Memphis: A Novel(32)

He straightened up, put his hands on his hips, and stared at her. Hazel realized he was a full head taller than her. Looked like there was no end to his growing.

“No one else was in there,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “And I like music.”

“You like music. Who don’t? We live in Memphis.”

“We don’t have music like that in Georgia.”

“That where you from?”

The boy nodded. “We got here right before the flood. Hell of a time to move, huh?” He looked at his feet. “Sorry about your daddy,” he said to his shoes.

Hazel looked down at her own boots. Her eyes felt hot.

“Heard about what he did,” the boy went on. “Saving all them families when the fire department had laughed. Took out his fishing boat—just a skiff, what folks say—and headed out. Drowned saving the drowning. And that’s more than God did that day. You must be proud.”

“Mm-hmm.” Hazel was determined not to cry in front of this boy.

He looked at her in surprise. “You’re a quiet gi—”

Hazel jabbed him hard in the shoulder—the only part of him she could reach—before he could finish.

“Ow!” He rubbed the spot where she hit him. “It’s true. Memphis women crazy. You might be more dangerous than any flood.” He smiled, and Hazel couldn’t have looked away if she’d tried—which she didn’t.

The boy extended his hand with the same gentle gesture he’d used in Stanley’s. She noticed the lines in his palms. How long and intricate they were. She wanted to trace her finger along them, discover where they led.

“Maybe we should try this proper. Hi. I’m Myron. Myron North. It’s been an absolute pleasure getting to know you,” he said.

Hazel blinked. She regarded his hand for some time. The hand that had been her safety raft, her compass. Instinct rose inside her for the third time that day. She knew if she took it, this hand, she would be opening the first chapter of a book that would span her lifetime.

Her chest expanded and contracted with a long breath. She steadied herself. Raised her head to meet his eyes. “I’m Hazel,” she said, and placed her hand in his.

Suddenly, a window in the second story of the pink house opened. A young woman in her twenties—with the loveliest brown arms Hazel had ever seen—had thrown it open. She wore a silk nightgown the color of a nectarine, and her head was a nest of short, messy locs.

“If y’all don’t go ahead and get married and get off my lawn, so help me God,” the woman shouted. Then, more to herself than anyone else, “But don’t nobody ever listen to Miss Dawn.”





CHAPTER 14


Hazel


1943


Hazel’s round tortoiseshell glasses kept slipping down the bridge of her nose. The almost-quilt in her lap consumed her attention. Technically, she was still piecing, not quilting. Quilting would come last, after Hazel had stuffed thick cotton in the middle and chosen a good, solid color for her quilt’s backside. Right now, she was piecing together the front side of her patchwork quilt in an assortment of robin egg blue and sea foam green.

She bit her bottom lip as she worked, smearing her red lipstick across her teeth. Her mother was attending to a customer on the other side of the parlor. Della was on her knees, pins in her mouth. She was affixing a knee-length lace hem to the end of Mrs. Finley’s white linen dress—a rarity. Ever since the war broke out two Decembers past, lace had been harder and harder to find. And more expensive. Only their rich white customers wore silk stockings now. The orders for new dresses had dwindled, too. Deliveries of new silks and chiffons had turned to deliveries of steamed, pressed handkerchiefs. Now when Hazel answered the phone and took down appointments, they were for simply mending dresses her mother had made the season before.

“Right there, not an inch higher,” Mrs. Finley said sharply.

“Mm-hmm,” Hazel’s mother said through what Hazel knew were clenched teeth.

The tall, broad-shouldered blonde was one of her mother’s most exacting and most loyal customers. Mrs. Finley was known throughout the Black neighborhood as one of the direct descendants of Nathan Bedford Forest. There was talk that she herself sewed her husband’s Klan robes, not daring to take them in to any seamstress. She had also convinced the entirety of the Women’s Board of the Memphis Botanic Garden to start coming to Della’s shop. This fact and only this fact had saved Della’s business when others had closed during the Depression. And when Hazel’s father had died, this white woman, for what it was worth, overpaid her monthly bill by a whole five dollars. So Hazel knew that she had to be on her best behavior whenever Mrs. Melanie Finley stepped into the shop for a fitting. It was her mother—always a proud woman—who more often needed the reminding.

“Mama, we got that two-o’clock with your favorite customer,” Hazel had said at the breakfast table that morning.

“When’s the last that Remington’s been cleaned?” her mother asked, as she poured grits into Hazel’s bowl.

“Mama!”

“You right. Her death should be slower than all that.”

Hazel laughed, shook her head.

Ever since Hazel turned eighteen, her mother had started paying her a small salary for managing her bookings and making her deliveries. Hazel had spent not a cent. Stashed every dollar her mother gave her in a blue-striped hatbox she kept high in her closet. She was twenty-one now; the box wasn’t full yet, but close.