“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.
CHAPTER 3
Miriam
1978
Miriam did not look up from her novel when the bell above the record store door announced a new customer’s entrance. It was all she could do not to roll her eyes. She took a bite of the peach she held, buried her head farther in her Bront?. Miriam did not like working at the record store; she did not much like working. She preferred to be studying. Chemistry. Physics. Anatomy. This was a summer job—a gig to make some money in between her college graduation and the start of nursing school that fall.
The record store was decadent and dusty, walls lined in vinyl covers: smiling Bessie Smith, a forlorn Roberta Flack, and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper. Overflowing stacks lined three sides of the store, and a high reception desk the fourth. Afternoon light streaked in through the tall windows, creating long diagonals of floating dust motes.
Miriam wore her hair in a large, curly Afro that rivaled Diana Ross’s. Her halo of tight-coiled curls shook at the slightest turn of her head. Except for her hair, she was the spitting image of her mother. Her breasts had grown, not much, but enough to attract attention. The beauty of her shape rested in her hips—as wide and welcoming as a front porch. And yet, Miriam knew, men usually found her the opposite of welcoming. She was indifferent to their catcalls, invitations, and their hanging around by her house. She’d shrug her shoulders at their compliments or cock her head, bemused, and walk back in the house, muttering to herself that men were strange things.
“Got any EJ?”
Miriam did not want to take her eyes off the page of her book. Heathcliff had returned, victorious and furious. Catherine, pregnant, had fallen ill. “Lord, if his woman dies…” she said.
“You know—EJ! EJ? Elton John. ‘Beh-beh-beh-Bennie and the Jets.’？”
Miriam rolled her eyes. She did not rightly care if this nigga was asking for Elton John or for the pope. She cocked her head to the right, her eyes attached, deep to her book. “Over. There,” she announced the words slowly, separately, making sure her irritation was known.
“Engrossed in your book, huh? I understand. Hell of a one. I’m convinced Heathcliff was Black.”
Miriam lifted her dark brown eyes from her novel and fixed them on the stranger in front of her. Miriam—who had only ever regarded men as inevitable oddities and annoyances, nothing more than mosquito bites in the summer, moths that made their way into chests in the winter months, the dust that settled atop books—Miriam, ever indifferent to the wiles of men, fell in utter, marrow-boiling love the moment her doe eyes locked with those of the young man in front of her.