“Shh shh shh,” Alix said to Briar for maybe the hundredth time that week. She turned to Peter and said, “I’m gonna try Emira.” Peter nodded with his phone to his ear.
And when Emira arrived fifteen minutes later in a tiny faux-leather skirt and strappy heels that she walked remarkably well in, Alix handed Briar’s little wrist toward her thinking, Wait a second, who is this person? Oh God . . . does she know what Peter said? All at once, it was somehow much worse to think of Emira knowing what Peter had said, rather than the hopeful first female president of the United States.
As Peter gave two policemen a statement, Alix scooped up the glass with a hand towel in the glaring light from the chandelier. In between long, sad strokes, she told herself to wake the fuck up. To write this book. To live in Philadelphia. To get to know Emira Tucker.
Three
There’s a town in Maryland called Sewell Bridge, where 6.5 percent of the population (5,850 people) are hearing impaired. This is the town where Emira Tucker was born. Emira had perfect hearing, the same as her parents and younger siblings, but the Tucker family had a proclivity toward craftsmanship that was so dogged that it leaned into religious territory, and Sewell Bridge served this philosophy well. The Tucker family worked with their hands.
Mr. Tucker owned a bee store with a long rooftop where the buzzing beehives were often kept. Despite hiring several deaf employees over the years, he didn’t waste any time training his fingers to do anything that wasn’t related to bees. Mrs. Tucker bound books in a shaded screened room attached to the front of the Tucker home. She made baby albums, wedding books, and Holy Bible restorations, and her worktable was consistently covered in leather swatches, needles, bone folders, and closures.
Twenty-one-year-old Alfie Tucker won second place in the National Latte Art Competition in 2013. He was invited to serve as an apprentice at a roasterie in Austin, Texas, where he trained other baristas, wearing an apron made by his mother. And nineteen-year-old Justyne Tucker sewed. She had an active Etsy shop where she took orders for Halloween costumes and flower girl attire. Upon graduating from high school, Justyne was hired by a community college to create the costumes for upcoming productions of Our Town and Once on This Island.
Because the interests of her family members had come so naturally to them, and because university seemed like an acceptable place to wait for her hands to find themselves, Emira became the first person in her family to attend a four-year college. It was Temple University where she met Zara (in line to take her student ID photo), where she got drunk for the first time (she threw up into the side pocket of her purse), and where she purchased her first weave from the funds she saved working in the library in between classes (long and black and wavy and big).
Emira tried to make her hands find formal sign language at Temple, but it was surprisingly difficult to unlearn the conversational slang she grew up with back in Sewell Bridge. Emira also tried transcription, which seemed like a career path and narrative that made sense. In her senior year, Emira typed lecture notes for two deaf students for thirteen dollars per class. This was more or less the reason she ended her five years at Temple with a major in English. Emira didn’t mind reading or writing papers, but this was also mostly the problem. Emira didn’t love doing anything, but she didn’t terribly mind doing anything either.
After graduation, Emira went home for the summer and desperately missed Philadelphia. She returned with a stern suggestion from her father: to find something and to stick with it. So Emira enrolled in transcription school, and she absolutely hated it. She wasn’t allowed to cross her legs. Memorizing medical terminology was insufferable. And when a key on her steno machine broke, instead of fixing it (which would have cost hundreds of dollars), Emira gave it up completely and applied to a part-time job she found on Craigslist. In a small office on the sixth floor of a high-rise building, in a large cubicled room labeled Green Party Philadelphia, a white woman in a T-shirt and jeans named Beverly asked Emira if she could really type 125 words per minute. “I can,” Emira said, “as long as you don’t mind if I cross my legs.” In a tiny corner with squishy headphones, on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12 to 5 p.m., Emira transcribed text from speeches and meetings. When things got slow, Beverly asked her to cover the phones.
Temple University had been kind to keep Emira as an on-call transcriber for the two years following her graduation, but they wanted to keep entry-level employment open to current students, and gave her fair warning that she’d have to move on by summer. Emira hadn’t told her parents about her departure from transcription school. She wanted to be able to replace it with something, rather than a passionless negative space. In a quiet panic, Emira changed her availability on SitterTown.com to Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and two days later, she met Alix Chamberlain.
Briar was a welcome break from Emira’s constant concern of what to do with her hands and the rest of her life. Briar asked questions like, “Why can’t I smell that?” or, “Where is that squirrel’s mama?” or, “How come we don’t know that lady?” Once, after Briar tried zucchini for the first time, Emira stood in front of her high chair and asked the toddler if she liked it. Briar chewed with her mouth open and looked all over the room as she articulated her response. “Mira? How, how . . . because—how do you know when you like it? Who says when you like it?” Emira was fairly certain that the caregiver-approved answer was something like, You’ll figure it out, or, It’ll make sense when you’re older. But Emira wiped the toddler’s chin and said, “That’s a really good question. We should ask your mom.” She honestly meant it. Emira wished that someone would tell her what she liked doing best. The number of things she could ask her own mother were shrinking at an alarming rate.
Emira hadn’t told her parents that she was babysitting and typing for a living, which meant she couldn’t tell them about the night at Market Depot. Not that they would have any insights she hadn’t heard before, but it would have been nice to safely share her frustrations. In the fourth grade, a white classmate had marched to Emira’s lunch table and asked her if she was a coon (upon hearing this, her mother had promptly picked up the phone while asking Emira, “What’s his name?”). Emira was once followed by sales associates in Brooks Brothers while she shopped for a Father’s Day gift (her mother had said, “They ain’t got nothin’ better to do?”). And once, after a bikini wax was completed, Emira was told that because she had “ethnic texture,” the total came to forty dollars instead of the advertised thirty-five (to this, Emira’s mother had responded, “Back up, you got what waxed?”). It would have been nice to talk to her parents about the night at Market Depot because it was honestly the biggest thing to happen to Emira in a while, and it involved her favorite little person. Emira knew that she should have been mostly disturbed by the blatant bigotry of the altercation. But more than the racial bias, the night at Market Depot came back to her with a nauseating surge and a resounding declaration that hissed, You don’t have a real job.