I can’t speak.
“Jenny, don’t you worry. We’re going to get that painted over, good as new.” Mrs. J gently pushes me inside. “Come on, it’s cold out here. Let’s get you indoors.”
I let myself be carried along back into the kitchen.
“I’m going to make you a cup of tea. Everything’s going to be okay. You hear me, Jen? It’s going to be okay.”
But it’s not. Nothing is okay. There’s no okay after this. There’s no okay after you’re the reason someone is no longer alive on this earth. I love my husband and I made a vow to stand by him for better or worse, but never did I think that worse would include my son being raised by a man who murdered a child.
No, Mrs. J, it will never be okay again.
Chapter Nine RILEY
That the grief is so physical, tangible, is a surprise. It’s heavy, as burdensome as the overnight bag pressing into my shoulder that I let fall to the ground with a thud in front of the Hertz counter. The clerk, a girl who looks like she’s barely out of high school, wears a bedazzled Santa hat over her bright pink hair. She’s drawn hearts around her name—Tiffany—on her name tag. Before she opens her mouth, I already know Tiffany is going to be too much, too perky, too cheerful.
“Heya, ma’am.”
Ma’am? I haven’t been called ma’am since I left Birmingham.
“Omigod, I love that nail polish color! How was your flight?! Ain’t it lovely out today?!”
Every single one of her sentences ends in an exclamation point. I don’t know what to latch on to first in that overwhelming greeting.
“Yeah, sure is warm,” I respond with as much enthusiasm as I can muster. Thankfully, while she’s looking up my reservation, she turns her chatter to her colleague at the neighboring counter, a prim elderly white woman with a helmet of blue-gray hair, who’s helping an older Black guy, decked out from head to toe in Miami Dolphins gear.
I fight the urge to look at my watch or tap the counter impatiently as Tiffany recounts her Saturday night in excruciating detail. Outwardly, I plaster my face with a polite smile. Inside, I’m screaming. No one cares!!! How could you possibly think anyone cares about any of this? Someone spilled wine on your new hobo bag. Oh, you poor little thing. My grandmother died six days ago. She’s gone, Tiffany. Gone.
The Dolphins fan shoots me a commiserating eye roll. He takes a step toward me, close enough now for me to see the keloid scars from old acne that dot his chin and smell the cigar smoke on his aqua-and-orange Starter jacket. When he opens his mouth to speak, I catch the glint of more than one gold crown.
“Hey, can you give me directions to the lynching memorial?” he asks in a slow, lazy drawl.
The clerk helping him, the elderly lady, interjects, probably to escape Tiffany’s inane ramblings. “I think you mean the National Memorial for Peace and Justice,” she corrects him, the patronizing tone unmistakable.
“Well, yeah, same thing,” he replies, throwing me a knowing glance. These white people.
The woman unfolds a large map and pulls out a plastic pen. “I’ll circle it here for you. It’s very close. About fifteen minutes from here.”
“I hear it’s pretty powerful,” the man says.
The clerk offers a vague nod. She obviously hasn’t been there.
Even grief can’t shake my compulsion to fill the quiet, to make everyone around me comfortable at all times. “I’ve read a lot about it. The memorial and the Legacy Museum down the road from it too. They’re supposed to be incredible.”
“Well, you’re here, you might as well check it out,” he says. “I’m Willie, by the way.” He extends a hand.
“Nice to meet you.” I don’t offer my name as he pumps my hand vigorously up and down.
Willie has at least two decades on me, and there’s something about his slightly flirty vibe that makes me think he’s angling to invite me along. Figures, my only action in ages would be with a man old enough to be my father at a museum dedicated to racial terror.
“Oh, well, I’m already late. I need to get to Perote.” I’m not sure why I bother to say the name of a dot on a map no one has heard of like it’s New York City.
“Never heard of it. Where’s that?”
“A little town, if you could even call it that, about an hour south of here.”
I will Tiffany to hurry up and finish with my paperwork so I can escape. I’d forgotten this about the South, the incessant small talk that draws out every errand and interaction twice as long as it needs to be. Sure enough, Willie shifts toward me now, fully invested in our chat. “And what brings you down here?”
It’s a reasonable question—a predictable one—and yet the answer doesn’t want to come out of my mouth. “Oh, uh, it’s actually my grandmother’s funeral.” The convivial mood is ruined as everyone suddenly looks at me with sympathy. The upside is that introducing death into the conversation might make Tiffany get me the keys already.
“Oh, well, I’m sorry for your loss,” Willie says with genuine compassion. “My moms died last month. It, well, it’s tough.”
My back stiffens when he turns to me; I’m irrationally afraid he’s going to hug me. Then I feel bad for tilting backward and force myself to lean into the conversation again. He nods and tells me to be strong as he walks toward the exit.
Be strong. God knows I’m trying.
His words have me slipping right back to the night Gigi died. Momma said the same thing when we were gathered around Gigi’s bed. “We have to be strong. We have to be strong.” The doctors had stabilized Gigi after she’d suffered a stroke. She was unconscious but looked peaceful. You almost wouldn’t know her organs were shutting down, even though the doctor had explained that was exactly what was happening. I made it to the hospital in time, which will always be one of the things I am most grateful for in this life. When I arrived, the first person I saw was my dad, staring vacantly into a vending machine down the hall.
“Daddy?”
He jumped a little, coming back from wherever he was. “Oh, hey, baby, come here.” He reached over, pulled me close. In the glass of the machine, I could see our reflection, how much we look alike, same round eyes and large forehead, same sadness.
“How you holding up, Daddy?”
“I’m fine. It’s your mother we need to worry about. You know this is—this is it, right?” He looked at me solemnly. He wanted me to be prepared. If there’s one thing my dad always wants, it’s for me to be prepared, for anything, everything in life.
But I wasn’t prepared for this, for losing Gigi. I nodded anyway. I knew that was what he needed to hear.
“How’s Momma holding up?”
“Oh, you know how she is. She’s making unreasonable demands of the nurses and of Jesus… going on about miracles. I keep trying to tell her that she has to let Gigi go, but I know that’s easier said than done. She should be grateful it’s so peaceful.”
The look on his face made me wonder if he was thinking about his own parents. They’d died before I was born, on their way from Baltimore to Philadelphia on a Greyhound bus that crashed. “Here one second, gone the next,” was how Daddy always put it. The modest settlement from the crash helped pay for my education, which makes me feel connected to the grandparents I never got to meet.