Memphis: A Novel(5)

“Your man is military, then?”

“An officer and a gentleman.” She almost laughed at herself. Then almost raised her hand to her left brow, still tender, covered in cheap Maybelline foundation not her shade because no drugstore ever carried her shade. She nodded at the hood of the white van. So big her kids called it “the White House.” So irksome she’d christened it “the Reagans.”

“Can you fix it?”

He was in the innards of the van now. She peered over his hulking frame. Then—

She didn’t hear the gentle creaking of the passenger-side door opening, just a crack, or the tiny pitter-patter of feet. But she did hear the growl.

Wolf was three feet away, Mya right behind her. Her youngest daughter. Mya stood on legs not seven years old. Wolf, the color of snow atop the Smokies, keeled low and flashed white teeth and pink gums bespeckled with black.

The white man turned. Looked aghast.

“Wolf, get back in the car. Mya, you, too.” Miriam held her brown arm straight, pointing at the passenger door.

“Woman, you got a Noah’s Ark full.”

“Who he, Mama? Where is Daddy?” Mya asked.

“Come on.” Miriam saw Joan poke her tiny head out the side window.

“My. Wolf. Come. Now.”

Miriam would have smiled if Mya’s question hadn’t sent the muscles in her neck into an entirely new level of tension. Joan’s tone was sharp. Mya obeyed her older sister. Wolf backed away, never taking her eyes off the white man. Suspicious. Protective. A snarl was forming in the jowls. Mya followed, though Miriam could tell she did so reluctantly.

The white man turned back toward the van’s innards. “See this here? This is the vacuum valve. See these holes? All I got to do is put some duct tape on them. Between meat and God, the only thing man needs is duct tape. Saved the crew of Apollo Thirteen, did you know? Your man a pilot?”

“If I could be that lucky. Have that man stationed in space instead of Memphis.” The sweet sour candy taste in her mouth had dissolved. Miriam was taken aback by the truth she told.

The white man paused in his work. Folded his arms into an Indian crisscross and settled against the van. “My missus got Alzheimer’s. Get so she don’t even know who she is. Calling out for me in the night. What am I? What am I? I’ve loved that woman for thirty years. Not all of them good. But together. Together. I reckon if she was on Mars, I’d hot-rig that there truck to get me there.” He sighed. “Come on, look here, see this? Toggle it like this if it goes out again.”

Ten minutes later, Miriam was back in the driver’s seat, pulling out of the station, a palm up in thanks to the stranger. Her daughters’ four tiny brown palms pressed against the windows in thanks. He raised an arm, saluted.

The air conditioner on full blast. The girls could breathe again. Wolf stopped her panting, curled up around Mya’s feet and slept. The tension of the encounter behind her, Miriam found herself wiping away tears with the back of her forearm. Trying to hide her sniffles. But she knew her girls knew. Understood the impact of the fatherless journey they were taking. Her voice cracked when she said, barely audible above Al Green, “We’re almost there, y’all. We’re almost there.”

She thought about where they might stop to get lunch. Hopefully, there’d be a place in an hour or two where they could get something to go. She’d rather stop in somewhere and eat there, but Joan had been refusing to eat inside most restaurants. The mustard. She wouldn’t go near the thing. And she refused to say more or go inside. Would just sit in the car with Wolf and wait.

Miriam let her mind drift back to the day before. The yard had been full. Armoires and chests and jade elephants, a vast assortment of Japanese geisha woodblocks, and a cast-iron slave stove any Southern woman would be proud to make biscuits in covered the green.

The neighbors. Miriam remembered the shock and awe in their eyes, their open mouths, their hands cupped to hide their dismay. Everything she owned out on display. A butter churner with a pearl handle was going for twenty. As if Miriam herself lay splayed out in the yard in an open kimono, bare-breasted and utterly spent.

The neighbors—especially the women, Miriam recalled—shook their heads. She knew they were thinking about the ball the night before. Who wouldn’t have remembered when Miriam showed up wearing a gold sequined dress with bloodred high-heeled shoes? She was certain they thought it was all because Jax had made major.

The neighbors’ necks crooked this way and that, and like hungry pigeons, they searched for the major. But he was nowhere in sight. Just his children. The girls. Mya, tiny, smaller than Wolf, hollering on top of a vanity that they’d let go for only ten.

And then there was the Shelby. Resting like some black beast at the very foot of the yard. The entire base, from general to private first class, knew Jax loved that black panther as much as, if not more than, the Corps. More than the china or the furniture or Jax’s absence, it was the sign in the window of the ’69 Mustang that proclaimed that Miriam and Jax’s storm of a marriage was finally over. In bold block letters the same shade as Miriam’s blush rose lipstick, the sign simply read, FREE.

The van’s AC broke again just outside Sugar Tree, Tennessee. Miriam parked the Chevy in a lonely rest stop shaded by an ancient hickory. Thrust her arms deep into the entrails of the van and fixed it herself, the hickory over her head heavy in green bloom.