I stopped scratching at my leg. “Uncle Clyde and Mama think Washington might be a fine destination for us, too.” I tipped my head to the left and squinted at him through a glare of sunlight winking through the leaves of the cherry trees across the street. “Would you be upset if we followed you up there?”
He snorted and leaned back. “Not at all. I don’t know a soul up in Washington.”
“You sure you’d be all right seeing me again?”
“Of course I’m sure. I’ll take you to jazz clubs on Jackson Street.”
I grinned. “Is that the place to be?”
“That’s what your stepfather claimed, anyway. He said the area’s interracial. Tolerant.”
“Really?”
He nodded and swiveled toward me in his half of the seat. He picked at a scratch at the top of the upholstery, below his right thumb. “Are you taking Fleur up there, too?”
“I don’t know. She’s worried about upsetting her mother and Laurence if she comes with us.”
“Tell her to just head up there for the rest of the summer. Get her out of Elston while everything’s still settling down here. If she likes Washington and her mother’s happy to have her safe with you, maybe it could become a permanent arrangement.”
“That’s a good idea.” I gave a small nod. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Give it a try.”
“I will.”
Across the street, on top of the barbershop, a man crouched on the roof and hammered loose boards into place. A car drove past us, another black Model T, but I didn’t recognize its occupants—a couple, young and white and handsome.
I cocked my head at Joe, and he lifted his chin and looked me in the eye. For a moment, neither of us said a word, and I nearly found myself asking, What are we, Joe? What do we mean to each other? Why did our paths end up crossing?
“I forgive you,” I said instead. “I know in the woods, when I was hurrying you to get dressed, I said I didn’t. But I do.”
He stiffened his jaw and gulped with a swallow I was able to hear. With a voice that came out as a sigh of relief, he breathed the words “Thank you.”
I laid the palm of my left hand on the leatherette seat between us. The man across the street hammered away, and another car whooshed by, whizzing a hot gust of air past my face.
“You swear you’ll take me to jazz clubs?” I asked.
“I swear.” He spread his hand over mine. “We’ll have a rollicking good time.”
“That would . . .” My voice caught in my throat. “That would be the bee’s knees.”
We both snickered at my use of goofy modern slang, and then Joe slid across the seat and wrapped both his arms around me. I pressed my cheek against his shoulder and closed my eyes, and we sat like that in his Model T for a good long while, out in the open where anyone who hated us could have seen us, but we just didn’t care.
I breathed in the clean scent of his shirt, and he cupped a hand around the back of my head, and I relived it all—our plotting in the woods, our escape through the darkening trees, the encounter with the Wittens, the Klan, the cross, the torches, the noose. He squeezed me close against him, nestling his face in the crook of my neck, and I passed through all that darkness and came out to a place warm and safe and bright with sunlight. A place in which I sat in a car with a friend, with the sun shining down on my head and loving arms clasped around me.
JOE DROVE US PAST THAT FALLEN OAK AGAIN AND steered us through the sites of both his accident with Daddy and mine with Sheriff Rink. We didn’t say one word to each other; we just blasted through the ghosts of the wreckage.
He and Uncle Clyde helped carry me back into the house and parked me on the sofa with my half-drawn pencil sketch still waiting for me.
Joe leaned down and kissed the top of my head. “I’ll see you in Seattle.”
I grabbed his hand. “Stay true to yourself, Joe. Always. No matter what happens. Please, promise me that.”
He opened his mouth, as though about to say something in response, but then he nodded and stood upright.
He left our house, and an empty hollow spread throughout my chest, even though, deep down, I knew I’d see him again. Our tale did not end in tragedy.
TWO WEEKS LATER, MAMA AND UNCLE CLYDE PACKED as many of our belongings as possible in the Buick, and we locked up Mama’s family’s beautiful yellow house. Uncle Clyde would be back in less than a week to arrange for the transportation of the furniture, as well as to try to rent out the place so we wouldn’t need to sell it just yet—in case the laws changed and the Klan died down in the near future. No burning crosses sprang up in our yard, and no one bothered us in the middle of the night, but at church we heard rumors of continued Klan congregations.