And now, in the morning light, Jax wore only a wifebeater as he threw a soapy rag into a bucket and then onto the hood of the Mustang. He and Bird had been in Memphis for two days.
“Remember when I tried to sell the damn thing for free? The sign in the yard?” Miriam figured Jax wouldn’t flinch at the sound of her voice, even though his back was to her. He was a Marine, after all. In all their many, many fights, Miriam could never get the upper hand, could never conquer the element of surprise.
“I remember,” he said, as he ran the wet rag along the Mustang’s spine. “Was in the Officers’ Club when Mazz burst in hollering that I better come and see what you had done.”
Miriam laughed. It was a bitter one. “Why you here, Jaxson?” She was tired of having him in the house. The scent of him was overpowering. It brought back too many memories, that sandalwood, that musk, that shoe polish, the cigarettes. It was hard for Miriam to stomach.
He paused in his cleaning. “To see my girls.”
“Our,” she corrected.
“Our,” he repeated.
“No, mine.” Miriam pointed an angry finger to her heart. “I’m the one raised them these last six years. Me. Without any help from you. Not a dime. You think it’d be any different had you died? That inferno on the TV, that hell you escaped, is nothing, nothing compared to what we’ve lived through here. And you didn’t see us jump into a car and come find you.”
“No, you jumped into a car and left.” Jax stood, his voice rising.
“I saved myself,” Miriam shouted back. “You were hell, Jax. Nothing but.”
Jax kicked over the bucket of soapy water. It hit a stone and flipped itself over. Water splashed around their feet. Miriam watched in silence as the bucket slowly rolled down the drive and rested at the mailbox.
Jax hung his head. His shoulders went up and down as a heavy sigh escaped him. “I know I wasn’t the best husband—”
Miriam crossed her arms, scoffed.
Jax raised an eyebrow, threateningly. He began again. “I know I wasn’t the best. But Meerkat…” He cleared his throat, shuffled his feet.
Miriam’s stomach turned at the sound of her pet name. She hadn’t heard Jax say it in years. The sound of it brought her back to when she was first pregnant with Joan. At month eight, she had worried and fretted over every burp; every pass of gas became an instant alarm of labor.
“The Gulf got the better of me,” Jax said, pleadingly now. “It got the better of me, Meer.”
Miriam took in the full picture of him. He looked pitiful. A tall, dark man ravaged by ghosts and war standing in her driveway, holding a soapy rag, apologizing to her in the best way he could. Years ago, hearing regret in his voice would have meant everything to her. Now she found it meant almost nothing. She had raised their daughters the best she could without his help. Raised them to ensure that they always provided for themselves, never relied on the whim of a man, because how far would a Black woman get with that? In that moment, Miriam remembered what Jax had spat out at her one day:
Say, you can’t leave me. Where the hell you think you going go, how far you think you going get, with two babies, no degree, and a Black face?
Miriam watched Jax wash his prized pony and realized that his entire life had been and would be dominated by war. “Just don’t break Mya’s heart” was all she could think to say. She turned to go back in the house.
“What about Joan?”
Miriam herself was surprised by the harshness of her own laugh. “You broke that girl’s heart long ago,” she said. She climbed the steps made of stones her father had selected and wondered if she meant her own heart. She wondered why her marriage couldn’t have been like her parents’。 Her mother had told her stories of her and Myron sharing secrets over their ice cream, being in such love on Miss Dawn’s porch swing. Miriam had wanted that for herself all her life. Simple, Black love. For the life of her, she couldn’t place a finger on what exactly went wrong or why. It was as if she held a broken teacup in her hands but couldn’t remember breaking it and had no idea how to mend it.
The next day, Jax was gone. But the black Shelby Mustang remained. There was a note next to the keys, which he’d left on the kitchen table: “Joan, Treat her better than I ever treated your mountain of a mother…Oo-rah.”
CHAPTER 30
Hazel
1985
The sun was bright that morning in Hazel’s garden, and the purple morning glories that lined the back fence were open and fragrant.
Hazel wore her gardening uniform: overalls, a straw hat, her yellow gardening gloves dotted with small sunflowers. It was the planting time of year—late April, when she was sure the last frost of the season was behind them. She carried a wicker basket full of seeds: sweet peas, haricots verts, hot peppers, lettuce.
Hazel knelt among the sprouting collard greens, the sweet corn stalks beginning to emerge, the sunflowers grown toddler-tall in her garden, and began to hum a Nina Simone song. Memphis in June, sweet oleander.
She thought of her daughters. August, inside with Derek, who’d turned five a few weeks back. And Miriam, pregnant with her first. She was thirty now, just four years younger than Hazel had been when she’d had her.
Hazel hadn’t liked Derek’s father, though at least he was out of the picture now, and she didn’t care for Jax, either. He and Miriam had married in a rush, and Jax had taken her daughter away just as quick. Hazel and Miriam’s interactions were now limited to Christmases, Easters, and phone calls between Camp Lejeune and Memphis.
“Well, you come on home to have the baby,” Hazel had told Miriam when she’d called to announce she was pregnant. “I want my grandchild born in Memphis.” They were set to arrive later that month, in time for the baby’s due date.
She knelt on her hands and knees in her raised garden bed and made neat rows spaced two hands apart for the planting. A hummingbird appeared in the hedges. Emerald green and dazzling. Hazel heard the quick beat of its wings and caught sight of it. It was so dark that, in the light, it was almost a dark purple, the color of indigo.
She wondered then if Myron could see her squatting in the garden he had built for her, planting her vegetables for the coming summer. She wondered whether he would even recognize her now, hair gray at the roots, thighs thickened from years of work and motherhood and suffering and laughter. What she never stopped to wonder, even after all the years, was whether Myron still loved her. That was fact. Always had been. She still spoke to him, albeit less often.
“God, I miss you,” she said aloud, pulling at a stubborn dandelion weed near the base of the bed.
A pain exploded in her outstretched arm. A second later, her entire chest felt like it was burning. She clutched at her heart. It was beating with the ferocity of a symphony’s final overture. She rested on her haunches and tried to catch her breath. She reached for the basket to steady herself, but it toppled over on its side, seeds spilling out into the dirt in haphazard abandon.
Awareness crept over the old nurse as the pain spread and spread. Hazel almost laughed. She was unafraid then. She no longer clutched at her chest. She lay down. Let her head hit the ground with a soft thud.