She glances up. “Nope.”
“How about ice cream?”
“Yeah, but we’re out. Delivery truck comes in the morning.”
She doesn’t seem inclined to help me, and focuses her attention on her puzzle again. “I just had a baby,” I blurt out.
“Wow,” she says flatly. “A medical miracle, in my very own checkout line.”
“Well, my wife had a baby,” I correct. “And she wants a milkshake.”
“I want a winning lottery ticket and Benedict Cumberbatch’s undying love, but I had to settle for this glamorous life instead.” She looks at me as if I’m wasting her time, as if there are a hundred people waiting in line behind me. “You want my advice? Get her candy. Everyone likes chocolate.” She reaches blindly behind her and pulls down a box of Ghirardelli squares. I flip it over, scanning the label.
“Is that all you have?”
“The Ghirardelli’s on sale.”
I flip it over and see the OU symbol—the mark that proves it’s kosher, that you’re paying the Jewish mafia a tax. I put it back on the shelf and set a pack of Skittles down on the counter instead, with two bucks. “You can keep the change,” I tell her.
—
JUST AFTER SEVEN, the door opens, and just like that I’m on full alert.
Since Davis arrived, Lucille’s been in twice—to check on Brit and the baby, and to see how he was nursing. But this—this isn’t Lucille.
“I’m Ruth,” she announces. “I’m going to be your nurse today.”
All I can think is: Over my dead body.
It takes every ounce of willpower for me to not shove her away from my wife, my son. But security is only a buzzer away, and if they throw me out of the hospital, what good does that do us? If I can’t be here to protect my family, then I’ve already lost.
So instead, I perch on the edge of the chair, every muscle in my body poised to react.
Brit grabs Davis so tightly I think he’s going to start screaming. “Isn’t he a sweetie!” the black nurse says. “What’s his name?”
My wife looks at me, a question in her eyes. She doesn’t want to have a conversation with this nurse any more than she’d have a conversation with a goat or any other animal. But like me, she’s aware that Whites have become the minority in this country and that we’re always under attack; we have to blend in.
I jerk my chin once, so infinitesimally I wonder if Brit will even see it. “His name is Davis,” she says tightly.
The nurse moves closer to us, saying something about examining Davis, and Brit recoils. “You don’t have to let go of him,” she concedes.
Her hands start moving over my son, like some kind of crazy witch doctor. She presses the stethoscope against his back and then in the space between him and Brit. She says something about Davis’s heart, and I can barely even hear it, because of the blood rushing in my own ears.
Then she picks him up.
Brit and I are so shocked that she just took our baby away—just over to the warmer for a bath, but still—that for a beat neither of us can speak.
I take a step toward her, where she’s bent over my boy, but Brit grabs the tail of my shirt. Don’t make a scene.
Am I supposed to just stand here?
Do you want her to know you’re pissed off and take it out on him?
I want Lucille back. What happened to Lucille?
I don’t know. Maybe she left.
How can she do that, when her patient is still here?
I have no idea, Turk, I don’t run this hospital.
I watch the black nurse like a hawk while she wipes Davis down and washes his hair and wraps him up in a blanket again. She puts a little electronic bracelet on his ankle—like the ones you sometimes see on prisoners who’ve been released on probation. As if he’s already being punished by the system.
I am staring so hard at the black nurse that I wouldn’t be surprised if she goes up in flames. She smiles at me, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “Clean as a whistle,” she announces. “Now, let’s see if we can get him to nurse.”
She goes to pull aside the neck of Brit’s hospital johnny, and I’m done. “Get away from her,” I say, my voice low and true as an arrow. “I want to talk to your boss.”
—
A YEAR AFTER I went to Invisible Empire camp, Raine asked me if I’d like to be part of the North American Death Squad. It was not enough to just believe what Raine believed in, about Whites being a master race. It was not enough to have read Mein Kampf three times. To be one of them, truly, I had to prove myself, and Raine promised me I’d know where and when the right moment came to pass.
One night when I was staying at my dad’s, I woke up to hear banging on my bedroom window. I wasn’t really worried about them waking up the household; my father was out at a business dinner in Boston, not due back till after midnight. As soon as I threw up the sash, Raine and two of the guys spilled inside, dressed in ninja black. Raine immediately tackled me onto the floor, forearm against my throat. “Rule number one,” he said, “don’t open the door if you don’t know who’s going to come inside.” He waited until I was seeing stars and then let me go. “Rule number two: take no prisoners.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Tonight, Turk,” he told me, “we are custodians. We are going to clean Vermont of its filth.”
I found a pair of black sweats and a screen-printed sweatshirt I wore inside out, so that it was black, too. Since I didn’t have a black knit cap, Raine let me wear his, and he pulled his hair back in a ponytail. We drove in Raine’s car, passing a bottle of Jägermeister back and forth and blasting punk through the speakers, to Dummerston.
I hadn’t heard of the Rainbow Cattle Company, but as soon as we got there, I understood what kind of place this was. There were men holding hands as they walked from the parking lot into the bar, and every time the door opened there was a flash of a brightly lit stage and a drag queen lip-synching. “Whatever you do, don’t bend down,” Raine told me and snickered.
“What are we doing here?” I asked, not sure why he’d dragged me to a gay bar.
Just then two men walked out, their arms slung around each other. “This,” Raine said, and he jumped on one of the guys, slamming his head against the ground. His date started to run in the other direction but was tackled by one of Raine’s friends.
The door opened again, and another pair of men stumbled out into the night. Their heads were pressed together as they laughed at some private joke. One reached into his pocket for a set of keys, and as he turned toward the parking lot, his face was lit by the glow of a passing car.
I should have put the pieces together earlier—the electric razor in the medicine cabinet, when my dad always used a blade; the detour my father made to stop for coffee every day to and from work at Greg’s store; the way he had left my mother all those years ago without explanation; the fact that my grandfather had never liked him. I tugged my black cap down lower and yanked up the fleece neck warmer Raine had given me, so that I wouldn’t be recognized.
Panting, Raine delivered another kick to his victim and then let the guy scurry into the night. He straightened, smiled at me, and cocked his head, waiting for me to take the lead. Which is how I realized that even if I’d been totally clueless, Raine had known about my father all along.