for my own sake. The man she had spent her whole life up to this point believing to be her father was Geoffrey Grace, a community college professor and Val’s now ex-husband. What little I knew of him had come from brief and bitter rants over the phone from Val. Hero hadn’t really talked to me about him at all. As we strolled about in the fading light, I began to wonder if her coming here was turning into something of a mistake. Just another in a long line for me. In a short three weeks, we’d be facing an unspoken reality: we had no plans beyond this moment and no need, either. Our lives could continue on as before, as if we didn’t exist. Once she left, we could easily never see each other again.
There were times, like this one, when it felt like this choice might even be best.
“You sure don’t talk like the stereotypical Southerner.”
“Not folksy enough for you?”
“No,” she said, “it’s not that. You’ve got a nice but subtle twang.”
“Thanks. Been practicing my whole life.”
“You just don’t sound like a dumb hick.”
“Fair enough,” I replied. “You don’t sound twelve, either.”
Hero paused in front of an expansive yard. The house was a good thirty yards off the sidewalk, largely hidden from view behind a cluster of palms and extensive tropical landscaping and iron fencing. On every avenue and lane, the remnants of long-deposed Southern aristocracy lay cloistered.
We moved deeper in, left on Summit Avenue, past Coral Court, up Inspiration Drive. The roads sloped upward, toward the crest of a hill that gave Magnolia Grove its towering quality. In a countryside otherwise flat, it had a feeling of regality that I’d always admired. Heavy rains barely touched us here as waters ran slowly, gradually downhill and downtown. But it was the aged and rising trees that gave it a presence, its soaring majesty.
Our path took us around and through the lavish and overwhelming. The streets wound and curved about. Everywhere deserted and still but for the occasional motorist, the slam of a door, the sputter and jerk of the automated sprinkler systems. Dim figures in windows watched as we passed, cautious and concealed and searching for signs of suspicious activities, for loitering, for an errant step onto private property. Mobile phones at the ready. Eyes following our every move.
three
My position as associate director of the State Department of Corrections was a point of contention between my daughter and me. It was my job to ensure that our convicted thieves, rapists, killers, and casual drug users were clothed, fed, warm and moderately—just not especially—content. Hero made no secret of the fact that she wasn’t especially pleased with this career choice.
“I’m just not sure I can get that excited about having a jailer for a father.”
“It’s not like I’m passionate about it. It’s not like I’m doing cell inspections. Shackling the inmates. I’m a paper pusher. A petty bureaucrat.”
“Look at me,” she said. “Swelling with pride. Really.”
Corrections was merely another step on a ladder, I pointed out, another in a string of political appointments I’d ridden for the past decade, and one I’d been doing for only the past year, at that. I’d worked for campaigns, think tanks, and, of course, other departments in government. Prior to Corrections, I’d been director of the Bureau of Environmental Study, which, I quickly pointed out, made me a friend of the earth and all its small and defenseless creatures.
“Don’t patronize me,” she said.
Bureaucracy was my trade, but more than anything, I was a political animal—or, more accurately, the scion of political animals. I was following a life of government and politics that had run for generations in my family. My father had started out as an aide to a state legislator before taking up a lobbying career in the textile industry. My grandfather Devon had worked for a governor and run the Public Works Agency for decades, and off some downtown alley, there was a small office building dedicated to him. And on and on, back to before the War. I was following in a tradition as rich and antiquated as this place itself.
We lived in the era of the New South, but the Old South was still remarkably persistent, more enduring than mere memory, enshrined in its crumbling and rebuilt structures and traditions, its registry of cherished landmarks, its mansions and battlefields and overgrown natural wonders and sense of inherent majesty. The original Capitol Building was a symbol at the crossroads between old and new. Built up from the charred ashes of the War, it had frustrated and bored the politicians and lobbyists who roamed its corridors for over a hundred years. Those who wanted change dreamed of state-of-the-art, longed to be the envy of our neighboring states. For those who had to work there, change was about practicality, with nostalgia a mere afterthought. And finally, after decades of wrangling and debate, an actual proposal had been put into motion. A new capitol was to be commissioned—a high-tech symbol for these modern times, a sign of just how this New South had put its past behind it. As for the old building, it was to be razed to the ground. That was the plan, at any rate.
Radically new ideas flowed slowly through these legislative halls, and the halting process gave time for opposition to grow. Soon the preservationists were clamoring to save the old capitol, upset that the new one was to be built over the foundations of its predecessor. A local historical preservation society marched onto the Senate floor and dumped a hundred-thousand signed petitions across the dais. A chapter of the Daughters of the South mounted the steps of the old capitol building and chained themselves to the bronze statue of a Civil War cavalry soldier. It was the lead story on all three local newscasts and one national.
The ultimate compromise left no one entirely pleased. The two buildings would both remain, side by side, nearly overlapping. The past and the present. The new capitol towering over the old—the old refusing to give ground to the new. And so it was done.
The Department of Corrections stood next door to this two-headed monster of government. Each workday, as the tall, thick shadows stretched across the parking lot, I’d look upward at the newly completed building, its twenty-five stories rising straight up, and every time it appeared to be collapsing down upon me.
In the office, my associate Hal Wallace stood beside an employee’s desk, his leg propped up on a trash can, leaning over the shoulder of our new assistant, a young woman whose name I had had to ask for, and then forgotten, probably a dozen times now. We made eye contact, Hal and I, and I waved. He nodded but didn’t stop talking. His western-style holster flashed, its tanned leather cut, its ornamental curlicues plainly visible at his waist beneath the flap of his coat. Hal always wore that sidearm to work, an ivory-handled revolver that had been handed down to him by his G.I. father. He was an assistant director of the Department of Corrections, technically one step below me, though he’d been there much longer, nearly seven years, with a degree in criminal justice —and now he’d advanced to the top of the civil service heap, where the only ones above him were members of the political establishment, like the director and me. That he held such an important position, or for that matter that the government building he worked in forbade weapons of any sort, had no bearing on the matter for him, nor apparently for the security guards downstairs, or anyone else. Ours is an open-carry state. We don’t care if you want to bring lethal weaponry to work. We just want to see what’s coming.
Also, as a well-to-do black man in the South, Hal said he preferred letting everyone know that he was armed. It not only fed the frustrations of the old guard Klansmen, who could never have imagined the sight a generation ago, it was also a much safer way to walk down deserted and dark streets at night. Multi-ethnic gang violence had been on the rise for years, and
