Kenia assumed a self-assured pose as she went down the hall, gathering what poise she could, her lessons in etiquette—formal and informal—coming back to her. Her mother’s voice reminded her to present herself in a professional manner, despite having just spent the night on the bus.
I wonder how red my eyes are. I probably look like I’ve been smoking drugs more than poor Janice.
Kenia turned into the doorway into a windowless office. Ms. Lewis, the public health services director for Selah Station, was a black woman in her fifties. She sat behind her desk with two mismatched office chairs before it. Her swivel chair squeaked as she stood up and offered her hand, her skin cold, her eyes flat. She wore a boxy salmon blouse with shoulder pads and a mandarin collar buttoned up just beneath her chin. Her hair was short, cut almost like a little boy’s, which Kenia thought a shame since Ms. Lewis possessed elegant cheekbones that would have been framed nicely by shoulder-length hair.
And she would be beautiful if it were not for that scowl.
Ms. Lewis’s fingers were without rings, her ears not pierced, but a large wood cross with metallic caps on its ends bounced on her chest as she shook Kenia’s hand.
“Ms. Dezy,” she said, pronouncing it Dee-zee.
“Day-say, but you can call me Kenia.”
“Ms. Jolene; please sit down.”
Kenia noted the “Ms.” before settling into the offered chair. She swung her backpack off, setting it down in the adjacent chair. A filing cabinet sat on her left, too close, and anchored to it with a magnet was a calendar with scripture verses and a picture of a cross on a hilltop in silhouette against a caramel sunset. She noted a picture frame on the desk, as well as a second calendar, a tear-away offering a bible quote for each day of the year.
“How was your trip?” Ms. Jolene asked, her voice laced with a courtesy Kenia found distancing rather than warm.
“A bit long,” she said.
“From Raleigh?”
“Correct.”
“No flights from there to here.”
“No,” Kenia said. “Are you from here in Selah Station?”
“Yes,” she said, straightening. “Born and raised.”
“All right,” Kenia said, thinking back to the small population of African Americans her brother had mentioned from the Wikipedia entry. “Well I was lucky you were working on a Saturday and that the office is so close to the station.”
“Everything is close in Selah. At least in the town proper, that is. It might be trickier to get to some of the homes outside town. There will be more distance to cover.”
Kenia nodded. She had been wondering if she might buy a scooter of some sort. She was almost certain there would not be Uber. Again, she was glad for her braids, as they would fit beneath a helmet better than curls would have.
“Seems like a picturesque part of the country.”
“It is. It keeps the tourists passing through. We have a bit of history here in town,” Jolene said, folding her hands on the desk in front of her, her eyes glancing momentarily at her computer screen. “But we certainly have our struggles.”
“Yes, I was reading about the statistics on the ride up.”
“Whatever the rates are for rural West Virginia, they are worse here.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Things have been in decline for years. The coal processing plant has been closed since the disaster in ’53. And the pharmaceutical plant closed up and went overseas. It’s left us with little but tourism and that’s just to the bed and breakfasts, if people are here for the disaster tour of the island. But even that is not much of a draw.”
“Disaster tour?”
“Yep, one of our own, Octavian Coates, runs tours of Selah Island. You can tour the integrated-town-that-might-have-been. It keeps the history buffs interested, as well as the occasional biologists who like to visit a site that’s gone back to nature. You should do it at least once while you are here.”
“Sounds interesting.”
Ms. Jolene shifted in her seat, laying her arms on the armrests, her hands—a bit ashy—hanging off the ends. “Tell me about your project.”
Kenia leaned forward, slipping her tablet out of her bag. “Happy to. I was assigned a bit last minute, but it’s a pilot project, really a feasibility trial for a smartphone app that helps users determine costs for a healthier diet.”
She slipped her own smartphone out of her pocket, tapped the icon shaped like a paper grocery bag with a lime-green dollar sign on it and a rainbow of fruits and vegetables peeking out the top.
“It’s called Healthy-Bytes,” she said, raising her eyebrow and waiting for the play on words to register. Ms. Jolene gave no sign. Kenia pushed through. “I’m collecting qualitative data on the usability of the interface and some quantitative data on demographics and food prices.” She handed the phone across the desk to Ms. Jolene.
Ms. Jolene tapped through the menu screen, scrolled up, then down, taking just long enough to note some of the icons, designed for free by students in the graphic design classes. It wasn’t long before her eyes seemed to lose focus, and she set the phone down with two fingers, as if it was covered in germs.
“You’re skeptical,” Kenia said, recognizing Ms. Jolene’s distaste.
“Hmmm?” Jolene countered, as if she had not heard Kenia across the desk.
“I know it’s not exactly glamorous, but it’s what the National Institute for Health funded, so Dr. Quientela went with it, and well, I followed,” Kenia said, letting her hands fall into her lap.
Ms. Jolene let out another long “Hmmm,” a sneer creeping into her lip, then decided to speak her mind. “Always interesting to me, what gets funded.”
“Well, it seems like there has been a lot of focus on obesity and type 2 diabetes.”
“Nationwide, but when you do your situational analysis you will find that most of Selah Station is a food desert. Folks have to travel far if they want a banana or spinach.” She closed her eyes, mumbled something that sounded like “My Lord,” then sighed, starting over. “Can I see the list of respondents you would like to contact for an interview?”
“Certainly,” Kenia said. She had it on her tablet, but looking around the office at the beige cathode-ray computer monitor, the keyboard with the letters worn off, and listening to the sputtering sound coming from the fan in the CPU, she thought it better to go with paper. She pulled a three-ring binder from her backpack, flipped to her section on demographic information, popped open the rings, and handed the respondent list to Ms. Jolene.
She began to read the names listed. Only a moment passed before she leaned forward to pull a red pen from the cup on her desk and drew a firm line through one of them.
“Josephine Dawson, she killed herself.” She crossed off another name and another, moving down the list. “Lonnie Cooper, drank himself to death. Luther and Bonnie Evans, he shot her then shot himself.” She paused, flipped to the next page by slapping it aside, and continued to cross out names. “She died . . . she did too—overdose. . . .”
Ms. Jolene reached the last page. Just when Kenia thought she was finished, Ms. Jolene came to the last name on the list and scratched it out with a flourish and a tsk of her tongue before handing the pages back. “She committed suicide. Hung herself, livestreamed it. Video circulated on Facebook for weeks afterwards.”
Kenia reached out for the pages and slid them back into the folder, closing the rings slowly so they would not snap.
“What . . . what has been going on here?”
“Opioid drugs, alcohol. Since 1999, the mortality rate in Selah for women thirty-five to forty-four is up 170 percent.”
“That . . . that’s pushing even the worst of the trends.”
Jolene shrugged. “It depends on the region being surveyed.” She paused a beat, staring down Kenia, her voice with an edge of bitterness. “Seems like more than a nutrition app can fix, doesn’t it.”
Kenia shifted in her seat and cleared her throat. “I see you have your work cut out for you.”
“Don’t I know it? My father owned a mortuary before he retired. I grew up there helping him. He retired early. Said the business was too sad. It was not like business wasn’t good. It was. But he used to find some pleasure in ensuring folks had a sense of dignity when they passed. He made all the arrangements, wanted folks to have nothing to worry about but their own grief . . . not whether or not the hearse would show up on time or if there would be enough flowers around the casket.
“But in the last decade or so, things changed. The folks dying kept getting younger.” She shook her head, looking down at the desk, her eyes focused on something visualized in her mind. “Not enough lotion or makeup to cover up decades of damage from drugs, alcohol, and despair in a forty-year-old looking like she’s sixty.”
Kenia nodded. She had no other response.
Jolene took in her silence with a narrowing of her eyes. “It’s really the story of small town America these days. Jobs are scarce. Plans recede and reality stretches farther and farther and well, we all need a break. Whether it’s a mani-pedi, Netflix, HBO, Facebook, porn, a cigarette, a pill to ease you into sleep, a glass of wine, a puff of weed, meth, or something even stronger . . . and then you are hooked, years pass, and you don’t recognize yourself anymore.”
Kenia thought of Janice in the waiting room. She could hear her leaving now, Thea wishing her a good-day. Kenia assumed Janice had passed the screening and was genuinely happy for her. “Seems like a few are getting by,” she offered. “But it sure must seem daunting at times, even overwhelming.”
Another sneer followed before Ms. Jolene turned in her chair, opened a drawer, and pulled out a set of keys on a Wild-And-Wonderful-West-Virginia key chain. “I told Dr. Quientela I’d rent you the mother-in-law suite over my garage. It’s just about a mile and a half from here. I’ll call Harry; he’s the local cab driver. He can drive you there. You won’t want to drag all that stuff you have there.”
“Thanks.”
“And you’ll want to save Harry’s number in your phone. He’s got a monopoly on the cab business, but he doesn’t overcharge.”
“Great. That will be helpful. I have a suitcase in the waiting room as well.”
“The place looks over the Shenandoah. It’s a nice view.”
“Sounds like it.”
Jolene drew out a folder, flipped through a few pages with carbon paper between them. “Just need you to sign this lease for the summer.”
“Of course. I can pay you now with a check if you would like,” Kenia offered, remembering that her practicum stipend had registered in her bank account the week before. Out of due diligence, she scanned the pages and conditions of the agreement, trying not to take too long.
As she did, Ms. Jolene continued speaking, as if to herself. “This whole town has changed. But I am not surprised. No ma’am. When you take God and prayer out of schools, things like this happen.”
Now it was Kenia’s turn to offer a non-committal “hmmm,” trying to divide her attention between listening to her new boss and landlady-to-be and studying the legally binding contract she was about to sign.
“And now with the gays marrying, Lord Jesus, where is this country going to go.”
Kenia stopped, her pen hovering just over the line for her signature. The pause drew out into an uncomfortable silence, her eyes fixed on the point of her pen, reluctant as she was to look up. She willed gentleness into her voice to make what she said next sound like a sincere inquiry, but the resentment in her voice was impossible to disguise.
“You are not comfortable with LGBTQ folks having the right to marry?”
“Sister, it’s a matter of faith. It’s God’s word.”
Kenia clicked the pen closed and looked up, leaning back into her chair. Her back felt rigid as steel. In her fingers she could feel a faint tremble. “I think it is a matter of civil rights.”
“Does man’s law supersede God’s word?” Jolene asked, leaning forward, her eyes meeting Kenia’s. She was poised to lecture. Ready for confrontation.
“Seems to me, religious folks found all sorts of justification in those same scriptures for things like slavery.”
“Well, they say even the Devil can quote scripture to serve his needs,” Jolene said, drumming the top of her desk.
Kenia took a deep breath and exhaled giving the pages of the lease back.
“Ms. Lewis, my sister is a civil rights attorney. She represents members of the LGBTQ community in civil litigation. Last year she won the Distinguished Alumni Award from Columbia Law School for the work she has done for the trans community. She has been out since she was seventeen and is married to an incredible woman I’m privileged to call my sister-in-law. I’m proud of my sister. I’m proud of her wife. I love them both.”
And I’ll be damned if I give you a penny of my stipend, she thought.
Ms. Jolene had not reached out to take the lease back. Kenia set it down anyway, next to the daily calendar of scripture quotes.
“I’m eager to work with you to see to the needs of the community members here in Selah Station. We can serve them side by side, but I would not feel that it is appropriate for me to stay under your roof for the summer.”
Finally, Jolene Lewis nodded, took the lease, sliding it back in the folder, closing it, and placing the folder back in the drawer of her desk. Then she took the keys, dropped them from the fingers of one hand to the palm of the other, pulled opened another drawer, dropped them in with a clank, and closed it.
The room was silent but for the click of the lock on the drawer. Ms. Jolene placed her folded hands back on the center of the desk, the cross on her chest staring back at Kenia like a crosshairs.
“I understand,” Ms. Jolene said.
Kenia slipped her binder back into her bag, picked up her phone and stood up, “I guess I will see you Monday. If you’ll excuse me, I need to attend to a few things.”
“Of course. Thea will see you out.”
Outside the Med-Dent building, Kenia set her suitcase upright beside her as she searched on her phone for an Airbnb. As her pulse returned to normal, she noticed the smell of the overflowing cigarette stand, the sand almost invisible from the stained butts that poked upwards like a clutch of mushrooms on a carcass.
What the hell am I doing?
It all seemed wrong to her. She remembered one of the most impactful things Dr. Quientela had ever shared with them in class: that the most important elements to any public health campaign were not pharmaceuticals, not policy reform, nor informational pamphlets. Those things played a part, but what came first, what was most fundamental were humanization and empathy. Without those things, there could be no progress.
Which was why what she had heard from Ms. Jolene, as the director of public health services here in Selah Station, just made no sense to her.
Guess they must not have a deep talent pool to hire from here in Selah Station.
Kenia needed to get away from this building. She jammed her phone back into her pocket, yanked her suitcase behind her and began walking back to the main street. Her heart was beating hard in her chest, a lifetime of hurts and injustices she had seen visited on her sister Chinemere because of her orientation flashing through her mind. As recently as last year, Chinemere and her wife had been spit upon in the lead-up to the election. Kenia’s braids were flopping against her shoulders in an irritating way as she marched, perspiration forming on her temples and neck. She stopped, took out an elastic, and pulled her hair back.
She needed to rest when she got back to the main street. She turned the suitcase on its side, sat down on it, and checked Craigslist.
No Service.
She dropped her head down again. She took long breaths, closed her eyes, and tried to calm herself. Her head hurt. It was the lack of sleep from the overnight bus. Who knew when she would find a place to rest at this point? Maybe the church? She knew she could stay in a hotel if she needed to, but not for the whole summer. She took a few more breaths, trying to fight the pain growing behind her eyes and the tension wrapping around her skull. She tried to focus on the sound of a car passing, the voices of children playing in the park across the street, and behind it all she tried to listen for that susurration of white water and wind in the river gorges that sounded like the whisper of words.
She closed her eyes, remembering a technique her mother had taught her, that she had learned from a team of Navy Seals she had trained in emergency first aid: four by four by four. Breathe in for four seconds; hold for four seconds; breathe out for four seconds; repeat four times. Kenia felt peace returning. A few more breaths, not unlike a yoga class. A bird chirped. She had found her center again.
When she opened her eyes, the street was transformed. She had shifted from daylight to the darkness of night as abruptly as one might in a dream. She stared out, the scene before her incomprehensible.
It was the same street, the same buildings, lit by the glow of streetlamps and passing cars. It must have been a classic car convention of some kind, because all the models were vintage with heavy frames, boat-like bodies, and paint jobs in primary colors, like those of a comic book. The sidewalks were filled with young people, teenagers mostly, the girls with long swinging skirts and the boys with short haircuts. A half-dozen kids passed immediately in front of her, staring at her, perplexed. They were a mix of backgrounds, white and black. She returned their stares, wondering at their vintage 1950s clothes. One of the black girls offered a wave and a tentative, “Hi.”
“Hi,” Kenia said, self-conscious, wondering if she’d had a fainting spell, passing out only to wake up, the day passed, some sort of 1950s festival taking place in the evening hours. The group of kids passed, moving down the sidewalk towards the movie marquee, dazzling with its bulbs blinking in sequence around lettering that advertised The House of Wax, starring Vincent Price. She saw letter jackets and cardigans under the light of the theater. Was that BB King’s Three O’Clock Blues she heard playing from a passing Studebaker? She squeezed her eyes shut, seized now with a sense of vertigo. When she opened them again, it was day again, the sidewalk empty, jagged with the press of tree roots once more.
Was that a hallucination?
“Excuse me,” a voice called out from the street.
Kenia looked up to where a Dodge minivan with faux wood paneling had pulled up to the curb. The passenger side window was rolled down and framed in its place by the door was the woman—the mother in the NC State sweatshirt from the bus.
“Did someone forget to pick you up?”
“Something like that,” Kenia said.
“Where you headed?”
Kenia assessed her situation, weighing the discomfort of the street versus the disclosure of her story, and decided on the truth. “Looks like my housing for the summer just fell through.”
The mother turned to the driver, her father in the Pittsburg Steelers jacket, exchanged a few words with him, then turned back.
“Why don’t you come with us?”
The woman’s father had already stepped out and was making his way around the minivan. He offered his hand, “I’m Earl Corrigan.”
“Kenia.”
“We sat next to each other all the way up from Raleigh. I’m Sandra by the way,” Sandra said, getting out and also shaking Kenia’s hand. She was not sure what to do with the sudden rush of friendliness.
“Nice to . . . meet you.”
“Mom and Dad have a converted garage. Why don’t you crash there? I know you just came up from Raleigh and must be tired.”
“I’m really touched, but I was thinking I’d stay at a hotel.”
“That will cost you,” Earl said.
“I don’t know what my mother would say, if I imposed on strangers.” Kenia tried to force an uncomfortable laugh. “I mean, I don’t know you folks.”
“Everyone knows everyone in Selah. Who you working for?”
“Jolene Lewis at the Bridgewater Med-Dent center,” Kenia said, her inflection rising like a question.
“We know her,” Sandra’s mother was saying from the back seat of the minivan now. “Earl, look up the Med-Dent number on your phone.”
Earl pulled out his phone. “Didn’t know I had that number in here.”
His wife rolled her eyes. “You do. Thea, Jacob and Mistie’s daughter, works there.”
“Oh, all right,” Earl said, scrolling through his numbers. As his wife had said, he found the number. “Dang-nammit, here it is.” He put the phone to his ear, the surprise still plain on his face.
Sandra was poised close to her father, as if ready to take the phone in case some clarification was needed.
Kenia found the spectacle more than endearing.
“Hello Thea, Earl Corrigan here . . . Good, thanks . . . Seems like we have run into your co-worker—”
“Intern,” Kenia corrected.
“Intern. She looks like she needs a place to stay.”
Earl chuckled and held the phone out to her. “Thea wants to talk to you.”
After being rescued by the Corrigans and assured by Thea that yes, indeed, everyone in Selah knew each other, and that the Corrigans were good, God-fearing people who would not be kidnapping her and insert-any-other-terrifying-scenario-her-mother-had-warned-her-about that would have led to her dead in the gutter, chopped into pieces in a freezer, or brainwashed into a cult, Kenia had climbed into the minivan and ridden a short while into a neighborhood of early-twentieth-century Victorians, where they pulled up to a three-story home painted in soft blues, with high gables and navy shutters and trim. Earl let them out in the driveway on the side of the house. Sandra and her son, Colton, who had already introduced Kenia to his Captain America figure—in addition to the Ironman one she had rescued earlier—helped her with her bags.
The garage was a separate building, painted in periwinkle, offsetting the house without clashing. It took both her and Sandra cooperating to carry her bag up the steps to the room above. The door was unlocked. Sandra nudged it open with her foot and stepped inside. Kenia stood in the doorway flabbergasted. It was one room, but spacious, with an updated kitchenette, stovetop, and a miniature refrigerator, its motor humming. Farther in was a sofa, a desk next to the window, and at the opposite end, a full-sized bed next to a window HV/AC unit. The floor and ceiling were done in natural pine.
“This is lovely, and you are sure I can stay the night?” Kenia asked.
“Likely longer. I heard my mother on the phone with Jolene. They just finished updating this place and could use a tenant. But you can let them know in the morning. I’m sure you will want to rest now.”
“That is so generous.”
Sandra shrugged, touching Colton’s mess of curls and mussing them. “Anything for another Tar Heel, right? Just think of it as southern hospitality, transplanted north.”
“I guess so.”
“Anyway, you are here to help. Selah needs it.”
Kenia nodded, a sense of shame building in her, remembering Ms. Jolene’s skepticism at her and Healthy-Bytes. “I’ll do my best.”
Sandra winked, gathered Colton, and left her to rest.
Kenia closed the door after them, made a circuit of the room, noting that the boards squeaked beneath her feet in a pleasant, settled-in way. The bathroom was clean and also recently remodeled. She was already wondering what the Corrigans might charge for rent for the summer. She texted her mother to let her know she had arrived safely, knowing she would not respond immediately, as she would be at the clinic. She texted Chiazam, attaching a picture of the room, sat down on the bed, leaned back, and was asleep before he responded.