As I drive to Ruth’s, I think about all the reasons this is a colossal mistake. When I was starting out as public defender, I spent my salary, which didn’t even cover my groceries for the week, on my clients when I could see they needed a clean set of clothes or a hot meal. It took me a while to realize that helping my clients couldn’t extend to my bank account. Ruth seems too proud to drag me to a mall and hint that she could really use a new pair of shoes, however. I think maybe she just wants to clear the air between us.
But as we drive to the mall, all we discuss is the weather—when the rain is going to stop, if it might turn to sleet. Then we talk about where we will be spending the upcoming holidays. At Ruth’s suggestion, I park near T.J.Maxx. “So,” I say. “Are you looking for something in particular?”
She shakes her head. “I’ll know it when I see it. There are items that just scream my mama’s name, usually ones covered in sequins.” Ruth smiles. “The way she dresses for church, you’d think she was headed to a black-tie wedding. I always figured it was because she wears a uniform all week long, maybe this was her way of cutting loose.”
“Did you grow up here in Connecticut?” I ask, as we get out of the car.
“No. Harlem. I used to take the bus into Manhattan every day with my mama to work, and then get dropped off at Dalton.”
“You and your sister went to Dalton?” I ask.
“I did. Adisa wasn’t quite as…scholarly minded. It was Wesley who made me settle in Connecticut.”
“How did you two meet?”
“At a hospital,” Ruth says. “I was a nursing student, on an L and D ward, and there was a woman having a baby whose husband was in the service. She had tried and tried to contact him. She was delivering twins a month early, and she was scared, and convinced she was gonna have those babies alone. Suddenly when she was in the middle of pushing, a guy comes flying in, wearing camo. He takes one look at her and drops like a stone. Since I was just a student, I was stuck taking care of the fainter.”
“So wait,” I say. “Wesley was married to someone else when you met?”
“That’s what I assumed. When he came to, he started hitting on me, turning up the charm. I thought he was the biggest jackass I’d ever met, flirting while his wife was delivering his twins, and I told him so. Turned out they weren’t his babies. His best friend was the father, but was out training and couldn’t get furlough, so Wesley promised to take his place and help the guy’s wife till he got there.” Ruth laughs. “That’s about when I started thinking maybe he wasn’t the biggest jackass after all. We had some good years, Wesley and me.”
“When did he pass away?”
“When Edison was seven.”
I can’t imagine losing Micah; I can’t imagine raising Violet by myself. What Ruth has done with her life, I realize, is braver than anything I’ve ever done. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” Ruth sighs. “But you know, you go on, right? Because what other choice have you got?” She turns to me. “Mama taught me that, as a matter of fact. Maybe I’ll find it embroidered on a pillow.”
“In glitter,” I say, and we walk through the store doors.
Ruth tells me about Sam Hallowell, whose name rings a faint bell, and how her mother has been working as a domestic in that household for almost fifty years. She talks about Christina, who gave her her first illicit sip of brandy when she was twelve, from her father’s liquor cabinet, and who paid her way through trigonometry, buying the answers to tests off an exchange student from Beijing. She tells me, too, how Christina tried to give her money. “She sounds awful,” I admit.
Ruth considers this. “She’s not. It’s just what she knows. She never learned any other way of being.”
We move through the aisles, trading stories. She confesses that she wanted to be an anthropologist, until she studied Lucy the Australopithecus: How many women from Ethiopia do you know named Lucy? I tell her how my water broke in the middle of a trial, and the dick of a judge wouldn’t give me a continuance. She tells me about Adisa, who convinced her when she was five that the reason Ruth was so pale by comparison was because she was turning into a ghost, that she’d been born black as a berry but was fading away little by little. I tell her about the client I hid in my basement for three weeks, because she was so sure her husband was going to kill her. She tells me about a man who, in the middle of labor, told his girlfriend she needed to wax. I confess that I haven’t seen my father, who is in an institution for Alzheimer’s, in over a year, because the last time I was so sad I couldn’t shake the visit for months. Ruth admits that walking through Adisa’s neighborhood scares her.
I am starving, so I grab a box of caramel corn from a display and open it as we talk, only to find Ruth staring at me. “What are you doing?” she asks.
“Eating?” I say, my mouth full of popcorn. “Take some. It’s my treat.”
“But you haven’t paid for it yet.”
I look at her like she’s crazy. “I’m going to, obviously, when we leave. What’s the big deal?”
“I mean—”
But before she can answer, we are interrupted by an employee. “Can I help you find something?” she asks, looking directly at Ruth.