ADISA SAYS I NEED TO treat myself, so she offers to buy me lunch. We go to a little bistro that bakes its own bread, and that serves portions so large you always wind up taking home half. It’s busy, so Adisa and I sit at the bar.
I have been spending more time with my sister, which is both comforting and strange. Before, I was almost always working when I wasn’t with Edison; now my schedule is empty.
“This is nice and all,” Adisa says to me, “but have you given any thought to how you gonna pay for your own lunch down the road?”
I think about what Kennedy said yesterday about filing a civil suit. It’s money, but it’s money I cannot count on yet—maybe never. “I’m a little more concerned with feeding my son,” I admit.
She narrows her glance. “How much cushion you have?”
There’s no point lying to her. “About three months.”
“You know if things get tight, you can ask me for help, right?”
At that, I can’t help but smile. “Seriously? I had to give you a loan last month.”
Adisa grins. “I said you can ask me for help. I didn’t say I’d be able to provide it.” She shrugs. “Besides, you know there’s an answer.”
What I have learned this week is that I am overqualified for nearly every entry-level administrative job in New Haven, including all open secretarial and receptionist positions. My sister believes I should file for unemployment. But I see that as dishonest, since once this is settled, I plan to go back to work. Getting a part-time job is another alternative, but I’m qualified as a nurse, and my license is suspended. So instead, I’ve avoided the conversation.
“All I know is that when Tyana’s boyfriend got busted for larceny and went to trial, the court date wasn’t for eight months,” Adisa says. “Which puts you five months in the hole. What advice did that skinny white lawyer give you?”
“Her name is Kennedy, and we were too busy trying to figure out how I won’t go to prison to discuss how I can support myself while I’m waiting for a trial date.”
Adisa snorts. “Yeah, because that kind of detail probably never occurs to someone like her.”
“You met her once,” I point out. “You know nothing about her.”
“I know that people who become public defenders are doing it because morals are more important to them than money, or else they would be off making partner in the big city. Which means Miz Kennedy either has a trust fund or a sugar daddy.”
“She got me out on bail.”
“Correction: your son got you out on bail.”
I shoot Adisa a glare and turn my attention to the bartender, who is polishing glasses.
Adisa rolls her eyes. “You don’t want to talk, that’s fine.” She looks up at the television over the bar, on which an infomercial is playing. “Hey,” she says to the bartender. “Can we watch something else?”
“Be my guest,” he says and hands her a remote control.
A minute later, Adisa is flipping through the cable stations. She stops when she hears a familiar gospel jingle: Lord, Lord, Lord, have Mercy! And then, the camera cuts tight to Wallace Mercy, the activist. Today he is lambasting a Texas school district that had a young Muslim boy arrested after he brought a homemade clock to school to show his science teacher and it was mistakenly identified as a bomb. “Ahmed,” Wallace says, “if you are listening, I want to tell you something. I want to say to all the black and brown children out there, who are afraid that they too might be misunderstood because of the color of their skin…”
I am pretty sure Wallace Mercy used to be a preacher, but I don’t think he ever got the memo that said he doesn’t need to shout when he’s miked on a television set.
“I want to say that I too was once thought to be less than I was, because of how I looked. And I am not going to lie—sometimes, when the Devil is whispering doubt into my ear, I still think those people were right. But most of the time, I think, I have shown all of those bullies up. I have succeeded in spite of them. And…so will you.”
Adisa gasps. “Oh my God, Ruth, that’s what you need. Wallace Mercy.”
“I am one hundred percent sure that Wallace Mercy is the last thing I need.”
“What are you talking about? Your kind of story is exactly what he lives for. Job discrimination because of race? He’ll eat it up. He’ll make sure everyone in the country knows you were wronged.”
On the television, Wallace is shaking a fist. “Does he have to be so mad all the time?”
Adisa laughs. “Well, hell, girl. I’m mad all the time. I’m exhausted, just from being Black all day,” she says. “At least he gives people like us a voice.”
“A loud one.”
“Exactly. Damn, Ruth, you been drinking the Kool-Aid. You been swimming with the sharks for so long, you’ve forgotten you’re krill.”
“What?”
“Don’t sharks eat krill?”
“They eat people.”
“This is what I’m telling you!” Adisa sighs. “White folks have spent years giving Black folks their freedom on paper, but deep down they still expect us to say yes, massuh, and be quiet and grateful for what we got. If we speak our minds we can lose our jobs, our homes, even our lives. Wallace is the man who gets to be angry for us. If it weren’t for him, white folks would never know the stupid shit they do upsets us, and Black folks would get madder and madder because they can’t risk talking back. Wallace Mercy is what keeps the powder keg in this country from blowing up.”
“Well, that’s all very well and good, but I’m not on trial because I’m Black. I’m on trial because a baby died when I was on duty.”
Adisa smirks. “Who told you that? Your lily-white lawyer? Of course she don’t think this is about race. She don’t think about race, period. She don’t have to.”
“Okay, well, when you get your law degree, you can advise me about this case. Until them, I’m going to take her word for it.” I hesitate. “You know, for someone who hates being stereotyped, you sure as hell do it a lot yourself.”
My sister holds up her hands, a surrender. “Okay, Ruth. You’re right. I’m wrong.”
“I’m just saying—so far, Kennedy McQuarrie is doing her job.”
“Her job is to rescue you so she can feel good about herself,” Adisa says. “It’s called a white knight for a reason.” She narrows her gaze at me. “And you know what’s on the other end of that color spectrum.”
I don’t give her the satisfaction of a response. But we both know the answer.
Black. The color of the villain.
I HAVE ONLY been to Christina’s Manhattan home once, just after she married Larry Sawyer. It was to drop off a wedding gift, and the whole experience had been awkward. Christina and Larry had a destination wedding in Turks and Caicos, and Christina had said over and over how sorry she was that she couldn’t invite all of her friends down there but instead had to limit the guest list. When she opened my present—a set of linen tea towels, screen-printed with the handwritten recipes of my mother’s cookies and cakes and pies she loved most—she burst into tears and hugged me, saying that it was the most personal, thoughtful gift she’d received, and that she would use them every day.
Now, more than ten years later, I wonder if she ever used her kitchen, much less the tea towels. The granite countertops gleam, and in a blue glass bowl there are fresh apples that look like they’ve been polished. There is no evidence that a four-year-old lives anywhere nearby. I have an itch to open the double Viking oven, just to see if there’s a single crumb or grease stain.
“Please,” Christina says, gesturing to one of the kitchen chairs. “Sit.”
I do, startled to find that there is soft music coming out of the wall behind me.
“It’s a speaker,” she says, laughing at my face. “It’s hidden.”
I wonder what it would be like to live in a place that feels like it is constantly part of a photo shoot. The Christina I used to know left a trail of destruction from the foyer to the kitchen the moment she came home from school—dropping her coat and book bag and kicking off her shoes. Just then, a woman appears so silently she might as well have emerged from the wall as well. She sets a plate of chicken salad down in front of me, and one in front of Christina.
“Thanks, Rosa,” Christina says, and I realize that she probably still drops her coat and her bags and her shoes when she comes into her house. But Rosa is her Lou. It’s just a different person now who’s picking up after her.
The maid slips away again, and Christina starts talking about a hospital fundraiser and how Bradley Cooper agreed to come and then backed out at the last minute because of strep throat, and then Us Weekly photographed him that same night in a dive bar in Chelsea with his girlfriend. She is chattering so much about a topic I care nothing about that before I even finish half my salad, I realize why she’s invited me here.
“So,” I interrupt. “Did you hear about it from my mom?”
Her face falls. “No. Larry. Now that he’s filed the paperwork to run for office, we have the news on twenty-four/seven.” She bites her lower lip. “Was it awful?”
A laugh bubbles up in my throat. “What part of it?”
“Well, all of it. Getting fired. Being arrested.” Her eyes grow wide. “Did you have to go to jail? Was it like Orange Is the New Black?”
“Yeah, without the sex.” I look at her. “It wasn’t my fault, Christina. You have to believe me.”
She reaches across the table and grabs my hand. “I do. I do, Ruth. I hope you know that. I wanted to help you, you know. I told Larry to hire someone from his old firm to represent you.”
I freeze. I try to see this as a gesture of friendship, but it feels like I’m a problem to solve. “I…I couldn’t accept that…”
“Well, before you go thinking I’m your fairy godmother, Larry shot me down. He feels as badly as I do, honestly, but with his candidacy, it’s just not a good time to be connected to something scandalous.”
Scandalous. I taste the word, bite into it like a berry, feel it burst.
“We had a huge fight about it. I mean, like, I made him move into the second bedroom and everything. It’s not like he’s going for the neo-Nazi vote. But it’s not that simple, I guess. Race relations are a mess right now, with the police commissioner under fire and everything, and Larry needs to stay as far away from that as possible or it could cost him the election.” She shakes her head. “I am so sorry, Ruth.”
My jaw feels too tight. “Is this why you had me over here?” I ask. “To tell me you can’t be associated with me anymore?”
What had I been stupid enough to think? That this was a social visit? That for the first time in a decade Christina had suddenly decided she wanted me to drop in for lunch? Or had I known all along that if I came here, it was because I was hoping for a miracle in the form of the Hallowells—even if I was too proud to admit it?
For a long moment, we just stare at each other. “No,” Christina says. “I needed to see you with my own eyes. I wanted to make sure you were…you know…all right.”
Pride is an evil dragon; it sleeps underneath your heart and then roars when you need silence.
“Well, you can check this off your good deed list,” I say bitterly. “I’m doing just fine.”
“Ruth—”
I hold up my hand. “Don’t, Christina, okay? Just…don’t.”
I try to feel through the chain of our history for the snag, the mend in the links, where we went from being two girls who knew everything about each other—favorite ice cream flavor, favorite New Kids on the Block member, celebrity crush—to two women who knew nothing about how the other lived. Had we drifted apart, or had our closeness been the ruse? Was our familiarity due to friendship, or geography?
“I’m sorry,” Christina says, her voice tiny.
“I am too,” I whisper.
Suddenly she bolts from the table and comes back a moment later, emptying the contents of her bag. Sunglasses and keys and lipsticks and receipts scatter the surface of the table; Advil tablets, loose in the bottom of her bag, spill like candy. She opens her wallet and takes a thick wad of bills and presses it into my hand. “Take this,” Christina says. “Just between the two of us.”
When our hands brush, there’s an electric shock. I jump up, as if it were a bolt of lightning. “No,” I say, backing away. This is a line, and if I cross it, everything changes between Christina and me. Maybe we have never been equals, but at least I’ve been able to pretend. If I take this money, I can’t go on fooling myself.
“I can’t.”
Christina is fierce, folding my fingers around the money. “Just do it,” she says. Then she looks up at me as if all is well in the world, as if nothing has changed, as if I have not just become a beggar at her feet, a charity, a cause. “There’s dessert,” Christina says. “Rosa?”
I trip over my chair in my hurry to escape. “I’m not really very hungry.” I avert my glance. “I have to go.”
I grab my coat and my purse from the rack in the foyer and hurry out the door, closing it tight behind me. I push the elevator button over and over, as if that might make it come faster.
And I count the bills. Five hundred and fifty-six dollars.
The elevator dings.
I hurry toward the welcome mat outside Christina’s door and slip all the money beneath it.
This morning I told Edison we couldn’t drive the car anymore. The registration has expired and I can’t afford to renew it. Selling it will be my last resort, but in the meantime, while I try to save enough to cover the state and federal fees and the gas, we will take the bus.
I get into the elevator and close my eyes until I reach ground level. I run down Central Park West until I cannot catch my breath, until I know I will not change my mind.
THE BUILDING ON Humphrey Street looks like any other government building: a square, cement, bureaucratic block. The welfare office is packed, every cracked plastic seat filled with someone who is bent over a clipboard. Adisa walks me up to the counter. She’s working now—making minimum wage as a part-time cashier—but she’s been in and out of this office a half dozen times when she was between jobs, and knows the ropes. “My sister needs to apply for assistance,” she announces, as if that statement doesn’t make me die a little inside.
The secretary looks to be Edison’s age. She has long, swinging earrings shaped like tacos. “Fill this out,” she says, and she hands me a clipboard with an application.
Since there is nowhere to sit, we lean against the wall. While Adisa searches for a pen in her cavernous shoulder bag, I glance at the women balancing clipboards and toddlers on their knees, at the men who reek of booze and sweat, at a woman with a long gray braid who is holding a doll and singing to herself. About half the room is Caucasian—mothers wiping the noses of their children in wads of tissues, and nervous men in collared shirts who tap their pens against their legs as they read each line on the form. Adisa sees me glancing at them. “Two-thirds of welfare goes to white folks,” she says. “Go figure.”
I have never been so grateful for my sister.
I fill out the first few queries: name, address, number of dependents.
Income, I read.
I start to put down my annual salary, and then cross it out. “Write zero dollars,” Adisa says.
“I get a little bit from Wesley’s—”
“Write zero dollars,” Adisa repeats. “I know people who got rejected for SNAP because they had cars that were worth too much. You’re going to screw the system the way the system screwed you.”
When I don’t start writing, she takes the application, fills in the blanks, and returns it to the secretary.
An hour passes, and not a single person is called from the waiting room. “How long does this take?” I whisper to my sister.
“However long they feel like making you wait,” Adisa replies. “Half the reason these people can’t get a job is because they’re too busy sitting here waiting on benefits to go apply anywhere.”
It’s nearly three o’clock—four hours after we’ve arrived—before a caseworker comes to the door. “Ruby Jefferson?” she says.
I stand up. “Ruth?”
She glances at the paperwork. “Maybe,” she concedes.
Adisa and I follow her down a hallway to a cubicle and sit. “I’m going to ask you some questions,” she says in a monotone. “Are you still employed?”
“It’s complicated…I was suspended.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I’m a nurse, but my license has been put on hold until an impending lawsuit is over.” I say these words in a rush, like they are being purged from the core of me.
“It don’t matter,” Adisa says. “Imma break it down fuh you. She don’t got no job and she don’t got no money.” I stare at my sister; I had been hoping that maybe the caseworker and I could find some common ground, that she might recognize me not as a typical governmental assistance applicant but as someone middle-class who has gotten a bum deal. Adisa, on the other hand, has whipped out the Ebonics, pushing as far away from my tactic as possible.
The caseworker shoves her glasses up her nose. “What about your son’s college fund?”
“It’s a five twenty-nine,” I say. “You can only use it for education.”
“She need medical,” Adisa interrupts.
The woman glances at me. “What are you paying right now for COBRA?”
“Eleven hundred a month,” I answer, flushing. “But I won’t be able to afford that by next month.”
The woman nods, noncommittal. “Get rid of your COBRA payment. You qualify for Obamacare.”
“Oh, no, you don’t understand. I don’t want to get rid of my coverage; I want to just get temporary funding,” I explain. “That’s the health insurance that comes from the hospital. I’m going to get my job back eventually—”
Adisa rounds on me. “And in the meantime what if Edison breaks his leg?”
“Adisa—”
“You think you O. J. Simpson? You gonna get off and walk away? News flash, Ruth. You ain’t O.J. You fa sho ain’t Oprah. You ain’t Kerry Washington. They get passes from white people because they famous. You just another nigga who’s going down.”
I am sure that the caseworker can see the steam rising from my hair. My fingers are clenched so tightly into fists that I can feel myself drawing blood. I’m not quite sure what precipitated this transformation into full-on gangsta, but I’m going to kill my sister.
Hell, I’ve already been indicted for homicide.
The caseworker glances from Adisa to me and then down at the paperwork. She clears her throat. “Well,” she says, all too happy to get rid of us, “you qualify for medical, SNAP, and cash assistance. You’ll be hearing from us.”
Adisa hooks her arm through mine and pulls me up from my chair. “Thank you,” I murmur, as my sister drags me from the cubicle.
“Now, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” she says, when we are out of earshot, standing next to a potted plant near the elevator bank. She is suddenly back to her normal self.
I round on her. “What the hell was that? You were a total asshole.”
“An asshole who got you the money you need,” Adisa points out. “You can thank me later.”
MY TRAINER IS a girl named Nahndi, and I am old enough to be her mother. “So basically there are five stations,” she tells me. “Cashier, headset, coffee headset, presenter, and runner. I mean, there are people on table too, of course, they’re the ones who are making the food…”
I trail her, tugging at my uniform, which has an itchy tag at the neck. I am working an eight-hour shift, which means I get a thirty-minute break and a free meal and minimum wage. After exhausting all the temp agency office job positions, I’d applied to McDonald’s. I said I’d taken time off from work to be a mom. I didn’t even mention the word nurse. I just wanted to be hired, so that I could give up some of the benefits I’d received at the unemployment office. For my own sanity I needed to believe that I could still, at least in part, take care of myself and my son.
When the manager called to offer me the job, he asked if I could start immediately, since they were short-staffed. So I left a note for Edison on the kitchen counter saying I had a surprise for him, and caught a bus downtown.
“The fry hopper is where the fries are loaded. There are three basket sizes to use, depending on how busy we are,” Nahndi says. “There’s a timer here you push when you drop the basket. But at two-forty, you need to shake it so the fries don’t just become one giant blob, okay?”
I nod, watching the line worker—a college student named Mike—do everything she is saying. “Once the timer goes off, you hold the basket over the vat and let the oil drain for about ten seconds. And then dump them into the fry station—watch out, that’s hot—and salt them.”
“Unless it’s a no-salt fry order,” Mike says.
“We’ll worry about that later,” Nahndi replies. “The salt dispenser puts the same amount on every batch. Then you toss with the fry scoop and press a timer. All those fries need to be sold in five minutes, and if they’re not, they get dumped out.”
I nod. It’s a lot to process. I had a thousand things to remember as a nurse, but after twenty years, that was muscle memory. This is all new.
Mike lets me try the fry station. I am surprised at how heavy the basket is when it’s dripping. My hands are slippery in their plastic gloves. I can feel the oil settling through my hairnet. “That’s great!” Nahndi says.
I learn how to bag properly, how many minutes each food item can sit in a warming basket before being discarded, which cleaners are used on which surfaces, how to tell the manager you need more quarters, how to push the medium-size button on the register before you push the button for Number 1 meal, or else the customer won’t get fries with his order. Nahndi has the patience of a saint when I forget ranch dipping sauce or grab a McDouble instead of a double cheeseburger (they’re identical, except for one extra slice of cheese). She feels confident enough, after an hour, to put me on table, assembling the food.
I have never been one to shy away from scut work. God knows, in nursing you have your share of holding emesis basins and changing soiled sheets. What I always would tell myself was that after an episode like that, the patient was even more uncomfortable—physically, or emotionally, or both—than I was. My job was to make things better as professionally as possible.
So getting a job as a fast-food worker really doesn’t bother me. I’m not here for the glory. I’m here for the paycheck, as meager as it might be.
I take a deep breath and grab the three-part bun and set the pieces in their spots in the toaster. Meanwhile, I open a Big Mac box. This is easier said than done while wearing plastic gloves. The top part of the bun is sesame-seed down in the top of the box; the middle piece sits balanced on top of that; the bottom part is bottom-side down in the bottom half of the box. Two squirts of Big Mac sauce from the giant metal sauce gun go on each side; shredded lettuce and minced onions are sprinkled on top of that. The middle piece gets two strategically located pickles (they should be “dating, not mating,” said Nahndi). The bottom gets a slice of American cheese. Then I reach into the warmer for two 10:1 patties, and place one on the top and one on the bottom. Lift the middle piece and place on the bottom part, place the top of the bun on that, and the box is closed and given to a runner for bagging or counter service.
It’s not delivering a baby, but I feel the same flush of a job well done.
Six hours into my shift, my feet hurt and I reek of oil. I’ve cleaned the bathrooms twice—including once after a four-year-old got sick all over the floor. I have just started working as a runner to Nahndi’s cashier when a woman orders a twenty-piece McNuggets. I check the box myself before putting it on a tray, and like I’ve been taught, I call her order number and tell her to have a nice day as I am handing it over. She sits down ten feet away from me and eats every last piece of chicken. Then suddenly, she is back at the counter. “This box was empty,” she tells Nahndi. “I paid for nothing.”
“I’m so sorry,” Nahndi says. “We’ll get you a new one.”
I sidle closer, lowering my voice. “I checked that box myself. I watched her eat all twenty of those nuggets.”
“I know,” Nahndi whispers back. “She does this all the time.”
The manager on duty, a cadaverous man with a soul patch, approaches. “Everything all right here?”
“Just fine,” Nahndi says. She takes the new box of nuggets out of my hand and passes it to the customer, who carries it out to the parking lot. The manager goes back to the presenter position, handing out food at the drive-through.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I mutter.
“If you let it get under your skin, you won’t make it through a single shift.” Nahndi turns her attention toward a high-spirited group of kids who surf through the door on the wave of their own laughter. “After-school rush,” she warns. “Get your game face on.”
I turn back to the screen, waiting for the next order to magically appear.
“Welcome to McDonald’s,” Nahndi says. “Can I take your order?”
I hope it’s not a shake. That’s the one machine I don’t feel confident running yet, and Nahndi already told me a story about how, her first week, she forgot to put in the pins and the milk exploded all over her and onto the floor.
“Um, I’ll take a Big Mac meal,” I hear. “Dude, what do you want?”
“I left my wallet at home…”
I spin around, because I know that voice. Standing in front of the counter is Edison’s friend Bryce, and beside him, hands jammed into the pockets of his jacket, is my son.
I can see the absolute horror in Edison’s eyes as he scans my hairnet, my uniform, my new life. So instead of smiling at him, or saying hello, I turn my back again before Bryce can recognize me, too. Before I have to hear Edison make yet another excuse for the situation I’ve put him in.
EDISON IS NOT home when I arrive, strip off my uniform, and shower away the smell of grease. I text him, but he doesn’t answer. So instead, I cook dinner, pretending that nothing is wrong. By the time he finally comes home, I have just put a casserole on the table. “It’s hot,” I tell him, but he goes straight to his bedroom. I think he is still upset about my new job, but a moment later he appears, holding a giant Mason jar full of coins, as well as a checkbook. He tosses these on the table. “Two thousand three hundred and eighty-six,” Edison announces. “And there’s got to be a couple hundred more in the jar.”
“That’s money for college,” I say.
“We need it now. I’ve got the whole spring and summer to work; I can make more.”
I know how scrupulously Edison has saved his earnings from the grocery store where he’s worked since he was sixteen. It was always understood that he’d chip in for his education, and between scholarships and FAFSA and the 529 plan we started for him as a baby, I would swing the rest of the tuition. The thought of taking money that is earmarked for college makes me feel sick. “Edison, no.”
His face crumples. “Mama, I can’t. I can’t let you work at McDonald’s when I have money we could use. You got any idea how that makes me feel?”
“First, that isn’t money, that’s your future. Second, there’s no shame in a good honest day’s work. Even if it’s making French fries.” I squeeze his hand. “And it’s only for a little while, till this is all cleared up and I can work at the hospital again.”
“If I drop track I can get more shifts at the Stop and Shop.”
“You’re not dropping track.”
“I don’t care about a dumb sport.”
“And I don’t care about anything but you,” I tell him. I sit down across from him. “Baby, let me do this. Please.” I feel my eyes fill with tears. “If you asked me who Ruth Jefferson was a month ago, I would have said she’s a good nurse, and she’s a good mother. But now I have people telling me I wasn’t a good nurse. And if I can’t put a casserole on the table and clothes on your back—then I have to second-guess myself as a mother, too. If you don’t let me do this…if you don’t let me take care of you…then I don’t know who I’m supposed to be anymore.”
He folds his arms tight across his chest, looks away from me. “Everyone knows. I hear them whispering and then they stop when I get close.”
“The students?”
“Teachers, too,” he admits.
I bristle. “That’s inexcusable.”
“No, it’s not like that. They’re going out of their way, you know? Like giving me extra time for papers and saying that they know things are rough at home right now…and every time one of them is like that—so nice, and understanding—I feel like I want to hit something, because it’s even worse than when people pretend they don’t know you missed school because your mother was in jail.” He grimaces. “That test I failed? It wasn’t because I didn’t know the stuff. It was because I cut class, after Mr. Herman cornered me and asked if there was anything he could do to help.”
“Oh, Edison—”
“I don’t want their help,” he explodes. “I don’t want to be someone who needs their help. I want to be just like everyone else, you know, not a special case. And then I get mad at myself because I’m whining like I’m the only one with problems when you might…when you…” He breaks off, rubbing his palms against his knees.
“Don’t say it,” I say, folding him into my arms. “Don’t even think it.” I pull away and frame his beautiful face. “We don’t need their help. We’ll get through this. You believe me, right?”
He looks at me, really looks at me, like a pilgrim searches the night sky for meaning. “I don’t know.”
“Well, I do,” I say firmly. “Now, eat what’s on your plate. Because I am sure as hell not going to McDonald’s if it gets cold.”
Edison picks up his fork, grateful for the distraction. And I try not to think about the fact that for the first time in my life, I’ve lied to my son.
A WEEK LATER I am rushing around, trying to find my uniform visor, when the doorbell rings. Standing on my porch, to my shock, is Wallace Mercy—wiry white shock of hair, three-piece suit, pocket watch, and all. “Oh, my,” I say. The words are puffs of breath, dry in the desert of my disbelief.
“My sister,” he booms. “My name is Wallace Mercy.”
I giggle. I actually giggle. Because, really, who doesn’t know that?
I glance around to see if he is being followed by an entourage, by cameras. But the only sign of his renown is a sleek black town car pulled up to the curb with its flashers on, and a driver in the front seat. “I wonder if I might take a moment of your time?”
The closest brush with fame I’ve had is when a late-night-TV-show host’s pregnant wife got into a car accident near the hospital and was put on the ward for twenty-four hours of monitoring. Although she turned out to be perfectly fine, my role segued from healthcare provider to publicist, holding back the crowd of reporters who threatened to overrun the ward. It figures that now, the only other time in my life I’ve met a celebrity, I am wearing a polyester uniform. “Of course.” I usher him through the door, silently thanking God that I already made my pullout bed back into a couch. “Can I get you something to drink?”
“Coffee would be a blessing,” he says.
As I turn on the Keurig, I’m thinking that Adisa would die if she were here. I wonder if it would be rude to take a selfie with Wallace Mercy and send it to her. “You have a lovely home,” he tells me, and he looks at the photos on my mantel. “This your boy? I’ve heard he’s something else.”
From whom? I think. “Do you take milk? Sugar?”
“Both,” Wallace Mercy says. He takes the mug and gestures to the couch. “May I?” I nod, and he motions so that I will sit down on the chair beside him. “Miz Jefferson, do you know why I’m here?”
“Honestly, I can’t even quite believe you are here, much less figure out why.”
He smiles. He has the most even white teeth I have ever seen, stark against the darkness of his skin. I realize that up close, he is younger than I expected. “I have come to tell you that you are not alone.”
Confused, I tilt my head. “That’s very kind, but I already have a pastor—”
“But your community is much bigger than just your church. My sister, this is not the first time our people have been targeted. We may not have the power yet, but what we have is each other.”
My mouth rounds as I start to put the pieces together. It’s like Adisa said: my case is just another apple box for him to stand on, to get noticed. “It’s very kind of you to come here, but I don’t think my story is one that would be particularly interesting to you.”
“On the contrary. May I be so bold as to ask you a question? When you were singled out and asked to not interfere with the care of a white baby, did any of your colleagues come to your defense?”
I think about Corinne, squirming when I complained about Marie’s unjust directive, and then defending Carla Luongo. “My friend knew I was upset.”
“Did she go to bat for you? Would she risk her job for you?”
“I would hardly have asked her to do that,” I say, getting annoyed.
“What color skin does your colleague have?” Wallace asks bluntly.
“The fact that I’m Black was never an issue in my relationship with my colleagues.”
“Not until they needed a scapegoat. What I am trying to say, Ruth—may I call you that?—is that we stand with you. Your Black brothers and sisters will go to bat for you. They will risk their jobs for you. They will march on your behalf and they will create a roar that cannot be ignored.”
I stand up. “Thank you for your…interest in my case. But this is something that I’d have to discuss with my lawyer, and no matter what—”
“What color skin does your lawyer have?” Wallace interrupts.
“What difference does it make?” I challenge. “How can you ever expect to be treated well by white people if you’re constantly picking them over for flaws?”
He smiles, as if he’s heard this before. “You’ve heard of Trayvon Martin, I assume?”
Of course I have. The boy’s death had hit me hard. Not just because he was about Edison’s age but because, like my son, he was an honor student who had been doing nothing wrong, except being Black.
“Do you know that during that trial, the judge—the white judge—banned the term racial profiling from being used in the courtroom?” Wallace says. “She wanted to make sure that the jury knew the case was not about race, but about murder.”
His words punch through me, arrows. They are almost verbatim what Kennedy told me about my own case.
“Trayvon was a good kid, a smart boy. You are a respected nurse. The reason that judge didn’t want to bring up race—the same reason your lawyer is skirting it like it’s the plague—is because Black people like you and Trayvon are supposed to be the exceptions. You are the very definition of when bad things happen to good people. Because that is the only way white gatekeepers can make excuses for their behavior.” He leans forward, his mug clasped in his hands. “But what if that’s not the truth? What if you and Trayvon aren’t the exceptions…but the rule? What if injustice is the standard?”
“All I want is to do my job, live my life, raise my boy. I don’t need your help.”
“You may not need it,” he says, “but apparently there are a lot of people out there who want to help you, just the same. I mentioned your case last week, briefly, on my show.” He shifts, reaching into the inside breast pocket of his suit and pulling out a small manila envelope. Then he stands and passes it to me. “Good luck, sister. I’ll be praying for you.”
As soon as the door closes behind him, I open the seal and dump out the contents. Inside are bills: tens, twenties, fifties. There are also dozens of checks, written out to me, from strangers. I read the addresses on them: Tulsa, Oklahoma. Chicago. South Bend. Olympia, Washington. At the bottom of the pile is Wallace Mercy’s business card.
I gather everything into the envelope, tuck it into an empty vase on a shelf in the living room, and then see it: my missing visor, resting on the cable box.
It feels like a crossroads.
I settle the visor on my head, grab my wallet and my coat, and head out the door to my shift.
I KEEP MY favorite picture of Wesley and me on the mantel of my house. We were at our wedding, and his cousin snapped it when we weren’t looking. In the photo, we are standing in the lobby of the elegant hotel where we had our reception—the rental of which was Sam Hallowell’s wedding gift to me. My arms are looped around Wesley’s neck and my head is turned. He is leaning in, his eyes closed, whispering something to me.
I have tried so, so hard to remember what my handsome husband, breathtaking in his tuxedo, was saying. I’d like to believe it was You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen or I can’t wait to start our life together. But that is the stuff of novels and movies, and in reality, I am pretty sure we were planning our escape from a roomful of well-wishers so that I could pee.
The reason I know this is because although I cannot remember the conversation that Wesley and I had when that photograph was taken, I do remember the one we had afterward. There was a line at the ladies’ room off the main lobby, and Wesley gallantly volunteered to stand guard at the men’s room so that no one would enter while I was inside. It took me a significant amount of time to maneuver my wedding gown and do my business, and when I finally made it out of the bathroom, a good ten minutes had passed. Wesley was still outside the door, my sentry, but now he was holding a valet claim ticket.
“What’s that?” I asked. We didn’t have a car then; we’d taken public transport to our own wedding.
Wesley shook his head, chuckling. “Some dude just walked up to me and asked me to bring his Mercedes around.”
We laughed and gave the ticket to the bellhop desk. We laughed, because we were in love. Because when life is full of good things, it does not seem important if an old white guy sees a Black man in a fancy hotel and naturally assumes he must work there.
AFTER A MONTH of working at McDonald’s, I begin to see the paradox between service and sanitary food preparation. Although all orders are supposed to be prepared in less than fifty seconds, most items on the menu take longer than that to cook. McNuggets and Filet-O-Fish fry for almost four minutes. Chicken Selects take six minutes, and weighing in longest in the fry vat are crispy chicken breasts. Ten-to-one meat takes thirty-nine seconds to cook; four-to-one meat takes seventy-nine seconds. The grilled chicken is actually steamed while it cooks. Apple pies bake for twelve minutes, cookies for two. And yet in spite of all this, we employees are supposed to have the customer walking out the door in ninety seconds—fifty for food prep, forty for a meaningful interaction.
The managers love me, because unlike most of the staff, I do not have to juggle class schedules with my shifts. After decades of working nights, I don’t mind coming in at 3:45 A.M. to open grill, which takes a while to heat up before we unlock the doors at 5:00. Because of my flexibility, I am usually given my favorite job—cashier. I like talking to the customers. I consider it a personal challenge to make them smile before they walk away from the counter. And after literally having women throw things at my head in the thick of labor, being berated for mayo instead of mustard really doesn’t faze me.
Most of our regulars come in the mornings. There are Marge and Walt, who wear identical yellow sweat suits and walk three miles from their house and then get matching hotcake meals with orange juice. There’s Allegria, who’s ninety-three and comes once a week in her fur coat, no matter how warm it is outside, and eats an Egg McMuffin, no meat, no cheese, no muffin. There’s Consuela, who gets four large iced coffees for all the girls at her salon.
This morning, one of the homeless folks who pepper the streets of New Haven wanders in. Sometimes my manager will give them food, if it’s about to be thrown out—like the fries that go unsold after five minutes. Sometimes they come in to warm up. Once, we had a man pee in the bathroom sink. Today, the man who enters has long, tangled hair, and a beard that reaches his belly. His stained T-shirt reads NAMASTAY IN BED, and there is dirt crusted underneath his fingernails.
“Hello,” I say. “Welcome to McDonald’s. Can I take your order?”
He stares at me, his eyes rheumy and blue. “I want a song.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“A song.” His voice escalates. “I want a song!”
My manager on duty, a tiny woman named Patsy, steps up to the counter. “Sir,” she says, “you need to move along.”
“I want a fucking song!”
Patsy flushes. “I’m calling the police.”
“No, wait.” I meet the man’s eye and start crooning Bob Marley. I used to sing “Three Little Birds” to Edison as a lullaby every night; I’ll probably remember the words till the day I die.
The man stops screaming and shuffles out the door. I paste a smile on my face so that I can greet the next customer. “Welcome to McDonald’s,” I say and find myself looking at Kennedy McQuarrie.
She is dressed in a shapeless charcoal suit, and she’s holding on to a little girl with strawberry-blond curls erupting from her scalp in a crazy tumble. “I want the pancakes with the egg sandwich,” the girl chatters.
“Well, that’s not an option,” Kennedy says firmly, and then she notices me. “Oh. Wow. Ruth. You’re…working here.”
Her words strip me naked. What did she expect me to do while she was trying to build a case? Dip into my endless savings?
“This is my daughter, Violet,” Kennedy says. “Today is a sort of treat. We, uh, don’t come to McDonald’s very often.”
“Yes we do, Mommy,” Violet pipes up, and Kennedy’s cheeks redden.
I realize she doesn’t want me to think of her as the kind of mother who would feed her kids our fast food for breakfast, no more than I want her to think of me as someone who would work at this job if I had any other choice. I realize that we both desperately want to be people we really aren’t.
It makes me a little braver.
“If I were you,” I whisper to Violet, “I’d pick the pancakes.”
She clasps her hands and smiles. “Then I want the pancakes.”
“Anything else?”
“Just a small coffee for me,” Kennedy replies. “I have yogurt at the office.”
“Mm-hmm.” I punch the screen. “That’ll be five dollars and seven cents.”
She unzips her wallet and counts out a few bills.
“So,” I ask casually. “Any news?” I say this in the same tone I might ask about the weather.
“Not yet. But that’s normal.”
Normal. Kennedy takes her daughter’s hand and steps back from the counter, in just as much of a hurry to get out of this moment as I am. I force a smile. “Don’t forget the change,” I say.
A WEEK INTO my career as a Dalton School student, I developed a stomachache. Although I didn’t have a fever, my mama let me skip school, and she took me with her to the Hallowells’. Every time I thought about stepping through the doors of the school, I got a stabbing in my gut or felt like I was going to be sick or both.
With Ms. Mina’s permission, my mother wrapped me in blankets and settled me in Mr. Hallowell’s study with saltines and ginger ale and the television to babysit me. She gave me her lucky scarf to wear, which she said was almost as good as having her with me. She checked in on me every half hour, which is why I was surprised when Mr. Hallowell himself entered. He grunted a hello, crossed to his desk, and leafed through a stack of paperwork until he found what he was looking for—a red file folder. Then he turned to me. “You contagious?”
I shook my head. “No, sir.” I mean, I didn’t think I was, anyway.
“Your mother says you’re sick to your stomach.”
I nodded.
“And it came on suddenly after you started school this week…”
Did he think I was faking? Because I wasn’t. Those pains were real.
“How was school?” he asked. “Do you like your teacher?”
“Yes, sir.” Ms. Thomas was small and pretty and hopped from the desk of one third grader to another like a starling on a summer patio. She always smiled when she said my name. Unlike my school in Harlem last year—the school my sister was still attending—this school had large windows and sunlight that spilled into the hallways; the crayons we used for art weren’t broken into nubs; the textbooks weren’t scribbled in, and had all their pages. It was like the schools we saw on television, which I had believed to be fiction, until I set foot in one.
“Hmph.” Sam Hallowell sat down next to me on the couch. “Does it feel like you’ve eaten a bad burrito? Comes and goes in waves?”
Yes.
“Mostly when you think about going to school?”
I looked right at him, wondering if he could read minds.
“I happen to know exactly what’s ailing you, Ruth, because I caught that bug once too. It was just after I took over programming at the network. I had a fancy office and everyone was falling all over each other to try to make me happy, and you know what? I felt sick as a dog.” He glanced at me. “I was sure that any minute everyone was going to look at me and realize I didn’t belong there.”
I thought of what it felt like to sit down in the beautiful wood-paneled cafeteria and be the only student with a bag lunch. I remembered how Ms. Thomas had shown us pictures of American heroes, and although everyone knew who George Washington and Elvis Presley were, I was the only person in the class who recognized Rosa Parks and that made me proud and embarrassed all at once.
“You are not an impostor,” Sam Hallowell told me. “You are not there because of luck, or because you happened to be in the right place at the right moment, or because someone like me had connections. You are there because you are you, and that is a remarkable accomplishment in itself.”
That conversation is in my thoughts as I now listen to the principal at Edison’s magnet high school tell me that my son, who will not even swat a bug, punched his best friend in the nose during their lunch period today, the first day back after Thanksgiving vacation. “Although we’re cognizant of the fact that things at home have been…a challenge, Ms. Jefferson, obviously we don’t tolerate this kind of behavior,” the principal says.
“I can assure you it won’t happen again.” All of a sudden I’m back at Dalton, feeling lesser than, like I should be grateful to be in this principal’s office.
“Believe me, I’m being lenient because I know there are extenuating circumstances. This should technically go on Edison’s permanent record, but I’m willing to waive that. Still, he’ll be suspended for the rest of the week. We have a zero tolerance policy here, and we can’t let our students go around worrying for their own safety.”
“Yes, of course,” I murmur, and I duck out of the principal’s office, humiliated. I am used to coming to this school wrapped in a virtual cloud of triumph: to watch my son receive an award for his score on a national French exam; to applaud him as he’s crowned Scholar-Athlete of the Year. But Edison is not crossing a stage with a wide smile right now, to shake the principal’s hand. He is sprawled on a bench just outside the office door, looking for all the world like he doesn’t give a damn. I want to box his ears.
He scowls when he sees me. “Why did you come here like that?”
I look down at my uniform. “Because I was in the middle of a shift when the principal’s office called me to say my son was going to be expelled.”
“Suspended…”
I round on him. “You do not get to speak right now. And you most definitely do not get to correct me.” We step out of the school, into a day that bites like the start of winter. “You want to tell me why you hit Bryce?”
“I thought I don’t get to speak.”
“Don’t you back-talk me. What were you thinking, Edison?”
Edison looks away from me. “You know someone named Tyla? You work with her.”
I picture a thin girl with bad acne. “Skinny?”
“Yeah. I’ve never talked to her before in my life. Today she came up at lunch and said she knew you from McDonald’s, and Bryce thought it was hilarious that my mother got a job there.”
“You should have ignored him,” I reply. “Bryce wouldn’t know how to do a good honest day’s work if you held a gun to his head.”
“He started talking smack about you.”
“I told you, he’s not worth the energy of paying attention.”
Edison clenches his jaw. “Bryce said, ‘Why is yo mama like a Big Mac? Because she’s full of fat and only worth a buck.’ ”
All the air rushes from my lungs. I start toward the front door of the school. “I’m going to give that principal a piece of my mind.”
My son grabs my arm. “No! Jesus, I’m already the punch line for everyone’s jokes. Don’t make it worse!” He shakes his head. “I’m so sick of this. I hate this fucking school and its fucking scholarships and its fucking fakeness.”
I don’t even tell Edison to watch his mouth. I can’t breathe.
All my life I have promised Edison that if you work hard, and do well, you will earn your place. I’ve said that we are not impostors; that what we strive for and get, we deserve. What I neglected to tell him was that at any moment, these achievements might still be yanked away.
It is amazing how you can look in a mirror your whole life and think you are seeing yourself clearly. And then one day, you peel off a filmy gray layer of hypocrisy, and you realize you’ve never truly seen yourself at all.
I am struggling to find the correct response here: to tell Edison that he was right in his actions, but that he could beat up every boy in that school and it would not make a difference in the long run. I am struggling to find a way to make him believe that in spite of this, we have to put one foot in front of the other every day and pray it will be better the next time the sun rises. That if our legacy is not entitlement, it must be hope.
Because if it’s not, then we become the shiftless, the wandering, the conquered. We become what they think we are.
EDISON AND I take the bus home in silence. As we turn the corner of our block, I tell him he’s grounded. “For how long?” he asks.
“A week,” I say.
He scowls. “This isn’t even going on my record.”
“How many times I tell you that if you want to be taken seriously, you gotta be twice as good as everyone else?”
“Or maybe I could punch more white people,” Edison says. “Principal took me pretty seriously for doing that.”
My mouth tightens. “Two weeks,” I say.
He storms away, taking the porch stairs in one leap, pushing through the front door, nearly knocking down a woman standing in front of it, holding a large cardboard box.
Kennedy.
I’m so angry about Edison’s suspension that I’ve completely forgotten we have picked this afternoon to review the State’s discovery. “Is this a bad time?” Kennedy asks delicately. “We can reschedule…”
I feel a flush rise from my collar to my cheeks. “No. This is fine—something…unexpected…came up. I’m sorry you had to hear that; my son is not usually so rude.” I hold the door open so that she can enter my house. “It gets harder when you can’t give them a swat on the behind anymore because they’re bigger than you are.”
She looks shocked, but covers it quickly with a polite smile.
As I take her coat to hang up, I glance at the couch and single armchair, the tiny kitchen, and try to see it through her eyes. “Would you like something to drink?”
“Water would be great.”
I go to the kitchen to fill a glass—it’s only steps away from her, separated by a counter—while Kennedy glances at the photographs on the mantel. Edison’s latest school photo is there, as well as one of us on the Mall in Washington, D.C., and the picture of Wesley and me on our wedding day.
She begins to unpack the box of files she lugged inside as I sit down on the couch. Edison is in his bedroom, stewing. “I’ve had a look through the discovery,” Kennedy begins, “but this is where I really need your help. It’s the baby’s chart. I can read legalese, but I’m not fluent in medical.”
I open the file, my shoulders stiffening when I turn the photocopied page of Marie’s Post-it note. “It’s all accurate—height, weight, Apgar scores, eyes and thighs—”
“What?”
“An antibiotic eye ointment and a vitamin K shot. It’s standard for newborns.”
Kennedy reaches across me and points to a number. “What’s that mean?”
“The baby’s blood sugar was low. He hadn’t nursed. The mom had gestational diabetes, so that wasn’t particularly surprising.”
“Is that your handwriting?” she asks.
“No, I wasn’t the delivery nurse. That was Lucille; I took over for her after her shift ended.” I flip the page. “This is the newborn assessment—the form I filled out. Temperature of ninety-eight point one,” I read, “nothing concerning about his hair whorls or fontanels; Accu-Chek at fifty-two—his sugar was improving. His lungs were clear. No bruising or abnormal shaping of the skull. Length nineteen point five inches, head circumference thirteen point five inches.” I shrug. “The exam was perfectly fine, except for a possible heart murmur. You can see where I noted it in the file and flagged the pediatric cardiology team.”
“What did the cardiologist say?”
“He never got a chance to diagnose it. The baby died before that.” I frown. “Where are the results of the heel stick?”
“What’s that?”
“Routine testing.”
“I’ll subpoena it,” Kennedy says absently. She starts tossing around papers and files until she finds one labeled with the seal of the medical examiner. “Ah, look at this…Cause of death: hypoglycemia leading to hypoglycemic seizure leading to respiratory arrest and cardiac arrest,” Kennedy says. “Cardiac arrest? As in: a congenital heart defect?”
She hands me the report. “Well, I was right, for what it’s worth,” I say. “The baby had a grade-one patent ductus.”
“Is that life-threatening?”
“No. It usually closes up by itself the first year of life.”
“Usually,” she repeats. “But not always.”
I shake my head, confused. “We can’t say the baby was sick if he wasn’t.”
“The defense doesn’t have the burden of proof. We can say anything—that the baby was exposed to Ebola, that a distant cousin of his died of heart disease, that he was the first kid to be born with a chromosomal abnormality inconsistent with life—we just have to lay out a trail of bread crumbs for the jury and hope they’re hungry enough to follow.”
I sift through the medical file again until I find the photocopy of the Post-it note. “We could always show them this.”
“That does not create doubt,” Kennedy says flatly. “That, in fact, makes the jury think you might have a reason for being pissed off in the first place. Let it go, Ruth. What really matters here? The pain from just a little bruise to your ego? Or the guillotine hanging over your head?”
My hand tightens on the paper, and I feel the sting of a paper cut. “It was not a little bruise to my ego.”
“Great. Then we’re in agreement. You want to win this case? Help me find a medical issue that shows the baby might still have died, even if you’d taken every single measure possible to save it.”
I almost tell her, then. I almost say that I tried to resuscitate that child. But then I would have to admit that I had lied to Kennedy in the first place, when here I stand, telling her it’s wrong to lie about a cardiac anomaly. So instead, I stick my finger in my mouth and suck at the wound. In the kitchen, I find a box of Band-Aids and carry them back to the table, wrap one around my middle finger.
This is not a case about a heart murmur. She knows it, and I know it.
I look down at my kitchen table, and run my thumbnail against the grain of the wood. “You ever make your little girl peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?”
“What?” Kennedy glances up. “Yes. Sure.”
“Edison, he was a picky eater when he was little. Sometimes he decided he didn’t want the jelly, and I’d have to try to scrape it off. But you know, you can’t ever really take the jelly off a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, once it’s there. You can still taste it.”
My lawyer is looking at me as if I’ve lost my mind.
“You told me this lawsuit isn’t about race. But that’s what started it. And it doesn’t matter if you can convince the jury I’m the reincarnation of Florence Nightingale—you can’t take away the fact that I am Black. The truth is, if I looked like you, this would not be happening to me.”
Something shutters in her eyes. “First,” Kennedy says evenly, “you might very well have been indicted no matter what race you were. Grieving parents and hospitals that are trying to keep their insurance premiums from going through the roof create a perfect recipe for finding a fall guy. Second, I am not disagreeing with you. There are definite racial overtones in this case. But in my professional opinion, bringing them up in court is more likely to hinder than to help you secure an acquittal, and I don’t think that’s a risk you should take just to make yourself feel better about a perceived slight.”
“A perceived slight,” I say. I turn the words over in my mouth, running my tongue across the sharp edges. “A perceived slight.” I lift my chin and stare at Kennedy. “What do you think about being white?”
She shakes her head, her face blank. “I don’t think about being white. I told you the first time we sat down—I don’t see color.”
“Not all of us have that privilege.” I reach for the Band-Aids and shake them across all her charts and folders and files. “Flesh color,” I read on the box. “Tell me, which one of these is flesh color? My flesh color?”
Two bright spots bloom on Kennedy’s cheeks. “You can’t blame me for that.”
“Can’t I?”
She straightens her spine. “I am not a racist, Ruth. And I understand that you’re upset, but it’s a little unfair of you to take it out on me, when I’m just trying to do my best—my professional best—to help you. For God’s sake, if I’m walking down a street and a Black man is coming toward me and I realize I’m going the wrong way, I keep going the wrong direction instead of turning around so he won’t automatically think I’m afraid of him.”
“That’s overcompensating, and that’s just as bad,” I say. “You say you don’t see color…but that’s all you see. You’re so hyperaware of it, and of trying to look like you aren’t prejudiced, you can’t even understand that when you say race doesn’t matter all I hear is you dismissing what I’ve felt, what I’ve lived, what it’s like to be put down because of the color of my skin.”
I don’t know which one of us is more surprised by my outburst. Kennedy, for being confronted by a client she thought was grateful to bask in the glow of her professional advice, or I, for letting loose a beast that must have been hiding inside me all these years. It had been lurking, just waiting for something to shake my unshakable optimism, and free it.
Tight-lipped, Kennedy nods. “You’re right. I don’t know what it’s like to be Black. But I do know what it’s like to be in a courtroom. If you bring up race in court, you will lose. Juries like clarity. They like being able to say, Because A, therefore B. Sprinkle racism over that, and everything gets cloudy.” She starts gathering up her files and reports, jamming them back in her briefcase. “I’m not trying to make it seem like your feelings don’t matter to me, or that I don’t believe racism is real. I’m just trying to get you acquitted.”
Doubt is like frostbite, shivering at the edges of my mind.
“Maybe we both need to cool down,” Kennedy says diplomatically. She gets to her feet and walks to the door. “I promise you, Ruth. We can win this case, without bringing any of that up.”
After the door closes behind her, I sit, my hands folded in my lap. How, I think, is that winning?
I pick at the edge of the Band-Aid on my finger. Then I walk to the vase on the shelf near the television. I pull out the manila envelope and rummage through the checks until I find what I’m looking for.
Wallace Mercy’s business card.