Social Blunders by Tim Sandlin Page B

said, “He was killed in Korea.” I picked up a picture of Jake in his army uniform. He was grinning and firing an imaginary tommy gun at someone off to the side of the picture. He looked about fourteen years old with big ears and a short haircut. He wasn’t any blacker than Maurey after a summer in the sun.
    “Is this the one your mother had?” Gilia touched the frame around Jake’s yearbook photo. Number twenty, gray jersey, leather helmet.
    “Yeah.”
    There was also a wedding picture of both of them dressed up, looking shy and happy and wholesome. The girl held a corsage in her hands. Jake smiled at her, protectively. Knowing Jake would soon die and the girl would be alone made it the saddest picture I’d ever seen.
    I turned to look at her. “Would it be personal if I asked your name?”
    Her eyes were on Jake. “Atalanta Williams.”
    I pronounced it like the city the first time and she had to correct me. Then I got it right.
    “Atalanta,” I said. “That’s pretty.”
    Gilia glanced from the photographs to me. Jake’s eyes were different from mine. And the nose. Heck, I don’t know if we looked alike. I’ve always made it a point to avoid mirrors.
    “So talk,” Atalanta said.
    “I’d rather not.”
    “I didn’t ask what you’d rather do.”
    “You owe it to her,” Gilia said.
    This wasn’t what I wanted. When Shannon had said wreak vengeance by destroying their wives, it had sounded good in theory, but the reality sucked.
    “Jake may have been my father,” I said.
    Atalanta took it well. She didn’t speak or anything. Just stared at the pictures on the piano. I followed her line of sight to see which one she was staring at. I think it was a five-by-seven head-and-shoulders shot of Jake wearing a coat and tie.
    “Five boys had sex with Mom and she got pregnant,” I said.
    “Was she white?”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “What do you mean, ‘had sex’?”
    I looked at Gilia but she gave no answers. “They raped her.”
    “It’s a lie,” Atalanta said.
    “I don’t think so.”
    All the years I’d lived in North Carolina, I’d never seen a black woman cry. She made no sound. Nothing but tears and sharp intakes of breath. I looked down between my hands at Jake, wishing he hadn’t been there that night. Wishing he wasn’t dead and I wasn’t born.
    “Get out of my home.”
    “That’s fair.”
    “And put down my picture. You can’t touch him.”
    I put down the picture.
    “You are a lying little white boy. How dare you come into my home desecrating the memory of my husband.”
    “I didn’t want to.”
    “You are trash.”
    “Yes.”

10
    “That house was nothing but one big shrine,” Gilia said. “I’ll bet you anything Jake left for the army about a month after he married her, when life was still perfect and she hadn’t had time to stop worshiping him. It’s love cut off at the peak that cripples people, not the long, ugly divorces.”
    I had been highly confused when we left Atalanta Williams’s house, so I drove south a while, then east, then back north, not really aware of where I was going. Having pain is nothing—you live through it and go on—but causing someone else pain is totally unacceptable. I can’t stand hurting people. Won’t stand hurting people. And, yet—guess what?—I’d just trashed a perfectly nice woman.
    Gilia was cool. She seemed to know that movement eases turmoil. After an hour or so of silently circling Greensboro, she suddenly got talkative. Mostly she talked about college days and the busted marriage with Jeremy. She had a story about a roommate sleeping with her boyfriend that was pretty good. Usually when a woman tells the roommate/best friend/sister-slept-with-my-man thing, they’re pissed off at the whole female gender. They never seem to blame the guy, but Gilia completely left out the self-pity part of the story.
    “Those two sluts deserve each other,” she said. “Their biggest problem was who got to face the mirror when