Celestial thawed as soon as we climbed into the car. Whatever bad mojo or heebie-jeebies were bothering her vanished once we were back on the highway. She undid the French braids over her ears, nesting her head between her knees, busy unraveling and fluffing. When she sat up, she was herself again, riot of hair and wicked smile. “Oh my Lord, that was awkward,” she said.

“Word,” I agreed. “I don’t know what that was all about.”

“Babies,” she said. “I believe that the desire for grandchildren makes even sane parents go left.”

“Not your parents,” I said, thinking of her folks, cool as icebox pie.

“Oh yes, mine, too,” she said. “They keep it in check in front of you. All of them need to go to therapy.”

“But we’re trying for kids,” I said. “What difference does it make if they want kids, too? Isn’t it good to have something in common?”

On our way to the hotel, I pulled over on the side of the road right before we crossed a suspension bridge that was out of scale with what maps called the Aldridge River but was basically a hearty stream.

“What do you have on your feet?”

“Wedges,” she said, frowning.

“Can you walk in them?”

She seemed embarrassed by her shoes, an architectural construction of polka-dot ribbon and cork. “How was I supposed to impress your mother in flats?”

“No worries, it’s close,” I said shuffling down a soft embankment as she baby-stepped behind me. “Hold my neck,” I said, picking her up like a bride and carrying her the rest of the way. She pressed her face into my neck and sighed. I would never tell her, but I liked being stronger than she was, the way I could literally sweep her off her feet. She wouldn’t tell me either, but I know that she appreciated it, too. Reaching the bank of the stream, I set her down on the soft earth. “You getting heavy, girl. You sure you not pregnant?”

“Ha ha, very funny,” she said, looking up. “This is a lot of bridge for a little slip of water.”

I sat on the ground and pressed my back against one of the metal pillars like it was the big hickory tree in our front yard. I scissored my legs and patted the space between them. She sat there and I crossed my arms across her chest and rested my chin where her neck met her shoulder. The stream beside us was clear; the water gushed over smooth rocks, and twilight outlined the little waves with silver. My wife smelled like lavender and coconut cake.

I said, “Before they built the dam and the water went low, me and my daddy came out here on Saturdays with our lines and bait. In a way that’s what fatherhood is about: bologna sandwiches and grape soda.” She giggled, not knowing how serious I was. Above us, a car passed over the metal mesh, and the sound of the wind passing through the holes played a musical note, like when you blow softly over the mouth of a bottle. “When a lot of cars pass over, it’s almost a song.”

There we sat, waiting on cars, listening for the bridge music. Our marriage was good. This isn’t just memory talking.

“Georgia,” I said, using her pet name. “My family is more complicated than you think. My mother …” But I couldn’t manage the rest of the sentence.

“It’s okay,” she promised. “I’m not upset. She loves you, that’s all.”

She swiveled and we kissed like teenagers, making out under the bridge. It was a wonderful feeling to be grown and yet young. To be married but not settled. To be tied down yet free.

My mother exaggerated. The Piney Woods was about on the level of a Motel 6, a star and a half by objective measure, but you have to throw in another star just for being the only hotel in town. A lifetime ago, I had taken a girl here after prom, hoping to get that virginity thing out of the way. I bagged a lot of groceries at Piggly Wiggly to pay for the room, the bottle of Asti Spumante, and a few other accoutrements of romance. I even swung by the Laundromat for a stack of quarters to operate the Magic Fingers. The night ended up being a comedy of errors. The bed massager ate six quarters before it finally kicked on, rumbling as loud as a lawn mower. Furthermore, my date wore a plantation-era hoop dress that flipped up and hit me in the nose when I was trying to get better acquainted.

After we checked in and settled into our room, I told this story to Celestial, hoping she would laugh. Instead, she said, “Come here, sweetie,” and let me rest my head on her bosom, which is kind of exactly what the prom date did.

“I feel like we’re camping,” I said.

“More like study abroad.”

Locking my eyes with hers in the mirror, I spoke. “I was almost born right in this hotel. Olive once worked here, cleaning.” Back then, Piney Woods Inn was named the Rebel’s Roost, clean, but the confederate flag hung in every room. Scrubbing a bathtub when labor pains kicked in, my mama was determined that I would not start my life under the stars and bars. She clamped her knees shut until the motel owner, a decent man despite the decor, drove her the thirty miles to Alexandria. It was 1969, April 5, a year to the day, and I slept my first night’s sleep in an integrated nursery. My mama was proud of that.

“Where was Big Roy?” Celestial asked, as I knew she would.

The question was the whole reason we were here at all, so why did I have such a difficult time answering her? I led her to this question, but once it was asked, I went as noiseless as a rock.

“Was he working?”

Celestial had been sitting in bed sewing more beads onto the mayor’s doll, but my silence got her attention. She bit the thread, tied it off, and twisted to look at me. “What’s the matter?”

I was still moving my lips with no sound. This wasn’t the right place to start this story. My story may begin the day I was born, but the story goes back further.

“Roy, what is it? What’s wrong?”

“Big Roy is not my real father.” This was the one short sentence that I promised my mother I would never say aloud.

“What?”

“Biologically speaking.”

“But your name?”

“He made a junior out of me when I was a baby.”

I got up from the bed and mixed us a couple of drinks—canned juice and vodka. As I stirred the cups with my finger, I couldn’t bring myself to meet her eyes, not even in the mirror.

She said, “How long have you known this?”

“They told me before I went to kindergarten. Eloe is a small town, and they didn’t want me to hear it on the school yard.”

“Is that why you’re telling me? So I don’t hear it in the street?”

“No,” I said. “I’m telling you because I want you to know all my secrets.” I returned to the bed and handed her the thin plastic cup. “Cheers.”

Not joining me in my pitiful toast, she set the cup on the scarred nightstand and carefully reswaddled the mayor’s doll. “Roy, why do you do things like this? We’ve been married more than a year, and it never occurred to you to share this with me before now?”

I was waiting for the rest, the terse words and tears; maybe I was even looking forward to it. But Celestial only cast her eyes upward and shook her head. She breathed air in, she breathed air out.

“Roy, you’re doing this on purpose.”

“This? What this?”

“You tell me that we’re making a family, that I’m the closest person to you, and then you drop a bomb like this.”

“It’s not a bomb. What difference does it make?” I flipped it as a rhetorical question, but I craved a real true answer. I needed her to say that it didn’t make a difference, that I was myself, not my gnarled family tree.

“It’s not this one thing. It’s the phone numbers in your wallet, the way you don’t always wear your ring. Then this. As soon as we get over one thing, there’s something else. If I didn’t know better, I would think that you were trying to sabotage our marriage, the baby, everything.” She said it like it was all my fault, as though it were possible to tango alone.

When I was mad, I didn’t raise my voice. Instead, I lowered it to a register that you heard with your bones, not your ears. “Are you sure you want to do this? Is this the out you’ve been waiting for? That’s the real question. I tell you that I don’t know my daddy and you’re having second thoughts about our whole relationship? Look, I didn’t tell you because it didn’t have anything to do with us.”

“There’s something wrong with you,” she said. Her face in the streaked mirror was wide awake and angry.

“See,” I said. “This is why I didn’t want to tell you. So now what? You feel like you don’t know me because you don’t know my exact genetic profile? What kind of bourgie shit is that?”

“The issue is that you didn’t tell me. I don’t care that you don’t know who your daddy is.”

“I didn’t say that I didn’t know who he is. What are you trying to say about my mother? That she didn’t know who she was pregnant for? Really, Celestial? You want to go there?”

“Don’t flip the script on semantics,” Celestial said. “You’re the one who kept a secret the size of Alaska.”

“What is there to tell you? My real daddy is Othaniel Jenkins. That’s all I got. So now you know everything I know. That’s a secret as big as Alaska? More like Connecticut. Rhode Island, maybe.”

“Don’t twist this around,” she said.

“Look,” I said. “Have some sympathy. Olive wasn’t even seventeen yet. He took advantage of her. He was a grown man.”

“I’m talking about me and you. We are married. Married. I don’t care what the hell his name is. Do I look like I care what your mother …”

I turned to look at her without the mediation of the mirror, and what I saw worried me. Her eyes were half-shut and she pressed her lips, preparing to speak, and I instinctively knew I didn’t want to hear whatever she was about to say.

“November 17,” I said before she could complete her thought.

Other couples use safe words to call a time-out from rough sex, but we used it as a time-out from rough words. If either of us says “November 17,” the anniversary of our first date, then all conversation must cease for fifteen minutes. I pulled the trigger because I knew that if she said one more word about my mama, one of us would say something that we couldn’t come back from.

Celestial threw up her hands. “Fine. Fifteen minutes.”

I stood up and picked up the plastic ice bucket. “I’ll go fill this up.”

Fifteen minutes is a nice chunk of time to kill. As soon as I was out the door, Celestial was going to call Andre. They met in a playpen when they were too young to even sit up, so they are thick like brother and sister. I know Dre from college, and it was through him that I met Celestial in the first place.

While she fumed to Dre, I walked up to the second floor and set the bucket on the machine and pulled the lever. Ice cubes tumbled out in fits and starts. As I waited, I encountered a woman about Olive’s age, heavyset, with a kind, dimpled face. Her arm was trussed up in a cloth sling. “Rotator cuff,” she said, explaining that driving was a challenge, but a grandbaby waited on her in Houston, a grandbaby she planned to lift with one good arm. Being the gentleman my mama raised me to be, I carried her ice back to her room, number 206. Because of her injury, she had trouble operating the window, so I lifted the frame and propped it open with the Bible. I had another seven minutes to go, so I went into the bathroom and played plumber, fixing the toilet that was running like Niagara. Leaving, I warned her that the doorknob was loose, that she should double-check to make sure it was locked when I left. She thanked me; I called her ma’am. It was 8:48 p.m. I know this because I checked my watch to see if it was late enough for me to return to my wife.

I tapped on the door at 8:53. Celestial had made us two fresh Cape Codders. Reaching into the bucket with her naked hand, she added three cubes for each us. She shook the drinks to spread the chill and then she extended her beautiful arm in my direction.

And this was the last happy evening I would experience for a very long time.