AllFreeNovel
Share Us
His mother had never forgiven herself for her daughter’s fate, though there was no fault in her ignorance. She had had two more children, Jack and his one-year-younger brother, Jefferson, who went by Jeff to all but his mother, who always referred to him by his full name. His mother had employed a midwife and taken no drugs for her sons’ deliveries, preferring to endure the unique pain of childbirth as perhaps penance for the daughter who had never been allowed to truly grow up because of the mother’s bad tooth. And ever since, she had refused any and all medication, including aspirin, though she was susceptible to migraines that sometimes forced her to lie in agony for hours in the dark.
“Momma?” he called out expectantly.
And he heard the woman coming.
CHAPTER 3
HILDA LEE, KNOWN TO ALL as Hilly, appeared, dressed in a crisp white T-shirt, faded Wrangler jeans, and flat canvas shoes, with an olive green apron tied around her middle. It was a tomboy foundation comfortably twined with a domestic facade.
She was quite tall and sinewy lean, and her short hair was light brown with a reddish tint attributable to her Scottish ancestry; it was also now liberally laced with gray. Her nose was straight as a razor blade. Her calm, pale green eyes gave the impression that no matter the challenge not only would she persevere, Hilly Lee would also conquer all comers, with grit to spare.
The woman’s veined, wiry, tanned forearms were festooned with sunspots because she liked the outdoors. However, when she was outside, Hilly moved with force and had some purpose, tending the kitchen garden, mowing the grass, helping her husband to reshingle the roof, felling a dead tree, or repainting the backyard wire fence. She had been raised on a mountain ridge on the far western edge of the state that to this day had no electricity or running water. His mother rarely spoke of her hardscrabble time there, and that in itself articulated volumes.
Hilly wiped her hands on the apron and gave her oldest boy a hug. “Ten minutes to go, Robert.” She had never called him anything other than Robert. John was your father’s idea, Robert was mine, so Robert it will be, at least for me. And they had left it at that. With his mother he had left many things at that.
If she’d had her way he would have officially been Robert E. Lee, after the gallant Confederate general who had sacrificed all to carry the mantle of the Army of Northern Virginia against his birth country in defense of states’ rights, or so the old story went.
But they were not those Lees. No First Families of Virginia lived on this street or even in this blue collar parcel of Freeman County. The homes weren’t big enough, and neither were the opportunities.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said back.
Her expression turned somber. “I still can’t believe they killed JFK’s brother.”
“I know,” he replied. A little over a week before, America had had another Kennedy running for president. Now they simply had another Kennedy to mourn.
“And Dr. King just two months ago. What is this durn country coming to where we have to settle things with guns?”
“World is a troubled place. Look at Vietnam.”
He shouldn’t have brought that up because of his brother, but perhaps it had slipped out intentionally, Jack thought. He’d had that sort of verbal sparring relationship with his mother from an early age. She usually seemed to relish the jousting.
And he had always found it bewildering that she venerated a long-dead Confederate general at the same time she shed tears for the recent deaths of two men who held views diametrically opposed to all the Confederacy had stood for. But then he had found much about his mother to be irreconcilable.
“Walter Cronkite said it was a man with the same two names who did it.”
“Sirhan Sirhan,” Jack told her.
She said, “What kinda name is that?”
“He’s from Palestine.”
“How did his kind get close to Bobby Kennedy of all people?”
“They say Kennedy was walking through the kitchen at a hotel in Los Angeles, and the man was waiting and shot him.”
“This Sir-han will probably hire himself a fancy lawyer like you and get off.”
He smiled at her. He would never be a fancy lawyer. “Doubtful.”
“Well, you’re the attorney in the family, Robert,” she said. Hilly’s gaze flitted to her daughter, who was still poking the balloon and giggling each time it moved in response to her jab. In his mother’s eyes Jack could read the unspoken thought: The family I have left.
“You seeing any girls I don’t know about?” she asked, turning back to him.
“You’d know. The gossip chain in Freeman is top-notch. Where’s Daddy?”
“He’ll be in shortly.” She gripped his arm. “Miss Jessup came by today.”
“Miss Jessup? What’d she want?”
