“He’s been handcuffed before. He was arrested at the Comet Club! What about Alabama?”

“The Comet Club, he was swooped up with a lotta others just happened to be in the wrong place. In Alabama, he’s arrested ’cause he’s part of something big, something grand, something gonna make a difference in the way people get to live in this world! But your place? He was a black man in a white woman’s house, a thief sniffing up a white girl, whupped by some peckerhead because he must be a burglar. His loving you done him in.”

“So you do know he does love me.”

“He was leaving you, missy. Oh yeah, you think I didn’t know that? I knew. He was leaving you, no matter what. He was going there to do the right, the decent thing, and give you back your damned key, and write you some sort of damned note. That’s what got him arrested. And now’s he’s gone, and he ain’t coming back and it’s your fault.”

“What do you mean, gone? There’s no answer at Naomi Avenue. The Challenger said he wasn’t there. Where has he gone?”

“You think I’d tell you shit about my little brother? Hell no.”

“What do you mean, he’s gone?”

“He sold the Porsche, and he’s took the money and he’s gone far away from you, Miss Summit-Drive-Ain’t-I-Special. He’s gone far from you and all your people. He’s gone”—sobs caught in Coralee’s throat—“and he ain’t coming back.”

“Where? Where did he go? Oh, god, don’t tell me he went back to Alabama. Did he?”

“I ain’t telling you shit. No one in my family gonna tell you shit. I never seen my brother so broke up. His pride ain’t never gonna be the same.” She slammed the phone down.

An intense headache descended on me, as if billiard balls suddenly cracked inside my head, that sharp, unmistakable sound of the laws of physics smashing into one another, hurtling toward some unseen destination. I placed the phone on the hook and turned to Thelma. “He’s sold the car and gone somewhere, someplace I can’t reach him, where love can’t reach and love won’t matter. Maybe he went back to Alabama. To look for the father he hasn’t missed for twenty years? Terrible things can happen in Alabama.”

“Terrible things happen right here in Southern California.”

“How will I live without him, Thelma? How?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but you will. You will have to.”

Chapter Thirty-four