Black Betty by Walter Mosley

our only daughter, and went down to Mississippi. Sometimes I thought of how Edna was calling my onetime friend Dupree Bouchard her daddy. When I thought about it too long I began to understand how some men say that they were driven to murder.
    Jesus came in a minute after Feather. He looked at me, and my heart skipped with anticipation. Then he walked over to us and hugged me. He looked up into my eyes and smiled the same silent greeting he’d given me for years.
    “Hold on!” I shouted and turned away to the stove as if my oil were burning in the skillet. Maybe I should have let him see me cry—but men didn’t cry where I survived childhood.
    I made hamburgers and an avocado salad with tomatoes, onion, and minced garlic for dinner. The kids ate up every bite and sent me back to the kitchen to make more.
    Feather told me all about her day at school. How she got mad at some little boy for not liking her and how they saw big hairy elephants in a book and then they made one.
    Jesus nodded, smiled, and hunched his shoulders to answer my questions. He’d won the meet that Hamilton High had against Dorsey; was the only runner from Hami to take first place.
    I spent many long and tense hours talking to the boy’s vice principal about Juice before he got into running. Other boys would make fun of him because he was Mexican and silent and small. But in spite of his size, Jesus was completely fearless. He’d never stop fighting until his opponent quit. And he wasn’t afraid to bleed or face more than one in a fight.
    They wanted to put him in a correctional high school, but I said no. I was prepared to keep him home rather than let them make him into some kind of delinquent.
    But then Coach Mark had him run the mile one day—and that was it for correctional school. Hamilton had a star, and they made sure the other boys left him alone.
    He was my son. A son of preference. We weren’t blood, but he wanted to live with me and I wanted to have him—how many fathers and sons can say that?
    But still I was hurt that he wouldn’t talk to me.
     
     
    “FEATHER?”
    “Huh?” she answered. Jesus had already gone up to bed, tired from his long-distance race.
    Feather and I were on the couch in the TV den watching Dobie Gillis. She loved Maynard G. Krebs, and I liked how the father was such a cheapskate about what went on in his store. He knew that no matter how much somebody wants to make something in this world there’s always somebody else who wants to take it away.
    “Why won’t Juice talk to me?” I asked.
    “He talk to you, Daddy. He just don’t say something.”
    “But why won’t he say something?”
    “Because,” she said. And then Maynard came on the screen. Somebody said the word “work” and he was having a conniption fit. I had to wait for a commercial until I could ask her again.
    “So, Feather?”
    “Um?”
    “Why won’t Juice talk to me?”
    “Because he don’t like you to talk to, Daddy,” she said as simply and easily as you please. “But that’s okay because he love you too.”
    “But I’m sad that he won’t say anything to me.” Somewhere I knew that I had crossed a line, that I was asking my little girl to be older than she was. But I wanted so much for Jesus to talk to me. He’d been abused as a child, as a baby, and I didn’t want the evil to have won and taken his words from me.
    Feather put her hand over my thumb, causing me to look down at her.
    “That’s okay, Daddy,” she said. “But he can’t right now.”
    I heard my own words from her lips. Then she stood up and put her arms around my head and held me like I had held her a thousand times when she was crying and sad.
    “It’s time for bed,” I told her, just to get some kind of control back in my life.
     
     
    ON THE COFFEE TABLE in front of me lay an old photograph and a newer one, a bus schedule, a bloody molar tooth, and a check for five thousand dollars written out by Sarah Clarice Cain of Beverly Hills. According