Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult Read Free Book Online Page B

it’s different for everyone. Personally, I hate spics more than I hate Asians, I hate Jews more than
that,
and at the very top of the chart, I despise blacks. But even more than any of these groups, the people you always hate the most are antiracist White folks. Because they are turncoats.
    For a moment, I wait to see whether Marie is one of them.
    A muscle jumps in her throat. “I’m sure we can find a mutually agreeable solution,” she murmurs. “I will put a note on Davis’s file, stating your…wishes.”
    “I think that’s a good plan,” I reply.
    When she huffs out of the room, Brit starts to laugh. “Baby, you are something when you’re fierce. But you know this means they’re going to spit in my Jell-O before they serve it to me.”
    I reach into the bassinet and lift Davis into my embrace. He is so small he barely stretches the length of my forearm. “I’ll bring you waffles from home instead,” I tell Brit. Then I lower my lips to my son’s brow, and whisper against his skin, a secret for just us. “And you,” I promise. “You, I’ll protect for the rest of my life.”
    —
    A COUPLE OF years after I became involved in the White Power Movement, when I was running NADS in Connecticut, my mother’s liver finally quit on her. I went back home to settle the estate and sell my grandfather’s house. As I was sorting through her belongings, I found the transcripts of my brother’s trial. Why she had them, I don’t know; she must have gone out of her way to get them at some point. But I sat on the wooden floor of the living room, surrounded by boxes that would go to Goodwill and into the trash dumpster, and I read them—every page.
    Much of the testimony was new to me, as if I hadn’t lived through every minute of it. I couldn’t tell you if I was too young to remember, or if I’d intentionally forgotten, but the evidence focused on the median line of the road and toxicology screens. Not the defendant’s—but my brother’s. It was
Tanner’s
car that had drifted into oncoming traffic, because he was high. It was in all the diagrams of the tire skids: the proof of how a man on trial for negligent homicide had done his best to avoid a car that had veered into his lane. How the jury could not say, without a doubt, that the car accident was solely the defendant’s fault.
    I sat for a long time with the transcript in my lap. Reading. Rereading.
    But this is how I see it: if that nigger hadn’t been driving that night, my brother wouldn’t be dead.

I N TWENTY YEARS, I ’VE BEEN fired once by a patient, and it was for two hours. She screamed bloody murder and threw a vase of flowers at my head while in the throes of labor. But she hired me back when I brought her drugs.
    After Marie asks me to step outside, I stand in the hall for a moment, shaking my head. “What was that about?” Corinne asks, looking up from a chart at the nurses’ station.
    “Just a real winner of a dad,” I deadpan.
    Corinne winces. “Worse than Vasectomy Guy?”
    Once, I had a patient in labor whose husband had gotten a vasectomy two days before. Every time my patient complained about pain, he complained, too. At one point, he called me into the bathroom and pulled down his pants to show me his inflamed scrotum, as my patient huffed and puffed.
I told him he should call the doctor,
she said.
    But Turk Bauer is not silly and selfish; based on the way he brandished that Confederate flag tattoo, I’m guessing he is not too fond of people of color. “Worse than that.”
    “Well.” Corinne shrugs. “Marie’s good at talking people off the ledge. I’m sure she can fix whatever the problem is.”
    Not unless she can make me white,
I think. “I’m going to run to the cafeteria for five minutes. Cover for me?”
    “If you bring me Twizzlers,” Corinne says.
    In the cafeteria I stand for several minutes in front of the coffee bar, thinking about the tattoo on Turk Bauer’s arm. I don’t have a problem with white