Whitaker!” his five-year-old nephew screamed from the top of the bouncy castle.
Whitaker gave a big wave. “Happy birthday, old man!”
“What’s the present?”
“I’ll stick it on the pile. You’ll see soon enough.”
The typist worked his way through the crowd, saying hello to people he’d known most of his life. Four generations of Grants. No one had more cousins and uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces. To his dismay, nearly all of them mentioned something about his writing career. After hugging and kissing and making small talk with half of them, he finally made it to his mother.
Sadie was not born a Grant, but to marry one was to cut your roots low and be replanted into dangerous Grant soil. He saw his mother as a brave yet aloof southern equestrienne riding the white flag of surrender into a bloodbath of familial dysfunction, the female Don Quixote of Florida.
Sadie was a doll. Born a doll and had always been a doll. A southern belle without the accent—at least without much of one. As southern belle as you can be growing up in Florida. For every native of Florida who had shucked an oyster, cracked open a boiled peanut, or polished off a bowl of grits, there was a snowbird’s child next to them saying, “What in the world are gator bites?” No, you couldn’t really be a southerner, not with all the northern and midwestern influence. But Sadie was a doll, as innocent as a flower, and everyone in St. Pete loved her. How could you not love someone who couldn’t stop smiling?
“I’m so glad you came,” she said loud enough to be heard over the kids screaming in the castle twenty feet away.
“Me too.” Whitaker kissed her cheek and detected the familiar hints of gardenia from the perfume she’d worn for as long as he could remember. He was careful not to mess up her hair, which she’d kept the same way for forty years, a sort of bulbous helmet hardened by hair spray. The only change over the years was from brown to gray. Whitaker appreciated that his mom had let her hair gray without hiding behind dye. This devil-may-care attitude carried over to much of her life. She wasn’t afraid to show her gray hair, and she damn sure wasn’t afraid to show the scars and weaknesses of her family. In her aloof, high-pitched tone, she would ask, “Why be ashamed of being human, Whitaker?”
If only that insouciance had rubbed off on him. If he looked back, maybe it had, but years of fighting an artist’s battles had made him start to overthink things and worry too much.
Doña Quixote looked down at the present in his hand. “Do I need to inspect it? No more fireworks, right? And you know Miles can’t have dairy.”
Whitaker sipped the beer someone had handed him. “No dairy. No gunpowder.” She didn’t say a word about anything sharp.
Sadie moved in and whispered into his ear. “Be nice to your father. He wants to talk to you about something.”
“What did I do now?”
“Nothing, honey. Just hear him out.”
What in the world could that mean? Whitaker wondered.
When he finally ran into his dad, Whitaker’s clenched teeth compromised his fake smile. He could feel the rest of his family watching this encounter, as if Whitaker were part of a bomb squad approaching a man in a suicide vest. Or was Whitaker the one in the vest?
Both men were known to fly off the handle. The last time they’d been together, Whitaker had unleashed a rant that had cut to the core of his father. Though he thought the man deserved his fair share of harsh words, even Whitaker knew he’d stepped over the line, and he’d even gone as far as apologizing the next day. Somewhere down there, deep into the sludge, his father was a good man. It was a lot of sludge, though. Epic quantities of thick, PTSD-riddled sludge.
Jack stood two inches shorter than Whitaker, but he always looked down on him. Even if Jack were four feet tall, he’d still look down on his son. Though he’d been as strapping as Whitaker in his early years, according to Sadie, Jack had aged rapidly after the war. He had lost most of his hair and walked with a slight limp from a helicopter crash in the Mekong Delta. The hardhead that he was, he refused to use a cane. When the army had shipped him home from Saigon with his broken leg, he’d also brought