The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,115

Momma’s gray face before she died. If I was imagining my biological father walking down a street, eating a sandwich, lying down next to his wife for an afternoon nap, or even buried on some faraway, strange hill, I was also less aware of Adam sleeping and unresponsive next to me.

My blood and bones, the tonality of my voice, the shape of my fingernails, my love of reading, even the roundness of my hips, might have been given to me by a man I’d never met. What else did I not know? The thought of my ignorance about my paternity made me shudder. I lived daily with the secret of having chosen a stranger to father my own children. How could I brush aside this news about my father? His blood ran in the veins of my daughters, mingling with Adam’s.

By 1965, the Piedmont Hotel, where my mother and Benjamin Mullins had been lovers, reeked of poverty and full ashtrays. An old, unshaven man slumped in an overstuffed chair in the lobby. The thin-necked clerk at the counter reluctantly put down his comic book to survey my plain dress and my lack of luggage.

“Is there still a stairway in the back?” I asked. “Can I see one of the second-floor rooms?”

He hesitated, then led me down a dank, uncarpeted hall and up a flight of narrow stairs, retracing my mother’s footsteps.

“Here, this one.” I stopped him at the first door.

He said nothing, just shrugged and unlocked the door.

The vertically striped wallpaper had faded to yellows and grays. A dark old bureau leaned in one corner, its missing leg replaced by a brick. Morning light, stark and unkind, shone through two dirty windows, illuminating a clot-colored bedspread. The curtains, a geometric patterned fabric from the fifties, were the one attempt at new décor.

Nothing of my young mother remained in the room. Nothing to explain how she could have let me grow up without such crucial knowledge.

“You want this room, lady?”

“No!” I ran from the room and out the back door.

I’d longed for some repercussion from Momma’s confession, some recognition from Daddy, some change in demeanor in Joe or my sisters. Anything that would convey that I was not alone in what I knew. But there was nothing, no difference.

What was an earthquake for me was undetectable in everyone around me. What I now knew estranged me, the very thing Momma in her secrecy had sought to protect me from. Leaning against the wall of the Piedmont Hotel, gulping the sharp, fresh air that seemed to splinter in my lungs, I saw again the anguish on her face as she’d admitted what she had kept from me. That shame, I suddenly realized, was the core of the matter for me, not the nature of the man who had fathered me, not any nuanced shifts in my relationships with my siblings.

My mother was ashamed of the circumstances of my conception. That was the stone I could not swallow or balance against all I knew of us, of what she had been to me.

And now she was gone. No longer accountable, she had surrendered me to my own resources.

That night, I made Adam accept my touch as I had the night before Momma’s funeral. Forcing intimacy on my husband was a strange cruelty on my part. A kind of fear filled his face and eyes as he lay stretched out under me. But that was the only time grief loosed its grip on him. It was exorcism, and we needed it; otherwise, we would have been lost to each other. Those were the only nights that he slept the whole night without waking. I knew I was taking unfair advantage of how well I knew his body and its responses, knowledge that he had given in trust. But I wanted the contact. I needed it. Tears—his and mine—were preferable to distance and silence.

In the months following Momma’s death, I was afraid for all of us. An unraveling had begun. Even the farm, my refuge since I was a girl, seemed dissonant, indifferent. The same mute slopes, the same red earth, and the same sky above the distant tree line. The apple tree bare now as it was every winter. The place where Frank ran over Jennie was visible from the back porch. I could have walked the exact trail of her blood across the field to the driveway. That part of the field and the top of the driveway, where the truck was stopped