Novel-The Plan: Patty

It was Patty, his cook and house-keeper, who would find The General half-conscious, ants crawling on his face, at the back of the property.

Mark and David had gathered the children. Mark was on the phone with Detective Brinks when they had heard her screams from the back.

"Somebody git tha am'bulance quick."

 Mark broke away from his conversation with the detective, and dialed the emergency number. David took the kids back upstairs

Mark ran outside to join her and found his ex-father-in-law prone outside the walled family plot, beyond pale, sweat-covered and incoherent, barely breathing.

Patty had worked for The General for years now. He had gave her the job after her own parents had passed away.  She had known a hard life in New Orleans and was only a generation or so beyond share-cropping. Even though he had met her in a hole in the wall bar off St. Peter Street, he had always treated her like a member of the family. Took her in like his own. Never treated her with anything but respect.

She was, surprisingly for a domestic, fiercely protective of him. Sometimes even when she knew he was in the wrong.

This was one of those moments.

"Git over here, boy," She chided Mark

"Wha's wrong wit'choo? Dis man love you mo' than yo own daddy ever done. He be needin' you now. No mat'r wha you tink he did or din't do."

Mark looked at the collapsed form of The General...how pale and somehow shrunken he looked. Pain etched into his face as he breathed shallowly. No longer larger than life. Just an old man who might be dying. The man had pissed himself during the fall, he realized with a touch of sadness.

He felt the anger and hatred of their earlier encounter slipping away.  It was replaced by real concern that this man who had stepped into his Dad's shoes when his biological father and mother had walked away. The man who had gave him back his life and his children. Had given them, and David, a place when no one else would. Tracy and Jerry were dead. There was no changing that. No matter how angry he stayed.

"I'm sorry, Dad" he whispered as he sat in the grass beside The General holding his clutched hand. "I'm so sorry."

"I do love you. Please hold on for Jade and Josh."

"And me." he added silently.

"Dav'd w'll stay wif de kids," Patty said more gently to him "You go on to tha hos'pital now.'

As the ambulance arrived and loaded The General's cot into its waiting maw, Mark answered the EMT

"He's my Dad"

and climbed in beside him.