Free Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong

Hammericks wanted to have an inside edge in both Heaven and Hell. The Hell that they feared was the one here on earth, a.k.a. any court of law. The Hammerick men, prior to Thomas, became lawyers not to practice law but to protect themselves from it. Unlike his father, Graven, Spartan was a pragmatist. If he had to choose between a judge and a minister, Spartan would rather have the judge on his side. Spartan knew that his odds, even without a minister, were better up in Heaven.

    My father dated DeAnne Whatley for three years before they were married, and my great-uncle Harper’s camera was on him from day one. Thomas walking up to the door of the green-shuttered colonial. Thomas standing in the backyard by the dogwood tree with a cigarette in his hand. Thomas sitting inside of his new Bel Air with the windows rolled up. This here was the confession. Because this wasn’t how young men posed with their new cars. They stood next to them. They leaned their hips against the doors. They touched the hoods. The photograph of Thomas neatly tucked inside of that two-toned, red and white sedan made it look more like a flashy coffin than a car.
    If he weren’t my father, I would say that Thomas Hammerick was a calculating man for dating the boss’s daughter. Though technically, he didn’t ask DeAnne out until Walter Wendell had left the firm to become Judge Whatley. Six months after my father joined the firm of Fletcher Burch, Walter Wendell handed the managing partnership over to Carson Powell, the man who one day would have a granddaughter named Kelly. The courthouse in Shelby, visible from the front windows of Fletcher Burch’s firm, had enough Corinthian columns and domes to strike awe and inspire trepidation in those who entered it. Located in the town’s main square in order to remind us of the centrality of the Law in our everyday lives, the courthouse was surrounded by century-old water oak trees. On the afternoon that Walter Wendell strolled from one side of the street to the other for his swearing-in, he stopped by Thomas’s office and invited him to the house on Piedmont Street for dinner. So, in fact, it was Walter Wendell who asked Thomas out on the first date.
    Baby Harper was thirty-three years old when Thomas Hammerick pulled up to the green-shuttered colonial in his red and white Bel Air. My great-uncle already owned the Greek Revival by then, but he came over to Iris and Walter Wendell’s house for dinner on most nights because Iris always had someone new cooking in the kitchen. Baby Harper liked the variety. He said it was like going to a different restaurant every couple of months. These cooks usually left once they had told Iris where she could shove their biscuits to keep them nice and warm.
    My great-uncle told me that my father was handsome. That made me blush. I was twelve years old when I began to ask Baby Harper about the mysterious coupling of Thomas and DeAnne. I was just beginning to see my father as a person and a man. I stared hard at the photographs that my great-uncle was showing me, and I tried to imagine how that young man had become my father. That young man had dipped himself again and again into melted wax and was now unrecognizable underneath the accumulated layers. That young man had taken his eyes out and replaced them with a pair of thick glasses. That young man had lost his head of hair. I must have looked disappointed because Baby Harper said, “It’s all right, Linda Vista. Your father, he had his moment in the sun.”
    There were three years’ worth of photographs of Thomas Hammerick standing, sitting, and eating meals at the Whatleys’. There was also a set of candidgraphs from this period tucked into the back of one of the H.E.B.’s. Shoes were the recurring theme. Baby Harper had moved away from the blurry mid-strides of his youth. His taste had matured to close-ups of shoelaces untied. It was easy to recognize my father’s shoes in these images. Leather wing tips, dark