“Without his life, each of theirs fell to pieces.” From Beloved, by Toni Morrison, p. 220.
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Without his life, each of theirs fell to pieces. That was how Kyrin saw it, at least. Kiara wasn’t so sure.
She ran her tongue over her front teeth and grimaced for the mirror. Her mouth tasted faintly of blood and mint-waxed dental floss. She did not floss every day, but lied and told the hygienist that she did. To make it feel like less of a lie, she savaged her mouth with thrice-daily flossings in the week before a cleaning. The hygienist knew, but she didn’t call Kiara out on it. No one called Kiara out on anything. Not anymore. Big Daddy had always been the one to confront Kiara with an objective reality, one not of her own making. And now that he was gone, not one of them was willing to assume that burden.
Big Daddy was a judge. A justice, in fact, of the Michigan Court of Appeals. He died on a Wednesday morning, in the little bathroom adjoining his chambers. If given the choice, Kiara thought, one would surely not choose to die in a gray-tiled bathroom, beneath the harsh glare of fluorescent bulbs. One would not choose to inhale, in one’s dying breaths, faint wisps of Clorox bleach and ammonia. One would not wish, as one’s last glimpse of this world, a foreshortened grid of mildewed grout and a shoe-scuffed rubber baseboard.
All things considered, however, it had not been an unrespectable death. At 9:45 a.m., Presiding Justice Joseph Lee Hendridge put down the morning paper, donned his robe for argument, and rinsed his coffee mug in the bathroom sink. He was seized, as if by an invisible hand, sank swiftly to one knee, bowed his head as if in prayer, and collapsed. His body, curled peacefully in the fetal position, was found by his clerks exactly 25 minutes later.
Kiara had asked once, how Big Daddy got his name. She was told it went back to little Jesse Clark, the first foster child who ever came to live with Judge (not yet Justice) Hendridge and his wife, Ada Lucia, in their modest bungalow at the end of Wynona Circle. The judge was not a particularly large man–about 5’9″ or 5’10” and 185 lbs, give or take–but Jesse’s biological father was just a skinny kid, who somehow managed to get his 13-year-old girlfriend pregnant one star-filled night in their church parking lot. To four-year-old Jesse, there was “Little Daddy,” who he saw less and less frequently, and “Big Daddy,” who took him fishing and taught him how to read. There was “Big Mama” (though only 13, Candice Grimwald was a corpulent young lady, even before she birthed a child), who cried each time Jesse was brought to see her, and “Little Mama,” the diminutive Ada Lucia, who pulled a stepstool to the big butcher-block counter so he could help her make snickerdoodles.
The names stuck. And so, to three generations of foster children to pass through the arched hedges of the little white house on Wynona Court, Judge Hendridge and Ada Lucia were known simply as Big Daddy and Little Mama.
And so it had been for the twins, Kyrin and Kiara, who arrived there one rainy afternoon in late May, two days after their father shot their mother in the chest and, as she lay dying, put the gun in his own mouth and fired.