Page 61 of A Love Song for Ricki Wilde

She noticed that bright, whimsical wildflowers were woven throughout the shoe repair shop’s wrought-iron gate. Even from that distance, she could tell they were Ricki’s flowers.

Ricki was still leaving her expensive, unsold arrangements at long-dead landmarks around town. But for the past few days, the flowers hadn’t stayed put at these lost historical sites. A curious thing started to happen. The bouquets were being discovered not only on Instagram, but with delight by local residents. Passersby began deconstructing her bouquets and then decorating the neighborhood with smaller clusters. Repurposed flower displays began ornamenting the exteriors of local statues, plazas, schools, churches, and public housing complexes. Then they posted pics of their handiwork on social media with #WildeThings.

My word, that girl’s making quite a mark, thought Della proudly. It felt good to know that her new granddaughter would be all right.

Della was waiting for her Lyft, sitting on the bench, accompanied by her new home aide, Naaz. As she’d later tell her deceasedhusband, Dr. Bennett, during their nightly chats (she couldn’t bring herself to call them prayers), Naaz was a hoot. A young, plucky Bangladeshi American woman with a Bay Ridge accent and a Lana Del Rey biceps tattoo, she’d been assigned to Della a few hours before. Naaz’s job was to keep her comfortable at home as she battled her bleak diagnosis.

Della’s Lyft pulled up, but she just wanted to sit outside for five more minutes. To feel the brisk, cool air against her skin. To watch life happening. Cars were honking. People were milling about, gathering the courage to visit their sick loved ones. Hospital staff rushed back from their lunch breaks at Sweetgreen, clutching biodegradable bags of twenty-dollar salad. Life was happening everywhere.

For eight years, she’d known this day would come.

Della was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2016. It wasn’t excruciating to live with, though the chemo was unpleasant, of course. And she lost her hair. But when it started growing back, she realized the short ’fro suited her. Dr. Bennett was with her then, and she was back in fighting shape within a year. She still swam three times a week and power-strolled with the Links Elder Steppers Walking Club. But the doctors had warned her that her cancer wasn’t gone; it was just at bay—and one day, it would, in fact, kill her.

But for the time being, she was alive. Which was a gift. It gave her space to think about what she wanted.

When she was first diagnosed, an obscene new president had just been elected, and she was worried about her and Dr. Bennett staying in Georgia. She knew that the POTUS’s wild-eyed hate speech had the potential to rustle up the evils that knitted the country together. A mob of delusional yahoo yokels could turn their woefully misplaced rage into violence at any moment. And she refused to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Especially if her time was limited.

She wanted to move to Harlem. It was a place she’d always romanticized, for many reasons, secret and close to her heart, not the least of which was the first picture show she ever saw,Swing!, back when she was barely eleven. The movie was about Mandy, a woman in Birmingham, Alabama, who quits her job cooking for a white family and flees to Harlem to be a cabaret singer. To Della, a serious, poised girl raised by a poorly paid domestic worker grandmother in the Deep South, it was a cage-rattling, Edenic fantasy.

Atlanta was wonderful, and she’d loved her life there. But the tides were turning. And in her remaining years, she wanted to taste Mandy’s freedom.

Dr. Bennett didn’t share her fears. He wasn’t frightened of much and couldn’t imagine some fool in the White House dictating where he lived. But he loved Della with every ounce of his stubborn, endearingly bossy body. And he owed it to her to help her realize this dream. Lord knew she’d supported his whims for the past seventy years, from being the receptionist at his first practice to throwing the Atlanta Neurology Coalition’s spring gala every year.

Dr. Bennett arranged for her to move into her dream brownstone. And then he died.

Why did he get to pass so quickly?thought Della, the wind whipping her cheeks. One fatal heart attack in his sleep, and he was gone. She didn’t know which was more preferable—knowing that your body was winding down, or disappearing in a flash. It must be nice to just be taken. Without stewing over it, obsessing, and preparing. Forever wondering when.

Now Della had a “when.”

She continued to have visions of beloved, long-dead friends and family members when she was on the edge of sleep. Or if her eyes unfocused a bit while she was reading. Still no Dr. Bennett, as much as it broke her heart. God, what she wouldn’t give to see him. She needed him now.

But Della knew that a heavenly hand controlled who she encountered, and she needed to trust its divine timing. Because the night before, she’d had a warm, welcoming vision that she couldn’t have imagined on her own. In her dreams, she was holding all seven of her miscarried babies. The ones her “inhospitable” womb couldn’t house. She cuddled each of them close, stroking their velvety, powder-soft new skin, and they nestled into the crook of her arm. And then, for the first time, she wasn’t sad about having lost them. She’d be seeing them soon. They were happy. And waiting for her.

Today, Della’s doctor told her that most terminal patients started seeing the people they’d loved and lost when it was almost their time to go. It eased the transition. She knew she’d see Dr. Bennett soon. Sometimes, she wondered if Nana would appear to her. She supposed not. In life, Nana had been ice cold and had expressed nothing but relief when Della married and moved to Atlanta. No reason to think that she’d be a calming guide into the afterlife.

Della also doubted that her parents would show up in her dreams. Her father was a mystery: no name, no photograph, no nothing. She did have an idea of what her mother looked like, since Nana had a photograph of her. But she never knew her. When she thought of her mother, which was rarely, all she felt was a resentment that had hardened like a callus. A grudge. Besides, the doctor had said people that shelovedwould reveal themselves to her.

She wished that she had control over when she died. That she could schedule it on the calendar, the way women these days scheduled C-sections. Della was a planner. Living each day, never knowing if it would be her last? That felt torturous, inhumane. So she decided not to share her prognosis with anyone. She’d just add this to the list of secrets she kept close to her heart. There was no reason for Ricki to grieve her before she was gone. Or Su, orany of her friends. It washerbusiness, and in six months, maybe a year, she would die.

Or maybe before then. Who could know?

She coughed hard into her elbow and then shut her eyes, allowing the brisk air to sweep across her skin. She had no regrets. From now until her final day, she’d breathe.

CHAPTER 15

YOU’RE THE BEE’S KNEES, BREEZE

February 27–29, 1928

Leap Day

Breeze Walker and Felice Fabienne had been dating for three months. And it was a scandal.

Ordinarily, he was smart about women. It was tough to imagine that only five years before, he’d had to rehearse what to say to them. But back then, when he was a new émigré to New York City, everything made him self-conscious: his lack of education, his almost unintelligible accent. Not knowing the latest lingo or the right car to drive. But he was a quick study.

All those nights partying in Harlem, he quietly observed how people talked to each other: women and men, men and men, women and women. He noticed that when straight fellas spoke to ladies, they seemed to be talking to a different species. Once a man was attracted to a woman, she became a conquest, a challenge, an idea. Most men didn’t seem to like women very much.

He’d grown up with mismatched parents whose only commonality (besides music) was liking each other. Hazel Walker was thefunniest person in Fallon County. A quick-witted spark who loved to dance and play the ukulele, she wasnotthe person to sit next to at services if you hoped to keep a straight face. But Big Ezra Walker? He was a serious, burdened man who loved his family and his harmonica but had no use for levity.

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