The Kindest Lie(39)

She wondered about the street her son lived on and hoped the house had heat that ran through the winter and working smoke detectors. She imagined a Black neighborhood like Grundy, where she grew up, a place where joy lived. Where people threw up a hand to wave when they checked the mailbox and piled into their Buicks for bingo and bowling on Saturday nights and church on Sunday mornings.

A few blocks over, stillness fell on Franklin Street, everything quiet except for the murmur of her car engine. Outside her window, she passed a building with a Cold Meats sign in front and a laundromat next to it. A small figure in a blue hooded jacket walked in front of the check-cashing store, kicking a mound of snow. The glare of her headlights caught his face. It was Lena’s grandson. She hadn’t forgotten that he’d pelted her car with snowballs. This boy’s smugness irritated Ruth, and she drove past him. Her only mistake: looking in her rearview mirror. Regret dogged her almost constantly these days. A dustup of snow blew in Midnight’s face. She put her car in reverse and rolled down the passenger’s-side window.

“Midnight! Let me give you a ride.”

“I can walk.” She heard the defiance in his voice.

“It’s cold and it’s dark out here and this area—”

Even now, just as Black boys didn’t walk the streets of Pratt, white boys didn’t walk the streets of Grundy. Not at night. Not alone.

“I’m not allowed to accept rides from strangers!” he shouted with a smile.

“That’s a good rule to follow, but it’s freezing out here and besides, I’m not a stranger. We met yesterday at your grandmother’s shop.” Driving slowly beside him, she tried to keep her car going in a straight line while leaning over to yell to him through the passenger’s-side window. “Please. Get in.”

The wind picked up and Midnight staggered trying to push against it. He jerked the door handle and climbed in, his breathing hard and his long eyelashes dotted with snowflakes.

“Why were you walking the streets by yourself this time of night?”

Midnight curled his booted feet under his legs and reclined the seat. He ripped off his mittens and held his fingers with their reddened tips over the heat vent.

“I needed to get away to think.”

Midnight was one of those kids the old folks would say had been here before in another life. She laughed, and his face became drawn, making it obvious he thought he was being laughed at.

“What have you been thinking about?” Ruth said.

He shrugged and didn’t answer. She hadn’t known him long, but it seemed Midnight stood on the outside of things, bitter, chafed by the unfairness of life. Yet his face also had an open, pleading countenance that she recognized in herself. He tried to mask his need with feigned indifference.

Midnight had to be around the same age as her son, and she wondered if they knew each other. Ganton was small, but what were the odds of that in a town of twenty-five thousand people? Besides, she had no idea what her own child looked like, so she couldn’t describe him. Also, she felt sorry for Midnight and it didn’t seem right to use him to get information. So, she stopped scheming in her head and tried to make conversation. The topic of the weather was always safe, if uncreative.

“Snow’s really coming down hard. Nobody should be out in it.”

“Daddy went to the plant every day in the snow, even when it was ten inches deep.”

She heard the pride in his voice, same as Papa’s. She also recalled the deep disdain her brother had for this boy’s father.

“I can tell you’re strong just like your dad.”

“Can you drop me off at Granny’s? My address—”

“316 Kirkland in Pratt.”

Midnight raised his eyebrows in surprise. Pratt was one of the white working-class neighborhoods Mama told her and Eli to avoid as kids, even if Lena did live there. Don’t be caught over there after dark, she’d said. Ruth had stayed home most high school nights, lying across her four-poster bed studying for AP exams. But Eli hadn’t listened. One night, he came home with a bloodied, busted lip and a story about a couple of teen boys at a Pratt pool hall who fought him over which song to play on the jukebox. Come to think of it, Midnight’s dad, Butch Boyd, had been one of those boys. Ruth wasn’t sure how much had changed over the years. Now, she tried to shake off the jitters she felt about having to drive through Pratt, a Black woman with a white kid in the passenger seat. A white kid she hardly knew but still gave the benefit of the doubt. A courtesy too magnanimous for the Black kids on the street who reminded her of who she might have become if she’d stayed in Ganton.

“Why is it so quiet when it snows?” His voice rose from the darkness, startling her when she was getting accustomed to the silence. A bag of doughnuts Midnight had pulled out of his jacket pocket lay on the seat between them, and he reached for a glazed one with green sprinkles.

“The weather’s bad, so not as many people are on the roads. I guess that’s why it’s quiet now.”

The day of her wedding, she recalled Eli’s young children asking why the sun was yellow and why water was wet and why the stove was hot. Maybe children never outgrew the why questions. Even the best answers led to an endless cycle of more whys.

“No. I mean snow is always quiet when it falls,” he said.

“I give up. You tell me.”