“Daddy, I put Mr. Jones in Room 1.”
“He’s going to need blood drawn today,” Daddy said. “Can you set up the cart?”
Daddy had an uncanny ability to remember details about his patients. He got there early and read the charts of everyone coming in that day. Patients wanted to know that you remembered them. They responded better when you asked, “Are you still experiencing those chest pains?” I had worked for him only a few weeks, but I had already learned a lot.
Later that afternoon, I helped straighten the office and chatted with Glenda while she turned off the lights. My mama had dropped off a new painting earlier that day and we had nowhere to put it. It was not one of her best, but it was a soft blue color and not too complicated. Perfect for an office.
“It’s too blue. People be staring into it thinking they about to fall into the sky.”
“Glenda, now I’m going to tell Mama you said that.”
“Tell her. I don’t care.”
We giggled.
“I’ll go lock up.” I unhooked the key from above her desk just as Ty walked through the front door.
“Hey.”
“Child, what brings you here? You sick?” Glenda peered at him through the window over her desk.
“Do I look sick?”
“He always look sick,” I said.
“No, that’s just my natural handsome face. Civil, have you talked to the Williamses lately?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“I stopped by to tell you Mace is moving tomorrow.”
I knew Mrs. Williams and the girls had already moved down to Rockford, but I had not heard anything about Mace. I had been trying to give the family their space, but I missed the girls already and was sad I hadn’t had another chance to say good-bye.
“You been in touch with him?” I asked, trying not to feel hurt that the two of them were talking behind my back.
Ty nodded. “He finally found a job down there, so he quit the pickle factory. He turns in the keys tomorrow. I figured you’d want to say good-bye.”
“I don’t know why you think that.”
He tilted his head, and I hated him for knowing me so well. I touched the edge of Mama’s picture frame, which was propped against the wall. Glenda was right: I did feel like I was going to fall through the sky.
* * *
? ? ?
TY DROVE ME to Dixie Court the next morning and waited for me in the car.
“I won’t be long,” I told him as he rubbed his hands together to keep warm.
The door stood wide open. Inside, the apartment was empty and I could not stand it. I tried not to remember all the furniture we’d so carefully picked out, the place where Mrs. Williams had sat in her chair, the sofa with the throw blanket. The living room smelled faintly of sweat and the air was chilly. They had already turned off the heat.
Mace came out of the back, a small box in his hands. He looked at me, then carefully set it down on the floor. He walked up to me and wrapped his arms around my waist. I shivered, but I was not sure if it was because I was cold or nervous. He put his lips to my ear. “Ty brought you here?”
I nodded.
“That boy loved you all your life. You know that, don’t you?”
I could not answer. He brushed his fingers up and down my cheek. “Civil Townsend. You done gave me my family back. Did I give you something?”
How could he ask me that? I had been the one to bring about all this damage. For years, I would wish I had answered that question, had given him a confirmation of how much our time together had meant to me. But my emotions were tied up in knots that day. I just had no way of knowing it was the last time I would ever see him, but I think I sensed it.
“Why y’all leaving?” was all I could say.
After Mace’s death, Alicia made the drive to hear the preacher give a eulogy at the gravesite, because they could not afford a church service. They had just enough to put him in the ground in a pine coffin, though Alicia told me he was buried on a beautiful fall day, and the preacher joked about how Mace loved to read and drove everybody crazy quoting newspaper articles. Erica and India sat next to each other, two straight-backed young women, one of them quiet, the other in the settled look of caregiver as she straightened her younger sister’s hat. Mrs. Williams got winded as she climbed the hill to reach her seat, but she strode on the arm of a new husband, a retired widower who offered her a simple life in a small but neat house, the house the sisters would inhabit after the couple passed on, the house I visited years later, where I ate sponge cake with strawberries.
But on that final day in Dixie Court, the day his hand brushed my cheek, Mace was very much alive. “You free, Civil. Use your freedom to change as many lives as you can.”
I had been entrusted with the key return, and I watched from the window as Mace’s truck spewed exhaust. It grunted and then moved off slowly, the truck bed filled with household items. I waited to see if he would turn around. He never did.
I bolted the door behind me and walked down the stairs. Across the street, Ty waited inside his car. I could not see his face through the glare of the window. As I walked toward the rental office, I thought of that first day, when Mace and I had followed the rental manager to see the apartment. The Williamses had not stayed even a year, but with the demand so high for these Dixie Court apartments, they probably had another family ready to move in.
All around me, families made their homes, gratefully accepting this government help, their kids running through the play yard, shouting.
FIFTY-TWO
Montgomery
2016
The morning after my visit with the sisters, I put on the nicest outfit I brought with me and check out of the hotel. When I look in the rearview mirror, something doesn’t seem right. I stop at a drugstore. Inside, beneath the harsh lights, I scan the shelves in the cosmetics aisle, unsure of what to choose. Will blush make me look cheap? Do my eyelashes need mascara? Are there chin hairs to pluck? Finally, I settle on a plum-colored lipstick. At the register, I grab a pair of silver earrings on display.
I call Ty from the car. I know that, once again, I have not ended things right with him. This business between him and me is unsettled and refuses to disappear. He answers right away.
“I’m on my way to Birmingham.” My voice shakes a little.
“How long will it take you to get here?” he responds, as if it is the most natural thing in the world for me to call him at eight o’clock in the morning and say I am on my way. He seems to immediately understand that I am coming to see him.
I look up into the sky, and I can see young Ty: watering his mama’s plants, driving me to Tuskegee, holding out a gift for me, teasing me. Ty—the kid with the long legs and ashy knees who stole my pencils in third grade, the kid who grew up into a gorgeous young man full of heart. Though I could not see it at the time, he had cared about those girls as much as I had.
And there I am, too. Twenty-three years old. Eager to prove my daddy wrong. Anxious about my mother’s illness. Longing for love. Hoping to make a mark on the world. Young Civil, smiling shakily and unsurely but with all the awareness of a future that remains to be lived.
Now I know why I came on this trip. I needed to make my peace. Ain’t nothing like peace of mind, Anne. Nothing.