into the street. She shifted in her seat to see him better. He looked familiar. The letter to her was folded in its envelope on the front seat. She''d read its block capital letters so often in the past week, she almost knew it by heart.
Dear Ms. Jewell Thompson, I am looking for my mother, formerly Jewell Needham, the daughter of Bobo Needham, originally from the town of Gunnerson in Beaufort County, SC. Please let me know if you are that lady. We lived in New York, in Harlem, I think, until I was about 7. Then I was sent to my grandfather Bobo Needham and his stepmother Selma Needham in SC, who also raised him. Now I am 30 years old. I am doing well, I am a contractor now, and just received my first contract with the city of Philadelphia. I said that I wished I could tell you, and my girlfriend suggested that I write this, and she would try to find an address for me to send it to.
I live with my girlfriend and her son. He is about the age I was when I was separated from my mother. That''s another reason I''m writing. Watching him grow has made me think about you. I hope that you will agree to meet. If you are not the right person, please let me know. This could just be one meeting, if you like, it doesn''t have to be more. Here''s my information for home or work.
Email is best or cell. Sincerely, Alonzo Rayne That was Lonnie in the truck behind Jewell. She knew it. ------ Jewell remembered her son''s deep-set, coffee black-brown eyes, like her grandfather''s. A big gap between his front teeth came from her grandfather, too. When Jewell had allowed herself to think of Lonnie as a man, she''d fitted his seven-year-old face into the image in her head of her grandfather King''s old sepia-toned photo. Nana Selma had had a mantel built, sans fireplace, just to make a proper display, like an altar, for that photograph. It had been taken by a black photographer in Columbia, whom Selma referred to as famous.
Later, when Jewell learned about African ancestor worship, she thought of that photo. Surely, the hulking farmer in his white shirt and stiff collar had seemed to live with them. Selma spoke to him as she walked by. She asked questions of him in passing, and seemed to receive answers. King had been a big, pale man burned bronze by the sun. His head and neck and shoulders filled the frame; the wide mouth and jaw were set, as if against the coming misfortune. His deep-set eyes looked straight and unsmilingly from under dark, arched brows into the small room that his father had built and he had improved. Jewell had been afraid of those eyes and their judgment.
Now she was similarly afraid of her son''s. His letter had been perfectly cordial, but, surely, he had to remember what she had done, just as she remembered and could never forget, starting with the train. Jewell had put him onto that southbound train and convinced herself that he''d be riding into a new, wholesome boyhood. "He''s much better off." Recalling how far she''d sunk back then, she''d repeated it to herself through the years: " much better off." And, until this moment, she''d mostly been able to keep herself from thinking about how very deeply he might hate her. She stopped the car and watched him in the mirror. It looked as if he were even taller than her father, big and hulking like him, with a walk that rolled his shoulders side to side.
On his head he wore a skullcap stretched over thick dreadlocks that reminded her of how unruly his hair had been when he was a boy. He unloaded from the back of the truck two boxes, walked them to the black-and-white house, and rang the bell. A young woman peeked her head out into the drizzle; slim, brown, animated, she waved her hands even as he shook his head no. She had big hair, too, twists or some similar style that poked out in all directions. She stepped onto the stoop and clearly strained to pick up one box and take it inside. They were open boxes filled with objects Jewell could not identify, except to see that the heavy contents seemed to slide when the young woman tried to pick up the top one. He called to her. Jewell saw his raised hand make a dismissing movement, which the young woman ignored.
Instead, she called into the house. A boy of about seven erupted from the doorway, danced a little moonwalk on the top step, then held the door for her, hands and legs moving in place. With that, she bent deep and hoisted and then carried first one box, then the other. Once the woman finished, the boy banged the door closed and ran shouting into the quiet street. Lonnie--Jewell called him that in her mind--pointed to the truck bed and spoke to the boy. It looked as if he was directing him to carry something else into the house. The boy climbed up onto the bumper and reached in at the same time that Lonnie pulled out another box. Instead of grabbing his own parcel, however, the child vaulted onto Lonnie''s back, laughing.
Lonnie bent forward slightly to accommodate him, said something to him sideways, then stopped in the middle of the street to regard Jewell''s car and the woman inside it, watching him. He squinted pointedly through the dim drizzled light at the rearview mirror and opened his big hands in an impatient gesture that communicated: "What are you looking at?" to Jewell. Flushed and embarrassed, Jewell took off too fast down the one-way street. The next intersecting street went the wrong way to aim her back toward the expressway. One block more took her to a street that was stoppered with a police barrier around construction. Although she was turned around now and confused, Jewell decided, superstitiously, that her way home was blocked because she was supposed to drive back to Lonnie''s house and introduce herself. Besides, she wanted to see him close up. She wanted to feel again the totally undeserved surge of pride that had filled her as she''d watched him, with his rolling gait and strength, and his relationships, whatever they were, with the young woman with hair as big and wild as his own and the boy who whooped with glee and jumped onto his back.
She wondered if he still had his great-grandfather''s gap-toothed smile. How could such a person have burst, full-grown, into her life? ------ It was a strange feeling. The driver of the champagne-colored Lexus on the next block was studying him, and so intently that when Alonzo Freeman Rayne looked up and squinted into her rearview mirror, it was as if the driver didn''t register the challenge, but only continued to observe. Rayne stared at her hard. At first he thought she was a case of early-morning road rage, pissed off because he''d urged her forward to let him into the parking space in front of the house. But she had not seemed offended: no visible huffing and puffing, no flip of the finger. From what he could see at this distance, she appeared simply to have been watching, head to the side--was he imagining her smiling?--as if he were a movie. <.