“You must be staying a while,” the driver said with a glance at her large suitcase.
“Three months. Summer practicum.”
“Well, you couldn’t have picked a better place. Like an Appalachian Switzerland here,” he said.
She made a show of scanning the mountains rising on either side of the town, emerald with the trees full of summer leaves. The clouds were marbled in pink and purple as the sun rose, the color of molten iron. It was a quiet Saturday morning, the main street empty of traffic, the shadows long and the shafts of sunlight between them a rosy gold. She could imagine that the soft whisper she heard in the background was from the river gorges on either side of the peninsula.
“It does look nice,” she said and tipped him with a five dollar bill.
He seemed a bit surprised at the gesture, tipping his hat and saying, “God bless you, young lady.”
She smiled and he turned to help other passengers with their bags. Once she had tapped her code into her phone, she entered the address of the William Bridgewater Medical-Dental Building. While the phone calculated her route, Kenia watched the mother in the NC State sweatshirt, her son Colton, and her family—her mother with the fluorescent bifocals, her father in a Pittsburg Steelers jacket—cross the street to a diner with the name “Selah Spoon” in its window, advertising itself as home of “Selah’s Famous Flying Mountain Biscuit.”
Mountain of calories, she thought, glancing back at her phone. She was pleasantly surprised that the Med-Dent center was within walking distance, the blue path leading her east two blocks then one block south. She pulled up the handle on the suitcase, tilted the bag, and started pulling.
The sidewalk was cracked and uneven, and she had not made it more than a few feet before her arm was burning from yanking the wheels over places where the concrete had risen like fault lines, pushed up from the pressure of tree roots. She thought back to her Injury Prevention class, imaging how hard the sidewalk would be to negotiate for the elderly or someone with a physical handicap. She had made a similar observation while in an older section of Raleigh with her brother once.
“Man, if Public Health doesn’t make you a scold,” he had said.
She smiled at the thought of Chiazam just as she stumbled, the wheels catching on another slab. It would have been easier to just pull the suitcase through the street—there was barely any traffic—but she did not want to stand out any more than she already did. She could just imagine people pointing her out and concluding that “Blacks just did not follow rules as simple as staying on the sidewalk and not walking in the street. . . .”
A bait, tackle, and hunting shop came up on her right. A number of old men in caps, with big bellies and shirts with more plaid patterns, talked at the counter over cups of coffee. No one looked like they were actually buying anything. The middle-aged man behind the register wearing a blue vest with pouches all along the front had his hands tucked into his jean pockets as he listened.
The next storefront was a rustic little shop, not yet opened, that sold “Treasures of the Blue Ridge Mountains,” including homespun blankets, beeswax candles, lumpy sweaters, and wood carvings. Next was an insurance office—also not yet opened. She rolled her suitcase under a marquee advertising a movie she knew to have come out six months before. The coming attraction had long since arrived and moved on from theaters in D.C. Despite the film choices, the theater had a 1950’s charm with an old-fashioned ticket window. She was sure the haze of nostalgia helped patrons see beyond the cracking paint, the door handles worn smooth from decades of use, and the duct tape on the cracking vinyl chair in the ticket window.
She turned the corner, passing a convenience store, the interior lit by fluorescent tubes that had all the warmth of a morgue. The young man behind the counter looked Indian, his attention focused on his phone while a flat screen behind the counter was playing a football match beamed from some other continent in another time zone, the sky beyond the stadium lights dark. The window advertised e-cigarettes, chewing tobacco, lottery tickets, and she even noted more synthetic urine kits.
She rolled on, her heart beating a bit harder than it would have without the suitcase. She felt warm, but her destination was close. A car was pulling out of the parking lot ahead that she imagined was adjacent to the Med-Dent building. Before she reached it, however, the storefronts receded, and she passed a lot with a Catholic Church: St. Anthony’s. It was a simple grey stone affair, with a bell tower and a sign with removable lettering announcing Sunday Mass at 5 p.m. Saturday, 9, 10:30, and 12:00 Sunday (Noon Mass in Spanish). Confession was Saturdays at 3 p.m.
The sidewalk in front of St. Anthony’s and leading to the Med-Dent building was thankfully even and unbroken. The Med-Dent building itself was squat, beige, and one story, spreading out in a functional manner with narrow windows and anemic-looking bushes along its sides. The tray for cigarette disposal was full with ground-out butts stained with tar and nicotine. Fortunately there was a handicap ramp which she dragged her suitcase up. An intercom for after-hours stared her in the face, but she found the doors unlocked. She swung them wide and entered at a rush, before the doors could close on the bag.
The lobby was like any other medical office, a receptionist in the window—a middle-aged white woman with her hair dyed red, wearing a denim top.
“How can I help you?” she asked.
“I’m here to see Jolene Lewis.”
“You must be her summer intern.”
“I am,” she said, relieved that she was expected. The woman looked down at a note on her desk behind the window, her brow furrowed, the corners of her mouth bending downward in a frown. Kenia knew the signs and what was coming.
“Ken-eee-aaa?”
“Kenia, sounds just like the country of Kenya,” Kenia said.
“The country? Huh, that is . . . different.”
Kenia felt the strain in her own face as she tried to smile. “It’s Nigerian.”
“Oh,” the woman said, brightening. “Is that in the Caribbean?”
“West Africa.”
“Oh, Africa. Are you from there? Your English is so good.”
“My father was from Nigeria . . . I’m from North Carolina,” she answered, now eager to move on. “Is Ms. Lewis’ office left or right?”
“Just down that hall there. Take the first right. The door will be on the left. It’s the office of Public Health; you can’t miss it,” the receptionist said, sitting back with a self-congratulatory air that Kenia suspected was not just from doing her job, but having done her job in a helpful way to a black person.
Another opportunity for a white woman to burnish her color blind credentials, she thought, resisting the urge to roll her eyes.
Kenia found the office door open, a carpeted waiting room on the other side, and another receptionist, this one a younger woman closer to Kenia’s age.
“Good morning, I am Kenia Dezy, here to see Ms. Lewis.”
“Oh, our intern. I’m Thea, nice to meet you,” the woman said. She was in scrubs and had wavy brown hair and blue eyes. She was light on the makeup but wore lip gloss. Both ears were pierced, one with multiple rings that climbed up the side and to the ridge on the top. Her badge read Licensed Nurse, and as Kenia moved closer, she could see a place where the piercing in her nose had closed. “Want any coffee, tea?”
Kenia considered the drip coffee maker and the pot of black fluid beneath it. Powdered creamer and packets of sugar sat in the adjacent tray.
“No thanks.”
She sat down, realizing she was tired and now sweaty from hauling the suitcase. She had not showered, had slept poorly on the night bus, and felt a bit more disheveled than she would have liked to when meeting her new boss for the first time. Her thoughts were a little blurry, and she was eager to get settled in her accommodations. Dr. Quientela had told her not to expect much, but at this point, as long as there was a bed, she would be happy.
Kenia had been staring at the poster on the wall for some time before she focused her eyes and read it. It listed numbers for suicide hotlines alongside numbers to call in case of an opioid overdose. On the bulletin board was a sheet of loose leaf with the first names and initials of the last of people willing to be Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous sponsors, followed by their phone numbers. Kenia turned her attention to the coffee table in the center of the room. Among the dated magazines was a stand with flyers on meeting times and brochures on AA and NA, healthy eating, exercise and meditation, how to detect and live with diabetes, and flyers on what to expect when taking anti-depressants, blood pressure medications, flu shots, and birth control.
A woman entered wearing a McDonald’s uniform and offered a sheepish smile before stepping up to the window where Thea waited.
“Here for a drug screening,” the woman said.
“Okay. Be right with you,” Thea said.
The woman sat down across from Kenia. Her name tag read: Janice. It was hard to guess her age: late thirties, forties? Her hair, currently pulled back into a bun, was graying in places, and her face lined with wrinkles that creased and folded while she looked around, elbows propped on her knees, legs bouncing.
“Twenty-one months clean, but I still get nervous at these things,” she said, her eyes darting from the floor and catching Kenia staring.
Kenia was not sure how to respond. Janice eyed the suitcase.
“Rehab or shelter?”
“Sorry?”
“You going to rehab or a DV shelter?”
“Oh, uh, neither. I’m here for a summer internship.”
Janice nodded a bit too vigorously. “I should have known. You don’t look like a junky or like you just got beat up.”
Kenia was not sure if she was supposed to thank her for what might have been a compliment.
“Twenty-one months, that’s great.”
“Yeah, well, I got tired of hating myself, you know? Six times in rehab. I had a stint of five-and-a-half years clean before I relapsed.” She shook her head at, what Kenia supposed, were regrets. “One day at a time and trying to do the next right thing and all that now.”
Kenia nodded, now a bit too eagerly herself. “Yeah, I guess so.”
She felt some relief when Thea called her back to meet Ms. Lewis. “Second door on the right. Janice, you can follow me to the examination room.”
“Hope you like Selah,” Janice said. “Nice meeting you.”