The white man paused in his work. Folded his arms into an Indian crisscross and settled against the van. “My missus got Alzheimer’s. Get so she don’t even know who she is. Calling out for me in the night. What am I? What am I? I’ve loved that woman for thirty years. Not all of them good. But together. Together. I reckon if she was on Mars, I’d hot-rig that there truck to get me there.” He sighed. “Come on, look here, see this? Toggle it like this if it goes out again.”
Ten minutes later, Miriam was back in the driver’s seat, pulling out of the station, a palm up in thanks to the stranger. Her daughters’ four tiny brown palms pressed against the windows in thanks. He raised an arm, saluted.
The air conditioner on full blast. The girls could breathe again. Wolf stopped her panting, curled up around Mya’s feet and slept. The tension of the encounter behind her, Miriam found herself wiping away tears with the back of her forearm. Trying to hide her sniffles. But she knew her girls knew. Understood the impact of the fatherless journey they were taking. Her voice cracked when she said, barely audible above Al Green, “We’re almost there, y’all. We’re almost there.”
She thought about where they might stop to get lunch. Hopefully, there’d be a place in an hour or two where they could get something to go. She’d rather stop in somewhere and eat there, but Joan had been refusing to eat inside most restaurants. The mustard. She wouldn’t go near the thing. And she refused to say more or go inside. Would just sit in the car with Wolf and wait.
Miriam let her mind drift back to the day before. The yard had been full. Armoires and chests and jade elephants, a vast assortment of Japanese geisha woodblocks, and a cast-iron slave stove any Southern woman would be proud to make biscuits in covered the green.
The neighbors. Miriam remembered the shock and awe in their eyes, their open mouths, their hands cupped to hide their dismay. Everything she owned out on display. A butter churner with a pearl handle was going for twenty. As if Miriam herself lay splayed out in the yard in an open kimono, bare-breasted and utterly spent.
The neighbors—especially the women, Miriam recalled—shook their heads. She knew they were thinking about the ball the night before. Who wouldn’t have remembered when Miriam showed up wearing a gold sequined dress with bloodred high-heeled shoes? She was certain they thought it was all because Jax had made major.
The neighbors’ necks crooked this way and that, and like hungry pigeons, they searched for the major. But he was nowhere in sight. Just his children. The girls. Mya, tiny, smaller than Wolf, hollering on top of a vanity that they’d let go for only ten.
And then there was the Shelby. Resting like some black beast at the very foot of the yard. The entire base, from general to private first class, knew Jax loved that black panther as much as, if not more than, the Corps. More than the china or the furniture or Jax’s absence, it was the sign in the window of the ’69 Mustang that proclaimed that Miriam and Jax’s storm of a marriage was finally over. In bold block letters the same shade as Miriam’s blush rose lipstick, the sign simply read, free.
The van’s AC broke again just outside Sugar Tree, Tennessee. Miriam parked the Chevy in a lonely rest stop shaded by an ancient hickory. Thrust her arms deep into the entrails of the van and fixed it herself, the hickory over her head heavy in green bloom.
CHAPTER 3
Miriam
1978
Miriam did not look up from her novel when the bell above the record store door announced a new customer’s entrance. It was all she could do not to roll her eyes. She took a bite of the peach she held, buried her head farther in her Bront?. Miriam did not like working at the record store; she did not much like working. She preferred to be studying. Chemistry. Physics. Anatomy. This was a summer job—a gig to make some money in between her college graduation and the start of nursing school that fall.
The record store was decadent and dusty, walls lined in vinyl covers: smiling Bessie Smith, a forlorn Roberta Flack, and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper. Overflowing stacks lined three sides of the store, and a high reception desk the fourth. Afternoon light streaked in through the tall windows, creating long diagonals of floating dust motes.