“That’s awful nice of you to pay for our breakfast,” said Alicia.
“I’m not a knucklehead like she thinks,” he said.
“Shut up, Ty.” I rolled my eyes.
Alicia looked between us. “Oh, I see. You two like each other.”
He shook his head. “Civil need an attitude adjustment.”
After he paid the check, we made our way outside. Two boys rode by on bikes. They waved at Ty. “Hey, y’all better stay out of trouble,” he yelled at them. A truck rolled past and kicked up dust. I sneezed and drew my sweater around my shoulders.
“Bless you. Hey, y’all want to come to my house tomorrow night? My mama is cooking Sunday dinner, and I’m sure she’ll want to hear all about the clinic,” Ty said, watching me.
“I can’t. I got something to do,” I said.
“You haven’t come to dinner in almost a year, Civil. You hurting my mama’s feelings.”
“I said I got something to do.”
“You want to come, Alicia?”
“Go,” I said before she could refuse. “You need to meet some folks in town, and Ty’s mama knows everybody.”
“Alright, then. Where you live?”
As Alicia reached in her purse for something to write on, I waved at them and crossed to the other side of the street, where my car was parked. I did not glance back because I could not look at him without revealing more to Alicia than I already had.
* * *
? ? ?
THE MONTGOMERY PLANNING Agency was sandwiched between a laundromat and a donut shop, an unlikely place for a federal agency, but it did make it easy to find. I’d already been there once before when I was in the process of applying for the clinic job. The agency oversaw our clinic and I’d had an interview there.
The desks were arranged in rows. The only person with his own closed office was the man who ran the agency. I remembered him from before. He constantly talked about his grandchildren. Only three of the six desks were occupied. Two women typed and the third was on the phone. The woman on the phone, the one with the bushy eyebrows that joined in the middle, placed the receiver to her chest. The brows gave her an intent look, and by the way she asked if she could help me, I figured I’d interrupted her from something important.
“Hi, um, yes, ma’am, my name is Civil Townsend.” I talked quickly. I hadn’t had a chance to run my idea past Alicia, so I figured I should just go on and do it before I changed my mind. “I’m a nurse over at the Family Planning Clinic. I’d like to ask about public housing for one of my patients, a family that lives out on Old Selma Road.”
“Are they already on public assistance?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. Technically, the clinic’s services were public assistance. Whatever else they were getting was a mystery to me. The Williamses barely owned a pot to piss in, as Daddy would say. If anybody was a candidate for public assistance, they were.
“Have a seat, dear.” She put the receiver back to her ear. I sat down in one of two plastic chairs across from her desk and waited.
When she finished with her call, she turned to a low file cabinet beside her desk. “Does the family have a social worker assigned to them?”
I hadn’t thought about that. I’d just charged in there with my plan to get the Williamses into a real apartment, but it made sense that if they were on public assistance, they probably also had a social worker.
“Yes, ma’am, I believe they do.”
“Well, the social worker will have to fill out the paperwork. Do you know her name?”
“No, ma’am.”
She looked down at the paper on her desk as if her mind were already elsewhere. “Tell the social worker to come here, and we can get the process started.”
“If you give me the paperwork, I can get it done. I think I’ll see her next week.” Well, now I was flat-out lying. The public assistance question had been an educated guess. Meeting up with the social worker was a whole nother level of lie.
“How many people are in the family, dear?”
“Four.”
“So you’re looking for a two-bedroom?”
“Actually, no, I need a three-bedroom. The grandmother lives with them.”
She frowned at me. “We don’t have a lot of apartments that size. They’re in high demand, and some of the families are a lot bigger than yours.”
“Yes, ma’am, of course.”
“Honey, we got families of five in two-bedroom apartments. That’s how stretched we are. Now, there will be some more apartment units built in the next few years. Maybe if we put your family on a wait list—”
“No,” I said. The clicking of the typewriter at the back of the room ceased, and I lowered my voice. “I mean . . . You see . . . These people are living in squalor, Mrs.”—I read the nameplate on her desk—“Livingston. They living in a shanty out on the back of a farm.” My gumption surprised my own self. I was being pushy like Diahann Carroll in that episode of Julia when she convinces Dr. Chegley to allow this family to work off their son’s medical bill.
“I understand. But we even got some homeless families, Miss—”
“Townsend.” I shifted one leg over the other. “These folks might as well be homeless. That house ain’t barely shelter. It’s riddled with holes. You ought to see it. And the grandmother, I don’t even know how she can stand it, what with the weather coming all through the walls.”
Yes, I could have been an actress except it was all true. Everything except the part about meeting up with the social worker. The lady reached over to her cabinet again.
“Take this and have the social worker fill it out and get the family to sign it.”
I took it from her. “Yes, ma’am. Thank you. I will do that. Thank you very much.”
As I walked back out to my car, I held the papers out in front of me so that I wouldn’t wrinkle them. I’d taken the first step to helping the family, and it felt good. Maybe getting them this new apartment would erase the wrong I’d done by injecting that little girl with birth control. This was why I’d taken the job at the clinic. I wanted to be like Alicia: doing right by people, proving God was real.
SEVEN
Getting the social worker’s name turned out to be harder than I’d thought. When I searched the Williamses’ medical file, there was no mention of one. Aside from outright asking the agency to give me a name, there seemed to be only one way to find out: ask the grandmother, Pat Williams. If I did that, she might ask what I was up to, and I didn’t want to mention my plan until I was sure it would happen. I needed to figure something out.
That week, while we were cleaning the clinic, I asked Val if she had any ideas on how to find the social worker. She suggested I try St. Jude, a hospital that ran some social service programs in Montgomery.
“I got another question for you.” I stopped sweeping. We were standing in examination room number two. Val sprayed the bed with a bleach solution and ran a rag over the vinyl while I talked. “Why you think Mrs. Seager hired all Black nurses? Ain’t no white nurses in Alabama?”
“Hush, child. You saying you don’t want this job?”