She leaned across the dashboard, rubbed her cheek into pooled sunlight, and wondered if she would ever feel warm again. It was impossible, had been impossible for months, but now she had no fight left in her. Clyde had seen right through her little game, and he probably didn’t even know it. He was the real Lawrenceville optimist, the genuine article, a good boy from down south who honored his elders and opened doors and volunteered for a hellhole of a war before he could get respectably drafted into it and honestly thought Tammy was the sweet, book-loving singer he’d fallen for all those years ago. He didn’t know shit, and she wasn’t even a good enough person to tell him. She’d orchestrated his love for her the way she orchestrated one of her legendary nights at the Pelican. But this wasn’t a night on the town, this was the rest of her life, and it turned out she’d stopped playing. She’d loved Dev, but she’d always been playing—was it really so surprising he had noticed? He wasn’t like Clyde, so country-fresh he was still cooling on the windowsill. He was good, but he was hard, too. He had to be, to survive for so long as an undercover cop at the heart of Victor’s empire. He lied as much as she did, but for a noble purpose. He had seen her, and loved her anyway. Was Clyde strong enough for that?
Make the audience really squirm in their seats, he told her. Make “Joe” judge himself, even if it wasn’t fair. Even if Joe never killed anyone. Joe had always been lying: to the killer, to the ferryman, to the audience. To the cards. To herself.
Tamara lurched upright, threw open the door, and ran a few steps into the crunching brown grass at the edge of the field. She sank to her knees and pounded on the earth and howled like a wounded dog.
She came back an hour later. Her hands were steady again, her eyes red, her heart hollowed out. She climbed the stairs to Phyllis’s room.
Tamara paused in the doorway. Pea was sleeping on her side, a pillow against her belly, and Tamara felt something swell inside her, something like the oracle’s knowledge, but her own. Tammy had agreed to come up here after Phyllis had been rushed to the hospital that last night at the Pelican, when she had nearly lost the baby. Tamara had imagined herself a Ruth to Phyllis’s Naomi. She had anticipated the boredom of short gray days that folded upon themselves like crepe silk. She had anticipated claustrophobia and desperation for a decent glass of bubbly with a well-dressed man who could tell good jokes.
But Tammy hadn’t anticipated the sweetness. The way Pea looked in the morning, with sun spilling that warm light across her wide forehead, settling in the valleys of her slightly parted lips, her throat, her thighs. With that pillow on her belly it looked still more mountainous, and sometimes she would hum in her sleep, and sometimes she would smile. The way they talked, like words were lumps of sugar and they were children gorging at Christmas Eve. They could talk the hands off the clock, but even the things they never said lingered in Tamara’s throat like candy.
She had never loved anyone like she loved Pea. Not even Clyde. Sure, she and Phyllis had kissed that night with Dev and even now, in certain light, she didn’t mind the notion of touching Pea until she came. But the love she felt wasn’t really that kind—it was a blood love, a bone love, and it ricocheted off of her other loves at unexpected angles.
She couldn’t—though the cards spoke in spades and sixes, though Pea’s second dream had come and gone, though her hands were wild and corrupt weapons still tied to her body, though the choice they demanded of her was impossible—Tamara couldn’t bear the thought of losing—
Phyllis turned over and opened her wide, clear eyes. “Well?”
“I’ve got to go. I’m going, Pea.”
Pea closed her eyes briefly.
“Ain’t nobody making you stay, baby.”
She told Mrs. Grundy when she came in the next morning.
“For how long will you be gone, Miss Anderson?”
Tamara waved her hand. “Oh, a few weeks, probably.”
Mrs. Grundy blinked. “Mrs. Patil is due in three weeks.”
“I called her sister. She’ll come down to help out this weekend.”
Mrs. Grundy set her jaw and nodded. Tamara could have slapped her. Did everyone get to judge? Even this northern peckerwood? But it didn’t matter, she reminded herself. That was the bittersweet pleasure of running up the white flag.
Phyllis said she understood when they said goodbye. If she did, she was doing better than Tamara, who cried on the afternoon train—so relieved to be gone, so guilty to be leaving her.
Walter picked her up from Grand Central in that silver Packard. She tilted her chin when she stepped in front of the white folks in her better fur to climb into the back seat of a better car. Walter just laughed and tipped his hat before he opened the door. Tamara caught the curious, resentful stares and smiled brighter. She couldn’t be proud of everything in her life, but at least she’d gotten where she’d meant to go: a long way from Lawrenceville, from the bloody ground beneath the hanging tree outside of town.
“You look tired,” he said.
She straightened her back—which had been hunched against some unconscious weight—and glared at him in the rearview mirror. “And you look nearly as silver as Victor.”
This wasn’t fair—he had a few more white hairs among the black, but they were mostly by his temples, giving him a skunky slick-back that suited his new role at the head of the operation.
He laughed. “My wife says I should dye it. I say it would look undignified.”
Your wife? Tamara thought, but kept her surprise to herself. “It looks good, honestly.”
“How’s
