Justine was finally able to exhale a normal breath when the station wagon came to a complete stop. She was barely able to discern where she was until she peered at a streetlight through the falling snow. The street sign read: 145THSTREET.
“This is your stop, miss,” the driver said. He shifted in his seat, then handed her an envelope. “Mrs. Crawford said to give you this.”
Justine took the envelope before slipping back into her coat. It was then she saw what had been written on the front of the large envelope. It was the address and apartment number of the building where she would live, and she hoped that in addition to the money she’d been promised, there was a key to her new apartment.
The driver hadn’t bothered to get out to help her, so she opened the car door and struggled to get her suitcases and then carried them up the stoop to the building. Justine made it inside the vestibule, and warmth enveloped her like a comforting blanket.
She smiled. At least she wouldn’t have to put on layers of clothing, like she’d done when living with her mother, just to keep from freezing to death. There were so many times during the winter months when she’d gone to bed fully dressed whenever the building’s superintendent told his tenants that he was awaiting a delivery of coal for the boiler. Justine opened the envelope and saw money, two keys, and a sheet of paper with typed listings. Not only was she grateful for the heat, but the apartment she’d been given was on the first floor. Under another set of circumstances, she would’ve thanked Mrs. Crawford, but the intense enmity she harbored for the woman and her daughter ran too deep for gratitude or forgiveness. Justine didn’t know why, how, or when, but there would come a time when she’d pay them back for what they had done to her.
She put the key in the lock and turned it smoothly. She pushed open the door, picked up her bags, and went inside. There was just enough light coming through the drapes on the windows for her to make out parquet floors.
Justine set down her bags, flicked on a wall switch, and the entryway was bathed in a soft glow from a milk glass ceiling lamp. She closed the self-locking door and walked into the kitchen off the entryway, leaving her coat on a chair and the envelope on a table. She then slowly made her way into the living room that was furnished with a sofa, two matching chairs, and end tables with matching lamps. She continued past the bathroom to a narrow hallway with two doors. She opened one door and looked inside. It was a bedroom with a full-size bed. Then Justine opened the other door to find a smaller bedroom with a twin-size bed. The two-bedroom apartment was a far cry from the little closet of a bedroom in Mount Vernon, and a virtual palace when compared to the apartment where she’d been born and raised in the Bronx.
Justine returned to the kitchen, sat down, picked up the envelope, and emptied its contents. Mrs. Crawford had given her seventy-five dollars—more money than she’d ever had in her entire life. There was also a duplicate key to the apartment, one for a mailbox, and a gold wedding band. And a photograph of a young Black man in an Army uniform. Justine wondered who he was and why it had been given to her. Moments later, she opened a smaller envelope and took out a copy of a birth and death certificate, and a marriage license from the state of Virginia. Her heart beat a double-time rhythm when she realized she was looking at her own birth certificate for the first time. Her mother had listed her father’s name as Richard Douglas. Why had her mother registered her in school using her maiden, rather than her birth father’s, last name? Then, there was the marriage license with the names of Kenneth and Justine Russell. She stared at the date on the license: July 17, 1951. Suddenly it dawned on herthat Lillian Crawford and Precious Boone had falsified a marriage license between her and the man in the photograph. The death certificate documented that Kenneth Russell had died at the age of twenty from a gunshot wound, two months following his marriage.
Justine stared at the two documents, struggling to understand how the two women had not only concocted a scheme to get her pregnant with Dennis Boone’s baby, but had also no doubt paid someone to forge legal documents, all with official seals, so she would be viewed as a widow and not an unmarried woman carrying a child.
A wry smile twisted her mouth as she closed her eyes for several seconds. It was obvious they wanted her to answer as few questions as possible once her condition became known. In as much as Justine hated Precious and Lillian, she was grateful that she wouldn’t have to prefabricate a story as to why she was pregnant and living on her own. They’d written the script for her. She picked up the single sheet of paper with typed instructions:
A midwife will call you a day before coming to check on you every month. If you’re not feeling well, then call her immediately. You will find her number under the telephone in the bedroom. You may use the phone, but at no time will you be allowed to make long-distance calls. The local post office has recorded your name and address for mail delivery. Check your mailbox often because you will get paid receipts for your rent, telephone, and electric, and gas. There is a supermarket on Amsterdam Avenue and several grocery stores on St. Nicholas Avenue. There is also a Chinese laundry, drug store, shoemaker, and drycleaner close by. The beds in the apartment have new mattresses, and you will find pots, pans, dishes, and eating utensils in the kitchen. The refrigerator is new and has been stocked with food items that will last you at least two weeks.
Justine shook her head. It was as if she’d been given her marching orders of what she could and couldn’t do. However, she wasn’t going to sit and lament the fate the two women had determined for her. She would make the best of what she’d been given, then move on after that. She peered inside the envelope, realizing she’d missed something. Reaching inside, she found a business card with the name and address of the secretarial school she was to attend after she’d given birth.
There were only the sounds of sleet pelting the kitchen window and an incessant ticking of the teapot-shaped clock on the wall as Justine continued to stare at the card. Mrs. Crawford had revealed she’d paid for the six-week coursework in advance, and that meant Justine could enroll at any time. Technical and trade schools, like public and private ones, operated year-round, and she perhaps—just maybe she would sign up now rather than in the summer. Picking up the gold band, Justine slipped it on the third finger of her left hand. It was a little large, but not so much that it would slip off. In that instant, she’d become the widow of Kenneth Russell and the impending mother of his unborn child.
Justine decided to wait a week before calling the school, because she wanted to settle into her new apartment and tour the neighborhood; then she would put into motion a plan that she and no one else would be able to control.
Two days after moving in, Justine met one of her neighbors for the first time. Tall, slender, light-complected with a sprinkling of freckles on her nose and cheeks, and large brown eyes that resembled copper pennies, Pamela Daniels, the mother with two young children, rang her bell and introduced herself as the wife of the building’s superintendent.
“I saw you moving in the other day, but I wanted to give you time to settle in before ringing your bell.”
Justine smiled. “I’m Justine Russell—and who is this little angel clinging to your neck?”
Pamela dropped a kiss on the braided hair of the toddler on her hip. “This little chatterbox is two going on twenty-two, and her name is Sandra. But everyone, including my husband, calls her Sandy.”
Justine opened the door wider. “Please come and rest yourself.” She hadn’t thought she would make friends or have any visitors aside from the midwife, who was expected to come at the end of the month.
Pamela shook her head. “Perhaps another time. I just came back from dropping my son off at school, and now I have to get Sandy ready for her doctor’s appointment.” She paused for several seconds. “The only thing I’m going to say is my husband was quite surprised when the landlord told him a single woman was moving in, when all of the apartments in this building are rented to families.”
“I’m not single but widowed. I lost my husband in an accident after being married for two months.” She rested her left hand over her stomach. “He’s gone, but I still have a part of him, because I’m carrying his baby. He was killed when someone tried to rob him, and when he resisted, he was shot in the head.”
“Oh, you poor thing.”
Justine’s eyelids fluttered. “I’m still dealing with his loss. He survived being shot at during the war in Korea, but not here in his own country.” She sighed. “It’s been difficult, but somehow I’ve gotten used to not having him.” She did not want to believe that she’d become such a convincing actress. If she’d learned nothing else from Lillian Crawford and Precious Boone, it was how to lie. “Even though we’d talked about wanting to wait to start a family, because I was planning to go to college this September, I’m glad we didn’t, because I never could have imagined losing my husband this soon.”
“When are you due?”
“Late June.”
“How old are you, Justine?”
“Seventeen. I’ll be eighteen in March.”
Pamela slowly blinked. “You’re only seventeen, expecting a baby, and living on your own?”
Justine registered the incredulity in Pamela’s voice. “Yes,” she answered, smiling. “Kenneth and I decided to get married last summer once I realized I would graduate six months earlier than my classmates. He was on leave from the Army, awaiting an honorable discharge when we went to Virginia, got married, then came back to live with my grandmother. A week after he was officially discharged, he was dead.” The lies rolled off her tongue as if she’d rehearsed them in advance. They no longer bothered Justine, because she was living a lie.
“What are you going to do after the baby is born?”
