The Cherokee Rose. Tiya Miles

Atlanta, Cheyenne had toured the Hold House once or twice in grade school. But having a chance to own it, to hold it for herself, was only a fantasy until this week. Her parents thought she was obsessed with genealogy because she hadn’t found the right man to settle down with. Her father humored her with fabricated interest in the draft charts that filled the pages of her Black Indian Genealogy Workbook. Her mother didn’t even pretend to care, waving away her grainy prints of family census records. To them, genealogy was a hobby. To her, it was a quest to find the missing pieces of an inner puzzle that could finally tell her who she was. Cheyenne was a throwback, her grandmother used to say, to an unknown branch of the Cotterell family tree. She fully intended to find that branch and brandish it.

      3

      Ruth Mayes stared at the ocean liner floating across her computer screen, wanting to squash it like a bug. Holland America had slashed its Jamaican cruise fares to drum up ticket sales for the fall season. Pop-up ads nettled her; so did movie trailers. She tended to edit the images she allowed into her head, resenting any loss of control.

      She x-ed out the picture of the long white boat, blocking the thoughts it conjured. Reaching for her travel mug, she took a sip of bad office coffee, then pulled off her tortoise-shell glasses and tugged a corkscrew of thick, dark hair. She leaned back into her seat, aligning her butt with the padding, shifting her swivel chair with the movement of her body. Wheeling the chair in close to her desk, Ruth dug her clogs into the floor and glanced at the architectural photographs taped to the backbone of her cubicle. She needed a muse, a muse who knew houses. She needed a story idea.

      Ruth rested her head on her forearms. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, one hour until the start of her forced vacation. She had nothing to do and nowhere to go for the next two weeks. What she absolutely could not do was lounge around at home in her basement apartment. When she had time on her hands, the pictures popped into her mind, forming a cloud of memories that overtook her like a storm.

      “Ruth, are you feeling all right?” It was Lauren, Ruth’s empathetic, India-print-skirted creative director.

      “Just fine. Thanks.” Ruth straightened her back and popped her glasses onto her nose, taking care not to tangle them in her thicket of curly hair.

      Lauren scanned the blank face of Ruth’s computer screen. “Good, because I’ve got an assignment for you. The sisal mat photo spread didn’t come through. By five, we need a filler story on floor coverings—something trendy, preferably natural fiber. Look for carpets; see what’s new.”

      “Carpets? Are you kidding me? Fudge, Lauren.”

      “I only need five hundred words. And don’t miss the deadline just so you have a reason to come in Monday. As much as we love you around here, Ruth, we don’t want to see you next week. Take the vacation that’s coming to you and save your company some money.”

      Everyone on staff knew Abode was suffering. Advertising had plunged in the last year; subscriptions had slowed as readers started cutting back on their leisure-activity budgets. For the first time in its eight-year run as a sleek Minneapolis-based shelter magazine, Abode was in the red. Instead of cutting staff or shutting down, senior management was trying an intermediate tack. All of the writers had been asked to take accrued vacation time without pay by December. Ruth, an office junkie who barely alighted at home, had saved up six weeks of vacation in her four years with the magazine. The lost pay would devastate some of her coworkers, but Ruth’s mother had left her an ostrich-sized nest egg. For Ruth, it wasn’t the money that kicked her heartbeat into high gear, it was the yawn of open time.

      “Carpets are cozy. Carpets are colorful,” Lauren was saying. “Just the thing for fall. Six hundred words with an ethnic twist. That’s all I’m asking.”

      “I thought you said five hundred.”

      “Six hundred,” Lauren said, patting Ruth’s shoulder in encouragement.

      Ruth shrugged off the touch. “Got it.”

      When Lauren moved away to make her office rounds like a chipper, bohemian candy striper, Ruth stood to stretch. She walked to the wall of windows at the far side of the industrial loft, touching her hand to the brick and gazing out at the skyscrapers. She cracked one of the windows that had been sealed all summer to trap the air conditioning. The breeze outside was cooler than she expected. She pulled together the buttons of her denim jacket over her Barq’s Root Beer T-shirt.

      “Ruth! Got a minute?”

      The voice came from behind her. She turned her back to the window, brushing dust from her fingertips. It was Justin, the magazine’s eco-stylist. He had been asking her out for months. Justin was one of those thirty-something white men with feeling eyes and attractively rumpled, longish hair. She had observed a whole tribe of his nouveau beatnik poet kind at Carleton College when she was in school.

      “So . . .” He took a breath. “Since you’ll be on vacation for a few weeks coming up, I thought maybe we could try to get together.”

      Justin was cute, Ruth supposed. Any woman with her head on straight might at least toss him a bone. “Thanks, Justin. That’s a sweet idea, but I’m going out of town for work.”

      “I heard about the late-breaking carpet story. Did you find a good angle? I’ve been thinking of doing a piece on rugs made out of recycled rubber. There’s a growing industry down in Dalton, Georgia, the U.S. carpet capital.” He smiled and leaned in. “Maybe we could do the research together. Pitch a feature-story idea to Lauren.”

      “My carpet piece is just a filler for the November issue. Nothing special. The carpet capital, though, there’s a ring to that. Thanks for the lead.” Ruth flashed him half a smile before walking away.

      She could feel Justin’s eyes on her ginger-colored culottes as the soft cotton shaped to her ample hips. It was one of her best features, she knew—her hip line to rump line to firm, strong thighs. The thighs came courtesy of many a long-distance weekend run, the hips and butt from her full-figured mother. Try as she had to lose weight back when she was in summer camp sharing a cabin with a Whitley Gilbert double, or when she was at Carleton rooming with stick girls who complained that the size twos were the first to go from the sales rack, she found that the weekend runs never quite canceled out strong maternal genes. She was a comfortable size fourteen, just a tad slimmer than her mother had been. She still recalled the rounded lines of her mother’s shape. “My Gold Coast,” her father would say with a proprietary smile, tracing the curve of her mother’s hips with cool blue eyes. Watching her mother’s expression cloud, Ruth would frown and, for reasons unclear to her small child’s mind, cling to her mother’s side.

      Ruth shut the memory down, slid into her desk chair, and typed “Georgia, rugs, carpets” into the Google search bar. The first few links were carpet-company websites. She scrolled through their menus, jotting down notes. Then she opened a link to a newspaper story about the carpet industry in northwest Georgia, the influx of Latino workers and arrival of Mexican groceries and taquerias. Thank you, Justin. This was the kind of angle she needed to type up six hundred words of cotton-candy copy for Lauren. If Justin was Abode’s eco-stylist with a regular column to his name, Ruth was its ethno-stylist, but without the title or highlighted byline. She was assigned virtually all of the “ethnic” stories—on drapery inspired by Somali fabrics, the Hmong kitchen garden, new directions in outsider-art furniture design. Ruth ignored the obvious pigeonholing of her de facto job description, which she knew fell to her only because she was black. So far, Lauren had been willing enough to keep her busy on assignment, which Ruth accepted as a trade for the narrow topical scope.

      Ruth had a rote method for her filler stories. She started with online research, made a few phone calls, conducted lightning interviews, and dashed off a feel-good piece. It took her just under an hour to pound out her story on how workers in the Georgia carpet industry incorporated hints of their Latin heritage into textile designs. It was claptrap, and she knew it. The real story was labor exploitation in the heart of the industrial Sun Belt. But that wasn’t the kind of story that would suit the readership of a glossy magazine like Abode, with its photos of lovely homes, emerald lawns, and wraparound porches as lacy