Round Hill looked like it was from another era? “It’s just … a regular place,” I said. “To be honest, I’ve never been out of the Carolinas, so I don’t know any different. And you’re right—there’s a lot of farming—but my father owns the pharmacy, so we’re not farmers.”
“Your accent,” Peggy said. “That’s going to take some getting used to.”
“Yours is pretty familiar to me,” I said. “My favorite aunt grew up in New York.”
“Why’d you want to do this?” Chip asked as we moved on from the sandwiches to the pound cake.
“Probably for the same reason you do.” I shrugged. “To help people vote.”
“Most Southerners couldn’t care less if Negroes get the vote,” he said.
“Most would just as soon they never get the vote,” Peggy said. She looked at me as if for validation.
“A lot do feel that way,” I said. “But I care, which is why I’m doing something about it.”
“Where do you go to school?” Chip asked. “You’re in college, right?”
“Carolina,” I said.
“Where’s that?” David asked. “Never heard of it.”
“The University of North Carolina. In Chapel Hill? We just call it ‘Carolina.’”
“Oh, Chapel Hill I’ve heard of,” Peggy said. “That’s a really great school.”
“Yeah,” said Chip, wide-eyed, and I had the feeling their impression of me finally jumped up a few notches.
“I’m a pharmacology major there.”
“Really.” Peggy eyed me like she wasn’t quite sure what to make of me now.
Chip looked at his watch. “We should go,” he said. “We’ve got another eleven hours ahead of us.” He looked at me. “You know how to drive?”
I nodded.
“You’re a lot fresher than we are,” he said. “Can you take the first shift behind the wheel?”
I hadn’t realized I’d be expected to drive someone else’s car, but of course it made sense.
“Sure,” I said.
“Can you drive a van?” Drew asked.
I laughed. “I can drive my brother’s old pickup,” I said, “so I guess I can drive just about anything.”
We carried our plates to the sink, where I washed and dried them quickly. I didn’t want to leave them for my mother.
“We have to remember to be careful once we get to Atlanta,” David said as we walked out the front door onto the porch. “They said to stay in the Negro neighborhoods if we can.”
That seemed backward to me. “Why?” I slung the bag of books over my shoulder, then picked up my suitcase and sleeping bag. Most people I knew avoided Negro neighborhoods.
Chip took the suitcase from my hand in a gentlemanly gesture. “White people’ll be watching for us,” he said. “For the SCOPE workers. They don’t want us there. We’re a threat to them.”
“To their way of life,” David said.
“They’ll be out to get us,” Chip added.
“Oh,” I said, remembering the murdered civil rights workers. “Well, let’s be careful then.” I did not plan to become a victim.
* * *
For the first four long hours, I drove while the three of them slept. Chip was stretched out on the long middle seat, and Peggy and David, who I now realized were a couple, slept tangled up together in the back row. The only person awake, I felt alone and a little scared. Were all the students going to be like these three chilly know-it-alls? Most of them would know other students, since they were coming from the same universities. They’d have school, home states, and their very Northernness in common. I would try to win them over, and if I couldn’t, well, it didn’t matter, I told myself. I wasn’t in SCOPE to make friends. I’d keep my goal in mind: getting folks registered to vote.
Around five o’clock, I saw Peggy get to her feet in the rearview mirror and make her hunched-over way toward the front of the van, where she perched on the edge of the long middle seat. “I need a bathroom break,” she said.
“Me too.” I smiled at her in the mirror and pulled off at the next exit with a restaurant.
It turned out that the three of them were twenty-one, so they were able to drink rum-and-Cokes while I nursed a beer as we ate burgers and fries, surrounded mostly by truckers. I wasn’t tired when Peggy started driving, so I sat in the other front seat. I thought I’d try to get to know her better, but found it hard to make conversation with her. I asked her about her family. Her father was a rabbi. That sounded so exotic to me. Her mother was a librarian, like mine, which finally gave us one thing in common, though that didn’t seem to impress her. Her mother probably worked at some huge New York library, while my mother worked at our little Round Hill library in a converted old house.
“Have you ever done anything like this before?” I asked.
She sighed, as if deciding whether or not to continue our conversation. “I worked with inner-city kids last year in this program that’s part of the War on Poverty, and that was okay,” she said finally. “But my father kind of talked me into this one. Though he wasn’t happy when David joined up, too.” She glanced in the rearview mirror, I assumed to see David.
I was stuck on the term “inner city,” which I’d never heard before. I guessed it meant the poor parts of New York, and I tried to picture my father actually pushing me into a program to register Negro voters.
She hadn’t asked me if I’d done anything like this before, but I answered the question anyway. “This is my first time doing something like this, myself,” I said. “I’ve done absolutely nothing. And now I plan to change that.”
Chapter 13
KAYLA
2010
I drive to the office Monday feeling even more anxious than I did last week. I actually case the main level of the parking lot for the red-haired woman before slipping into my usual spot and getting out of my car. I barely slept over the weekend, still trying to figure out what the woman wanted with me. Does she regret confiding in me? If she’ll murder one person, she could just as easily murder two. If the woman knows where my new house is—and she obviously does—does she also know that Rainie spends her mornings at preschool? Does she know where that preschool is? How the hell does she know anything about me?
I spend half an hour on the phone, trying to find a fencing company willing to run a fence between my thickly wooded backyard and the lake. It turns out, fencing companies are not crazy about installing fences through a wooded lot. I hear about copperheads and yellow jackets and the sheer misery of clear cutting a straight line for the posts. The one company that is willing has no openings for a month. I make an appointment with them to come out and take a look. Give me an estimate. Then I get off the phone and stare out the window for a while. I have never even seen the lake, it’s so deep in the woods. Do I really need to worry about it?
After work, I visit my favorite shop for window treatments in Carlisle, the county seat of Derby County, where all the good stores are. Amanda, an interior designer I’ve worked with often on my projects, gives me a bunch of catalogs and a stack of samples to bring home. Now I have an hour or so to myself before I have to pick Rainie up and I can’t wait to get to the new house and figure out how to cover all those big gaping windows.