Until that moment she hadn’t even realized he knew her name. She felt a sudden rush of blood to her face, the telltale curse of being a redhead with a fair complexion. Blushing to her toes, she dropped his hand and backed away. Walter Hopwell called her name, “Lorraine? Some coffee?”
One of the television crew called to Bess that they had a breaking, story downtown, and all the TV people rushed out, leaving only the mere newspaper and magazine reporters, and Foster’s people, black and white, and the rain, and the long night ahead.
She was waiting on the corner in the rain, a flimsy umbrella over her head, half the spokes broken, the rain coming down as if it would never stop, when all of a sudden a dark blue automobile pulled up to the curb and the window on her side rolled down.
“Lorraine!” a man’s voice called.
“Who’s that?” she said, bending to look into the car.
“Me,” he said. “Do you need a lift?”
She walked over to the car, peered in more closely.
“Oh. Hi,” she said.
“Get in,” he said. “I’ll drive you home.”
“The bus’ll be here any minute.”
“It’s no trouble.”
“Only if it’s on your way.”
“Get in before you drown,” he said, and leaned across the seat to throw open the door. She slid onto the seat, closed the umbrella, swung her legs inside, and then pulled the door shut behind her.
“Boy oh boy,” she said.
“Where to?”
“Talbot and Twenty-eighth.”
“At your service,” he said, and put the car in gear, and pulled it away from the curb. The windshield wipers snicked at the rain. The heater insinuated warm air onto her feet and her face. The car felt as warm and as safe as a cocoon.
“How long were you waiting out there?” he asked.
“Ten minutes, at least.”
“This time of night, you never know when a bus is coming.”
The digital clock on the dashboard read 10:37.
“I wouldn’t mind,” she said. “But this weather!”
“Snow, rain,” he said, “what’s coming next? And it isn’t even winter yet.”
“Oh, I know” she said.
“How’d you like tonight?”
“It was wonderful.”
“I could see you were enjoying yourself.”
“I love working for him, don’t you?”
“I surely do.”
“Did you ever see him do a TV taping before?”
“Once or twice. He’s an incredible person.”
“I know, oh, I know.”
They fell silent, anticipating the precinct protests tomorrow morning, awed by the fact that they both worked for this marvelous human being who was doing so much for race relations in this city. Lorraine had been assigned to a precinct all the way out in Majesta. She wasn’t even sure she knew where it was.
“I hope it won’t be raining,” she said. “Tomorrow.”
“Or snowing,” he said. “Snow would be even worse.”
“Where will you be?”
“The Fifth. Down in The Quarter. Near Ramsey U.”
“My building’s just up ahead,” she said. “On the right.”
“Okay.”
He eased the car to the curb, looked at the dashboard clock. It read 10:52.
“Damn,” he said. “I’m going to miss it.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The news. It goes on at eleven. I’m sure he’ll be the lead story.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yes. Oh, that’s too bad.”
“Well, there’ll be other stories.”
“Why don’t you… well… would you like to come up? Watch it with me?”
“It’s late,” he said. “Tomorrow’s a big day.”
“If we don’t hurry, we’ll both miss it,” she said.
He parked and locked the car, and they dashed through the rain to her building, her spindly umbrella virtually useless now, the rain relentless.
Once inside the small apartment, she went immediately to the television set and turned it on, and then asked him if he wanted a beer or anything.
“Help yourself, they’re in the fridge,” she said, and pointed toward the tiny kitchen, and then went into the bathroom across the hall. He took two bottles of beer from the refrigerator, found a bottle opener in the top drawer of the kitchen counter, and uncapped both bottles. He found two glasses in the cabinet over the sink, and poured beer into each of them. Glancing toward the closed bathroom door, he took a pair of blister-packed white tablets from his jacket pocket, and popped both of them into one of the glasses.
He was sitting on the couch in the living room when she joined him a moment later. The news was just coming on. As he’d suspected, the Gabriel Foster announcement was the lead story. He handed her one of the glasses.
“Thanks,” she said.
“This is Bess MacDougal at the First Baptist Church here in Diamondback…”
“There it is,” she said.
“Cheers,” he said.
“There you are! Oh, look, there you are!”
“Cheers,” he said again.
“There’s me, too! Look!”
“… has called a press conference.”
The pan shot over the photograph of Martin Luther King worked exactly as Foster might have hoped, forging a dramatic pictorial link between the slain civil rights leader and himself. They both fell silent as he began speaking.
“I don’t care what color you are out there,” he said, “you have to believe that what the Mayor said today was untruthful and unjust. Truth and justice! That’s all there is, and all we need to know!”
“Yes, Rev!” someone shouted.
“Look at him,” Lorraine said.
“Beautiful.”
