Read New England White for Free Online Page A

arrive as television bulletins. Shut off the set and they pop up online as headlines. Get off the computer and the phone rings: in this case sugary Tonya Montez, chief Sister Lady of Harbor County, bearing the breathless news that she was listening to one of the inner-city talk radio stations a little while ago, on the way home from morning worship at Temple Baptist
(Yes, by the way, I’m also more faithful than you!),
and heard the host, Kwame Kennerly, proclaim that the murder of Kellen Zant proved once and for all that it was open season on the men of the African diaspora. She did not often agree with Kwame, said Tonya, which was a lie, but he was right about this one. Julia tried to get a word in, but nothing slows a Ladybug in full flutter. You wait and see, said Tonya. There’s gonna be more.
    More what? asked Julia, perhaps missing the point.
    Next came Donna Newman, whom Julia—shopping with Jeannie—encountered later Sunday, at the deli counter of the Stop Shop on Route 48. Donna, who ran half the social clubs in the Landing—the Caucasian Squawk Circle, Lemaster called them—had heard that “this Zant” was seen in town the night he died.
    “Of course he was,” said Julia.
    “I mean
before
you found him.” A glance up and down the aisle. “They say he was with a
woman,
” said Donna, ominously, but he always was.
    Then, on Monday, it was Tessa Kenner on the telephone, Julia’s roommate at Dartmouth, whom she hardly ever heard from, still less saw, other than on television, where Tessa read the news for two hours five nights a week on one of the cable networks, not because she had been Phi Beta Kappa at Dartmouth and a star in law school but because she possessed the principal qualification producers sought: blond hair. But Tessa had saved her life twice in the bad old days, and Julia was never quite able to hold against her what Lemaster insisted was a hopeless waste of talent.
    Tessa, as it happened, did more asking of questions than spreading of gossip, and Julia, despite the warm space her old roommate occupied in her heart, danced around the answers. They agreed that Julia should call when next in Washington, and Tessa would call if she ever passed through Elm Harbor, although nobody ever did. Then Tessa, before hanging up, asked the worst question of all.
    “And the two of you were over, right? I mean, like, really over?”
    “Of course.”
    “There wasn’t, like, any hint of any little thing?” A professional chuckle, as if laughing was a subject she had studied. “No juicy tidbit?”
    “Is that why you called, Tessa? To ask about me and Kellen?”
    “I’m not working on a story,” she said hotly, denying an accusation Julia had not made. “I’m just worried about you, that’s all.”
    “I’m fine,” Julia lied, wondering what tales Tessa might be spreading through the higher echelons of broadcast journalism; and whether her past would come back to bite her after all.
    Later that evening, as snow whirled, dervishlike, outside every window, Mona called from France—Mona, who never talked on the telephone, because she knew hers was tapped!—to make sure her daughter was bearing up as poorly as she expected, and also to ask whether she had heard this story that Kellen was some kind of fascist, a turncoat who worked for murderous American-supported dictators all over the world.
    No, Julia told her mad mother. She had missed that one. But Kellen was an economist, she said, so she kind of doubted the story. And, by the way, how are you?
    “Well, all I can say is, I’m
so
glad you didn’t marry him.” As if he had ever asked.
    Mona had never approved of Kellen, just as she had never approved of Lemaster, neither of them really quite one of
us,
dear—the one too poor and the other too dark—just as she had never approved of her daughter’s decisions to raise her children in the suburbs (where their friends would be white) and to take the job at the divinity school (because God