My Father Had Been in the Ground Less Than an Hour When My Stepmother Drove Me Onto a Dirt Road in the Georgia Heat and Told Me to Get Out of Her Car.

I Was Ten Years Old, Still in My Funeral Clothes.

All I Had Was a Creased Note My Dad Pressed Into My Hand Before He D/ied...

The note was written on the back of a CVS receipt.

One name and a phone number, in my father's shaky handwriting, from his hospital bed.

I kept it in my pocket that entire day, walking down a Georgia road in funeral shoes that pinched.

It saved my life.

It brought me an uncle I didn't know I had, and a folder my stepmother never saw coming.

But I didn't turn that receipt over for sixteen years.

When I finally did, there was one more line on the back, in faint pencil.

And it was about her.

PART 1

"Get out."

My stepmother said it without looking at me.

Both hands on the steering wheel of her black Escalade, engine idling, air conditioning on high.

"As of today, you're not my problem anymore."

My name is Matthew Banks.

I'm twenty-eight now.

On July 12, 2008, I was ten.

That morning, I'd stood next to a hole in the ground at a cemetery in Riverdale, outside Atlanta, and watched them lower my father into it.

Alexander Banks.

Forty-three years old.

Three weeks from diagnosis to the end.

Leukemia, the fast kind.

My mother d/ied when I was five.

Dad married Veronica when I was seven.

She was never harsh when he was in the room.

Around him, she bought me school clothes and asked about my spelling tests and laughed at his jokes.

The second he walked out, her face changed.

Like I was an item of furniture she hadn't picked out and couldn't wait to get rid of.

Three days before he d/ied, Dad called me close to the hospital bed.

His hands were so thin I could see the bones.

He placed a folded scrap of paper into my palm and closed my fingers over it.

"Gabriel," he whispered.

"If anything happens, you call him.

He'll help you.

Forgive me, son."

On the paper was a name.

GABRIEL.

And a phone number with an area code I didn't recognize.

I had no idea who Gabriel was.

I'd never heard my father say that name in my life.

I slipped it into the pocket of my church pants and didn't take it out.

After the funeral, I thought Veronica was driving us home to Peachtree City.

Instead she took I-75 south and kept going.

An hour.

Then she turned off onto a county road, and then a dirt road, with open fields on both sides and a barbed-wire fence leaning over in the heat.

When she stopped, my stomach dropped.

"Here?" I said.

"Here."

I looked out the window.

No houses.

No mailboxes.

No cars.

Just red dirt, dry weeds, and a sky so bright it hurt.

"How am I supposed to get home?"

"You're not going home."

She said it like she was reading off a grocery list.

"Your father left everything to me.

The house.

The company.

The accounts.

Every dollar he ever made." She finally turned her head and glanced at me.

"I'm not spending the next eight years raising another woman's child."

"But I live with you."

"You used to."

I clutched my backpack against my chest.

Inside was a notebook, a pencil, a library book about sharks, and an empty water bottle.

Nothing that could help me.

"I don't have any money."

"Not my problem."

"I don't have a phone."

She shrugged.

"There's a town a few miles that way.

Walk."

"Veronica, please.

Please."

She reached across me and pushed my door open.

The heat poured in like an oven.

I got out.

I don't know why.

I was ten, and an adult told me to get out of a car, so I did.

She pulled the door shut, rolled up the window, and the Escalade spun around in the dirt and sped off in a cloud of red dust.

I ran after it.

I pounded on the back window, screaming her name, until it pulled away and I couldn't keep up.

Then I stood alone on that road in my funeral clothes.

That was when it finally hit me.

My father had been buried that morning.

And before the sun went down, my stepmother had thrown me away too.

I walked for three hours.

My church shoes were a size too small.

I'd grown since Easter.

By the second hour, my heels were rubbed raw inside my socks.

My lips cracked.

I drank the last warm swallow in my water bottle in the first twenty minutes and spent the rest of the walk wishing I hadn't.

The first house I reached, nobody answered.

The second house, a man looked at me through the screen door and shut the inside door without a word.

At the third house, a white clapboard with a porch swing and a garden full of tomato plants, a woman in her late fifties answered the door with a dish towel over her shoulder.

She looked at me.

A ten-year-old boy in a black clip-on tie, covered in red dust, alone.

"Sweetheart," she said.

"Where are your people?"

"We buried my dad today," I said.

"My stepmother left me on the road."

Her whole face changed.

Her name was Lucille Tate.

She taught third grade in Pecan Hill, Georgia, population eleven hundred.

She led me inside, sat me at her kitchen table, handed me a glass of ice water and a tomato sandwich, and soaked my feet in a basin of warm water with Epsom salts while I told her everything.

When I finished, I remembered the paper.

"My dad said to call this man.

If anything happened."

She dialed it on her kitchen phone.

It rang and rang.

No answer.

No voicemail.

That night I rested on a cot in her sewing room and stared at the ceiling.

"What if he doesn't want me either?" I said into the dark.

Lucille was quiet in the doorway for a long time.

"Then tomorrow we'll figure something else out," she said.

"Together.