She let her mind wander.
I wonder what they’ll name her, she thought.
Strangely, the pain had subsided now. But she felt her breaths grow shorter and shorter as she lay there in the red dirt.
Hazel’s love of the Lord had always been a battle. She had shunned God when Myron died, and the silence was deafening again after August’s father’s assassination. But now, Hazel smiled. She almost damn-near called God a salty bitch—because, in that moment, Hazel’s mouth was filled with the taste of butter pecan ice cream.
“Myron,” she said softly. “Myron.” She smiled at the morning sun and was gone.
There was still a smile etched on Hazel’s face when August found her an hour later. August ran down Locust Street in pink pajamas screaming for help, for someone to call a doctor, turn back time, murder God.
But what could be done? Hazel had died. And August, feeling that not only her mother but a queen had died, thought of Churchill’s words on the death of a king, and tried to calm herself: Her mother had passed away as any Southern woman brought up to fear and love the Lord can ever hope to do—she died, very much loved, in her warm garden.
When Miriam got the call from August screaming into the phone, she sank to the floor with her first child inside her. She knelt there for a long time in silence. She lifted her head to Jax and said, “Why even bring a child into this world if she won’t ever know my mother?”
“You think it’s a girl?” Jax asked.
Miriam opened her hand wide. “Hand them over,” she said.
“What?”
“Your keys,” Miriam said with a determination that would brook no argument. “I’ll drive the damn Shelby myself if I have to, but my daughter”—Miriam, still on the floor, rubbed her eight-month-swollen belly affectionately—“will be born in Memphis.”
CHAPTER 31
Miriam
2003
The front door of the house was illuminated by a porch light, and the yellow, the warmness of it all, was just the balm Miriam needed after a fourteen-hour shift shadowing the RNs in the maternity ward.
She had spent the day soothing worried mothers, wiping their brows, telling them to breathe, to push, to stop. And the children, how they came. Came into this world screaming and gangly and bursting with life. The nurses told her that the joy, the miracle of it all, would fade with time, but Miriam wasn’t so certain. She took to nursing. Loved it nearly as much as her daughters.
But she was not sure if she had ever been this tired before. Perhaps, after Mya was born. Her birth had been difficult. Came a month early. Miriam couldn’t diagnose this medically, even with her growing expertise, but she knew in her bones that Jax had caused it. And Derek, too, somehow, though she tried to focus her hatred on Jax, not the boy. He was only a boy, after all. A child. Jax was a full-grown man and had abused her all the same. Derek wasting away in prison, and Jax out free, medals on his chest.
Yes, Miriam was tired, needed to see her home’s hearth. She wanted her bath more than anything.
She placed her key into the lock and entered.
“You need to see something.”
“Dear God in Heaven!”
The lights of the parlor were off. Miriam had only the faint glow from the kitchen’s light to see. She hadn’t noticed August sitting at the piano stool, draped in her kimono, smoking a Kool, of course.
Miriam dropped her purse in the scare of it all. She bent and reached for its strap. “You scared the Christ out of me, Aug.” Miriam shook her head. “Nearly killed me.”
“You need to see something,” August repeated. She took a drag from her Kool, uncrossed her legs, and rose.
Miriam rolled her eyes. She was exhausted. She wanted to put down her bag, get in the shower, and not think in there for fifteen minutes. Her nightly ritual. She’d let the too-hot water pour over her, and she would not think: Not about the girls. Not about money or the lack thereof. Not about the seemingly never-ending rounds of exams. She wouldn’t even pray. She’d let her mind simply rest. She’d allow herself that respite. For fifteen minutes, she was free.
“I am so dirty. Let me shower first.”
August came close to her sister. Miriam hated that she was the oldest and August always mistaken for it; she was just so tall. Miriam felt August hover over her. Not threatening, but persistent. Like a mosquito. Or a sister.
August exhaled her smoke so that it did not wash Miriam in a plume. Blew out the corner of her mouth and said, for the third time, “You need to see something.” She grabbed Miriam’s wrist lightly, an olive branch.
Miriam agreed. She had no other choice. August’s eyes were dark pools in the room, but Miriam knew she would not let her be. Her shoulders fell. “Lead the way,” she said.
She followed August from the parlor through the dining room and into the back hallway that divided the house into its two wings, east and west. August turned left toward her wing, the wing that still held Derek’s room. August stopped in front of Derek’s door. She had her hand on the handle.
“August, I don’t want to go in there,” Miriam said, and she did not. Derek was such an unpleasant memory for Miriam, to say the very least. She thought about her shower, the warm water, the forgetting. She craved her fifteen-minute oasis and nothing else.
August turned and faced Miriam. “You open it,” she said, stepping aside.
“I don’t want to go in there.”
August put a hand on a hip and, this time, blew her smoke where it went, directly into Miriam’s face.
Miriam swatted away the smoke.
“Then I guess we stand here looking at each other all night into morn.”
“Fine!” Miriam exclaimed, her frustration mounting. “Hardheaded as I don’t know what.”
Miriam twisted the handle and threw her right shoulder against the door, and it swung open.
Unlike the rest of the house, Derek’s room was brightly lit. At first, the light dilated Miriam’s pupils, blinded her a bit. It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust, longer for them to process what she was seeing.
For the second time that night, Miriam nearly had a heart attack. She could have fallen to her knees, dropped down onto the hardwood floor and prostrated herself in front of all the beauty.
She had never really looked at Joan’s drawings, her sketches. All these years of telling Joan to put her sketch pad away, asking her bluntly if she had finished her calculus homework, Miriam had never really seen anything Joan had done. At least, not since she was a child. And now Miriam was certain her daughter had grown up into such a fine thing.
For all around that room was Joan’s art. Ten pieces, as tall as the ceiling, lined the room. And they were all of folk she knew: Miss Jade. Mika. Other women from the shop. It would’ve been almost sacrilege, near blasphemous, not to have recognized Miss Dawn’s hands. Joan had used ink on white canvas, and like in some ancient Japanese print, Miss Dawn’s dark hands held a branch thick with blackberries.
And August. Miriam saw her sister awash in vivid colors that belonged only in heaven. The cream of August’s kimono looked like the buttermilk she soaked her chicken in. Joan had even got the plume of August’s cigarette smoke just so; it looked like lace. The pale green of the Kool box was the color of a hummingbird in her sister’s hand.