“Hope is the thing with feathers.”

Ms. Van Story chalked the quote of the day creakily on the board, looking like chalk herself with her pale skin and white hair sprayed into a sort of helmet on her head.

As usual, I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I dutifully wrote it down in my notebook. On my left, Eliza, who had been sitting next to me since the fourth grade, diligently sketched a unicorn. On my right, Elroy, a kid I didn’t know well, continued his semester-long nap, head resting on his arms on the desk. Up ahead, Ms. Van Story talked on. Drowsily, I looked down at the ancient graffiti carved into my desktop, including one faded note that read Glory, Glory, Ms. Van Story. How long had she been teaching here, anyway, I wondered? Then everything in the classroom paused, suspended out of time just for a moment. Eliza stopped mid-leg on her latest unicorn. Elroy stirred. The usual jokers behind me stopped whispering and chuckling.

At the front of the classroom, the new kid in the chair closest to the door, someone who had appeared suddenly and mysteriously in mid-October wearing thick glasses and his head wrapped like the top-part of a mummy, held his hand stiffly in the air. “Excuse me, miss,” he said in an accent that reminded me of the Beatles. “Excuse me. “What is mastorboreal great apes?”

The question hung in the air like a bomb about to go off, which it did. The air sucked out of the room, then boomeranged back.

Eliza put her hand over her mouth but laughed loudly anyway. Elroy, newly alert and present, shook hard, his big belly rippling in joy. The jokers behind us howled and flung a paper airplane made from a girlie magazine into the air in celebration.

“Orangutans,” Ms. Van Story said in a voice that could freeze rain, “O-r-a-n-g-u-t-a-n-s,” she repeated slowly, “are the most arboreal great apes.” She pivoted with surprising agility to the blackboard and re-wrote the sentence with deliberation, using her pointer to slap the board with a hardness that matched her voice.

None of us wrote this down, not even me. Once again, I didn’t know what Ms. Van Story was talking about and I didn’t stick around much longer to find out.

Ever since the riots after Martin Luther’s King’s death in April the year before, ahead of the bad, bad summer of 1968, the looks in the hallways at school had become harder, the jostling in the stairwells sharper, the shoving in the cafeteria line more deliberate, the towel snapping and headlocks in the locker room after gym class more directed. By late fall, most of my few remaining classmates from grade school had transferred, either to the whiter schools across Rock Creek Park or out to the Maryland suburbs.

Eliza and were among a handful of white students left. Eliza didn’t have any problems because, well, she was Eliza. I got along with most people too, and was good at hiding in plain sight if I needed to and fading into the background like a small splotch of Wite-Out on an end of term report.

All of this made it easier for me to just slip away. Plus, my father needed the help. I had spent the summer helping him dig out his liquor store on U Street, which had been looted and burned during the riots from that bad, bad summer. We moved what was left of the store to a smaller bottle shop up 16th street near the Maryland line. By December, with the winter cold setting in, my father’s bad back from years of lifting boxes worsened, and he needed more help.

I didn’t mind missing school. I enjoyed the rhythm of opening and closing the store, counting out the register at the end of the day, slotting pennies, nickels, and dimes into paper sleeves from the bank. The rolls of coins had a reassuring, hard certainty to them, as did adding up the day’s receipts, matching the numbers with the items sold, and being able to go back and find out where you made a mistake.

Slowly, the winter break became an extended one. Sometimes walking to work in the morning, I would look up through the bare trees and past the row houses I could see my old boxy, brick school with its white tower.

I wondered then what Eliza was up to and how her unicorns were coming along. If Elroy was still asleep, and how things were going in Ms. Van Story’s life sciences class. Had she re-discovered that old glory mentioned in the desktop graffiti? Was she still telling students to always start sentences with the majuscule? And where had that kid with the thick glasses and British accent come from mid-semester, anyway, appearing like a genie from a magic lamp. I wondered too if anyone had noticed I was gone.

Gradually, stealthily, without the familiar school schedule to rely on, the damp winter months turned into spring. The leaves returned to the trees and the days became longer and heated up as spring became summer.

One hot afternoon, I sat cocooned in the store, the air-conditioning frosting over the windows. Just after four, the bell over the door jingled and I looked up from the sports page. Unexpectedly, my father walked in, fedora pushed back on his head, damp patches under the short sleeves of his collared shirt. I put down my Creamsicle because my father didn’t like it when I helped myself to the cooler.

But he didn’t notice. Instead, he headed toward me with, for once, a big smile, his black rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the aqua and cream linoleum.

We hadn’t seen each other much in recent months. While I was at the store, my father filled his days sorting out what was left of his shrinking empire of small businesses. The main store on U Street remained empty and charred. Meanwhile, a lunch counter he owned in Southwest had been knocked down for a neighborhood renewal project and he had a running argument with government lawyers about compensation. He also owned a laundry over on Columbia Road, near where he had grown up, and some other businesses I didn’t know much about. He kept quiet when he came home in the evening, as did I.

Today, though, he stood before me rubbing his hands together like a man who has just won an unexpected prize. Somewhere out in the suburbs, I thought I heard thunder boom.

“David, my boy, let’s lock her up,” he said, while spinning a whiskey bottle around so its red label faced forward like the others on the shelf.

“What about this place?” I asked.

He glanced around the empty store.

“Who’s going to notice?” my father replied with a small smile. “Besides, than sitting behind a counter eating ice-cream.”

We stepped out into the heat. The pavement steamed from a recent rain. I rolled the metal shutter down over the store and climbed into my father’s Plymouth Valiant idling at the curb.

“Where are we going?” I tried again as my father cruised past the Takoma movie theater, one hand on the wheel, the other tapping ash from his cigar out the window.

“You’ll see, you’ll see,” he replied in a dreamy tone.

We drove in silence to North Capitol Street, with its long rows of turreted brick houses, when my father stopped and pointed to a building.

“You see that store over there,” he said jabbing a finger toward a corner store that looked like any other in the city, with its faded signs for Coca-Cola, rusted metal window grill, and a group of men drinking from brown paper bags out front. “Your Ma, God rest her…well, your Ma and I got our start at that place. We lived in the apartment up above just before you were born.”

I looked up at the second story and spotted a small Black boy watching the street. I waved but we had already moved past him by then. I wasn’t sure who I was waving to…Ma maybe.

Along North Capitol, all the pointy turrets on the houses brought to mind witches’ hats and formed a sort of tunnel leading to the Capitol dome at the end of the street. My father made a left on Mass. Ave., and I thought for a moment we might be headed to D.C. Stadium.

“Senators’ game?” I asked.

“You’ll see, you’ll see,” my father said once more, still with a far-away look in his eye. I put my feet on the dashboard above the glove box and remembered the Senators were out of town. We then drove in the silence through shady streets of sturdy brick row houses with people cooling off from the heat on their front steps while children played on the sidewalk.

On the bridge across the Anacostia River, my father suddenly spoke.

“We’re getting warmer,” he announced as we drove east of the river and past a run-down commercial strip. Just past a wig store he made a right onto a smaller side street and halfway down the block turned left into a driveway.

At my father’s direction, I hopped out and took down a chain across the entry. My father pulled forward and parked in front of a squat cinder block building with a shattered plate glass window. What was left of a wooden sign ripped off the front door read, “Sol’s Soles. inest ootwear.” Through the smashed window I could see the inside was empty except for bare shelves lining the walls.

“Are we buying this place?”

“Ha,” my father chuckled, not smiling, while unlocking the front door with a thick ring of keys. We stepped in and found a small circle of empty bottles of cheap wine against one wall, cigarette butts, the missing F’s from the front door sign, and a stray woman’s high heel against another.

“What happened here?” I asked.

“Somebody out there sure doesn’t like me,” my father said, emerging from the back office with a push broom. I dumped the bottles into a trash bag and picked up the woman’s shoe. Just then the gravel in the driveway popped and an Oldsmobile the same dark green as the woman’s pump pulled in.

“Here we go,” my father said handing me the broom and stepping outside.

I put the broom against the wall and followed.

Outside, the passenger door of the Oldsmobile swung open, and a familiar face emerged wearing a headdress decorated with long feathers, a tank top, moccasin boots, and red and white striped shorts—Eliza. Another girl I recognized also stepped out.

Meanwhile, my father approached a tall Black man wearing a sharp suit and a floppy black beret with a blue feather off to one side.

“Rowland Morgan?” my father said, holding out his hand, “Sol Brody, thanks for coming out.”

Eliza stood before me, leggy and grinning. Up close I could see she had stenciled the band name Rolling Stones on her shirt.

“Hey you, Happy Fourth,” she said.

“Is it the Fourth…? I guess it is…” I said stupidly, suddenly remembering it was a holiday. “Happy Fourth. What brings you out this way?”

“I could ask you the same question,” she responded, punching me on the shoulder as she did. “Where did you disappear to last year? Oh, you know Wanda, right?” Next to Eliza, Wanda, who was in our homeroom back at school, gave me a small, slow wave and shy smile.

“Hey,” she said, then nodded her head toward the store, “that’s my brother Rowdy, he’s in the business school at Howard and works at the Drum and Spear bookstore…”

“Cool,” I said evenly.

“That’s all you got to say for yourself, ‘cool?’” Eliza said, hitting me again on the shoulder but harder this time.

Behind me I heard Rowland Morgan saying, “market share” and “target audience” to my father.

“This neighborhood certainly has the right retail demographic,” Rowland Morgan continued as he and my father stepped back outside.

My father grunted uncertainly.

“Look, I even had cards made up,” Morgan added, handing over a business card. My father looked at it uncertainly. I looked over his shoulder. In the top left corner, a smiling worm emerged from the center of a spinning record. The card read:

EARWORM MUSIC

Vinyl, Super-8 tracks, Audio Supplies

Rowland Morgan, Proprietor

My father grunted again and spoke, “Very nice. Let me think this over. Thanks for your time, Mr. Morgan.”

“That sounds great,” Rowland Morgan replied, shaking my father’s hand firmly. “Have a nice Fourth.”

“So, see you in the fall, right?” Eliza said, turning toward me.

“Yeah, of course,” I said, though I hadn’t thought about the future or going back to school. Not sure what else to say, I handed her the green pump.

She turned it over in her hand, inspecting the shoe carefully.

“Looks like it needs a friend,” she finally said, giving me a look that shot right through me and left me short of breath. Rowland Morgan put his arm around his sister Wanda like a protective wing and they all glided toward the car.

My father stayed rooted in the same spot after the three of them drove off. He said nothing and instead puffed on a cigar. He held the EARWORM card in his hand and stared into the darkening parking lot while the cicadas chanted with rising and falling creaks. After a long while staring into the gathering dark, my father said, “Let’s go.”

On the bridge back into town I could see the white dome of the Capitol on the horizon, backlit by a Creamsicle sunset of fading pink and orange.

My father gripped the steering wheel hard, like he was driving into a strong headwind, the fedora pushed back on his head, an unlit cigar pushed to the side of his mouth. “Earworm? What the hell?” he said to himself.

Perhaps the last year—the lost businesses, burned neighborhoods, Ma’s death—was hitting him all at once, the way an overloaded shelf in a stock room suddenly topples over on you. “What the hell?” he repeated, squeezing the steering wheel, before down-shifting. “Who was your pal in the Pocahontas get-up and Uncle Sam pants anyway?”

I thought about Eliza in her homemade headband and Fourth of July shorts and I felt light, buzzy. She was like a rainbow, with colors everywhere, as the Rolling Stones put it. I pulled the round cigarette lighter from the console and the metal circle glowed hot. I offered my father a light, but he shook his head. I thought about the last year, too, Ma, Eliza, Ms. Van Story…trying school again in the fall.

Suddenly and for no reason at all, I said, “Hope is the thing with feathers.”

“What?” my father said. He turned to look at me, relaxing his grip on the wheel. “What did you say?”

I repeated the words, realizing now how ridiculous they sounded.

A slow smile spread across my father’s face, pushing his cigar upward like an exclamation mark. “What the hell?” he said again, but this time smiling, then erupting into laughter— a loud, rolling belly laugh, leaving him gasping for breath like when you come up for air at the pool after a deep dive.

“Hope is the thing with feathers,” I said again, tripping over the words as I started to laugh myself.

Maybe it was that simple after all.