Chapter 16
The heat was already in the kitchen by seven.
It pressed against the screen door and out across the little back porch and the patch of yard and the tomato plants Lucas had put in back in May and talked to every morning like they were employees.
Late August in Cabbagetown meant the air never cooled, not even at night.
It just rested for a few hours and started again.
She sat at the kitchen table with her coffee and her notes for the welcome. Forty students. Forty names. She had every one of them memorized, and she was reading them over one more time anyway, because she was nervous, and reading names was what she did when she was nervous.
The table was small and round and scarred, from a junk store on Memorial Drive.
It had two chairs. They had found the chairs on a curb on Wylie Street in June, a matched pair of old wooden kitchen chairs with the paint half gone, and Lucas had stopped the car in the middle of the street and gotten out and put them in the back seat without saying a word.
He had sanded them himself, on the back porch, badly. She had painted them blue.
One of them wobbled. They’d decided not to fix it.
She heard him on the stairs. The house was narrow and old and every stair had its own complaint, and she knew his weight on every one of them.
He came into the kitchen in his shirtsleeves with his tie in one hand, reading something on his phone with a frown.
He crossed the whole kitchen to her before he looked up.
Then he put the phone face down on the counter and took her left hand and kissed the base of her thumb.
The scar. And, just above it, the ring. Roxanne had given it back in May, one evening on her porch, out of the zippered pocket over her heart. I said I’d keep it till you needed it. Amelia had put it on herself.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi. You look terrible.”
“I look nervous.”
“Why are you nervous? It’s my speech.”
“That’s why I’m nervous.” He held out the tie.
She stood up and put it around his neck.
He bent his head. She tied it, slowly, as she had a thousand mornings, and pulled the knot up snug and smoothed his collar down.
His hair was grayer at the temples than it had been a year ago.
She liked it. She liked that he still refused to do anything about it.
“Before you hear it from anybody else,” he said, while her hands were still at his collar. “Ray called last night. Denison’s done. We closed it.”
“Last night? Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“You were asleep with your notes on your face. I didn’t have the heart.” He smiled a little. “I’m telling you first. Before the board. Before my assistant. You’re the first person who knows.”
He did that now. Every time. Big news, small news, a bad meeting, a good one.
A thing that scared him. He came and found her and told her first, before anyone else could, even when it was nothing, even when she was half asleep.
At first it had felt strange, like being handed something she didn’t know where to put.
Now it felt like the most ordinary thing in the world. Like the tie.
“Congratulations,” she said, and kissed him.
“Thank you. Eat something that isn’t coffee.”
“You sound like Denise.”
“Denise called to tell me to tell you that.” He looked at the notes on the table. “Are you going to do the names?”
“I’m going to do the names.”
“All forty?”
“All forty,” she said. “They’re going to hear their own names said out loud by somebody who knows them. Every single one. That’s the whole speech. The rest is just talking.”
He looked at her for a moment. Then he picked up her hand again and kissed the scar again, for no reason, and went to find his shoes.
* * *
The welcome breakfast was in the fellowship hall of the old Methodist church on Carroll Street, because it was the only room in Cabbagetown big enough and cheap enough, and because the church ladies made biscuits.
By nine the hall was full. Forty students, and their parents and grandparents and little brothers and sisters, from Waycross and Macon and Albany and Dalton and Columbus.
Some of them had driven four hours in the dark to be there.
They sat in rows of folding chairs under the ceiling fans, dressed in their best, the boys in ties that didn’t fit and the girls in church dresses, looking around the plain white room like they didn’t quite believe it was real.
Tasha was at the door with name tags and a clipboard and a look of fierce joy.
Keisha was next to her, working the clipboard, because Keisha had announced in June that she was on the board now whether Amelia liked it or not.
Jenny Tran was in the fourth row with the baby on her lap, who had Amelia’s chin and was eating a biscuit with both hands.
Patrice was in the front row. Deja Williams had come down from Georgia Tech, in a Tech T-shirt and jeans, to talk to the new kids about the first semester.
She’d hugged Amelia at the door so hard she lifted her off the ground.
Marcus Hill was in the third row with his mother. He was wearing a blue tie with small lawn mowers on it. Amelia saw it from across the room and had to look away for a second.
Lucas was in the second row.
Not the first. The second, off to the side, in a folding chair between a grandmother from Valdosta and a little girl with a coloring book.
He hadn’t come as a donor. He didn’t sit on the board.
He had no seat, no say, and no reason to be there at all, except the one he’d given her that morning in the car.
I want to watch you work.
She’d laughed at him. And then she’d seen that he meant it.
* * *
Maureen came at ten to nine.
Amelia saw her in the doorway, small and silver in pale gray, holding her handbag in both hands. She looked out of place in the plain church hall the way a good piece of china looks out of place in a camp kitchen. People glanced at her. She didn’t seem to notice.
She came straight to Amelia.
It had been a slow year with Maureen. Not a warm one.
They had had lunch four times since April.
Twice it had been stiff and polite and awful.
Once Maureen had talked about Robert for an hour, about his maps and his fishing, and cried a little into her napkin, and not apologized for it.
And once, in July, she had asked Amelia a real question about the Kirby Fund and then listened to the whole answer without saying a single gracious thing.
Lucas and his mother were speaking again. Carefully. Like two people learning to walk on a leg that had been broken. He called her on Sundays now. Sometimes she called him back.
“Amelia,” Maureen said.
“Maureen. You came.”
“You invited me.” Maureen looked around the hall, at the folding chairs and the ceiling fans and the kids in their too-big ties. Then she looked back at Amelia. There was something in her face Amelia had never seen before. Something almost shy.
“Where would you like me to sit?” Maureen asked.
Amelia looked at her.
It was a small question. Seven words. It was also, she understood, the closest thing to a speech that Maureen Fletcher would ever give her.
Five Christmases of you’ll sit by me, dear.
Forty years of steering people to their chairs by the shoulder.
And now this small silver woman was standing in a church basement, holding her handbag with both hands, asking.
“Wherever you’d like,” Amelia said. “There’s no chart.”
Maureen looked around the room. Then she walked, by herself, to the back row, where Roxanne Vega was sitting alone in her work clothes with a biscuit in each hand. She sat down in the empty chair next to her.
Roxanne looked at Maureen. Maureen looked at Roxanne.
“Biscuit?” Roxanne said.
“Thank you,” said Maureen Fletcher, and took one.
* * *
Amelia stood up at the front of the room at nine o’clock and didn’t use her notes.
She told them who she was. She told them she was from outside Macon, and that her mother cleaned houses, and that she’d worked a night crew for seven years and never finished college.
She told them the Kirby Fund would be there for them.
Not just for the money. For the phone calls at two in the morning, freshman year, when everything went wrong.
She told them there was a counselor named Janelle whose whole job was them, and her number was on the back of their name tags, and she wanted them to call it.
Then she said, “I’m going to say your names now. All of you. Because I think somebody should.”
And she did.
She said all forty. She didn’t read them.
She looked at each kid while she said it.
Marcus Hill. Keyana Brooks. Daniel Reyes.
Mary Beth Sims. She watched each one hear it: the ones who sat up straight, the ones who looked at their shoes, the girl from Albany whose mother worked nights at the poultry plant, who put her hand over her mouth, a grandfather from Dalton wiping his eyes with a folded handkerchief.
She got to the end. She said the last name. The room was quiet.
In the second row, off to the side, Lucas was watching her with an expression she had seen exactly once before, on a stage at the Waverly in April. Wide open. Nothing held back.
She smiled at him. Just a little. Just for him.
Then the room clapped, and the church ladies brought out more biscuits, and Deja got up to tell the new kids that the first semester was going to be the hardest thing they’d ever done, and that they were going to be fine.
* * *
The house was four streets from the yellow shotgun house, on a short dead-end street near the old mill.
It was narrow and tall and a hundred years old, painted a gray-green that the paint store called Sage, and Roxanne called hospital hallway.
It had a front porch with a swing and a back porch with a view of the railroad tracks.
It had three small bedrooms and one bathroom and a kitchen with a window over the sink.