lived there till he was eighteen and they kicked him out on the street. From there, there’s about three years that I can’t account for. He was probably bouncing around and living on the street. When he was twenty-one, he popped up in a small town in southern Missouri. In the boot heel area of the state close to Tennessee and Arkansas. He spent two years at a vocational/technical school in Poplar Bluff, Missouri. He went there on a baseball scholarship. He played first base for the Poplar Bluff Mules. It’s weird that a vo-tech school had a baseball team, much less any scholarship players, but that’s what I found. He got his CDL license at the vo-tech. I found the school records in an old county database. The school’s been closed for fifteen years.
“Once he graduated from the vo-tech he somehow scraped together enough money to buy a truck. He started picking up loads in Mexico just across the border and brought them into the States. I couldn’t really find any type of residence for him for about five years, so either he was living with someone or just living in his truck. There isn’t a whole lot I could find about him and your mother or really anything about him until the arrest in Miami. We’re gonna have to hit the road to dig up anything else.”
Gran had been perched around the corner and she digested every word of the narrative. It was far more than she ever knew about the father of her grandson and much more disturbing than she had imagined. The stories of Gilbert’s childhood brought about a pain in her gut, a pain that only a mother could feel when she learned of such things happening to a child. The hate that she had nurtured and grown in her being for twenty-five years for the man was suddenly replaced with sadness and sympathy.
“Seven, listen, I know there’s more that I can find with some fieldwork, but my question is do you really want to know any more?” Joey said as he tossed the file across the table to Seven. As it slid into his lap, the team photo of the vo-tech baseball team exited the file folder and stopped on the table directly in Seven’s view. He found his father among the team without a search. It could have easily been