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Juliabelle stopped me on the back piazza with a small box tied in one of Mae Mae’s perfect white ribbons. She had taken off her apron and looked very elegant in the peach suit with pearl buttons her cousin had lent her and with her hair pulled back tightly in a braided bun on the top of her narrow head. At graduation she had stood out in the audience in a white hat with white feathers that swayed in the draft from the air conditioner.
    â€œYou made the grade real good,” she said, holding my chin up with her long, skinny fingers. “Here’s somethin’ worth totin’ on your journey.”
    When I slid back the ribbon and snapped open the gray velvet box, I saw a silver medal of St. Christopher carrying the Christ child across the churning waters. After I read the words inscribed on the outer rim, “And Go Your Way in Safety,” I reached up and squeezed her long neck so hard that her pointed chin left a red mark on my shoulder.
    Other than the childhood picture I had stolen from Mae Mae, it was the first tangible thing I had of Juliabelle.
    â€œThank you, thank you, thank you,” I said as she laughed her quiet laugh and hugged me back.
    â€œYou know I’ll make the prayer for you, my Adelaide. I’ll be here making it every time you come to mind.”
    She watched me as I carried my bags of gifts and a bouquet of flowers through Mae Mae’s flower garden and the shrubs and over to my house, where the backyard was littered with plastic lawn chairs, an abandoned playhouse, and fiddler crabs crawling sideways in and out of their holes along the mud banks. We didn’t have a gardener like Papa Great and Mae Mae did, so the kudzu was always threatening to swallow our yard, and Daddy fought it every few months with an array of chemicals as it crept toward the tomato vines and the dock.
    Now I put down my stuff in the dirt by the playhouse and walked out to the mildewed hammock at the end of the crab dock and swung myself out over the creek, smelling the ripe tomatoes and the fishy low-tide mud as the sun baked me dry.
    That night I flipped through my NBU course catalog and highlighted the literature and philosophy classes I planned to take come fall. Josiah Dirkas, a prizewinning poet I’d studied at Governor’s School, was going to be the writer-in-residence there, and I was going to do all in my power to finagle my way into one of his upper-level workshop courses. If I could get my chapbook in front of him, maybe he would let me in.
    The phone rang, and when I answered, I was surprised to hear the familiar voice on the other end of the line.
    â€œYou did good today,” he said.
    â€œLazarus! I saw you! It should have been you, not me.”
    â€œNah,” he said. “It should have been Georgianne, but things happen, and you sure pulled it off.”
    â€œWhy didn’t you tell me good-bye?”
    â€œI didn’t want to bring trouble on you. You know, Skaggs and all.”
    â€œDid he threaten you after the dance?”
    â€œTried to,” he said. “But it didn’t bother me. Taught me something, though.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI don’t want to go to school down here. I mean, Adelaide, they still fly the Confederate flag over the statehouse, you know? I turned down my scholarship, and I’m moving up to DC. to live with my uncle who teaches at Howard University. He’s got some contacts at Georgetown, and he thinks he can get me into their journalism program.”
    â€œYou’ll do great, Lazarus. You deserve every shot at what you want.
    I’ll look you up if I head up to DC. It’s only a few hours from NBU.”
    â€œI hope you will,” he said. “You’re my friend, and you’re going to find the answer to those two questions you posed today.”
    â€œYou think?” I said.
    â€œOne way or another,” he said before he hung up the phone with a final “Take care.”
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