Memphis: A Novel(70)

“No, but Joanie, you’ll get in,” she said more seriously, patting my arm.

It had taken all day for Daddy to teach me how to drive stick. He showed me the inner workings of the car, too. Lifted its hood and showed me where to put oil in and how much, where the battery was located, how to jump-start the car if ever the battery ran down. It had taken me the entire day to figure it all out. I had missed my art class that Saturday—something I had never done before.

I drove us around Memphis instead. Mya and Uncle Bird were in the backseat, and he was showing her his gun. He had triple-checked that it was unloaded before giving it to Jax for a second look; Jax had then handed it, begrudgingly, to his daughter.

“Okay, see that bend in the road?” Daddy had his eyes on the gearshift. “I usually take long turns in second.”

“Why not just shift to neutral and coast it?”

“More dangerous that way. You always want to be in a shift when you’re in motion.” He saw my blank, uncomprehending stare and continued. “Okay. Say a kid runs out in the street. If you’re driving along—say, in third—fine. You brake. Hard. Right then. Stall out the car. Whatever you got to do to get it to stop, right? But say that kid came out when we were turning this corner and we were in neutral. To stop in neutral, you’d have to throw the clutch and hit the brake. Too many movements to make in that split second. So, always, always, drive stick in a certain gear—first, second, doesn’t matter. Use neutral only when you’re parking.”

I felt the power of the car underneath me as I shifted into third after the turn and we roared down Poplar. As I drove, the demands of my art class dwindled away. I lost track of time. I began to fall in love with driving, with the power it gave me.

When I took a right at the corner of Poplar and McLean, by the Memphis Zoo, I made sure I shifted down to second, instead of riding it out in neutral. I kept my eyes on the road, but I could still see Daddy smile wide as I made the turn.

I had not forgiven him for abandoning us. That was too big a thing to forgive. But driving in the Shelby through the streets of North Memphis with my daddy, I couldn’t deny how lovely it felt to have one.

He left in the early hours on the third day. I heard the door of the quilting room creak open. Wolf’s head immediately left the comfort of my lap, but then I heard her whine in that way she did only for him.

I’d felt the edge of my bed sink from the weight of him and pretended to sleep on as he perched there. But it was all I could do not to sob outright when he planted a kiss on my forehead, rustled Wolf’s mane, and closed the door, quiet, behind him.

Mya twisted the radio station dial. The Mustang went from blaring Three 6 Mafia to 101.1, Memphis’s Smooth Jams. With all my heart I love you baby came out soft as butter.

“God, that woman can sing. Mama damn near wore out her Fairy Tales album,” Mya said. She began humming along.

“She gets it,” I said, thinking of how I’d never really said goodbye to my daddy either time.

“Gets what?” Mya asked.

“Heartbreak,” I said.



* * *



—

“That your kid?” That was our welcome to Riverbend three hours later.

“No,” I said.

“That his kid?”

“No!”

“Well, then, no minors without a parent or guardian.”

The prison guard who ran the visitors’ office had a Southern accent that was slightly different, a tad more tonal, telling me we were far from home. He had a dark, full mustache, in direct contrast to the growing bald spot at his crown. He sat at a desk behind bulletproof glass and barely looked up from his paperwork as he spoke.

“My, you may have to sit this one out.”

The Riverbend Maximum Security Institution was a massive compound made up of tan slabs for buildings, cut against the green, sloping Nashville acres surrounding it, giving it the impression of a pyramid rising up out of the earth. The colossal fortress could be seen from I-40 a mile out. Giant oaks lined both sides of a narrow access road that led to the prison’s gates. The visitors’ center was a heavily guarded separate building to the immediate left of the prison’s main complex. To enter, Mya and I had passed through two sets of metal detectors before reaching a windowed box that contained the gruff prison guard refusing Mya entry.

It was hard to argue with or deceive the man. Mya looked her fifteen years. We both wore our school uniforms. It would have given us away to Mama had we left the house in ripped jeans and Converse. I could envision Auntie August’s raised eyebrow, the tone of her question: Y’all ready for school today? No, we had to wear our uniforms. Mya wore a maroon polo tucked into a pleated plaid skirt, looking the part of a too-young child. Her thick socks came up knee-high. I, too, wore a polo shirt with Douglass’s crest embroidered over my left breast. But seniors were allowed to wear dark jeans instead of the pleated skirts and pants sets, so my polo was tucked into a pair of black, less conspicuous cropped jeans.

Mya stared hard at the prison guard. He ignored her, circling something in his stack of papers.

“Fine,” she said after it was clear he wouldn’t be intimidated by a fifteen-year-old’s glare.

I pressed the Mustang’s keys into her palm. “You wait in the car,” I said. I didn’t want her in that prison without me, although, truthfully, the interior didn’t look so much like a prison. The visitors’ area was a long, rectangular room with cafeteria tables in the middle and a children’s play area at one end. A TV was mounted high in the middle of the room, and it played CNN on silent, subtitles shooting across the screen. It was mundane enough.