A kitchen chair scraped the linoleum. Mrs. Tuttle gripped the sides of the table to brace herself as she stood. “This has gone on long enough. Lena, thank you for dinner. I know you were trying to do a good thing, getting our families together again, the way it used to be when our husbands were still alive. But things have changed. I won’t have my husband, God rest his soul, disrespected like this.” She shot a glance at Daddy, who looked away.

The color drained from Granny’s face. She pleaded, “Come on now. Ernestine, please sit down. My son-in-law can be a bit of an ass, I know. But I consider you one of my oldest and dearest friends. Besides, I cooked all this food. Can we just eat? Please.”

The anguish made Granny’s face draw up like a dried-out grape. He worried about her bad heart. Did hearts wear out like old factory machines? He couldn’t lose her, too. Silently, he begged Mrs. Tuttle to do what Granny asked and stay. Slowly, she lowered herself back into her seat.

Then little Nicky screamed and pounded the table. Everyone turned to see his square mouth opened wide, revealing pink gums. Midnight reached across the table to gently press a pacifier to his mouth and the child grabbed it, holding it between his lips.

Miss Ruth said, “What happened to your arm?”

Midnight’s shirtsleeve had lifted just enough to expose the scars he tried to keep covered. Granny’s eyes flashed from Daddy to Mr. Eli and then to Midnight.

He shrugged. “It happened a long time ago. It’s no big deal.”

Lightly touching the shiny pink skin on his forearm, she said, “It is a big deal. It looks painful. Does it still hurt?”

He shook his head and she let it go. They all began twirling their spaghetti on forks while he thought back to that day three years ago.

The boys jumped him the day after the fight at the new gravel pit. He had been sitting on the curb of his street trying to build a fort with sticks. The smell of grilled meat wafted from somebody’s cookout nearby.

Midnight never saw the boys coming.

They descended upon him, knocking his glasses from his face, and everything became a blur. They ripped his T-shirt as he lay on his side, his cheek scraping asphalt. Cool liquid splashed his arm. Only later, at the hospital, would he learn it was lighter fluid.

“This is for being such a punk-ass traitor,” one of the boys yelled before lighting the match and tossing it at him.

The fire’s heat was so intense, he thought his skin had peeled away. Still, in the fog of losing consciousness, he heard Corey’s voice. “Stop. Stop.”

At the hospital, the doctors said he’d suffered third-degree burns and was lucky only his arm had been burned. He was also lucky Corey had shown up when he did and screamed for help.

Granny cried at his bedside while Daddy looked for someone to blame. “How do we know that Corey kid didn’t set Patrick on fire? Huh? Tell me that. Maybe he got scared, his conscience got to him. He called for help when he thought he might get in trouble for what he’d done.”

The pain medicine kept Midnight too groggy to tell Daddy any different. Word of what happened spread around town, and so did Daddy’s accusation. Eli Tuttle kept defending Corey even from behind bars. He’d gone to jail for shooting that gun in the air when the white boys attacked Corey the day before. Maybe he stood up for Corey because they were both Black. People in Ganton chose sides, lining up behind whomever they believed.

A week later, doctors told Midnight the skin on his arm would heal, but the burns had snapped his nerve endings and it was possible he would never regain feeling in his arm. The thought of never swimming or playing baseball or tossing a Frisbee made him want to die.

Only when he slept could he forget about everything he’d miss out on forever. And whenever he was awake, he and Daddy argued about what had really happened.

“Those boys had been saying mean things to Corey that day, and I was just helping him.” Corey had been too traumatized to identify the boys and none came forward, so no one got in trouble for setting Midnight on fire.

“You should never have gotten mixed up in that in the first place.”

At night, when Daddy’s plant shift ended, he came home and washed Midnight’s arm with mild soap and then rubbed on antibiotic ointment. Sometimes he felt a slight sensation in his arm, but most of the time, nothing. But strangely, Midnight instantly felt closer to his father than he ever had since Mom died. He smelled the cigarette smoke on Daddy’s breath, the chemicals from the plant on his clothes. Lying on the bed, his arm stayed numb, but his heart vibrated with feelings he couldn’t explain.

When Daddy changed his dressing, he told him he forgave him. It was absolution Midnight hadn’t asked for. He said, “It’s okay, son. You’re still young, don’t know any better.”

He wrapped a gauze roll around Midnight’s arm and held the ends down with tape. “You didn’t have a clue you were fighting on the wrong side of the war.”

Eighteen

Ruth

On the drive back home after dinner at Lena’s, they passed the fence of the old Fernwood plant. In the glow of their headlights, she read the sign: This facility is closed. NO TRESPASSING. She could still picture Papa and Eli walking out at the end of their shifts carrying their lunch pails, their hands leathery, dirt under their fingernails.

Eli didn’t come home with them. He wanted to be alone. There were so many questions she needed to ask him. She couldn’t stop thinking about what Butch Boyd had said at dinner about him stealing and her grandfather cutting corners at the plant. Eli had fired back at Butch but hadn’t refuted any of the man’s accusations.