Lousiana Hotshot

something? I’d need to know that, wouldn’t I?”
    Carrie grabbed her arm, hovering like a crow. “Ya pregnant, Sandra? Tell me ya ain’t pregnant. Break ya poor mama’s heart.”
    “I’m not pregnant.” She felt defeated. “I just need to know.”
    Perhaps she sounded so desperate her aunt loosened up, Talba wasn’t sure. All of a sudden Carrie stepped back and looked her in the eye. “Maybe ya do have a right. I don’t know, maybe ya do.” She seemed to come to a decision. “Ya daddy’s name was Denman.”
    Talba took it in slowly. “Denman. Denman Wallis.”
    “Denman La Rose Wallis.”
    “La Rose? You telling me La Rose?” She could barely breathe. It couldn’t be a joke— Aunt Carrie was hardly a student of Shakespeare. The irony of it was smothering.
    Her aunt shook her head in puzzlement. “That mean somethin’ to ya?”
    “No kidding— that was really his name?”
    “I tol’ ya it was. Prob’ly shouldn’t have, but I tol’ ya. Ya think I’d lie about it?”
    Talba thought,
Yes. At this point, I’d think anything.
She said, “I guess not. I just don’t understand why everyone’s so secretive about him.”
    “’Cause it’s over and done with, that’s why. That man nearly ruined ya mama life— didn’t do you and Corey no good either…”
    “We wouldn’t be here without him.”
    “It’s a miracle you here
with
him. I done somethin’ for ya, Sandra. I gave ya his name, and I done it for a reason. I want ya to promise me somethin’.”
    Talba knew what was coming. She felt her stomach seize up. “What’s that, Aunt Carrie?”
    “I want ya to promise to let it be. Ya don’t know what ya do to ya mama when you bring that man up. I want ya to let her alone. Go on about ya business and leave it in the past, where it belongs.”
    Talba hated this. Damn if she wasn’t tearing up again. Aunt Carrie, for all her gruffness, all the distance she was displaying today, had been an important figure in her early childhood, a nurturing second mother, often more tenderhearted than Miz Clara herself, who preferred Corey, anyway.
    “I can’t promise that, Aunt Carrie. I’m sorry, I just can’t.”
    Carrie said, “God help ya then, girl,” and there was something unexpected in her eyes and voice, something different from the anger Talba expected. It was something soft and compassionate. “God help us all.”
    What the hell had happened to cause that kind of reaction? Talba thought about it all the way home.
He must have molested us,
she thought.
Corey and me.
    It would certainly explain the secrecy, and the paranoia when anyone brought him up.
    But Talba felt oddly distanced from the notion. She ought to be a bit more creeped out, it seemed to her, and thought it must be so thoroughly buried she’d have to dream to bring it back up.
    Miz Clara had supper waiting when she got home. “Where ya been? I expected ya home an hour ago.”
    Now or never,
thought Talba. “I went to see Aunt Carrie.”
    “Carrie? What ya need from Carrie?”
    “Same thing I wanted to ask you.”
    “About what?”
    Talba wondered if she was pretending— if she didn’t even know how obsessed her daughter had become. “About my father,” she said.
    “Ya father! Honey, you ain’t got no father. You an example of spontaneous combustion— or whatever they call that thang.”
    Miz Clara had been ready for her— that was as close as she got to kidding around. Talba knew damn well she shouldn’t push it. “Mama, just tell me one thing. Only one thing, and I’ll never ask anything else.”
    “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Ya sound like ya ‘bout seven years old.”
    “Just one thin fact; that’s all I ask.”
    “Go ahead and ask. I ain’t saying I’ll answer.”
    “Why do you hate my dad so much?”
    It was evidently the simple three-letter word that did it. Miz Clara went up like Vesuvius. “What in the name of God ya mean ya ‘dad’? Sound like somebody ya know and see every day and helps ya mama raise ya, and even helps support ya. Tell me, girl, ya got one of those? I don’t want to hear none of this ‘dad’ stuff— not now and not ever. You mention that man to me again, and I swear to God I’ll boot ya right out of this house ya was raised in. Now you go to ya room, just like you was a little girl. And without ya supper too! Yeah! I mean it! And don’t you ever, ever bring up that man’s name to me again.”
    Very seldom did Miz Clara get on such a high horse.
    She’d never