“He writes when he can. Calls now and then when he can find a pay phone.”

“He calls you, and not me or Ruby or my sister?”

“We don’t talk very long. It’s expensive. Mostly he writes.”

“He writes you letters and he sends us postcards? We, all of us, we say his name in church every Sunday. ‘O Lord, bless and protect Terrence Dexter while he is braving hostile forces there in the Cradle of the Confederacy,’ and we ain’t heard his voice? I call that shameful. Really. Shameful. He oughta know you’re no good for him, Miss Granville.”

“Please, Coralee, call me Roxanne.”

“I only call my friends by their first names.”

“I could be your friend. I want to be your friend. I want to be Ruby’s friend.”

“Listen to you! The great white hope come down here to bestow us with your friendship. Are we supposed to be grateful?”

“I don’t want your gratitude. I don’t want anything from you, except that you should believe me when I tell you I love him.”

“Listen, missy, I never thought I’d be happy to see anyone I love go to Alabama, but if it means Terrence not around you, well then, fine with me. You put him in danger every time you go out with him.” She lowered her voice to a hiss. “Every time you go to bed with him, you put him in danger. Every time you so much as look at him, you’re saying to the world, come and take it out on this black man! Take out all your ugliness. All your fear. You wanna be my friend? You are crazy, girl. You are the living end. Remember Emmett Till.” She ran her rag along the counter with frenzied effort.

“This is California.”

“You think that really matters?”

“Yes. I do. It’s not Alabama.”

“It’s not the pastures of heaven either, and all god’s children don’t got wings.” She flung down the check on the counter, and as I reached for it, she suddenly gripped my wrist. “If you really loved him, you’d give him up. For his own good. For his own sake.”

“I do really love him, and I can’t give him up.”

“Sooner or later, sooner or later, you and he, you’re gonna be somewhere where some cracker just can’t stand the thought, can’t stand the sight, and they are going to kill him.”

“Then let him leave me.”

“He might just do that.” She released my wrist.

I paid for the root beer float, and I put ten dollars in the jar by the cash register that said Send Montgomery Shoes before I walked out the door.

Chapter Twenty-nine