“Girl, don’t you see this here line?”
“God bless the child, maybe she’s crazy.”
Stanley’s eyes misted over, and he looked like he was struggling to compose himself. “Now isn’t that good news,” he said, and packaged the trout and handed it to the annoyed waiting woman. Took the grocery order from the next in line but kept his eyes on Hazel throughout. “Good news,” he repeated.
“Mr. Koplo.” Hazel’s bottom lip quivered. She grabbed at her rosary, twisted it in her fingers, and bit down on her lip hard to keep it from moving uncontrollably.
She thought about telling him about Myron’s draft papers. How he was being shipped off to Stanley’s own homeland to fight in a war…No. The look on Stanley’s face stopped her. So did the terrifying thoughts of war. No, she decided. Not today. She would think about the war when she was a wife. For now, on this morning, she was a bride-to-be.
“Mr. Koplo, will you walk me down the aisle?”
Della had thought it just right that Hazel should ask Stanley. When Hazel returned from the deli, her mother was in the front room. “The only white man on this earth I trust,” she said and went back to sketching the pattern for the wedding dress.
Hazel began gutting another catfish. In the ten years since the war ended, the only thing missing from her and Myron’s life was a baby. They had their work: Hazel had her own loyal customer base now, and Myron had joined the police academy. But they wanted children desperately, had built bedrooms for two or three, but month after month, the blood came—faithful as a tide. Sometimes Hazel would despair, feeling she’d failed them, but Myron wouldn’t let her blame herself. “It’s just not our time yet” was his constant refrain. “One thing’s for sure, though—our baby’s stubborn as her mother, making us wait till she’s good and ready. And when she is, we’ll be ready for her, too.” He kept the faith for them, always working on some project around the house while Hazel sewed and stitched just about everything under the sun—quilts, curtains, tablecloths, pillow covers. In a way, the house had become their child for those ten years. Until the beginning of this year, when Hazel missed her cycle for the second time in a row.
Hazel paused with a cold fillet in her hands, let out a long sigh. At first, she’d thought it was the grief. Della had died earlier that winter. Unexpectedly. Hazel shuddered, remembering how she’d discovered her mother slumped over her Singer, in the midst of mending, of all things, pants for Myron. A heart attack took her. Died before Hazel could tell her she was pregnant.
Hazel shook the thought from her mind. No more death, now, ya hear? No more, she chastised herself. There was a pain in her gut. Her craving for fried fish became overwhelming. She winced from the sharp stab of hunger and hurried in her work. Threw herself into it. She was going to clean and fry up this fish. Eat a big plate. Then take it down to Myron. Her love. Myron, who had just made homicide detective. The first Black man in Memphis to do so. She would take him this lunch. Have his baby in a week. God as her witness. Standing at the sink, scraping out fish guts, Hazel simply, understandably, didn’t want to think about the fact that she was an orphan. Her only kin on this earth Myron and the baby inside her.
CHAPTER 17
August
1978
The night before Miriam and Jax got married, August decided that her wedding present to her sister would be the gift of song. Jax’s recent first lieutenant rank had come with orders to be in North Carolina—his new wife by his side—by the start of fall. The two sisters were sitting in their bedroom, hair wrapped in rollers, when Miriam said, “Sing for me tomorrow, will you?”
There was a catch in her voice, and August could see desperation in her older sister’s eyes. In all their years together, this was the only favor Miriam had ever asked of August.
August was aware of the power of her voice. Knew it was the cause of many a weeping man and a terrified woman. Knew she could calm animals with it, large or small, however feral. She preferred piano. If she sang, damn near all the stray cats in Memphis, the homeless, construction workers tending to the power line at the end of the block—all would gather on her family’s yard and nap for hours. August hated to sing in church. The crying, the speaking in tongues, and the grown men falling to their knees terrified her. All because she had hit that perfect high-C note? Folk are ridiculous, August gathered. She thought God was more demon than anything, more trickster than Father, for bestowing this of all gifts upon her.
“Fine,” August said. “But I ain’t singing no church song.”
Miriam laughed. “Don’t matter what you sing. Church moves through you. That voice.”
The next morning, August stood not far from Jax at the altar, both of them pointed toward the church doors, waiting. Jax was in his Marine Corps dress whites. August hated to admit it, but the stranger looked sharp. The Marine Corps emblem, an eagle perched atop a globe with an anchor struck through the globe’s middle, dazzled in bronze buttons along Jax’s collar and down his jacket front. And his dress whites fit him like a glove. He seemed nervous, quiet for once—which August preferred. But his eyes kept darting all over the church until the doors opened and Miriam and Hazel appeared.
Miriam looked ethereal in a layered tulle gown made to look Victorian, antique. Her arm was linked with Hazel’s, who led her to the beginning of the aisle.
Stanley hadn’t been able to do it. He was weak from his latest stroke, confined to a wheelchair. But he was there. Right before the wedding, he wheeled himself up to August, tugged on her sleeve. His speech had altered so much from the stroke, but his German accent had never lessened over all the years.
“Umwerfend,” he said. German for “stunning.”
August had kissed his cheek.
The old lace of Miriam’s dress made a lovely sound as it swept the floor. As Miriam and Hazel began to walk down the aisle, August sang the first notes of “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,” almost in a whisper. Even with the veil, August could tell her sister was holding back laughter. Likely thinking to herself, “That girl. That crazy, crazy girl.”
August’s voice grew stronger. She’s not just a plaything. She added vibrato. Leaned in on certain notes, let up on others. She’s flesh and blood just like her man.
Hazel shot her a look that could have cut a block of ice.
August sang on.
“You lucky I love you,” Miriam whispered to August when she and Hazel finally reached the altar.
Her mother’s face was set in stone, but August could make out the birth, the beginnings, of a smirk.
“August Della North, your daddy turning over in his grave,” Hazel scolded into August’s ear before kissing Miriam’s cheek and making her way to the front pew.
But it didn’t much matter. The entire congregation was in hysterics. Not so much at the song August had chosen, but at how she sang it. A fifteen-year-old girl—fatherless, dark, tall—singing Aretha like Aretha should have sung the song.
* * *
—
The wedding had been short, bless God, August thought as she entered the Officers’ Club an hour later. Catholic weddings were usually not longer than a traditional Mass. Miriam’s had taken place in the morning—a Southern tradition—the reception held at three in the afternoon at the Officers’ Club.