She bit her bottom lip as she worked, smearing her red lipstick across her teeth. Her mother was attending to a customer on the other side of the parlor. Della was on her knees, pins in her mouth. She was affixing a knee-length lace hem to the end of Mrs. Finley’s white linen dress—a rarity. Ever since the war broke out two Decembers past, lace had been harder and harder to find. And more expensive. Only their rich white customers wore silk stockings now. The orders for new dresses had dwindled, too. Deliveries of new silks and chiffons had turned to deliveries of steamed, pressed handkerchiefs. Now when Hazel answered the phone and took down appointments, they were for simply mending dresses her mother had made the season before.
“Right there, not an inch higher,” Mrs. Finley said sharply.
“Mm-hmm,” Hazel’s mother said through what Hazel knew were clenched teeth.
The tall, broad-shouldered blonde was one of her mother’s most exacting and most loyal customers. Mrs. Finley was known throughout the Black neighborhood as one of the direct descendants of Nathan Bedford Forest. There was talk that she herself sewed her husband’s Klan robes, not daring to take them in to any seamstress. She had also convinced the entirety of the Women’s Board of the Memphis Botanic Garden to start coming to Della’s shop. This fact and only this fact had saved Della’s business when others had closed during the Depression. And when Hazel’s father had died, this white woman, for what it was worth, overpaid her monthly bill by a whole five dollars. So Hazel knew that she had to be on her best behavior whenever Mrs. Melanie Finley stepped into the shop for a fitting. It was her mother—always a proud woman—who more often needed the reminding.
“Mama, we got that two-o’clock with your favorite customer,” Hazel had said at the breakfast table that morning.
“When’s the last that Remington’s been cleaned?” her mother asked, as she poured grits into Hazel’s bowl.
“Mama!”
“You right. Her death should be slower than all that.”
Hazel laughed, shook her head.
Ever since Hazel turned eighteen, her mother had started paying her a small salary for managing her bookings and making her deliveries. Hazel had spent not a cent. Stashed every dollar her mother gave her in a blue-striped hatbox she kept high in her closet. She was twenty-one now; the box wasn’t full yet, but close.
She was saving for Myron. For the both of them.
For the past six years, ever since that day at Stanley’s, Hazel and Myron had met every Friday in front of the deli, ordered two butter pecan ice creams, and walked hand in hand down Chelsea until they reached Locust and the ancient fading mansion at its flowering dead end. Miss Dawn, the mysterious new owner of the leaning house, begrudgingly let them sit on her wide porch swing. More often than not, she would open a window or door and yell at them they should go ahead, get married, and get their own damn house to live and love in.
“Maybe she’s right,” Myron had said one Friday toward the end of their senior year at Douglass High.
They’d been together for three years at that point. Hazel’s head was in his lap—their customary position atop Miss Dawn’s porch swing. Myron held a branch of honeysuckle over her head. It was 1940, and the talk of a war in Europe was gently kneaded into the evening gossip shared on front porches. Honeysuckle was in full, delicious bloom. He broke off flower from stem and, with a gentle pinch, pulled a droplet of nectar toward Hazel’s open mouth.
“About what?” she’d said, after swallowing the nectar.
“Getting our own house.”
Hazel propped herself up on her elbows. “You want to buy a house?” she asked.
“No,” Myron said.
Hazel relaxed. She sank back into her comfortable position. Closed her eyes. Felt the heat of the Memphis day on her cheeks. They were both only eighteen. Hazel knew her mother wouldn’t let her get married to some neighborhood boy not a cent to his name no matter how much she was in love.