Free Family Affair: A Smokey Dalton Story by Kris Nelscott Page B

said.
    I looked at the three of them, still
standing in the parking lot. The woman wiped her good hand over her eyes.
    “Why would she go with Valentina and not
with us?” I asked.
    Marvella rolled her eyes. “Valentina has
apparently reached honorary white person status. She nearly lost it when seen
in the company of her black cousin and the mean-looking black driver. You
should have heard the crap that woman spouted about niggers come to kidnap her
daughter —”
    “I don’t need to hear it,” I said, waving
my hand.
    “Me either,” Marvella said. “I nearly
told the bitch to shove it up her bony little ass, but Val wouldn’t let me. She
said she’s just scared and out of her depth and had we forgotten that Madison
is 90% white? I’m thinking maybe she forgot or she should have at least told us
so we could’ve brought your society girlfriend along to make little miss
holier-than-thou over there a lot more comfortable.”
    I let the dig at my society girlfriend go
by. Marvella and Laura got along, now, after a lot of wrangling and harsh words
over the years. This was just Marvella’s way of letting her anger out without
aiming it at the woman we had driven an hour and a half to help.
    “So let’s just go,” Marvella said. “We’ll
pull over somewhere with a pay phone and call Helping Hands, and then our job
here is done.”
    I hesitated for just a moment. The little
girl was still watching us. Valentina turned slightly, waved her hand in a shoo
motion, and I nodded.
    I started the car, turned the wheel, and
pulled out of the parking lot, glancing into my rear view mirror to make sure
no pick-up truck followed us.
    None did.
    After twenty minutes, I let out a breath.
    After thirty, I knew we were in the
clear.
    After we had made the call to Helping
Hands, I figured we were done with this job.
    Of course, I was wrong.

 
    ***

 
    Three months later, Marvella pounded on
my apartment door. We lived just across the hall from each other.
    “I have a phone call you need to take,”
she said.
    I yelled to my fourteen-year-old son Jim
that I would be right back, then crossed the hall. Even though it was December
and the landlord had forgotten to turn on the heat in the hallway, Marvella was
bare foot. She wore a towel around her hair, and a brown caftan that she
clearly used as a robe.
    “Since when am I getting calls at your
place?” I asked.
    “Since I can’t talk sense into Val,” she
said.
    I peered at her. I hadn’t heard from
Valentina since that day in September when she’d delivered the white woman to
Helping Hands. After she had completed her mission, she had taken me, Marvella,
and Marvella’s sister Paulette to dinner. She told us about her life in
Madison, which sounded a bit bleak to me, and then drove the three hours back
so she wouldn’t miss the university extension class that she taught the
following morning.
    Marvella’s apartment had the same layout
as mine, but was decorated much differently. Hers was filled with dark,
contemporary furniture, and African art. The sculptures covered every surface,
faces carved from mahogany and other dark woods. The sculptures were so
life-like they seemed to be staring at me.
    The phone hung on the wall in Marvella’s
half kitchen. The receiver rested next to the toaster.
    “There she is. You tell her our policy.” Marvella
waved a hand at the phone. “I have to finish getting dressed.”
    She vanished down the hallway and slammed
her bedroom door, as if I was the one who had made her angry instead of
Valentina.
    I picked up the receiver. “Valentina?”
    “Smokey?” She was one of the few people
who called me by my real name. Most people in Chicago knew me as Bill Grimshaw,
a cousin to Franklin Grimshaw, one of the co-founders of Helping Hands. My real
name is Smokey Dalton, and I’m from Memphis. A case four years ago put me on
the run and brought me here, forcing both me and Jimmy to live under an assumed
name.
    On the night she almost