“I called. The lady at the admissions office said she’d do what she could.” Miriam raised her glass in a toast.
“Well, don’t that beat all?” August clinked her glass against her sister’s. “Another nurse in the family. I know Mama would be proud, Meer. Real proud.”
“It’ll be hell,” Miriam said, but she smiled. She put a worried palm to her forehead and held it there while she exhaled. She was going to go back to school, at the age of forty. The studying alone would swamp her. The forthcoming long nights at the library. And all the other students would be so young and hungry and ambitious. Miriam was just plain hungry. She knew she needed to provide for her girls. And something deep and almost animalistic, instinctual, in her did not want Jax’s money even if it were offered. She wanted to do this on her own.
Her mind went to a fight long past, when Jax had spat out a vicious question she had no true answer for: “Where the hell you think you going go, how far you think you going get, with two babies, no degree, and a Black face?” Miriam doubted she had the answer now. But she knew she needed to try to find it.
Maybe it was the whiskey, but there was a sudden heat in her chest when Joan’s soaked pant legs came into the frame of Miriam’s mind. How will we survive? she thought to herself. How on earth? She was jolted from her worry when she felt her sister’s sudden, hard grasp on her forearm.
“Gotta be better than the hell you just left, Meer. Gotta be.”
“We best keep that boy away from Joan.”
August stiffened in her seat.
“Don’t act like that,” Miriam said. “Might as well say it out loud.” She swirled her whiskey in her glass. “I’m worried my Joanie may just kill your boy.”
CHAPTER 8
Miriam
1988
She was pregnant again. This time it was early fall, and the Memphis nights were exquisite. Most of the trees had turned to copper—the sunlight catching in the gold medallion leaves of the trees. She and August sat out on the front porch, sweet tea in hand, and Miriam was thankful for the cool night air. The breeze shook the sunflowers her mother had planted years before, that somehow had survived the first Memphis frost and had now grown tall as titans. And without the death of her mother hanging over her pregnancy, this baby seemed lighter, easier. Miriam was sick of grieving. Sick of seeing her dead mother all over the house in Memphis. Miriam saw her as if in the flesh, standing in the kitchen over a pot of something hot and boiling on the stove. Or once, she thought there was someone in the backyard, and she swore she saw her mother there, among the tomatoes, straw hat on and everything.
When Miriam had been pregnant with Joan, she finally understood why her mother would sometimes take out her father’s uniform, press everything, lay it out on the bed, and sob quietly next to it until she fell asleep. When Hazel died, all Miriam had left was the grief of her. So, she saw her all the time. Saw her in the delivery room. For twenty-six hours Miriam had sweated and heaved and pushed her first child out of her insides, screaming all the while, “Mama, it hurts!”
The baby had been a girl.
“Joan,” Miriam had christened her daughter.
“And she saw things others couldn’t,” she’d said simply to Jax when it was all over.
And now, Miriam had come back to Memphis to give birth for a second time. Jax was away at officers’ training, a yearly sojourn for any high-ranking Marine Corps officer. He would miss the birth of their second. But Miriam had been adamant that her second daughter be born in Memphis, too.
Miriam, though she missed her husband, was thankful to be back home with her sister and her young nephew. Joan loved the house too, her tiny body explored the house like a calico kitten, always hiding in the crannies of the antique furniture. August had given birth eight years before, to the first son in the North household in generations. She spoke little of his father, and Miriam, not wishing to upset her sister, asked few questions.