Don't You Ever Read online

  Dedication

  For Mom and Ronnie

  Side by side on these pages

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part I: Two Funerals

  1: Losing the Brother I Hardly Knew

  2: Losing the Mother I Thought I Knew

  Part II: The Parents Who Raised Me

  3: My Mother: Gentle Hands and Foul Moods

  4: My Father: Joy, Wonder, and Self-Hate

  Part III: Our World

  5: The Kingdom of the Rich

  6: The People in the Big House

  Part IV: The Lie

  7: Original Shame

  8: On Her Own

  9: Polly and Roy

  10: Freaky Little Bastard

  11: Truth at the Kitchen Stove

  Part V: Finding and Losing Ronnie

  12: I Walk into His Barbershop

  13: We Get Acquainted

  14: What Was Wrong

  15: Trying to Help

  16: Losses, Gains, Losses

  Part VI: Learning Still

  17: Unearthing Ronnie

  18: Our Family Shrivels

  Part VII: A Finer Sifting

  19: I Draw Closer

  20: Walking with Them

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part I

  Two Funerals

  1

  Losing the Brother I Hardly Knew

  Ronnie’s foster mother, Polly Hall, took many pictures of a joyful Ronnie at her family’s farm near Blacksburg, Virginia.

  I sit alone by Ronnie’s body at the funeral home in Vinton, Virginia, on February 20, 1991.

  They found him the day before, sitting up in bed, clip-on reading lamp shining above his head. He was fully clothed: khaki pants, a short-sleeved button-down shirt, a down vest, Hush Puppies, and brown socks. The uniform he wore to his barbershop on Vinton’s main street. The illness that had tormented Ronnie finally soaked his mattress with blood and stopped his heart.

  I reach over and place my right hand over his. Though cold and rubbery, it feels familiar. I loved to watch those long, wide fingers gently tap the heads of little boys, angling them just so for his scissors. Those giant hands were careful.

  I always wanted a brother or a sister. I’d watch kids running wild across the fields on farms near my childhood home, two hours from Vinton. It looked like pure elation to me, a gang of children squealing in unison as their quick legs tore through the alfalfa.

  At our tenant house, I played alone. Surrounded by pastures, the old farmhouse was the last structure along the winding road of a rich man’s estate. Children lived a hike away across vast fields. Most of them weren’t a natural fit for me. They were rich. Or they were too old. Or they were too young. Or my mama didn’t know their mama.

  There was, though, for a while, a boy. They said he was my cousin. Tall, thin, ten years older, he was a mystery to me. He disappeared when I was seven. I was thirty-two before I learned by accident from a government document that he was not my cousin; he was my half brother. When I confronted my mother, she thought I already knew. I was a prize-winning journalist, a professional observer of the human condition, but I had missed the most significant fact of my life, a secret hiding in plain sight.

  * * *

  I PULL MY reporter’s pad from my pocketbook. Tomorrow the undertakers will close the lid on Ronnie’s casket, and I will never see him again.

  He’d probably curse me for putting him on display like this, I think. I can hear him now: Goddammit, woman, leave me alone! But I want his friends to come think about him and say goodbye. For them, and for me, and even for my brother.

  Ronnie made his living holding people’s heads in his hands. The rest of the time, he kept to himself. He hated being stared at, but he loved it when people had their backs to him in his barber chair. Then they could hear him, but they couldn’t see him. As he snipped away, I’d watch from a chair in his waiting area.

  In him, I saw my long, skinny arms and legs. We shared a reverence for old forests, a certain Southern cadence of speech, and a quick, explosive laugh. In his voice I heard a low gurgle like our granddaddy’s, and in the way he saw the world, our mother’s many fears.

  In Ronnie’s last years, he fed me piece by little piece what had happened to him as a child. Each revelation was a punch to my heart. I’d had it so good. He’d had the exact opposite.

  I process hard times by writing them down, a habit from my days as a newspaper reporter. My long neck tilts permanently to the right from four decades of hauling a heavy bag of notebooks, recorder, and camera from my right shoulder. That bag came with me on many visits with Ronnie, but he never let me photograph him or record him. Except for two minutes and seventeen seconds on a cassette tape—a recording he stopped when he grew self-conscious—I have no record of him as he was at the end. All I can do is commit him to memory with my words.

  He was a tall, odd-looking skeleton of a man who commanded his barbershop with a flap of his bony arms and a low voice that sounded as if it came from deep within a hollow tube.

  His customers roared at his tales, loaded with “hells,” “damns,” and “sons-a-bitches.” He told them stories about rascally old hermits up in the mountains and the bears, snakes, and wild turkeys he’d tracked deep within the central Appalachians. He had left school in the eighth grade and educated himself later reading history books at the public library.

  On my first visit to his barbershop, I thought Ronnie was somebody else. He’d been a young man the last time I saw him. Now it was 1987. He had changed. His forehead jutted out like the prow of a ship. His nose was bigger. His eyes sank deeper within his facial bones. His lips, once on the thin side, had blown up. (How did the undertaker manage to stuff his oversized tongue into his mouth?)

  His straight, coarse silver hair stood out stiffly from his scalp, a dense forest of steel wires. My hair was thin and fine like my daddy’s. Ronnie, though, had our mother’s hair, thick as a wig. Even she couldn’t deny the resemblance.

  Ronnie stood with his right foot resting on his left, like a six-foot-three stork. His huge hands splayed out from his thin wrists and violently whapped the hydraulic lift of the barber chair to lock a customer into place. Sometimes the men looked a little frightened.

  Ronnie’s face flew into crazy mechanics when something amused him. Not much did; or rather, it had to be novel or really clever or blasphemous. As soon as he heard the thing, he’d abruptly lift his mighty head a couple of inches as if electrically jolted. Then, just as quickly, he’d drop it in a half nod while digesting the story. In another second, great sheets of skin on his face would rise up, turning his eyes into slits and exposing teeth set wide apart by the long, slow jaw growth of the disease that did him in. He’d peer at you above his glasses and deliver a big, booming laugh.

  This was the closest thing to joy I ever saw in Ronnie. Most of his customers bored him. His face fell or kept the same “oh crap” expression when most of them walked through the shop door. But when they or I made a sarcastic comment he admired, he’d close his eyes in smart-ass authority and pronounce in a rich bass, “Shee-IT!”

  Soon after I reconnected with Ronnie, I wanted to write about him. My folks and I had treated him badly. I couldn’t fix that. But through him, I thought, I might reveal a lifetime’s reach of suffering for a woman and her unwanted child.

  * * *

  THE MORNING I got the call that he was gone, I drove in from out of town. I tore down the interstate as if a magnet in my blood were pulling me back to Ronnie.

  At his two rented rooms, his heaps of stockpiled clothes, guns, cash, and food
testified to his reclusive life. He’d always been ready for a quick getaway. I’d stopped by to grab his prized camel-colored suede coat along with a favorite shirt, tie, and fresh khakis for the undertakers. I picked a pair of size 14 shoes from a mound of them. At fifty-five, his feet were still growing.

  Ronnie’s death certificate listed the cause as a heart arrhythmia brought on by a rare disfiguring disease. More than anything, however, Ronnie’s distrust of people killed him.

  Once, he’d been a sweet-faced little boy with soft gray eyes and white-blond hair. Pictures show him giggling as a baby and, up to the first grade, beaming like a handsome prince. Then his circumstances took an awful dive. Ronnie lost his base of support. He was thrown from one institution to another. In early adulthood, he won his freedom and achieved some small-town dignity. He made friends and had some fun. Then biology would take its turn clobbering him.

  Old driver’s license photos reveal that in his twenties a glandular disorder began transforming his face, hands, feet, heart, larynx, airways, gut, all his insides. Over decades, it turned him into the freak he always thought himself to be.

  He avoided stares by getting his food at drive-throughs. He thought he was just turning old and ugly earlier than most people. Maybe he looked like his father, he said, whoever the hell his father was.

  It occurred so incrementally that it would be decades before anyone on his short list of friends realized something medically terrible had been happening to Ronnie. They’d witnessed it, yet they hadn’t understood what they were seeing. His girlfriends drifted away as he became sicker and stranger looking, and I came back into his life too late to make much of a difference. No one—not his doctor, not his dentist, not the men who sat in his chair for their flattops and their high and tights—not a soul had sounded an alarm insistent enough to help Ronnie save himself.

  Now his young doctor appears by my chair at the casket. I rise to stand beside him. Shoulder to shoulder, we gaze silently at Ronnie. We had tried hard to help. There was a way, but it required more self-love and more faith in people than Ronnie possessed.

  * * *

  THE DAY I learned that Ronnie had died, our mother suggested we cremate him. It didn’t seem right to me to shove him in an incinerator. We settled on the casket and a graveside service, with a couple hours’ visitation the night before. She would pay for it all. After lying about Ronnie all his life, it was the least she could do.

  Our mother was a different person to each of us. To me she was as loving as she could be. She tenderly nursed my fevers. She cheered me when I was down. Every day for decades, no matter what city or country I was in, I found a phone booth and called her. She gave me everything she dreamed of for herself: unending love, summer camp, piano lessons, college, store-brand clothes. Ronnie got none of that.

  My tenderhearted mother grieved when Daddy cleaned out nests a bird kept building in her newspaper box. She befriended lonely old ladies, and she loved nothing so much as holding a baby. How, then, had she turned so cold toward her firstborn?

  * * *

  THE DAY BEFORE the funeral, she and Daddy arrive. She is anxious and grumpy. Ronnie’s death has chased her out into the open. I listed her in his obituary. “He is survived by his mother, Adria Bishop . . .” She doesn’t say it, but she probably wishes I hadn’t. I know she’s relieved that nobody back in her town will see it. They don’t know about Ronnie.

  Ronnie’s customers and neighbors begin to shuffle by his body for the visitation. We’re in the funeral home’s smallest room, so we’re jammed in close. His landlord tells me Ronnie ached so deeply that he impatiently cursed a young waitress at his favorite home-cooking place. He felt bad about it, so forever after he insisted on sitting in her section and tipping her well.

  A customer reveals that Ronnie was too weak toward the end to walk even a single block to deliver his barbershop rent. Ronnie gave the guy a free haircut for walking his money up the street.

  The next morning, at Ronnie’s grave, the undertakers escort Mom, Daddy, and me into wobbly chairs on the cemetery’s uneven ground. Mom’s cousins and lifelong friends stand in a semicircle behind us. They grew up with her and are some of the few people who ever knew she had a little boy named Ronnie. I don’t see any tears in her eyes, but I put my hand to my mother’s back. The gesture feels false, but I leave it there.

  * * *

  THE YEAR BEFORE he died, Ronnie was rushed to the hospital in respiratory distress. I was with him every day for the next five weeks. More than once, he nearly died.

  Doctors asked me to go to his home and bring back his identification cards, insurance papers, and clothes for his eventual release. His landlady unlocked his upstairs door for me. Slung over a piled-up chair were the slacks he’d worn the last day he’d worked.

  I found his wallet in the right back pocket. I extracted his current driver’s license, and it was then that I found, tucked behind, five others spanning twenty years. I had stumbled across an unintended record of his disease’s march across his face. I was about to bag it all to take to the hospital when I noticed something in his left rear pocket.

  I fished out a tight stack of greeting-card-sized papers, each folded over once. The little sheaf was bundled in two directions by ten or more rubber bands. Some were new. Some were medium fresh. Deepest down, bands were brittle and broken with age.

  He had transferred this precious packet from pants to pants like a talisman. He’d been sitting on it atop his barber’s stool for years.

  I teased apart the compressed papers. A bank stub was on top. Beneath it were two birthday cards decorated with pictures of butterflies and taffy-like candies. An Easter card of pastel flowers. A letter. Some pieces of correspondence were four years old; one six years old. The postmark on one had eroded away.

  In them, the writer asks Ronnie how he is and chitchats about vacations and Halloween decorations and strep throat and grass mowing and a cataract surgery. Penned inside a birthday card, “Can’t you come over for lunch Sunday? We would love to have you! I’ll bake you a birthday cake.”

  “Do come and see us soon—call so I’ll have something decent to eat 293–4823,” read another.

  Ronnie jotted that number on other papers in the stack, preserving the digits as if they were a lifeline to be tapped in case of emergency.

  Each piece of mail is signed with the two words that, in spite of everything, brought comfort to Ronnie:

  Love, Adria

  2

  Losing the Mother I Thought I Knew

  Mom at about sixteen.

  After Ronnie was gone, we stuffed the awkwardness about him back under the family floorboards. Mom lived fourteen years more, and tensions surrounding Ronnie’s life troubled our relationship to the end.

  I’d press her gently for information on her first pregnancy and her on-again, off-again times with Ronnie. My curiosity irritated her, but sometimes she’d offer up a tiny detail, like how baby Ronnie had a cold the day the social worker took him to his foster parents and how Mom worried about him all that day while she worked. I’d tuck scraps of their story into my journal.

  After his death, I learned he left no will. His medical debts far exceeded his savings and his tiny bit of life insurance. Someone needed to sell his cars, guns, and barber chairs and to distribute those assets to his creditors. Arthritis and early signs of dementia made it impossible for Mom, at seventy-five, to do it. It would have been too emotionally painful for her anyway, and besides, she lived a hundred miles away and didn’t drive. I lived just across a mountain valley from Ronnie’s place. I could do it, and I wanted to.

  * * *

  LATER THAT YEAR, I went to Mom’s town and drove her to a notary public at her bank so that she, as Ronnie’s next of kin, could legally transfer the estate job to me. “I am the mother of Ronnie Lee Overstreet . . .” Mom handwrote on her engraved stationery. It was the first time she said it straight out, on paper.

  She was nervous as we headed to the bank. Might t
he notary know her? Might her carefully kept secret seep out into her longtime home of Charlottesville, Virginia?

  The notary was a stranger. Mom was safe. Wrinkles in her brow smoothed away as I drove her home.

  * * *

  IN 2002, SHE and Daddy moved to my street in Roanoke, Virginia, two hours from Charlottesville. My father died of emphysema eight months later.

  The following year, at eighty-eight, Mom broke a hip. Her arthritic knees stymied her rehab. She was stuck in a nursing home because she couldn’t get out of bed and stand on her own.

  She rarely mentioned Ronnie by name, but I knew she was thinking about him. Out of the blue, she lamented to me that she was no good, that she had sinned, that she was unforgivable. Nothing I said eased her mind. Was she grieving over how Ronnie’s life had gone? Or was she still stuck on the fact that she wasn’t married when she had him? Maybe it was the simple fact of Ronnie’s existence that hounded her. It was hard to tell.

  I wrote a letter, marked “confidential,” and left it at the office of her compassionate new minister. I told him that Mom had been bearing a shameful lie nearly all her life and shared her secret with no one. I told him what I knew about Ronnie. Unable to distract herself with much of anything, Mom was finally alone with her terrible sense of unworthiness. She was fretting over her very soul.

  One day when I was out, the minister came to Mom’s room and prayed with her. Without letting on that he knew her secret, he did his best to shore up her faith in God’s forgiveness. No end date on it; nobody was ever disqualified, no matter what. A few weeks later, on an early spring afternoon in 2005, her heart very slowly stopped beating. She died nice and easy.

  * * *

  OF ALL THE virtues in Mom’s value system, “pretty,” which she pronounced “priddy,” was close to the very top. So, the day after she dies, I arrange the prettiest two-city send-off she could have imagined.

  * * *

  THE MORNING IS mild, with the smells of warming earth swirling all around us as my husband and I drive over the Blue Ridge Mountains for Mom’s church funeral and her burial in the cemetery on the mountainside near Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. I’m wearing the blue moonstone necklace my mother wore on her wedding day.