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I am sure he has told me so on a number of occasions, but right now I am not interested in the location, only the added time it will take to pick up the poor creature that had the unfortunate experience of pushing such a big lunk from her loins. I want her to see it too.” I don’t ask what the “it” he is referring to is, and contrary to what George assumes I know, I am unaware of just exactly where it is his mother lives. He says, “I asked if it would be okay if we picked up mother on the way? You know she lives just right off Cobb Parkway, at Simon’s Personal Care Home. So I say, “Now, what George? What did you ask?” He smiles as if only he can understand such a forgetful young man as me. There have been a few times where I’ve agreed to something George has asked of me only to wind up and find myself a few weeks later at one of his union ticket raffles where I’ve offered, unbeknownst to me, to be the dope sitting in a dunk tank. “I said, is that okay Lance?” I shake my head yes, but then think twice about it. He arranges his brow queerly, repeats his question. He says, “Is that okay?” He is looking at me as if I need to give him permission to pass through some guard gate. Inside the truck cab, with no place for me to go hide, George is still rambling. I can hear the words “Alice” and “Laura” and something about a wall and a photograph and his mother, but my mind is now too mired down in the worry of Marie to make much sense of what he is yammering on about. We get into the truck as George mumbles something about a newly added item in his house. I have to be at work in Atlanta in less than two hours for the four to twelve shift, and I still have to make the crucifying drive with George from my place to his subdivision in Austell, a twenty minute drive, at the least. While George has helped take my mind off what I have come to conceive as the equivalent of legal boils seeping over the heater vent in my new place, I can now feel his same presence bringing me back down to the reality of my upheaved life. This activity allows George to once again show me his high-tech key gizmo and honestly, I am starting to wear down. Then I try to tell him I’ll just put them inside the apartment, but he insists that I place the junk, which most people wouldn’t pay two dollars at a garage sale for the whole kit and caboodle, inside his dealer-ordained, vehicular equivalent of a bank vault. I take the few boxes from the back of the truck and try to set them on the doorstep, but George won’t have it. He says with a look of bewildered astonishment on his face, “Can you believe what they can do these days with those microwave chips?” He almost begs for me to listen to the nifty chirp his key chain makes when the doors are all securely battened down. He makes certain his boat-of-a-SUV is properly locked up.

We close up the apartment George wants me to turn the dead bolt three times to make sure it’s aligned securely. Lance becomes embroiled in the life of George as well as his own attempts to stay in his baby’s life. In this story about the New South, Lance befriends an older man named George who himself is struggling with connecting with his troubled, adult daughter. In Indiana, Lance was employed as a crop duster and has opted to work at Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport rather than use his psychology degree.

He is in the throes of a divorce and custody battle over his baby daughter after having moved from Indiana to Georgia so his wife, Sherry, could attend a master’s degree program. Author’s note: The novel Mother Belle is narrated by Lance Bancroft, a man in his late twenties who has never used his Bachelor’s degree in psychology, which he doubts is of any consequence.