The examination room door clicked. I took the picture off the wall just as I heard Daddy telling Glenda to write up a prescription for 250 milligrams of something or other. His leather soles rasped against the linoleum. I pushed the picture under the sofa. A lonely nail stuck out of the bleached square on the wall where it had hung moments before.
He opened the door. “Civil, what are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”
I opened the foil until the sandwich peeked through and passed it to him. He sat beside me on the small couch and put one foot up on the coffee table. The salty scent of bologna tickled my nose.
“I’m about to go visit my first home case.”
“Where do they live?”
“Out on Old Selma Road.”
“How far out? You got gas in the tank? Be careful.”
“Careful of what, Daddy? Rattlesnakes?” I knew what he meant, but voicing it was unseemly, somehow. Daddy treated patients from every station of life, even tending to those who could not pay. But he had no desire to go out into the neighborhoods, no desire to get his fingernails dirty and experience their discomfort. That’s what I wanted to do, and it’s why I didn’t want to work in his office.
“When you get there, just blow your horn and wait for them to come out. Don’t go up in the house.”
“But, Daddy, how am I supposed to work if I don’t go inside?”
“Just take care of your business directly.”
“My patients are eleven-and thirteen-year-old sisters.”
“On birth control?”
“I thought the same thing.”
“They got children?”
“None that I know of.”
“Dr. Townsend?” Glenda knocked on the door, then briefly poked her head in without waiting for him to answer. “Your next patient is here.”
I always got the feeling that if Daddy spit in the air and told her it was raining, Glenda would believe him. Growing up, I’d understood doctor worship at an early age.
He closed his eyes, as if a few seconds like that would be the equivalent of a nap. With his eyes still closed, he said, “Eleven years old and having sex?”
“I’m helping them, Daddy. Not nosing in their business. The federal government is trusting us to keep these girls from ruining their lives.” I avoided his eyes. I didn’t want him to know I’d almost ruined mine. Neither of my parents had any idea that Ty and I had ever even dated, let alone terminated a pregnancy.
“You don’t know nothing about them people, Civil.”
“Them people have names.”
“Just make sure you not over there after the sun sets.”
“You think I’m going to get myself killed or something? They’re people just like us, Daddy.”
His eyes popped open and he seemed a bit more alert than before.
“You should get more sleep,” I told him.
“I wouldn’t be so tired all the time if you went to medical school and came to work with me.”
“Daddy, sexual health is health care, too. Besides, I wouldn’t want to take attention away from your disciple.” I poked a thumb toward the door.
“Civil, be nice.”
“She spends more time with you than Mama does.”
He crumpled the foil and tossed it in the trash can. “I’m proud of you, Civil. You did fine in school. Don’t let that self-righteous attitude overcome you and you’ll be alright.”
When he opened the door, I watched his shoulders relax and straighten. It was as if another person took over his body when he went in to see patients. He was himself, but he was also someone else. Daddy was short, not a hair over five foot six, with a wide girth that gave him substance.
He closed the door behind him, and I let loose a breath. He had not noticed the missing picture, though even I could not explain why I’d hidden it. Daddy might have been the family’s rock, but I was all pillow, a coward to this hurt that I could not bear to talk about with anyone. The photograph of me as a baby had left me feeling unsettled, a scraping rawness in my stomach. Would my baby have looked like me? I reached under the sofa for the picture and put it in my purse.
FOUR
Alabama. Heart of America’s Bible Belt. Home at one time to nearly half a million enslaved humans. I am a born and raised Alabaman, but up until the time I met the Williams family, much of my life in Montgomery had been circumscribed by my little community on Centennial Hill. Mama was a Link. Daddy belonged to the Boulé. When I was four years old, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church hired a twenty-five-year-old pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. Not long after, he was elected to head the bus boycott, eventually leading the voting rights march right up to the steps of the state capitol in Montgomery. When Daddy took me to see Dr. King, he pointed at the gathered crowd and said, You see these people? You got to make your place among them.
I know you want to argue that there isn’t one Black community, that we aren’t a monolith. But back then, when we talked about the community, it was something real, something defined by shared experience. Course that doesn’t mean we didn’t have our fissures. A big one was between the educated and uneducated, the poor and the not-so-poor. Fact is, the only time I remember us going out to the country was when we were passing through on the way to someplace else, maybe a church picnic or something like that. We definitely had never been in folks’ houses out there. That was something else entirely. Now when I say the country, I’m talking the country country. No running water. Outhouses. Unpaved roads. The places off Old Selma Road weren’t that physically distant from my house, but they may as well have been on another planet.
When I drove up, at first I assumed that the Williams sisters lived in the neat, brick rambler with the two pickup trucks parked out front. A thick cloud of dust swirled around my mama’s little car, and when it cleared, I spied two little white boys standing on the house porch. I rolled my window all the way down, hoping they’d see my uniform.
“I’m looking for the Williams family?” I was positive I had read the number on the mailbox correctly.
One of them pointed behind the house, and I understood. I wound the car around the pickups, following the scant outline of tire tracks. The Pinto pushed through the ruts, bouncing so hard I was afraid I’d hit my head on the roof. I prayed I wouldn’t get stuck. The last thing I wanted was to have to walk back down to that house and ask those boys to go get their daddy. Fortunately, it hadn’t rained in a while and the ground was dry.
The trees cleared and the land swelled up into a hill. At the top sat a cabin. The car sputtered, but I tapped the gas pedal and somehow made it to the top. Everything leveled out, and the tire tracks disappeared into brush. Off to my left, I could see a wide field of green stalks. I didn’t know a thing about farming, but anybody with eyes could tell that was wheat growing out there. Cows grazed in a lot beside the barn. A lone chicken peeked at me as it stepped through knee-high grass. Up close, the structure was more of a wooden shanty than a cabin. And it looked tired, as though a wind had blown it askew and it hadn’t had the energy to right itself. A skinny black dog scratched its back in the dirt. In the rearview mirror, I could see my lips were dry. I licked them and my cracked bottom lip scratched my tongue.