The hospital had a small café solely for staff—doctors and nurses and medical students—if a coffee station and stale bagels counted as a café. But Miriam was grateful for the break in her shift. Grateful for the cup of hot hazelnut, her favorite, in her hands, as she waited in line to pay.
She had been on her feet for about eight hours. She had a six-hour shift at the library ahead of her, one that started at eight that evening. While she’d been showering that morning, she’d heard a car honk, summoning Derek. She shook her head and kept scrubbing. Miriam, too, was afraid of Derek, but what was to be done? She did not hate him. Her faith stopped her from hating her own kin, but she felt a pang of pity whenever she saw him. Maybe the boy just needed a father. But didn’t her children? All she could do was monitor Derek and Joan when she was home. And when she wasn’t, both Miriam and August agreed Derek could never be left in the house alone with the girls. Could never enter the quilting room. The east wing of the house was segregated—the girls and Miriam occupied this space, with Derek and August on the west side of the house. The kitchen became the family’s hub, the only room were Miriam allowed her girls to be with Derek, and always, always with supervision. It hurt Miriam to think of it this way, but think of it she did: Derek was a rabid dog, and her girls, though lionhearted, were still children. Miriam loved her sister and was grateful for shelter, but she felt a different kind of shame, a deeper kind when she would glance from Joan to Derek across the round kitchen table.
She slugged along in the trail of exhausted human beings on the front lines of fighting cancer and virus and depression. Twisted her gold chain rosary absentmindedly in her fingers.
“That boy’s got your eyes.”
“What now?” Miriam said. The voice had come from a surgeon behind her, someone she didn’t know. He held a cup of coffee in his hands as well and gestured with his coffee back and forth between Miriam’s face and the television mounted high on a wall.
The surgeon flushed at Miriam’s confused face. “Oh, hell. I’m just joshing you. Been in surgery too damn long. No offense, ma’am,” he said. “Y’all don’t look alike,” he muttered more to himself than to Miriam, going on about how he had a bevy of Black friends, some of his closest, in fact. Still confused, she looked more closely at the television.
The local news station was playing their daily five-o’clock roundup. Miriam saw one of her favorite anchors—a serious woman with a thick Southern drawl and hair piled high on her head—announce that there had been another drive-by shooting in Memphis. The war between Kings Gate and the Douglass Park Bishops did not appear to be waning anytime soon, the anchor warned.
Annoyed, Miriam turned away. It wasn’t necessarily a surprise that the doctor associated her with this news story, but it was almost enough to make her wish she hadn’t come down for coffee. Almost. She was exhausted. As the line crawled forward, the news anchor continued the report. Apparently, a house in the south side neighborhood of Orange Mound, rumored to belong to a known leader of the Kings Gate Mafia, had been another victim in this summer war. In a tragic turn of events, the anchor said, he had not been home during the time of the shooting. Instead, his grandmother and his three-month-old baby boy had been riddled with a barrage of bullets from an AK-47. A Memphis police car had, luckily, been parked nearby and had seen a tan Chevrolet Impala speeding away. Miriam’s neck tensed. Wasn’t that car tan, the one that had picked Derek up nearly every damn day this summer?
Trying to act casual, she slowly turned her head toward the television. “After a short chase,” the anchor was saying, “police apprehended two suspects: the owner of the car, a Ricky ‘Pumpkin’ Howell, and a second man, as yet unnamed.” Derek’s mugshot flashed across the screen. “Both men were arrested and are in custody now.”
Miriam pushed her coffee cup into the surgeon’s chest without taking her eyes off the screen. “Here. Be a dear and pay for my coffee, will you?”
She didn’t wait for his response. She dug in her purse for her keys to the van and was out the café and down the hallway in seconds.