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“I wasn’t laughing at Him,” Tia said.

Sister Gwendolyn started once more, clamping the heels of her hands onto Tia’s temples, harder now: Oh Lord she has laughed oh Lord at your loving kindness oh Lord …

“I WASN’T LAUGHING AT HIM.”

Sister Gwendolyn stopped. Tia shook off Sister Gwendolyn’s hands. Sister Gwendolyn relaxed. “No?” Sister Gwendolyn said, her wreath of beauty-parlor curls quivering. She reached for a hymnbook and opened it to a random page as if to suggest that, with reading material, she could wait forever. “I suppose you’re going to tell me you weren’t laughing at him, you were laughing with Him.”

“Something like that,” Tia said.

Sister Gwendolyn threw the hymnbook on the floor, where it slapped the concrete. Once it was thrown, she refused to look at it. “I want you to say the Lord’s Prayer for me, Tia Townsend.” She said it with a quiet steadiness that did not dam the anger behind it. “I want you to say the Lord’s Prayer. I want you to cry tears for Jesus.”

Tia said the Lord’s Prayer. Then the scripture about God giving his only begotten Son. Then the one from Revelation that foretold of rivers flowing blood and seven angels opening seven seals that would end the world.

After a time, no tears in sight, she was allowed to leave.

ΤIA AND her aunt Roberta walked home from church on the old rural road. Oaks spread their huge, trophy-shaped crowns, branches of bayberry looking like fans. Beyond this was bottlebrush weed, and beyond the weed, the endless green nap of the cemetery. It was a beautiful day outside; the sky was a color Marcelle called Aqua Velva blue. It seemed a colossal injustice that her internal weather never matched the one outside.

As they walked, Tia briskly and impatiently ahead, her great-aunt unhurried and elephantine behind, Roberta hummed an old tune, a spiritual so mournful people sang it only at wakes, and the only word Tia could make out was “Nebuchadnezzar.” Roberta did not mention her conversation with Sister Gwendolyn; Tia did not mention the closet.

“I want,” Tia said, “to live with my mother.”

She had been working up to these words for a long time. Her mother, as far as she knew, lived in Atlanta, but Tia had only seen her once since Roberta had become her legal guardian. Tia had been seven then, though she hadn’t remembered that last visit as well as she would have liked; she had expected that more visits would follow. But she remembered her mother in a hazy soft-focus way. How her mother would absently stroke her hair, wherever she happened to be, like a starlet. How she would hold Tia’s face with both hands, as if it were a big blossom. Once, Tia recalled to Roberta her mother’s game of making Tia recite the days of the week and months of the year at random. Roberta snapped, “She was trying to make sure you weren’t high on her stuff. She kept it laying around so much it’s a wonder you didn’t get high from the dust bunnies.” After that, Tia kept her questions about her mother to the essential few, and after a while, living with Roberta seemed less like an arrangement and more like the way things simply had to be.

Tia felt emboldened from her time in the closet with Sister Gwendolyn, and repeated, slowly, forcefully, as if accommodating a lip reader. “I want. To live. With my mother.”

The insolence of her tone was enough to merit a single sharp slap on the face, though Roberta had hit her only twice before. But Roberta did not stop humming, nor did she signal in any way that she’d heard Tia, and when they’d reached home, Roberta took the thawed-out chicken from the Frigidaire and served it baked with green beans as planned.

The next day, Tia walked to the Montgomery Greyhound bus station instead of catching the school bus. She had stuffed all that would fit into her backpack without looking suspicious: five skirts, five blouses, and stockings. Deodorant, a toothbrush, a washcloth, soap, and all the underwear she owned. She opened her clarinet case and laid her sheet music atop the clarinet pieces. She stashed her books under her bed and thought about how it might be her last time smelling the lemony Murphy oil soap that rose from the cool hardwood floor. She had thirty-four dollars. A bus ticket to Atlanta cost thirty-two.

She’d been in the station before, but never as a passenger, always with Roberta to drop off or pick up church members who didn’t want to pay the five-dollar cab fare. Now that she had two hours of waiting ahead of her, she had time to notice how outdated it seemed, the bus arrival and departure tables on the same corrugated plastic as corner-store menu boards; the seat in which she sat — huge and spoon-shaped, rendered in taffy-orange plasticine — must have once seemed like the height of space-age decor. Perhaps this was exactly how it looked when King lived here, and she tried to imagine where the “Colored” and “Whites Only” signs would have hung, then realized she didn’t have to. All five blacks waited in one area, all three whites in another.

She decided to call Marcelle, who lived so close to school that she’d still be home.

“Mrs. Barnes, is Marcelle there? It’s Tia.”

“Who?”

Mrs. Barnes, Marcelle’s mother, was what people at church called “sick and shut in.” She had some ailment that wasn’t serious enough for hospitalization, but was serious enough that she stayed in bed all day. Marcelle said it was depression, and that nobody in her family wanted to admit it. Finally, Mrs. Barnes put Marcelle on the phone. Tia told Marcelle she was leaving.

“What are you going to tell them when they ask about me?” Tia said.

“Which time? When you don’t come home or when your face is on a milk carton?”

“Look, they didn’t lock you in a closet, so I don’t even want to hear it.” She’d expected Marcelle to be happy for her; it was exactly the kind of thing she thought Marcelle would have done.

“I’ll be down there in twenty minutes.” Marcelle said.

It took Marcelle nearly an hour. When Tia suggested they get some orange juice in the bus station diner, Marcelle refused. “Hell, naw! The longer you stay in the station, the more likely they are to remember your face.”

So they walked the periphery of the station grounds, Marcelle asking questions Tia should have known the answers to.

“You don’t know where your mother lives?”

“I told you, she lives in Atlanta.”

“Her and twenty billion other people.”

But Marcelle didn’t try to talk her out of it, and for that, Tia was grateful. When it was time to board the bus, Marcelle gave her forty-two dollars, all one-dollar bills.

“You were saving this for your prom dress.”

Though church members weren’t allowed to dance, and though Marcelle wouldn’t be a senior for two years, she was working on a way of going to the prom, stealing a dollar here and there from her zonked-out mother’s purse.

“What was I supposed to do? You only got like two dollars.” Marcelle tried not to show disappointment at giving up the money, but Tia could see it, and felt powerless, since she knew she was not about to refuse the money. “I got two more years to save,” Marcelle said, and with a wicked grin added, “Long as those SDI checks keep coming in!”

“Don’t talk about your mother that way.”

“She’s my mama!” Marcelle grinned as broadly as ever, then moved to hug her, but Tia pulled back.

“Like you said, they’ll remember us.”

Marcelle glanced at the white bus driver, talking about transmissions with a black lady midget. “He won’t notice,” Marcelle said, hugging her. “We all look the same to them anyway.”