Small Great Things (28 page)

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.

E
DISON 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.”