Lost in the City

HIS MOTHER’S HOUSE

When his mother moved into that 10th Street house Santiago Moses bought for her, one of the few things she brought from the place she left behind was the coffee table made of see-through glass and false wood. And once in the house he bought, in the renovated house, one of her pleasures in the first weeks was watching the neighbors watch as the trucks came to deliver furniture, some of it still in sealed boxes and crates, brand new furniture and appliances that no other woman in the world had lived with. In the midst of all the new that her son bought for her — the living room couch itself cost as much as all the furniture in the place she left behind — she put the coffee table that had been owned by God knows how many people before she herself bought it in that second-hand store on H Street in Northeast and had her man rope it to the roof of his eleven-year-old Chevy.

Her whole life, in dozens of pictures, could be seen through the glass top of that old coffee table, and that was what she told her son.

“Oh, don’t give me that stuff, Mama,” Santiago told her two months or so after she had moved in, “go back to Levitt’s. Go back to Woodie’s. You can find somethin somewhere that’ll be better than this piece of shit.” He was sitting on the leather couch beside Rickey Madison and her son leaned forward and knocked twice on the top of the table. It was along about midnight.

“Stop,” Joyce Moses said, “you’ll break the glass.” But her words lacked the scolding force of the old days, and she giggled and put both hands to her mouth and shook herself: She was still exhilarated by the new world her son had bought for her, and, in any case, one more crack in the top wouldn’t have been the end. Her two younger children were upstairs, asleep in oaken beds, safer than they had ever been in their lives. Santiago Moses watched his mother, then he gave the table another playful tap. He was twenty years old.

“Nope nope nope,” Joyce said. “Don’t want another table.” She had been drinking, but “only a teensy-weensy bit a wine,” as she told Rickey after he arrived with Santiago. The carpet was down, having been installed throughout the house before she and Rickey and her two younger children moved in, but much of the new furniture had yet to be arranged in the rooms just as she wanted. There was no hurry. She sat on the floor, leaning back on her arms, her toes disappearing into the carpet. “With all this other stuff, don’t you think if I’da wanted another coffee table, I woulda gone out and ordered it?”

“It’s a gotdamn shame to buy the best and then have this shit sittin in the middle of all the good stuff,” Santiago said. He laughed. “We can give this old one to the poor,” and he laughed again. His feet were propped on the edge of the coffee table, and as he laughed he stretched his legs out over the table and shook them up and down.

“He’s right, honey,” Rickey said. He had been her common-law husband for six years. “Better find somethin new. We can look next week.”

Santiago stopped laughing and turned to Rickey. “My mother’s old anough to know what she want. She ain’t nobody’s child, Rickey. She don’t need nobody tellin her what to do.”

“I didn’t mean anything by it, Sandy. Why you gettin all upset again? Sides, I think I should be able to tell my own woman somethin.”

“Rickey, you can’t tell nobody shit! Just do what I tell you and keep your mouth shut.”

“All right now, you two,” Joyce said. “I don’t want yall startin nothin.” She stood up quickly, for this was how the last fight started. “All right. All right. This conversation’s closed far as I’m concerned, cause I’m keepin this table and thas all there is to it. Why yall wanna go and spoil a good time?”

“We gotta be goin anyway,” Santiago said.

She walked them to the door, and Santiago kissed her cheek, the same kind of peck he had been giving her since he was months old. He turned up his jacket collar and went out the wooden and iron-bar doors and down the steps to his Range Rover. Rickey kissed her mouth. “See you later, baby,” he said. He whispered that she should get a new table and she gave him a playful push.

“C’mon,” Santiago said, “You know what she taste like by now. I ain’t got all night.”

The layered curtains were now up, and she parted them and watched her son and husband ride away down 10th Street. She continued to stand by at the window. She loved this time most, the hours when her house and all that was in it seemed to conspire with the quiet and envelop her. She had, while still in the old place, passed this house a million times, when it had contained a horrible family of loud people. Back then, she would have bet the souls of her children if someone had told her that one day the house would be made over and then hold her and her family.

She turned out the lamp beside her, and by and by she saw a form across the street peel away from a huge shadow, take the shape of a man, and walk toward the house. Before the man was midway across the street, she could see, in the walk without purpose, in the thinness, that it was Humphrey, her godson. For a minute or so, he stood in the middle of the empty street and looked up and down, his hand shading his eyes as if it were the middle of a very sunny day.

“Mama Joyce, it’s so good to see you,” Humphrey said, holding on to the banister with both hands as he made his way up the stairs. She opened the wooden door wider. “Sandy here?” He smiled through the iron-bar door, then he began to laugh, and she saw that he was out of his head again.

“Sandy just left,” she said and opened the iron-bar door. “He might be back fore long. Come on in, sweetie.” She did not bother to ask why he was across the street, as if he had been waiting, because she knew she would not have received an answer that meant anything.

“Mama Joyce, I can’t stay.” He laughed. “Could I just leave some money here for you to give him?” He stepped into her house.

“Now, honey, you know I don’t handle any money for Sandy. You gotta take that up with him.”

He blinked uncontrollably, then turned his head and looked at something invisible beside him. He laughed again, then he turned back to Joyce. “It’s all right, Mama Joyce. I told him…I said, I said, ‘I’m gonna leave it with her just this one time.’”

“You sure bout that?”

“Please, Mama Joyce. Please please. Pretty please with sugar on top.” He giggled.

“All right, you crazy thing. Just this once.” She shut the iron-bar door, listening for the click that told her it was secured, and then locked the wooden door. The world was not a safe place, Rickey kept telling her. Humphrey handed her a folded lump of bills. “Wow,” she said, “nough to choke a horse.”

He looked intently at the money. “It’s never enough,” he said, and for a second or so he straightened himself up. “But you tell him, Mama Joyce, you tell him I’ll get the rest to him as soon as I can. Sooner than soon.”

“You hungry?” She took off his baseball cap and ran her hand through his hair, something Santiago would no longer let her do. “You need a haircut. You want somethin to eat?”

He shook his head and then stared at her as if he were trying to remember something. “I ain’t hungry, Mama Joyce. Thanks all the same.” He continued to stare. “Gettin in shape. Gettin in shipshape.” He began to box with the invisible something beside him. “We gettin in shape, ain’t we?” he said to the thing. “Ain’t we gettin in shape?”

Finally, he sat on the couch. Joyce put the money on the coffee table and the wad began to unfold. In little or no time, Humphrey had tumbled over and was asleep. A few tiny, clear packets fell out of his jacket pocket onto the floor. She picked up the packets and placed them on the coffee table. She could have counted on one hand the times she had seen the stuff, but each time she did, the cream-colored nuggets always reminded her of small chunks of white Argo starch she had eaten when she was pregnant.

From the hall closet, she took new sheets from their wrappings and covered him, then put a couch pillow under his head. In his sleep, he was laughing again. “He uses more of the stuff than he sells,” she had once overheard Santiago tell Rickey.

She unlaced Humphrey’s tennis shoes and discovered that they were the same pump kind Santiago had bought for her other son. She pushed the air-release button and thought she could hear the hissing of the escaping air. She set the shoes under the couch.

“Two-hundred-dollar shoes,” she said, “and holes in his socks.” She and Humphrey’s mother, Pearl Malone, had been like sisters since they were ten years old. They had, at seventeen, given birth to their oldest sons, Santiago and Humphrey, within three weeks of each other.

Joyce sat across from Humphrey in what the store salesman had called a Queen Anne chair. One of her legs was resting across a chair arm, an old habit she was trying to break in the new house. She watched the sleeping boy and listened to the grandfather clock in the hall. Before Santiago and Humphrey were born, Joyce and Pearl had decided to share an apartment to save on the money they would get from public assistance. They discovered, a week or so after Humphrey was born, that Pearl’s milk had mysteriously dried up, and Pearl became convinced that without her milk, her son would grow up without immunity.

“Oh, girl, you worry too much” Joyce told her one morning in a splendid June. “They makin formula and stuff thas just as good as breast milk.”

“Joyce, I don’t wanna feed my baby outa no box.” They were in their kitchen and Pearl, standing at the stove, was reading aloud every word on the box of formula. Then she held it to her ear and shook it, as if just the sound of the contents was evidence of a lack of something vital. “He’ll get all those diseases. I read about it.” The babies were in plastic carriers, setting on the table. Santiago was asleep and Humphrey was watching Joyce, who sat playing with his hair.

In the end, Joyce offered to feed Humphrey from her own breasts. And for the six months or so Pearl felt it took to give Humphrey protection against the world’s diseases, Joyce would take him up and put him to her breast. “I’m gonna teach him to call you Mama Joyce,” Pearl said, wiping sweat from her brow one day in the crushing humidity of August.

In the very center of Joyce’s coffee table, under the see-through glass, were pictures of her children and Pearl’s as babies. Chubby-cheeked beings looking off to the side uninterestedly, or looking dead at the camera eye as if to challenge. Surrounding those pictures were photographs of the children in later years, and surrounding those were pictures of Joyce’s parents and aunts and uncles and the children of her friends. There were pictures of her and Rickey together, arms around each other, and there were pictures of her alone, at the beach, at parties, sitting with crossed legs on the hoods of boyfriends’ cars. In the top left-hand corner of the glass, there were cracks of one or two inches, radiating out, like the sun’s rays in a child’s drawing. Santiago, not long after they bought the table, had promised that if the cracks got any longer he would use his summer job money to replace the entire glass.

About two that morning Santiago called. The telephone sounded with the most unobtrusive chime she had been able to find. She was on the second floor, in the room she had furnished with such care and set aside for her mother, who would not ever step foot in her daughter’s house. When she told Santiago that Humphrey was there, he told her not to let Humphrey leave. “I been lookin for his bony ass for two whole days,” he said.

“He downstairs sleepin,” Joyce said, “and I don’t think he goin anywhere.” She wanted to know where Rickey was, why he wasn’t home yet, and Santiago told her that he would send Rickey home soon and that he himself would be staying at his Capitol Heights apartment if she needed him.

She had little use for sleep anymore, and after the call, she roamed the house with all the lights turned out, something she often did, even when Rickey was home. She and Pearl had shared poor-women dreams of living in a place like this, with furniture no one else in the whole world had ever used. As she walked about the dark house, she liked to remember what she and Pearl had said once upon a time, remember how painful it could be just to dream. Then, her mind would leap to now and she would touch something, the grandfather clock, the shelves of food in the pantry, the drawer of brassieres still with their price tags, the silver racing bicycle her youngest son was too small to ride.

About three that morning, while Joyce stood looking out the third-floor hall window, Humphrey got up and stumbled out. She got downstairs and found the iron-bar and wooden doors open to the world. She discovered later that he had taken the money. Toward three thirty, Rickey, nearly dead on his feet, finally came home. She fixed him a sandwich with thick slices of ham and then sat across the kitchen table from him, sipping a beer. “What a way to pay the rent,” he kept saying between bites. She helped him upstairs and into bed. Then she roamed the house some more until about four thirty, when she came to bed and curled up close to him. But she could not sleep because she kept thinking she had not locked all the windows and doors.

The pictures of her mother started in the center of the coffee table display. Her mother rarely smiled in the photographs and she often looked into the camera as if the eye had caught her doing something God would not approve of. “I just don’t take the good pictures,” her mother had said when she saw the display at the apartment Joyce had left behind.

The pictures of Rickey began under the see-through glass more or less where the photographs of Santiago at ten began. Rickey did not like having his picture taken, and so most of the photos were of him in unguarded moments. One was taken at somebody’s house during Christmas. The camera had caught him with his mouth parted in a small O and the camera had given him red eyes. Rickey’s pictures had replaced those of the two men who had fathered her three children. He was the first man in her life who had never beaten her. And for a long time she thought that because he did not beat her, he did not care for her as much and that one morning she would wake up and, like the others, he would be gone.

Before Rickey Madison became a driver and bodyguard for Santiago Moses, he worked construction. The work was steady enough so that at least once a week he could take Joyce and her children to the Flagship on the wharf. One evening two years or so before, they came out of the restaurant and found that Rickey’s Chevy wouldn’t start. Rickey, after spending more than half an hour under the hood, stepped away from the car with resignation and spat into the gutter. Joyce watched him. He was the kind of man who had nightmares about not getting to work on time. Santiago, laughing, made the sign of the cross over the car.

“What the hell you laughin at, boy?” Rickey said. Clovis, Joyce’s little girl, came up to him and put her hand in his.

“You,” Santiago said. “You look like you don’t know whether to shoot that thing or beg it for another chance.” He put his arm around Rickey’s shoulder, for by then Santiago was a head taller than the man.

“You think this so damn funny, huh?” Rickey said. “If I can’t get to work in the mornin, you may not eat next week.” Joyce worked as a home care aide, but it was Rickey’s money that kept the family going.

“Oh, I’ll eat all right,” Santiago said. He took several new bills from his pocket. “Next week, and the week after that, and the one after that, and all the ones after that too.” He stuck some of the money in Rickey’s pocket. “Take a cab to work tomorrow.”

“It probably some play money,” Clovis said.

“Play money my ass,” Santiago said. He had not come to the restaurant that evening with the rest of the family. And when he did arrive, he was accompanied by a woman who must have been at least ten years older than he. The woman had brought along her son, about three or four years old. “Play money my ass,” the woman said.

Rickey counted the money, then he counted it twice more, spread it fanlike and turned to show it to Joyce. “Look,” he said to her. “Look at this.” He said to Santiago, “You hit the number or somethin, boy?”

“God provides,” Santiago said. “God is good.” He said to the woman, “Ain’t that right, baby?” She sidled up to Santiago and began to giggle. The woman wore a low-cut blue dress and a gold crucifix on a gold chain around her neck, and all through dinner Joyce had looked at the cross resting between the woman’s breasts. “God is everything,” Santiago said. “God is good.”

The moment Joyce had seen the woman walk into the restaurant, she knew she would not like her, knew the woman had been doing things with her son. Santiago continued on about God and goodness, and the woman leaned herself and her breasts against him. “Now why don’t you go find a cab so you can take the family home,” Santiago told Rickey. Rickey, without words, went off to look for a cab. “Me and Tamara gon take her car.” The woman’s little boy, looking at Rickey walk away, sat down on the sidewalk with a very loud sigh, as if he thought there would be much more talking and he may as well wait until it was all over.

In the cab, Joyce, seeing how happy Rickey was, told the cab driver to take the long way back to their apartment.

The next time Joyce saw the boy and his mother, it was the day after they had delivered the pool table for the basement in the new house. The woman had reached through the iron-bar door and knocked at the wooden door, and she was about to knock again when Joyce opened the door.

“You tell Sandy he can have him,” the woman said to Joyce. She took one of the boy’s hands and wrapped his fingers around one of the bars. “This is my settlement for all the money I owe him.” In his other hand, the boy was holding a little car, and leaning against his leg was a small suitcase held together with rope. “You tell him he can stop buggin me now bout what I owe him. Mark me down paid in full. And tell him to send me a receipt care of General Delivery.” She went clackety-clack down the stairs in her high heels, wobbling the way Joyce had seen Humphrey wobble, and the boy began to cry. “Shut up, gotdamnit! Shut up, I said!” She was down the street before Joyce could collect herself to say anything.

“Hey! Hey! Wait a minute! Whas goin on here!” Joyce opened the iron-bar door, nearly knocking the boy down the steps. “Come back here!” The woman was nearing O Street. “Sweet Jesus,” Joyce said to herself. Had she not been in her bathrobe she would have run after the woman. “What are you doin?”

The boy was still crying. “Well, I don’t love you neither!” he yelled to his mother as she turned the corner, and then he threw the car in her direction. “And I never even did.”

When Santiago called that afternoon, he told his mother it would be all right, that the boy would be gone by the evening. “The dopey bitch just made a mistake, thas all,” he said. But the boy, Adam, stayed three weeks, and no one ever again saw his mother. He was a silent presence in the house and never caused Joyce a moment’s problem. Whatever Joyce told him to do, he did without question or sass. He had retrieved the car the first day, and for all those three weeks, he mostly sat out of the way in a corner of the living room, rolling the car back and forth. The carpet was too thick for the car to move very far on its own, and the boy usually pushed it all the way. Unlike other boys she had known, he did not make car sounds as he moved it. By the time the city government woman had come to get him, Joyce had given him a piece of her heart. The city government woman, who quickly produced a large red sucker as if she expected trouble from Adam, spoke college-people English and double-parked in front of the house. The city government woman took him by the hand, and the boy did not say good-bye and he did not cry. Quite often after that, after Santiago had released Rickey for the night and Joyce had curled up beside him in their bed, she would see Adam in her dreams. But in the dreams he was always a grown man and he would somehow come through the iron bars of one of the basement windows in the dead of night, and when, in the dark, they came upon each other, in the kitchen, on the stairs, in one of the children’s rooms, she did not understand why she was not afraid of him.

“I guess he must get that kinda need from you, cause he done gone and bought a house in Fort Washington,” Rickey said to Joyce one evening, nearly a year after they had moved into the house. They were in their second-floor bedroom, in their pajamas on the bed, the way Joyce liked to relax with Rickey after her two youngest children were asleep in their beds on the third floor. For a change, Santiago had let him go early. Rickey was leaning back against the headboard and Joyce was lying across the foot of the bed, and in front of her were a beer and her cigarettes and an ashtray on a bamboo tray that could not be tipped over. “I guess he’ll be invitin you and the kids out to see it soon.” This was how she received most of the news about Santiago, in bits and chunks from Rickey when the day was all but over.

“You look so tired, baby,” she said. “Why don’t you lay down and let me give you one of my special back rubs?”

“I don’t want nobody’s gotdamn back rub!”

“Well, you sure look like you could use one.” When he moved his head, she could see that it was making a greasy spot on the white headboard. She considered what it would take to remove the spot. The day before, he had accidentally dropped a lighted cigarette on the carpet in the hall and she had cursed him for being careless.

“You know what I saw last week?” he said. He took a swig from his own beer on the nightstand.

“No, baby, what did you see last week?”

He did not like the way she said that, and at first he thought he would just shut her out and turn over and go to sleep. But soon he said, “I saw the most money I ever seen in my whole life.” He suppressed a belch. He squinted, gazed at the bedspread as if the memory of the money were now a scene unfolding in the spread’s pattern of palm trees and sand and birds in flight. “And it was in a room with a few kids that couldn’t a been no more than thirteen, fourteen years old. They was playin this big radio that was sittin in the windowsill and they all knew the songs that was playin on the radio, and every time a song came on they would sing along, like they was at camp or somethin. They were at this big round table, countin that money and laughin and havin all the fun in the world like they were just countin so many leaves and it wouldn’t be anything if it all blew away.” He yawned. “So much money that it musta been some kinda sin just to have it at one time in a place that wasn’t a bank. Some house in Northeast, maybe it was Southwest. One place is gettin to be like another now. ‘Drive me here, Rickey.’ ‘Drive me there, Rickey.’”

Joyce took a sip of beer and lit another cigarette.

“I thought you was gonna quit them things,” Rickey said. She could tell one of his drunk spells was coming on.

“You member: I told you the first of the month. Don’t you remember? I promise.” She could tell he didn’t believe her.

Rickey said: “All the men there ever was in my family, that’ll ever be in my family, each one could work day and night for a thousand years, and all the money they would make would never come close to what I saw in that room. I can still hear some a those songs that was on the radio, and I can tell you some a the words.” He sang one of the songs.

“You ready for that back rub now, sugar?”

He yawned again, then inspected his fingernails and slid farther down in the bed. “I forgot to tell you that day fore yesterday I finally got a look at this Smokey Peebles. Himself. The William ‘Smokey’ Peebles everybody talks about. After all this time, I guess Sandy trust me enough.” Despite Joyce’s pleadings, he refused to wear the silk pajamas she bought for him. The cotton and synthetic ones, he told her, didn’t let him slide off the bed as the silk ones did. “Gimme a sip.” He reached for Joyce’s beer.

“You got your own.” She lit another cigarette. “Rickey, why you gotta always bring that stuff home? Those people don’t interest me in the least. I thought we was gonna have a nice evenin, just me and you, baby.” She was afraid he might start pouting, as he now did more and more when he was drunk, and to head him off, she pushed the tray out of the way and crawled up the bed and put her arms around him. “All right,” she said. “I’m sorry. So this was the one himself, huh?”

He was silent for a long time and she reached into his underwear and stroked him.

“Not right now,” he said, taking her hand out. “Besides it don’t seem to be doin the job anyway.”

“You gotta be patient,” Joyce said. “Thas the thing bout makin babies. It helps if thas the last thing on your mind. Makin em. Then they come one two just like that.”

Rickey said, “Sandy had me drive him to this place off Florida Avenue, to some kinda old-fashioned drug store. But they didn’t have a pharmacy or nothin like that. It was mostly just a soda fountain and some booths. A few tables and chairs, just like in those old black-and-white movies.” She put her hand inside the shirt of his pajamas and stroked his chest; sometimes there was nothing to do but ride the whole thing out.

“I could tell that Sandy’d been there before, just from the way he gave me directions,” Rickey said. “When they let us in, Sandy goes to the counter and sits down beside this little boy, who was drinkin a milkshake all slurpy-loud and everything. I stood near the big front window, just like he told me to. There was two men I’d seen someplace else before standin near the front door, and there was a large man in one of the booths sittin across from this very pretty woman who was drinkin a big milkshake just like the little boy. This big fella had on the best-lookin suit I’d ever seen, the kinda suit I want you to bury me in when I pop off. Sandy was steady-talkin to this little boy and I just kept lookin at Smokey, at that big back a his. It made me nervous at first to be near somebody they say had killed three men. The woman he was talkin to had on a lot of makeup and she was more interested in the milkshake than whatever it was Smokey was sayin to her.”

Joyce continued to stroke his chest and threw her leg over his thighs. “Shoulda went up and introduced yourself,” she said. “‘I heard so much about you, Mr. Peebles. Can I call you Smokey?’”

Rickey smiled. He said, “There was an old white man in a nice clean apron behind the fountain and he had one a those old-timey soda jerk hats on. He held up one a those metal glasses they useta make milkshakes in and he shook it at me, wantin to know if I wanted one. I shook my head. There wasn’t nobody else in the place but these people, and no aisles with soap and toothpaste and aspirin and whatnot, and I gradually got the feelin that this white man’s one job in life was to make milkshakes and banana splits and everything for whoever big Smokey told him to.”

The grandfather clock in the hall downstairs struck ten, and Joyce lifted her head momentarily from Rickey’s chest to listen for Clovis getting up and going to the bathroom.

“At the last, this little boy Sandy had been talkin to turned in his seat and hopped away from the stool. He twisted his body around without movin his feet to see how far he’d hopped away from the seat. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He came toward the door and everybody jumped up, includin Sandy. One a those guys opened the door. The boy stuck out his hand to me, and I could see that he wasn’t a boy atall. ‘You Rickey, huh?’ he said. ‘I’m Smokey. Smokey Peebles. You keep watchin out for my boy there. There’s some bad shit in the world, y’know, and I don’t want my boy hurt.’ He pointed over his shoulder to Sandy. ‘He my righthand man.’ I just shook his hand, cause I didn’t know what to say. ‘How you like my tennis shoes,’ he said. ‘They Chuck Taylors. Converse. Thas all I wear is Chuck Taylors.’ He just went on like me and him was old walk partners and like the only important thing in the world to him was what kinda tennis shoes he wore. The fella who’d opened the door closed it, seein that Smokey wasn’t headin out. I could see some children gatherin at the door. ‘When I was a little boy,’ Smokey was sayin, ‘Chuck Taylor was the thing. Every boy had to have Chuck Taylors. They were like ten dollars or somethin back then, but that was a whole lotta money. My mama — I’ll never forget this — my mama got me these cheap-ass three-dollar tennis shoes from Becker’s on 7th Street. You know how mamas can be. If you saw those tennis shoes like from a mile away you’d think they were Chuck Taylors, but up close, even a blind man could tell you they was just imitation. And people, my own friends now, got on my shit about it too, stomped all over my feelins. Every time I wore them they’d like come up to me, bend down, and point real close at these imitation Chuck Taylors.’”

Rickey reached over and drank the last of his beer in one swig. “I think he musta been twenty-five or somethin like that, and all he was talkin about was those damn tennis shoes. This woman at the booth came out and zipped up his jacket. Then I saw that she wasn’t really a woman but a girl, maybe eight, nine years old, and I thought I was gonna be sick. She had on high heels and big earrings and a short dress and a painted face that made you wanna cry. She moved like every move she had learned by practicin, like maybe she’d studied how to move like a real woman while standin in front a some big mirror. She put her arm through Smokey’s, just like they was man and wife or somethin. Smokey was steady talkin. ‘Now all I wear is Chuck Taylor tennis shoes. High-tops, low-tops, red, yellow, gold, green, purple. All colors. Even the regular white or the black ones. Guys all over the world wearing hundred-dollar, two-hundred-dollar, three-hundred-dollar tennis shoes and me — I’m happy with some of the cheapest on the market. No pump, no flyin; just me and Chuck.’

“The guy opened the door again, and everybody followed him on out. The big man who’d been in the booth started to open the back door of this Mercedes for him, but Smokey said, ‘Oh, no. I feel like tryin out my drivin muscles.’ And he raised his arms and flexed his muscles. One man took this thick pad of foam and put it in the driver’s seat. All these kids was crowdin round Smokey, and one of the fellas with Smokey started throwin change in the air and the shit came down on some a their heads, but the kids didn’t care cause it was money. ‘Yall stay off dope, you hear me?’ Smokey told em. ‘Yall stay off dope. Stay away from that mess. And stay in school. Stay in school.’ All the kids knew his name and they started singin what he’d just said. Made up a little song right there on the spot. The white man in that apron came to the window and started wavin to nobody in particular. Then I heard him lock the door and I could see the shades comin down.”

When the telephone chimed, Joyce was dozing. Rickey picked up the entire telephone and handed it to her. She sat up and blinked herself wide awake. “Pearl? Pearl, what is it?” she said after a bit. “Stop cryin now, honey, and tell me whas wrong.”

Rickey went downstairs to get more beer because the tiny refrigerator in their bedroom had conked out the day before. When he returned, Joyce was wetting her finger and rubbing it on the greasy spot on the headboard.

“What Pearl squawkin about?”

“Somethin about Humphrey owin Sandy money,” Joyce said. “She want me to talk to Sandy, have him let up on Humphrey.”

“He ain’t gonna do it,” Rickey said, sitting on the side of the bed and kicking off his slippers. “He done give the Hump too many breaks already. Pearl sound like all this stuff is somethin logical, like some Riggs Bank loan. She should bring her ass out of Potomac once and a while and see what it’s like in the real world. What can she know bout what Humphrey’s up to if all they do is talk on the phone?”

Three years before, Pearl had married what she told Joyce was her “dream man,” a much older man who owned four restaurants scattered throughout Northeast and Anacostia. They moved to Potomac, but while her new husband had accepted her second child, he told Pearl that he would have nothing to do with Humphrey until the boy “straightened himself out.” The result, essentially, was that home for Humphrey became just about anywhere he happened to be. He had declined to come and live with Joyce.

“I’ll talk to Sandy,” Joyce sighed.

“Talk to the Hump while you at it.”

The telephone chimed again. Joyce answered, said, “Yes, mama, tomorrow,” a few times and then hung up. “She sounded very calm,” she said to Rickey. “But the calmer she sounds, the madder she is about somethin. Problems, problems. Ain’t I got problems.” She took Rickey’s beer from him and placed it on the nightstand. “If Daddy want a baby, Daddy gotta work for it.”

The next day was Friday, and she put off going to see her mother because it was too nice an April day not to begin preparations for her backyard garden. Santiago called twice during the day and he assured her that his Mama Pearl was exaggerating about what Humphrey owed him.

“Then what’s this she talkin about?” Joyce said to him Sunday morning. Sundays were the only days he would agree to come over early so she could have everyone together for breakfast.

“I don’t know,” Santiago said. He was sitting across the table from his brother, Taylor. “Think fast!” he told the boy before tossing a biscuit at him. “You know how Mama Pearl can be.” Taylor ran around the table and grabbed Santiago’s ear. He feigned pain and then pretended to choke Taylor.

“Then you won’t mind talkin to Humphrey when he get here. I made him promise to come over.”

Santiago stopped playing with Taylor. He shrugged. “I don’t mind. I told you it was cool.”

Taylor continued to play with Santiago. “All right,” Joyce said. “Thas anough of that. Get upstairs and clean your damn room! You know I’m still hot about that bike, so you better stay outa my sight today.” She said to Santiago, “After I told him again not to take the bike, he took it out last night and busted the front wheel.”

“What’s the use of havin some toy if you can’t play with it,” Taylor said. Joyce had promised that he could begin riding it on his next birthday, when she thought he would be tall enough to reach the pedals.

“When the toy cost three hundred dollars, it ain’t no toy no more,” she said. “And listen here: I’m gettin tired of all this mouth you been givin me lately. Les not forget who runs things around here. You keep it up and you’ll be missin some teeth.”

“Oh, it’s all right, Mama,” Santiago said. “I’ll just have Rickey take it next week to get fixed.” Rickey, sitting next to Santiago, said nothing. He was reading the newspaper and he turned the page.

Joyce came in from her garden when Humphrey arrived and had him and Santiago go into the living room. “I don’t want yall to come out till this whole thing is straightened out,” she said and reminded them of the way she and Pearl used to do it when they quarreled as boys. Then she returned to her garden. A half hour or so later, Rickey came out and stood on the steps watching her. “I’m gonna put some corn over there,” she said when she noticed him. “I’m gonna put the tomatoes right there. Might even try some peppers. You know how you like peppers. How’s it goin in there?” She had a transistor radio playing on the last step and he had not heard most of what she said.

Rickey turned off the radio. “I wasn’t in there, but when I went by I heard em talking like the old days.”

“Well, thank the Lord Jesus,” she said, taking off her gloves. “Whew. No wonder my mama and daddy left the farm for the city.”

“You takin the pill or somethin?”

“What?”

“It’s takin you longer to get pregnant than it took em to make Frankenstein,” Rickey said.

“Well, I hope we aimin for somethin far better than that,” she said. She was standing before him now and she reached around him and began kneading his behind. “It’s discouragin,” he said. She said, “I know, baby. Just hang in there.”

Inside, she pinched the cheeks of Santiago and Humphrey and told them she was proud of them. She offered to make a celebratory dinner that evening. But the dinner did not come off as planned. Humphrey did not show up, and Rickey called about eight to say he and Santiago would be out late.

A year or so after she moved into the house, she began searching for another coffee table similar to the old one. The old table was running out of room for new photographs, and whenever she added new pictures, she was forced to overlap everything. In some cases, a face was hidden by the picture above it or next to it; in others, these were missing limbs, and in still others, entire bodies were gone, except for a sleeve or shoe here and there. There was always an empty space she saved for some especially wonderful picture that might come along. That space shifted about, according to how she arranged things. On the day Rickey asked her about the pill, the space happened to be next to a picture of her in a white-and-green cotton print dress, and she was standing beside the man who was Clovis’s father. The photograph had been taken a year or so before she met Rickey, and a month after her tubes were tied. “I hope he tied the knot tight enough,” Joyce said to one of the hospital nurses who had befriended her.” “A pretty bow,” the nurse said. “It’s one of the few things they get right in this joint.”

Three weeks after she had promised to come by the next day, Joyce finally got up the courage to visit her mother. She waited until one o’clock, hoping the washer and dryer repairman would show up before she left. Her mother had not called back to remind her of the promise, which was her mother’s way. As always, Joyce tried to anticipate all that her mother would throw at her and spent the walk down to her mother’s thinking of ways to counter it. She would not have noticed the woman and the three children walking down the other side of 5th Street had the little girl with the woman not cried out to one of the boys, “Stop, you hurtin my sore!” When Joyce looked over, she saw the woman scolding the youngest of the boys, shaking her finger in his face. Joyce saw immediately that the other boy, standing off to the side of the others, was Adam. She uttered an oh loud enough for the man passing by her to ask if she might be ill.

She crossed the street and touched Adam’s shoulder, saying, “I know you remember who I am, your Aunt Joycie.” The boy looked up at her and blinked twice, then looked at the woman he was with as if she might have the proper response.

“Thas my child, lady, leave him be,” the woman said.

“It’s all right,” Joyce said. “Me and Adam know each other from way back, don’t we, Adam?” The boy shook his head. “Sure you do,” Joyce said. “Come on now, think. Remember how I useta to fix you all them banana splits piled up this high?” There seemed to be no memory at all in the boy’s face, and for several seconds he looked out into the street as if Joyce were a bother. “Remember all them baths with the soap bubbles? Bubble time?”

“Listen, you can see he don’t even know you,” the woman said.

“It was a long time ago,” Joyce said. She took money from her purse and gave Adam five dollars. Then, seeing the other two children look hungrily at the bill, she gave them five dollars as well.

“I don’t let my children take money from strangers off the street,” the woman said.

“She useta to be my mama,” Adam said, inspecting the back of the bill.

“You can’t have him back,” the woman said, grabbing each bill and throwing them at Joyce. “I got him fair and square. I got the papers on him to show it. You can’t have him.” She gathered the children by the hands and hurried them against the light across H Street. She continued to watch the woman and the children go down 5th Street, and when they were nearing F Street, Adam turned to look back, as if to confirm the feeling she had that the initial denial was part of some game.

Her mother lived in the Judiciary House, an H Street apartment building for senior citizens and the disabled. Joyce let herself into the apartment with her own key and found her mother in the living room. The small black-and-white television Joyce’s father had bought on credit twelve years ago was on, but her mother was reading a paperback book and paid no attention to the television. Her mother, who did not look up when her daughter entered, was wearing, as usual when she was inside, one of her dead husband’s shirts and a pair of his checkered socks. And as Joyce bent down to give her mother the kind of kiss on the cheek that Santiago would give Joyce, she smelled her father’s cheap musky aftershave.

“I want you to give Sandy a message,” her mother said, taking off the eyeglasses she kept on a string around her neck. “And if you want I’ll tell it to you slow so you can get every word down.”

“I’m fine, Mama,” Joyce said. “Thank you very much. And how you doin?” Her resolve to do battle had dissipated in the street with the woman and Adam. In that second-floor bedroom in her 10th Street house she had set aside for her mother, there was a telephone with giant numbers so her mother would not have trouble dialing her friends. And there was a picture over the poster bed of Jesus Christ, blonde hair down to his shoulders, praying in the garden at Gethsemane.

“Santiago been comin by some nights and sleepin sida my bed like he did when he was young,” her mother said.

“That sounds like good news to me, Mama. I’m glad you two friends again. You coulda told me this on the phone.” She sat across from her mother in a cheap metal chair that was part of the dinette set. “I would think you’d be glad to see your grandkids, since you don’t want to come to my house.”

“It ain’t the comin and stayin and what not. He stayed here the other night. Got up early when that beep-beep thing went off and let hisself out. And when I got in here I found a hundred-dollar bill on the table layin under the sugar dish. One hundred dollars. It’s on the table there and you take it outa my house when you go. I ain’t some sportin woman in the street. I told him never to bring a thing in this house but hisself and the clothes on his back. Well, maybe he’ll listen if the words come from his own mother.” She had been reading a romance novel and now she inserted a funeral-home bookmark in her place and closed the book.

Joyce said, “He just wants to make you happy, Mama. You know how he likes to be generous with his family.”

“I just this moment changed my mind,” her mother said. She never once looked at her daughter, only watched the people on the television. “Since all this givin is in his blood that way, then tell him not to come to my house again. And if he comes I’ll have him locked up.”

“That’ll break his heart, Mama.”

“Tell him not to worry: God don’t put no more on us than we can bear.” Her mother put on her glasses and opened the book.

Joyce stood and went to the door, and her mother told her not to forget the money.

She took the long way back home, lest she bring bad feelings back to her house. She walked downtown along F Street and looked in the store windows. At a shop at 12th Street, she bought a doughnut and several large cookies with the hundred-dollar bill and ate them unselfconsciously as she walked along, the way a child would. At a shoe store near 13th Street, she abandoned once and for all any hope she ever had that her mother would come to live with her and spend the rest of her life in the room on the second floor. And at Garfinkel’s she wondered if that doctor could go back inside her and pull one end of that pretty bow so that it would come untied and she might make Rickey, with all his whininess, happy.

There had been, along the false-wood part of the coffee table, a few cigarette burns when she bought the table. Rickey had somehow managed to make the burns disappear and the table looked almost new. The burns had been near some pictures taken at various Christmases. In one, taken months after his mother married, Humphrey was sleeping in a chair by a window. In his lap was a knit cap Clovis had given him. When they woke him for dinner, he was angry, as if he had been arguing in his dreams and did not know he was now awake. “I got my pride, you know,” he shouted. “I still got a whole lotta pride people don’t even know about.”

In another picture, taken during a Christmas when he was still courting her, Rickey had allowed Joyce to set Clovis in his lap, arrange the boys on either side of him, and photograph the four of them in front of the Christmas tree. “I’m a family man without a family,” he’d told her not long after they had met at a cabaret in Southeast. And those words were in her mind when she knelt on the linoleum floor and took their picture. Three times. “I can give you all you want,” she had said before he moved in with them. “I can give you all the kids you can afford.” “I can afford a hundred,” he said. “Then that’s how many I can give you.”

The garden came up beautifully, despite a week or so of bad weather. It had rained hard three days straight, and on the second morning they had awakened to find the basement floor covered with three inches of water. All the rain in the basement was gone now, but it had left some seed, some indestructible life form, that threatened to turn the basement into something prehistoric. Despite a virtual army of men hired by Santiago to disinfect the basement periodically, Joyce would come down some mornings and find green, furlike mold growing along the paneled walls, sprouting in corners, sharing space with the mousetraps.

But the garden thrived, and a summer came on, Joyce spent more and more of her days there. She was there, bent down in a row of tomatoes, when Clovis ran out to her and told her that Sandy was picking on Humphrey again down at the corner. Calmly, and with an exasperated sigh, she took off her hat and gloves and told Clovis to stay in the house.

She would not ever remember if she heard the two pops before she got to the corner at O Street. When she turned the corner, she saw a crowd, but between her and Humphrey there was no one. He was backing toward her, and he would have reached her, but Santiago shot him again and he fell. She thought that he had only stumbled, and when she saw Rickey out of the corner of her eye standing in the street watching them, she was somehow nearly reassured that Humphrey had only misstepped.

She shouted to Santiago. “Stop it fore you hit somebody!” When she got to Humphrey, he was sitting, and when he began to lie back, she reached down to help him, took him by the front of the dark jacket with one hand and the back of his head with the other. When he was down all the way, he shook his head as if to say, “Clumsy me.” There was wetness on the hand that had taken the jacket, but she was concentrating on Santiago too much to take note of it. She continued on toward him and he lowered the gun and did not move.

“You stay outta this, Mama. This ain’t got nothin to do with you.”

“What you been doin?” she asked him.

She slapped him twice, and when she saw the blood on his cheek and then on her hand, her heart sank because she thought she had injured him.

“All right now, Mama, I’m warnin you.” He pointed the gun between her eyes, then he backed away. “This ain’t none a your business.” He pushed back against the people behind him, and they made room for him, then he ran to the Range Rover that was double parked. In seconds he was gone.

She called to Rickey, who was now standing on the sidewalk across O Street, and then she began to scream his name. He ran away. She went back to Humphrey, whose front was now completely bloodied. She asked someone to call for help. Joyce sat down and cradled Humphrey’s head in her lap. She thought that he was already dead, but he opened his eyes and said, “Please don’t tell my mama.” He said it again and would have gone on saying it, but she covered his mouth with her hand.

It was well after dark when the police left her house, and when they had all gone, she called Pearl. She stayed on the telephone for several hours, until Pearl’s husband got home from work. Pearl said that she forgave Santiago, but Joyce knew that that would never be true in this life. After she hung up the telephone, she sat on the floor in the living room until the grandfather clock told her it was ten. In a small cabinet near the couch was a fifth of vodka, which she drank in less than an hour. Then, beginning in the basement, she went about the house undoing the locks on all the doors and windows, for Santiago had no key to her house. And outside that house there was a very cruel world and she did not like to think that her child was out there without a place to come to.