Free Book of Mercy by Sherry Roberts Page B

market for a birth certificate. It had taken Antigone a while to arrive at this point. First, she’d tried official channels, but there was no New York birth certificate filed for Irwin Cassius Butler.
    Ryder wanted to forget the whole deal after that, but Antigone was obsessed with securing documentation of Ryder’s birth. She had explained that he would need it for all sorts of identification in the future. Eventually, Ryder caved. “I might know a guy who knows a guy.” That guy was Raul in New York, who understandably was cautious about doing business with a strange woman from North Carolina. But she nagged and pleaded in one telephone call after another; she was becoming quite good at badgering, just like a real mother. Finally, just to keep her from calling him anymore, Raul put her in touch with his “Southern connection,” Hector Bob.
    Hector Bob had been equally leery, asking numerous questions and hanging up on her several times. But Antigone kept calling, and finally, they reached the stage of negotiation. She suggested a park for their meeting; he was adamant about the location, an alley behind a rundown building in Greensboro. He preferred doing business at midnight; she told him it was Saturday, mid-morning, or no deal.
    “How will I recognize you?” she asked, when they’d finally nailed down the details.
    “That won’t be a problem,” Hector Bob said. “And bring cash.”

    A S SOON AS THEY had entered the city, Antigone had seen the shadow of change pass over Ryder. She felt him drawing on a mantle of alertness and suspicion, a posture she hadn’t seen in full bloom since they first met. She realized she had enjoyed watching Ryder relax in the months they’d been together. Some days she even saw the child in him again and felt inexplicably happy. This was city Ryder, and she hated seeing him return to that hard-shelled stranger. She wanted to hurry home, where he would become her Ryder again. Where the hell was Hector Bob?
    As they sat in the sun, in the quiet warmth, Antigone thought: Mothers do crazy things for love. The mother of a Texas cheerleader once hired a hit man to eliminate her daughter’s competition. Mothers starve so their children can eat. They trudge in worn-down sandals so their teenage daughters can add to their Ugg collections. Mothers will love and love and love—no matter the number of pierced body parts, forgotten birthdays, lame excuses, and silent nights waiting for phone calls. Maternal instinct is soldered onto the female soul and sometimes it just bypasses other instincts for fair play, for common sense, for survival; instincts like the one screaming inside her right now, “Get out of here!”
    “This goes south, you gun it out and don’t look back. Forget the damn papers,” Ryder said, his eyes continuing to survey their surroundings.
    Antigone tapped the steering wheel nervously. “Stop it. We do the deal, and we’re out of here. We’re not leaving without that birth certificate. I’m not going through this hell again.”
    “Sam’s gonna kill if me he ever finds out I let you do this,” Ryder muttered.
    “You let me? I’m the one who should have her head examined, dragging a kid into this. What was I thinking? I should have dropped you off at a Starbucks to wait for me.”
    Ryder gave her a look that said
get real
and ignored her.
    Tap, tap, tap on the steering wheel. “This is what bad mothers do. They drag kids to mysterious meetings in unsavory places with strange and probably dangerous men.”
    “I’m an expert on bad mothers,” Ryder said. “You don’t even come close to making the cut.”

    P RETENDING TO STARE OUT the windshield while she watched Ryder out of the corner of her eye, Antigone said, “Even though the clerk’s office didn’t have a birth certificate for you, they had one for your sister. Your mother gave birth to a girl named Angela. What happened to her, Ryder?”
    “I don’t talk about Angela,” he said, slowly