Small Great Things(42)
“Ruth…I can’t let you work tonight.”
I am dumbfounded. Corinne is late more than 50 percent of the time, but I have a single transgression and I get punished for it?
“It won’t happen again,” I say.
“I can’t let you work,” Marie repeats, and I realize that she hasn’t met my gaze, not once. “I’ve been informed by HR that your license is being suspended.”
Suddenly, I am made of stone. “What?”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers. “Security will escort you out of the building after you clear out your locker.”
“Wait,” I say, noticing the two goons who are hovering behind the nurses’ desk. “You’re kidding me. Why is my license being suspended? And how am I supposed to work if it is?”
Marie draws in her breath and turns to the security guards. They step forward. “Ma’am?” one of them says, and he gestures toward the break room, as if after twenty years I might not know the way.
—
THE LITTLE CARDBOARD box I carry out to the car has a toothbrush, toothpaste, a bottle of Advil, a cardigan sweater, and a collection of photos of Edison. That’s all I kept in my locker at work. It sits in the backseat and keeps drawing my attention in the rearview mirror, surprising me, like a passenger I wasn’t expecting.
I have not even pulled out of the parking lot before I call the union lawyer. It’s 5:00 P.M., and the chances of him being at his desk are slim, so when he answers the phone I burst into tears. I tell him about Turk Bauer and the baby and he calms me down and says he will do some digging and call me back.
I should go home. I should make sure Edison is all right. But that will spark a conversation about why I’m not at work, and I’m not sure I can cope with that right now. If the union lawyer does his job, maybe I can even be reinstated before I’m supposed to work tomorrow night.
Then my phone rings. “Ruth?” Corinne says. “What the f*ck is going on?”
I lean back against the driver’s seat, closing my eyes. “I don’t know,” I admit.
“Hang on,” she says, and I hear muffled noises. “I’m in the goddamned supply closet for privacy. I called you as soon as I heard.”
“Heard what? I don’t know anything, except that my license is apparently being suspended.”
“Well, that bitchy hospital lawyer said something to Marie about professional misconduct—”
“Carla Luongo?”
“Who’s she?”
“The bitchy hospital lawyer. She threw me under the bus,” I say, bitter. Carla and I had each gotten a glimpse of the other’s cards, and I’d thought that was enough for us to implicitly agree we both had aces. I just never expected her to play her hand so quickly. “That racist father must have threatened a lawsuit, and she sacrificed me to save the hospital.”
There’s a pause. It’s so small that maybe if I wasn’t listening for it, I might not have heard it. And then Corinne—my colleague, my friend—says, “I’m sure it wasn’t intentional.”
At Dalton, there was one table at lunch where all the Black kids sat, except me. Once, another scholarship student of color invited me to join them for lunch. I said thanks, but I usually spent that time tutoring a white friend who didn’t understand trig. This was not the truth. The truth was that the Black table made my white friends nervous, because even if they’d sat down there with me, they would have been tolerated but not welcomed. In a world where they always fit in, the one place they didn’t chafed hard.
The other truth was that if I sat with the other kids of color, I couldn’t pretend I was different from them. When Mr. Adamson, my history teacher, started talking about Martin Luther King and kept looking at me, my white friends shrugged it off: He didn’t mean it that way. At the Black table, if one student talked about Mr. Adamson staring at her during that same lesson, another African American student would validate the experience: That totally happened to me, too.
I so badly wanted to blend in in high school that I surrounded myself with people who could convince me that if I felt like I was being singled out because of the color of my skin, I was making things up, overthinking, being ridiculous.
There was no Black table in the cafeteria at the hospital. There were a handful of janitors of color, and one or two doctors, and me.
I want to ask Corinne when she was last Black, because then and only then would she have the right to tell me if Carla Luongo’s actions were intentional or accidental. But instead I tell her I have to go, and I hang up while she is still responding. Then I drive out of the hospital where I’ve been hiding for two decades, underneath the highway that pulses with New York–bound traffic, like an artery. I pass a small tent city of homeless vets and a drug deal going down and park outside the projects where my sister lives. She answers the door with a toddler on her hip and a wooden spoon in her hand and an expression on her face that suggests she has been expecting me for years.
—
“WHY ARE YOU surprised?” Adisa asks. “What did you think was going to happen, moving into Whiteville?”
“East End,” I correct, and she just gives me a look.
We are sitting at her kitchen table. Given the sheer number of children she lives with, the apartment is remarkably clean. Pages from coloring books are taped to the wall, and there is a macaroni casserole in the oven. In the kitchen, Adisa’s oldest, Tyana, is feeding the baby at her high chair. Two of the boys are playing Nintendo in the living room. Her other child is MIA.