Memphis: A Novel(17)

Miriam and August exchanged looks, then each woman’s eyes went to her respective child.

Miriam watched Joan put the card back slowly, carefully, in the glass box and close its lid. Joan then narrowed her eyes until they were mere slits set in her face. “I know more than you think,” she finally said. Then she crossed herself three times and picked up her steak knife.

Miriam was brought back to the present with a suddenness that made her jump in her cushioned seat.

“Gunshot,” August said. Then: “You’ll hear those often. Girl, it’s like when you left, you took the last of Motown with you.” She took a drag from her menthol. She had smoked it down to the filter. Smoke and the echo of the gunshot hung thickly in the air. “Shit, I saw a girl last week on Chelsea. Not fourteen years old. On the corner, girl. Working it. You hear me? Crack may as well have been a virus for all what it’s done here.”

Miriam finished her two fingers’ worth of rye in a single shot, throwing her head back to take the full weight of the whiskey. Her cheeks were flushed, she could tell. The gunshot had sounded uncomfortably close. The last time she heard a gunshot, she was Joan’s age: ten. It had been a .32 then, too. And she had been with her mother.

“Am I a bad mom, August, for coming here? Bringing the girls?” Miriam bit her lip and twisted the long gold rosary around her neck as she always did when she was nervous.

August fumbled in the folds of her kimono and brought forth her pack of Kools and her lighter. She took her time, removing a fresh cigarette from the pack, placing it on the perch of her full lips, tilting her head toward lighted flame, cupping expert hand over the flame, lighting the cigarette, and inhaling and exhaling in a long stream of smoke.

“You’re only a bad mother if you don’t feed them,” August said through plumes of smoke. “Speaking of, what you going to do for work? They hiring secretaries down at the police station.”

“The same one kill my daddy?” Miriam exclaimed.

“Touché, trick,” August said. She shook her glass back and forth quickly, signaling to her sister that she needed more.

Miriam rolled her eyes. She poured her sister a hefty amount and measured the same for herself. “Nah. I’m going to make Mama proud.”

August’s eyes bored holes into Miriam’s. “You aren’t,” she said, awe in her voice.

“I am. I brought my transcripts. I’m not a complete fool. I brought what mattered.”

“And they going pay you?”

“I called. The lady at the admissions office said she’d do what she could.” Miriam raised her glass in a toast.

“Well, don’t that beat all?” August clinked her glass against her sister’s. “Another nurse in the family. I know Mama would be proud, Meer. Real proud.”

“It’ll be hell,” Miriam said, but she smiled. She put a worried palm to her forehead and held it there while she exhaled. She was going to go back to school, at the age of forty. The studying alone would swamp her. The forthcoming long nights at the library. And all the other students would be so young and hungry and ambitious. Miriam was just plain hungry. She knew she needed to provide for her girls. And something deep and almost animalistic, instinctual, in her did not want Jax’s money even if it were offered. She wanted to do this on her own.

Her mind went to a fight long past, when Jax had spat out a vicious question she had no true answer for: “Where the hell you think you going go, how far you think you going get, with two babies, no degree, and a Black face?” Miriam doubted she had the answer now. But she knew she needed to try to find it.

Maybe it was the whiskey, but there was a sudden heat in her chest when Joan’s soaked pant legs came into the frame of Miriam’s mind. How will we survive? she thought to herself. How on earth? She was jolted from her worry when she felt her sister’s sudden, hard grasp on her forearm.

“Gotta be better than the hell you just left, Meer. Gotta be.”

“We best keep that boy away from Joan.”

August stiffened in her seat.

“Don’t act like that,” Miriam said. “Might as well say it out loud.” She swirled her whiskey in her glass. “I’m worried my Joanie may just kill your boy.”





CHAPTER 8


Miriam


1988


She was pregnant again. This time it was early fall, and the Memphis nights were exquisite. Most of the trees had turned to copper—the sunlight catching in the gold medallion leaves of the trees. She and August sat out on the front porch, sweet tea in hand, and Miriam was thankful for the cool night air. The breeze shook the sunflowers her mother had planted years before, that somehow had survived the first Memphis frost and had now grown tall as titans. And without the death of her mother hanging over her pregnancy, this baby seemed lighter, easier. Miriam was sick of grieving. Sick of seeing her dead mother all over the house in Memphis. Miriam saw her as if in the flesh, standing in the kitchen over a pot of something hot and boiling on the stove. Or once, she thought there was someone in the backyard, and she swore she saw her mother there, among the tomatoes, straw hat on and everything.

When Miriam had been pregnant with Joan, she finally understood why her mother would sometimes take out her father’s uniform, press everything, lay it out on the bed, and sob quietly next to it until she fell asleep. When Hazel died, all Miriam had left was the grief of her. So, she saw her all the time. Saw her in the delivery room. For twenty-six hours Miriam had sweated and heaved and pushed her first child out of her insides, screaming all the while, “Mama, it hurts!”