Squinting to read an ingredients label at the grocery store, Courtnesha Rogers breaks down. Tears stream down her face and blur the print.
She stands there, sniffling it all back, trying to pull herself together as other shoppers, wary in the time of COVID-19, make a wide detour around her.
Her friend’s death would have been easier to take if it were COVID-19, she thinks.
Courtnesha Rogers’s first hint of pandemic was the day she showed up at the Flance Early Learning Center to pick up her daughter, Angele. “Hey, you can’t go any farther,” she heard someone yell. A table with bottles of Germ X was set up outside, and she had to sanitize her hands before she could enter the building. What? Then she was told she could not bring Angele a My Little Pony cake with four big candles for her birthday.
And then she heard that her father’s best friend had died.
He was 36.