I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway Read Free Page B

Angeles hipster would drool over—pulls up. Two more guys, waistlines courtesy of too many trans fats and not enough leafy greens, get out. “We saw her, ” the Oldsmobile driver drawls, gesturing toward me, “and decided to stop.” Apparently, it doesn’t take much to be newsworthy in Midway. Big hair, skinny arms, and premium denim will do it.
    I turn to the two new guys and repeat my pitch. “Hi, my name is Tracy McMillan and I’m visiting from Los Angeles, and my dad is from this town. I wanted to come and check it out.” They, too, look at each other. Then they look at the other four guys. I see that the main older dude has changed his expression slightly, to something like Amusing, isn’t she?
    “What did you say your name was?” Oldsmobile queries. Slowly.
    “Tracy McMillan.” At this point, I can tell these guys think I am just about the funniest thing that’s happened all year. I start to play along. Big smile. Tilted head. Exaggerated arm gestures. I can get a pretty good airhead thing going on when I want to.
    The lawn chair guy points at Oldsmobile guy. “He’s a Mack -Millan.” I love how he says “Mc” like it has an “a” in it.
    “I sure am,” says Oldsmobile. “Who’d you say your daddy was?”
    “Freddie McMillan. I think he left here when he was about eight and moved to Birmingham. His mother was named Thelma?”
    “Is he white or black?” asks one of the until-now-silent lawn chair brothers.
    This question surprises me. I have light skin and features some have sworn were Greek (or whatever) but my hair is pure Soul Sister.“Black!” I answer indignantly. I can only guess that at this moment my German farmer side is shining pretty bright.
    Oldsmobile sizes me up. “I’ll take you to meet my mama.”
    One would think I would be circumspect about following a man I have known less than ninety seconds to some unknown location, but—unless I am intensely sexually attracted to a guy—my People Assessment System (standard equipment for every foster child) is absolutely foolproof. (Actually, it’s foolproof all the time. If I am intensely sexually attracted to a guy, I can be 100 percent certain having sex with him would be a bad idea.) Since I am not at all sexually attracted to Oldsmobile, I have no hesitation about following him to meet his mother. I get in my car and trail him a mile down the road.
    Oldsmobile’s mom turns out to have a vague recollection of my grandmother. “But you should really talk to my sister,” she advises me. “She know ever’body around here.”
    I’m totally interested in talking to anyone who knows everybody, so I get back in my car and caravan to the next house. I’m amazed that Oldsmobile has so much patience for this, but then again, I am pretty much the gossip of the day.
    A few minutes later I’m standing in the kitchen of the sister, who apparently functions as a sort of town memory bank. She knows a bunch of my relatives, people whom I’ve never met but have heard of. Then she shows me a picture of her dad, a McMillan, who has sloping shoulders identical to my dad’s, and I have them, too. Who needs a DNA swab? Sometimes things are just obvious.
    I spend an hour with this woman and her son, Oldsmobile (I don’t remember his name, or hers). She serves me a warm-ish Coke, and I sit in her dim but orderly living room and look at her family pictures. It is a strange and lovely afternoon. After a while, I leave, feeling a little bit guilty that I am going back to the Big City, leaving them (decades) behind.
    Not until I am almost halfway back to Atlanta, after eating ribsoff a plastic plate with slices of white bread at a roadside barbecue joint and blasting soul oldies on the radio, soaking in the “realness” of the true South, did I have a deeper revelation.
    My dad was born in that place.
    How he somehow had a child—me—who, in only one generation, found her way into the world of journalism, film, television, private schools,