A week later, Zena was standing in a Greyhound bus line with her mother and sister at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan. Everything they owned amounted to five boxes being slid into the cargo hold of a bus en route to Atlanta, Georgia. Speaking as if she was a grown woman who’d lived a life and had the necessary scars on her soul one would need to give another grown woman advice, Zena said in her gruff Jamaica, Queens-girl accent, “You didn’t even give him a chance. He was trying and you didn’t give him a chance. And I resent you for that.” Zena thought she’d really said something. Standing in line at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, she crossed her slender teenage arms over her chest and awaited a defense she felt was impossible.
“Mothers don’t have time to give people chances. You’re my top priority. Not him. Not even me. I did this to save you and your sister from growing up and being stuck in a hole like me and your daddy. I did this so you could be happy,” her mother said.
“Happy? In Georgia?” Zena laughed the way any Queens-born girl who’d been torn from her home to live in Georgia would. “You’re making us move from our friends and school. We’re losing everything, Mommy.”
Zena’s mother paused and responded with unmistakable passion in her voice. “You may feel like that now, but I’m giving you a real opportunity to have a better life.”
* * *
Zena’s bicycle chain had popped the morning she met Adan. Her mother had just gotten the rickety red ten-speed from the Salvation Army and unloaded it from the back of the dented 4Runner some cross-eyed deacon at their new church let her mother borrow. Zena was complaining about being locked up all day in the house looking after Zola and begged for a bicycle. While she’d complained about cobwebs on the frame and the cracking fake-leather seat when they spotted the ten-speed in the back of the secondhand store, once Zena got the thing home and kicked off from the curb, she tasted the kind of freedom every fifteen-year-old knew while riding a bicycle.
At first, she heeded her mother’s instructions and only rode around the corner a few times, but then she became curious about her new surroundings and rode faster, standing up on the pedals as she pushed two and three miles from her front door. The houses got bigger and the cars nicer as she sped along. She noticed that the house she lived in with her mother and her sister was the smallest one in the entire neighborhood. She’d heard her mother mention on the phone to her grandmother that she’d gotten the rental for a quarter of the price through some pilot fair-housing project that would later be known as “Section 8 housing.”
It was late summer, and the Georgia heat kept most people indoors, but she saw some stray gaggles of teenagers entering cars and front doors and wondered if any of them would be her classmates when she started classes at her new high school in a few weeks. Walking up flower-lined driveways in bright colors and smiling, they all looked so solidly middle-class, so happy, so far away from the armor-clad, stone-faced friends she knew back in the New York projects. Right then, Zena decided that she wasn’t going to tell anyone at her new school that she lived in the smallest house in the neighborhood.
Soon, droplets of warm sweat escaped Zena’s underarms and wet her T-shirt. The precipitation seemed to descend on her brow and draw every ounce of energy from her body. Zena, going on pure zeal, continued her tour, but she was panting like a thirsty dog and she began feeling as if she’d been away from home for hours, though it had only been twenty minutes since her departure. This was her official introduction to the stifling Georgia humidity that suffocated everything that had the nerve to move before 7 p.m. in late July. Zena would never forget that feeling, that day; it was as if she’d fallen asleep in a sauna and awoke in a pool of her own sweat.
Growing concerned after considering her wet knuckles and steamy scalp, Zena decided to head home, fearing her mother must be panicked because she’d been gone so long.
She’d been resting her bottom on the prickly cracked bicycle seat but decided to get up and floor it home.
When she rounded the curb onto her new street, catching a breeze that did little to cool her off, Zena noticed a family getting out of their car in the driveway on the side of a house that looked identical to the one she lived in just seven houses down. It was a mother and father with two boys. One of the boys looked her age. The other couldn’t be much older than Zola.
While Zena was two houses away, the family stopped and looked at her as if she was an alien pushing a ten-speed up the street.
Zena’s delicate fifteen-year-old self-esteem made her wonder if she was doing something wrong. Could they see the sweat stains at her underarms? Had the wind swept her hair all over her head and she looked like a parading Medusa? What were they looking at?
The little boy started waving, but Zena was too afraid to wave back, fearing she’d lose control of her bike and crash into one of the cars parked on the street. Instead, her bubbling anxiety under their watching eyes made her want to simply disappear, so Zena decided to race home, where she’d run into the house and never ever emerge again.
That was when the chain popped.
The pedal push that was supposed to send her somewhere quickly actually split the chain. There was a click and then the bike simply stopped moving. Zena’s insistence on continuing her pedaling sent her and the bike, rather quickly and very dramatically, to the hot tar pavement, where she really hoped she would die.
“Lord, she done fainted,” Zena heard a man’s voice say, so she knew she hadn’t actually died, which was a letdown.
“No, she didn’t. I think she just fell,” she heard a woman’s voice say, and she knew it was the mother, who’d been standing by the car, because as she looked up from the ground, she could see the woman’s coral espadrilles rushing toward her.
Soon, the family of four was gathered around Zena as if she was a fallen angel. Worry was on everyone’s face. Everyone but the boy who looked her age. He was smiling. Almost laughing at the sight.
Zena was quiet, quieter than she’d ever been in life. She watched as the four fussed over her, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. The father discovered that it was the broken chain that sent her tumbling to the ground, but he kept saying something about the heat and that it was too hot for anyone to be riding a bicycle at 3 p.m. And didn’t she know that? The mother tried to quiet him after sending the little boy into the house for water.
She asked, “Where are your parents, honey? You live around here?” Her voice was Southern sweet. She sounded as if she could get anything from anyone. Zena had never heard a woman sound quite like that. It made her instantly like the woman.
Zena was listening but not speaking so the mother made the father check for broken bones. He found none and announced that Zena was just in shock. Just afraid because she’d fallen from her bike and here they were hawking over her like police officers. The couple laughed in unison at their hovering in a way that Zena had never heard her parents connect. It was as if they were suddenly alone and had heard lines in a conversation no one else could hear. Then the father kissed the mother. He said, “That’s the nurse in my baby. Always worried about somebody.” They kissed again and giggled.
The boy who was about Zena’s age, the one who’d been ready to laugh at her fall, was frowning then and rolling his eyes at his parents as if he’d seen this all before and it was making him sick. He turned to Zena and pointed his index finger into his open mouth toward his tonsils as if he was about to make himself vomit.
The little comical gesture introduced Zena to the saying, “I have butterflies in my stomach,” because some new feeling was literally tickling her insides, from her navel to her throat. At that very moment, the tough girl from Queens awakened into feelings she’d never known. It was as if those little butterflies fluttered their delicate wings at her insides all