“I don’t want to talk about this right now.” I pulled away and yanked open the drawer. The silverware clattered.
“Alright, alright, suit yourself.” He backed off but was still looking at me seriously. “You know you can talk to me about other stuff, too.”
“Yeah, like what?”
“Like Alicia told me how shaken up you were about giving a shot to those kids.”
“She told you that?” For someone agonizing over keeping her mama’s secret, Alicia sure did have a big mouth.
“Yeah, those drugs y’all using, Civil, they’re not safe.”
“You mean the Depo-Provera?”
“Yes. We don’t know enough about that drug. It could be harming all your patients, let alone those little girls.”
“What do you of all people know about birth control? You never acted like you knew anything about it.” Every time I looked into Ty’s face I wondered if our baby would have resembled him, if it would have been a boy or a girl, if he would have made a good father.
“That’s not fair and you know it. Besides, I thought you didn’t want to talk about it.”
“I don’t.”
“Listen, I found out that Depo hasn’t been approved by the Food and Drug Administration,” he said.
“That’s not true,” I said defensively.
“It is true.”
“How do you know?”
“I looked it up and read about it.”
“You don’t read.”
“You don’t know what I do.” He took the forks from me and set them down on the counter. “Civil, I’m not that little boy who used to tie your shoelaces together. I’m a man.”
“I know that.”
“Well, then stop talking to me like that.”
Ty just didn’t understand. I wanted so badly to reach for him, to hold him, but I couldn’t bring myself to cross that bridge. The hurt was still too fresh.
“Alicia already told you the teenage pregnancy rate in Montgomery. We can’t turn our backs on this problem and pretend it doesn’t exist.” I shook the spoon, the pudding landing in the bowl like a cloud. I could tell the pudding had been in the refrigerator overnight because the cookies had softened.
Ty scooted a clean bowl toward me. “Think about it, Civ. What if those drugs are doing more harm than good?”
I couldn’t believe Alicia hadn’t mentioned to me they were looking into this. If she and Ty had talked about Depo not being safe, then weeks had passed by without her so much as bringing it up. I tried to hide my embarrassment that I did not know it had not been approved by the government. That was news to me.
“There’s nothing that says it’s harmful. Some of the patients at the clinic have been getting shots for years. If there had been side effects, we would have known about it.” I remembered that Erica had told me she bled every day. It was normal, according to the materials, to experience some irregular bleeding. But bleeding every day? Was it heavy? Was she cramping, too? I hadn’t even asked. As her nurse, I should have asked more questions.
“You don’t know the long-term effects,” he said.
“It’s not that complicated a drug. It just suppresses ovulation so that—”
“Since when are you a pharmaceutical expert?”
“Depo-Provera is not that complicated, Ty.” I spooned extra pudding into all five bowls so we wouldn’t have to come back into the kitchen for seconds. Then I followed him through the swinging door.
Mr. Ralsey’s cigarette smoke filled the dining room and someone had turned on the radio. WRMA played gospel on Sundays, and somebody with a voice was singing “Just Another Day.” I knew the song well, but at that moment, I could barely hear the words. I was trying to digest what Ty had just told me.
“What are you two over there whispering about?” Ty placed the pudding on the table.
“You,” Alicia said, and Mrs. Ralsey laughed.
I sank into a chair.
Mrs. Ralsey spooned pudding into her mouth. “Civil, did Ty tell you he was the graduation speaker for his class?”
“No, ma’am.”
“In the course of the speech, he tried to be respectful to the college president, Dr. Barnes. But he kept calling the man Dr. Bailey. At first, we didn’t know who he was talking about. We figured he was talking about some professor. But then . . .” She chuckled. “Ty calls the man up to the podium. He turns around in this serious voice and say, Dr. Bailey, I want to present this gift to you in appreciation of everything you’ve done for our class this year and by this time you can hear the whispering in the crowd. Everybody was about to bust out laughing, but Dr. Barnes didn’t seem to mind that the name was wrong. You best believe he came right up to that podium and took that gold pen Ty handed him.”
“Huh,” I said.
“Mrs. Ralsey, this banana pudding sure is good,” Alicia said. “Tastes like my grandma pudding.”
“Thank you, Alicia.”
The pudding tasted bland on my tongue. I looked over at Alicia. She and I hadn’t discussed the Williams girls since I first confided in her at the diner, and now she had been running around with Ty behind my back doing some kind of investigation.
“Mrs. Ralsey?” I turned to Ty’s mama. “Do you know anything about the drug Depo-Provera?”
“Depo what, baby?”
“Depo-Provera. It’s the birth control drug we give to some of the patients at the clinic. An injection that suppresses ovulation for three months.”
“No, I can’t say I’ve ever heard of it. Why?”
“I was just telling Civil that I read up on it,” Ty interjected. “And I discussed it with one of my old professors. His brother works in Washington, DC, for the federal government. They’re still doing trials on that drug. I don’t think it’s safe, but they’re using it over at the clinic.”
“If it weren’t safe, Ty, they wouldn’t be injecting people with it.” Mrs. Ralsey placed two elbows on the table.
“Unless you’re poor and Black. You know how they did those men at Tuskegee.”
Mrs. Ralsey’s face turned serious. All of us had been stunned by the revelations about the experiments on men at Tuskegee. Even though the study went on for forty years, none of us knew anything about it before the summer of 1972. It was unthinkable to us that they left hundreds of men untreated, letting them die long after penicillin was available.
“Ty, what are you saying?” Mrs. Ralsey asked.
Mr. Ralsey appeared in the archway that separated the living and dining rooms, a stub of a cigarette dangling from his fingers. “What’s this?”
“Ty is saying that the birth control drug they’re using over at the family planning clinic is dangerous,” his wife answered.
“The clinical studies suggest it causes cancer,” Ty said.
“In humans?” his father asked.
“Mice. Monkeys. The studies began five years ago. And the FDA rejected its approval.”
“Well it’s not unheard of for unapproved drugs to be prescribed for certain uses. Civil, are your patients aware of the risks of the drug?” Mrs. Ralsey looked at me.