Then they were all staring at him as he drove past on his new bike.
But he didn’t care about Donny and his dad. Only about her. And instead of peeling out of there as originally intended, he found himself slowing down. Actually wanting to see her reaction.
Actually wanting to watch her watch him leave.
Her eyes stayed on him as he rode out, confused and troubled. Not nearly as happy as you’d expect a woman who’d just found out she was getting a new Chevy Volt absolutely free. Probably to be expected. He’d been nothing but an asshole to her in high school.
So why couldn’t he tear his eyes away from her now? He even looked back over his shoulder after he drove past the window. Stealing a few more glimpses before he had to either force his eyes back to the road or risk wrecking his brand new custom bike.
2
WILLA arrived home still in a state of shock. He’d bought her a car. Sawyer Grant had bought her a car. She still couldn’t wrap her head around it, unless…
I’ll find you…
No, no, that couldn’t be it.
Could it?
No, she told herself, pushing through the front door of the modest two-bedroom brick house she shared with her sister, mother, Trevor, occasionally her grandfather, and a whole bunch of books. It couldn’t be that.
Her thoughts of Sawyer were cut short when she walked into the childhood bedroom she still shared with her sister. Thel was standing at the room’s only window with a cup of tea in her hand, staring through the dirty glass with a forlorn expression on her face.
“What’s wrong?” she asked her sister.
Thel looked up, surprised. She must not have heard her come in.
“Sorry, I didn’t know you were rehearsing,” Willa said.
“Rehearsing” was what Thel called it when she got to concentrating on a piece so hard, she couldn’t hear or see anything else. But to the rest of the world it just looked like she was drinking tea and staring into space.
“I wasn’t,” Thel answered, her voice distant. Her eyes flicked back to the window and she was quiet for a long while. Then she said, “Trevor’s with Marian. They went into Richmond to look at some book she found on Craigslist.”
Then before Willa could ask, she said, “Don’t worry, I took her debit card and told Trevor to call me if she tries to buy anything.”
Willa frowned, “I’m not sure policing our mom is a job Trevor can handle.”
Thel nodded. “I know it ain’t. I should have gone with them. But I got a call from the SoCal Opera right as we were about to leave. So I told them to go on without me.”
“Oh,” Willa said, her voice lighting up at the news of her sister’s new job prospect. “Did they want to go over the moving details?”
“No, they called to tell me I was no longer invited to take part in their Young Artist Program. They gave my spot to somebody else.”
“Oh, Thel…” Disappointment set in like a leaden weight as she tried to think of something to say.
Most of the reason she’d gone to buy that car was because Thel, Marian, Trevor, and her were supposed to be leaving Greenlee soon. Thel had gotten the go ahead to live her life fully from her oncologist a few months ago, and she’d easily gotten into the SoCal Opera’s Young Artist Program.
Thel had already given notice at Greenlee County Care, the hospital where she worked the night shift as one of the cleaning staff. They’d been all set to move. To begin a new life together.
Willa had even lined up a few interviews for physical therapist jobs in L.A. “What happened?” she asked her sister now. “I thought that spot was supposed to be locked down.”
“It was. The program director was so excited I wanted to come back to opera and that my voice was still good. But someone got to her. Told them they couldn’t let me into the program.”
Willa shook her head, even more confused now than she’d been at the car dealership. “Who’d do that? And why?”
Granted, she didn’t know a whole lot about opera. But she’d never in her life encountered anyone with a better voice than her sister. Who else would they have found for the program with more talent than Thel?
Instead of answering, Thel turned her smoky dark eyes back to the window. “The lights are back on at Greenlee Place. You think Kate’s messing with us?”
Willa moved to go stand next to her at the window, looking across the small valley and over the James River tributary that separated their place from the large brick colonial on the hill. Sure enough, the huge house was all lit up. At least partially. Two out of ten windows now glowed with yellow light.
The story of how their family, the only black family left in all of Greenlee County, had come to own property directly across the river from the house of its founding family—the one the whole county had been named after—was long and involved.
Real long. Their little brick house had originally started off as nicer than average slave quarters back in the 1700s. Then after the war, the slaves had been upgraded to sharecropper status.
Eventually the last of the sharecroppers to work the property, their grandfather, died. And that was how their mother, Marian Thompson, a single mother with three children with three different last names, had come to make national news back in the late 90s.
Having recently divorced Trevor’s father, she’d moved into the house with Willa, Thel, and their brother, Trevor, after securing a job as a nurse at Greenlee County Care—only to get an eviction order from the property’s now sole owner, Admiral Grant, just a couple days after moving in. Seeing as how her father was no longer working the land and bringing in a profit, the newly minted state representative wanted to demolish the house and the nearby woods to build a golf course to entertain his political buddies.
Well, Marian wasn’t having any of that. She’d read herself a whole bunch of legal books and sued Admiral Grant ten ways to Sunday. You would have thought all them lawyers the congressman had working for him would have taken care of the problem, but they didn’t count on just how much crazy they’d run into.
Her mother not only met everything they threw at her with claims that “the spirits told her to say this” and “the spirits told her to answer this way,” she’d also managed to put on enough of a show that the case became national news.
And it was right after an election year, so eventually Admiral Grant settled with her out of court. He gave her all the property on their side of the river and back pay for all the money “the spirits” had told Marian his dead wife’s estate owed her father for a grossly unfair contract Kate Greenlee’s great-great grandfather had made with her father’s great-great-great grandfather shortly after the Civil War.
For a while there, Marian was telling anyone who would listen that she was the only black person in Virginia history to receive reparations for what the white folks had done to her ancestors. And a few people in state government still blamed her family for Admiral Grant’s failed bid to become his party’s candidate for President back in the early aughts. Folks also said that was why he chose to live in a house in Bon Air after he became the state senator, instead of coming back to the house in Greenlee County where all his dead wife’s people had been bred and born, including his two sons.