When Miriam had taken Joan into the bathroom, she dropped to one knee, undressed her daughter with the deftness only mothers possess, and simply held her, for a very long time, neither one of them saying a word.
At the center of the round dinner table was a tiny crystal box. Joan had been quiet throughout dinner, so Miriam opened the box and encouraged Joan with a nod to take one of the cards inside.
Joan hesitated for a second, but then took the card. Her eyes widened as she began to read the prayer written in gold on it. “？‘Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it.’ Hebrews thirteen-two,” she read.
“How fitting,” August had said. “I reckon I’m cracking up several thousand angels right now. Somebody hand me my Emmy!”
Mya had let out a shrieking laugh and slapped her hand on the table, shaking the plates of lamb cooked in red wine, red buttered potatoes sprinkled with parsley, and steaming candied yams.
“My, do you even know what an Emmy is?” Joan had asked.
“Do you?” Derek snapped. It was the first time Derek had addressed Joan directly. Words chosen like a weapon. Silence was a gun. And when it went off, when it was fired, the entire table fell silent.
Miriam and August exchanged looks, then each woman’s eyes went to her respective child.
Miriam watched Joan put the card back slowly, carefully, in the glass box and close its lid. Joan then narrowed her eyes until they were mere slits set in her face. “I know more than you think,” she finally said. Then she crossed herself three times and picked up her steak knife.
Miriam was brought back to the present with a suddenness that made her jump in her cushioned seat.
“Gunshot,” August said. Then: “You’ll hear those often. Girl, it’s like when you left, you took the last of Motown with you.” She took a drag from her menthol. She had smoked it down to the filter. Smoke and the echo of the gunshot hung thickly in the air. “Shit, I saw a girl last week on Chelsea. Not fourteen years old. On the corner, girl. Working it. You hear me? Crack may as well have been a virus for all what it’s done here.”
Miriam finished her two fingers’ worth of rye in a single shot, throwing her head back to take the full weight of the whiskey. Her cheeks were flushed, she could tell. The gunshot had sounded uncomfortably close. The last time she heard a gunshot, she was Joan’s age: ten. It had been a .32 then, too. And she had been with her mother.
“Am I a bad mom, August, for coming here? Bringing the girls?” Miriam bit her lip and twisted the long gold rosary around her neck as she always did when she was nervous.
August fumbled in the folds of her kimono and brought forth her pack of Kools and her lighter. She took her time, removing a fresh cigarette from the pack, placing it on the perch of her full lips, tilting her head toward lighted flame, cupping expert hand over the flame, lighting the cigarette, and inhaling and exhaling in a long stream of smoke.
“You’re only a bad mother if you don’t feed them,” August said through plumes of smoke. “Speaking of, what you going to do for work? They hiring secretaries down at the police station.”
“The same one kill my daddy?” Miriam exclaimed.
“Touché, trick,” August said. She shook her glass back and forth quickly, signaling to her sister that she needed more.
Miriam rolled her eyes. She poured her sister a hefty amount and measured the same for herself. “Nah. I’m going to make Mama proud.”
August’s eyes bored holes into Miriam’s. “You aren’t,” she said, awe in her voice.
“I am. I brought my transcripts. I’m not a complete fool. I brought what mattered.”
“And they going pay you?”