Free The Whites: A Novel by Richard Price Page B

over her chest, her eyes fixed on the floor.
    “What happened?”
    “Nothing,” Carmen said without looking up.
    “Nothing?” Victor said sharply.
    “What happened,” Billy addressing the men now.
    “We’re adopting,” Victor said. “That’s all.”
    Carmen exhaled through her nose, studied the tilework.
    “We just came by to share the good news,” Richard added, his voice so even-keeled that Billy couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic.
    “No, I’m happy for you,” Carmen said, her gaze shifting to the backyard. “I am.”
    Billy followed the men out to their ancient Range Rover in the driveway.
    “So wow, adopting,” he scrambled. “Where from?”
    “Brazil,” Victor said.
    “Brazil, huh. Boy? Girl?”
    “One of each.”
    “Twins?”
    “Can’t break up a set,” Richard said, unlocking the driver’s-side door.
    My husband . . . Billy had never thought of himself as having a problem with gay marriage, but he still couldn’t quite wrap his head around another man uttering those two words.
    “Did you tell your sister it’s two?”
    “I would’ve,” Victor said, “but I was afraid her heart couldn’t handle the joy.”
    “Anyways, that’s terrific, really great,” Billy said, then added by way of apology: “You want us to throw you a baby shower or something?”
    At least that got them smiling.
    When he returned to the house, Carmen was still standing wedged into her corner of the kitchen.
    “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
    “Heather has two daddies,” she muttered, looking away.
    “I don’t get it, your brother comes over with such big news, you couldn’t even give him a hug or something?”
    “Guess not,” she said defiantly but starting to tear up a little.
    “Just tell me what’s going on.”
    “Why does something always have to be going on with you?” she snapped, then walked out of the kitchen, up the stairs, and into the bedroom, closing the door behind her.
    And that’s where they left it. That’s where they always left it when it came to Victor and, if he thought about it, so much else.
    At five in the evening, Billy walked into Brown’s Family Funeral Home, on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard. The chapel, a glorified living room, fluorescently lit and lined with folding chairs, was standing room only and awaft in dope smoke. A twenty-two-year-old banger tagged Hi-Life, who had been shot dead in retaliation for an earlier retaliation, lay in his coffin in a front corner of the chapel facing his people, most of whom were wearing oversized rest-in-peace T-shirts silk-screened with a photo of Hi-Life sitting on a stoop. A second laminated RIP snapshot on a bead chain hung off their necks like a backstage pass.
    Walking down the room-length particle-board partition that divided the chapel from a line of office cubicles, Billy passed Redman’s elderly father in the first cubicle, Redman Senior leaning back in his chair playing computer poker. In the second cubicle, Redman’s twenty-three-year-old fifth wife, Nola, was lying on a daybed reading a book in her Côte d’Ivoirian accent to Redman’s seventh or eighth son, Rafer, a toddler with a gastrointestinal feeding tube inserted into his stomach. And then finally, in the last cubicle, was the man himself, all six foot five of him, hunched over his desk slurping lo mein from a take-out carton, the spindly wire bookcase behind his back filled with unclaimed cremains in cardboard urns going back to the 1990s.
    “There he is,” Redman said, extending an absurdly long-fingered hand but remaining in his chair due to the bullet that had drilled him through both hips five years earlier.
    “Christ,” Billy said, waving away the chronic in the air.
    “They pay like everybody else.”
    “You ever hear of secondhand smoke?”
    “That’s just a story they tell you.”
    “A conspiracy, you mean.”
    “You said it, not me.”
    “Like seat belts?”
    “Government can’t tell me to buckle up. I break some