Till You Hear From Me: A Novel (16 page)

“H
OW DOES SHE LOOK TO YOU?” THE
R
EV SAID WHEN THE BREAKFAST
gathering was over and he and Mr. Eddie were back in the Lincoln, headed for Athens.

Mr. Eddie shrugged and set the cruise control on sixty-five. “She looks great. A little tired, maybe, but she just helped elect a president. She’s supposed to look a little worse for wear.”

“She’s too thin.”

“Well, you know a lot of young women these days prefer travelin’ light.”

“I’m not talking about how much luggage she brought. I’m talking about her health. She looked worried.”

“Listen to yourself! All you do is worry. The girl is fine. She looks fine. She sounds fine. She’s here to spend some time with you before she moves into the White House. She’s probably just a little preoccupied. Why don’t you relax?”

“Why don’t you slow down? You’re going to get us a speeding ticket.”

“Have I ever once gotten a speeding ticket?”

“There’s always a first time.”

Mr. Eddie looked at the Rev and kept his voice neutral. “Why don’t you just lean back and gather your thoughts?”

“My thoughts
stay
gathered,” the Rev said. “I don’t have to do any special gathering.”

“Good, then how about some music?”

Mr. Eddie liked blues, and Albert King’s voice filled the car with a tale of unmatched, unmitigated woe.

“Now,
that
is a Negro with some bad luck,” Mr. Eddie said, falling in behind a cream-colored El Dorado with Florida vanity tags that said:
4UEthel
.

“What’s Ida B got to be preoccupied about?” The Rev turned down the music.

“Every human bein’ has got a right to be preoccupied when they want to,” Mr. Eddie said. “She’s a grown woman, after all.”

The Rev, like many fathers before him, knew this to be a fact, but he didn’t have to like it. “It’s all my fault.”

Eddie glanced over at his friend. “What is? That’s she’s a grown woman? How’s that got anything to do with you? Time passes.”

“That she might not get that job at the White House.”

“I thought Iona said she already got it.”

“That’s exactly what Iona said, but from what Ida B told me last night, your president is doing some more fancy backtracking.”

“Did Ida B use the words ‘fancy backtracking’?”

“That’s not the point.”

“What exactly did she say?”

“She said they are still going through the vetting process and
she ought to know something in a couple of weeks, but I can read between the lines.”

“That doesn’t sound like backtracking to me,” Mr. Eddie said. “It sounds like being thorough.”

The Rev snorted. “Thorough? She’s got no kids, no household employees, no back taxes. It doesn’t have anything to do with Ida B. It’s about
me
.”

“You still worryin’ about that Jeremiah Wright business?”

“I’m not
worried
about it. I’m
conscious
of it. I know how vindictive these Chicago Negroes can be.”

“You think they’re not going to give Ida B a job because you’re her father?”

“It’s not outside the realm of possibility.”

Mr. Eddie passed a truck with a camel painted on the side, running so fast its big pink tongue was hanging out and trailing behind it and the words “Humpin’ to please!”

“I can’t argue that, Rev,” he said, calmly, “but I will say that if they didn’t trust you, why would they have asked for your assistance in a matter that we know means a whole lot to them?”

The Rev considered the question, but unable to still his worried mind, he changed horses in midstream.

“You don’t think they sent Ida B here to keep an eye on me, do you?”

Mr. Eddie just grinned and turned up the music. “Shoot, man, they already got
me
. How many eyes you need on you at one time anyway?”

EIGHTEEN

I
T WAS ONLY SEVEN THIRTY AND OUR STREET WAS STILL QUIET WHEN
I stepped outside to take a look at the old neighborhood, so I turned toward West End’s main commercial drag, where the day had already officially begun. I grew up here and even with all the changes, the things that defined this neighborhood for me are still intact. The five colleges of the Atlanta University Center anchoring things at one end and the Wren’s Nest, Victorian Home of Joel Chandler Harris of Brer Rabbit fame, holding down the other. In between, the churches, from St. Anthony of Padua to the Shrine of the Black Madonna, the bookstore, the park, the tattoo parlor next to the braid salon.

There was Watkins Funeral Home; the twenty-four-hour beauty salon; the flower shop that stays open until midnight; the gardens every couple of hundred feet; Miss Iona’s house; Mr. Eddie’s backyard; and all those bright blue front doors that had sprouted after I left. Aretha had painted them because she had read that
turquoise on the front door was supposed to ward off all manner of evil spirits. Maybe I’ll see if I can get some of that paint to take back to D.C. with me.

I turned off Peeples Street and onto Abernathy on my way to the West End News, hoping to score a
Washington Post
and maybe a cappuccino. I knew I’d already had two cups of coffee, but there are worse ways to die than an overdose of caffeine. I remembered in the pre-Blue Hamilton days when the West End News was a dingy little storefront that sold a few newspapers, but specialized in dream books for lottery plays and porno magazines so foul that patrons had to go into little cubicles to make their selections. I went in there once as a young girl looking for a copy of
Jet
magazine because there was a picture of my father in it. I remember the heads of the men in the little penlike enclosures all swiveled from whatever giant breasts or welcoming vaginas they had been contemplating for purchase, to see me suddenly standing in their midst. The man behind the counter handed me the
Jet
and showed me the door.

When Blue rescued the neighborhood, one of the first things he did was buy the place, gut it, and turn it into a real newsstand and coffee shop, featuring over one hundred international publications and a gleaming antique cappuccino machine that looked like a prop from
The Godfather
. The place was always crowded in the morning with equal numbers of students on their way to class and commuters on their way to the MARTA rapid rail station a block away. When I stepped inside, careful not to let in any cold air, there were two young women ahead of me, and one man standing at the counter, clutching a five-dollar bill and waiting patiently for his order.

I took my place in line and inhaled deeply. The place smelled great. Coffee and newspapers, my two drugs of choice. When it comes to newspapers, I’m old-fashioned. I read lots of stuff online, but I like to hold my newspapers in my hand. I picked up
The Washington Post
from a rack beside the door and reached for
The New York
Times
. That’s when I saw Flora waving from a tiny corner table. I waved back. She grabbed her coat off the back of the chair and headed toward me.

The West End Grower’s Association was two doors down the street and I had planned to stop in before I went home. That’s the other thing about this neighborhood. You don’t have to look for anybody. All you have to do is step out the front door.

“You’re up early,” Flora said.

“The Rev and Mr. Eddie hit the ground running before the sun came up,” I said. “They didn’t come by your house, too, did they?”

She laughed. The large man behind the counter had finished the cappuccino order and was now pouring two cups of the house blend for the two girls in front of me, who were giggling over a text message and pushing a neatly folded dollar bill into the tip jar.

“If they did, they missed me,” she said.

“Actually, I was planning to stop by your place a little later.”

“I was hoping you would say that,” she said, sounding genuinely pleased as the texting twins got their coffee and stepped aside, rolling their eyes at each other over the response they’d just received. “Hey, again, Henry!”

“You need one to go?”

“I do,” I told Henry, deciding to forgo the cappuccino for a faster option. “How about a large coffee, cream and sugar?”

Flora held up her hand. “I’ve had my limit.”

“Just the coffee and the papers,” I said. “Oh! And let me get a
Constitution
and a
Sentinel
.”

She smiled. “You and Hank and your newspapers.”

“I’m addicted,” I said, paying for the order and leaving a tip in the jar. “But I’m trying to cut back.”

“You all need an organization,” she said, walking beside me to her headquarters, “like alcoholics or dope fiends.
Hi, I’m Ida Dunbar. I’m a news junkie
.”

I liked Flora. She took everything seriously except herself. We had only met the night before, but she already felt like an old friend.

The West End Grower’s Association boasted the most colorful front window on the block. It featured a brightly painted scene of a community garden filled with impossibly red tomatoes, dark purple eggplants, a few tall stalks of pale yellow sweet corn, and double wide rows of dark green collards. In the center of the garden stood a man and a woman, two little kids, and a grandfatherly guy who looked a little like Mr. Eddie to me. In big red letters painted in sort of a semicircle around the garden were the words “West End Grower’s Association, Est. 2000.”

“I didn’t know you’d been here ten years,” I said, following her into the storefront and looking around while she flipped on the lights.

“Well, we’ve
existed
for almost ten years,” she said, “but we’ve only been in this spot since 2004. Before that, I just sort of ran it out of our apartment. I think you were already away at school then. When did you move to D.C.?”

“Well, I went to Smith first, in Northampton. That was in ninety-two. After that, I went to graduate school and then I started doing some consulting and working with campaigns. It’s actually been seventeen, eighteen years since I lived here.”

The number startled me. Eighteen years?
How was that possible?

“All right,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me about these famous gardens?”

NINETEEN