He didn’t say that now. He loosened unexpectedly. The drink, the melancholy heat. The slow way Eva eased the conversation out of him. He spoke of his mother: how beautiful she had been in her youth, movie-star beauty. How she had been too young to have him when she had him, and heartsick, still, and how she tried her best. To raise him, to have the family accept him, the brown child they desperately tried to pass off as white.
