When we returned to the house Cornell and his family were gone. Delilah had made lemonade for her and Eddie, Mi Lin and Newland. They were sitting in the TV room on the mismatched chairs and sofa there.
Eddie climbed up on my lap and Newland began talking, telling stories as he always did when he had a captive audience.
He regaled us with the minutiae of the huge post office on Central and Florence.
“... and, and, and our supervisor, Nia, is what you call a performance poet,” he was saying, “and Jack, her boss, collects guns. We got two musicians, three ex-schoolteachers, and just about every race and religion under the sun. It’s not like they say — we’re not all crazy and antisocial, but you better believe that no two people in that whole buildin’ see a glass’a water an’ think the same thing.”
“You think I could get a job there?” I asked him.
“I think you could do better than that, sis.”
“You work there, Newly.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But only while Mi Lin at school studyin’ to be a dental assistant. After she get a job I’ma go to school too.”
“And study what?”
“I wanna be an architect. I wanna build houses.”
I thought about Rash but didn’t mention him. It all seemed too perfect: that I would have met a man who could help my brother — maybe. It was almost a miracle that my mother had stood up and defended me when no one, except my dead father and maybe Theon, ever had.
It was hard leaving Edison that evening. He cried and wanted to come with me. Delilah held him up and kissed us both.
Newland walked me to my car.
“What do you think it will do to Delilah if I take Eddie away?” I asked my brother.
“She always told him that she was just holdin’ him for you while you got some stuff together. He expects it and so does she.”
“It just doesn’t feel right.”
“Nuthin’ felt right since Daddy died, sis. But we got to keep on movin’ though, got to.”
Theon came to me on the ride from South-Central back to my Pasadena home — not a ghost or apparition, not a hallucination or even a vision. I couldn’t see him and I knew he was dead, but still, he was in that car with me giving me the only thing he had in abundance: fear of life and suspicion of potential danger.
“Family seems like a good thing but in the end it’s always the family that brings you down,” he said, a repetition of a platitude he’d mouthed many times in life.
“My mother loves me,” I’d told him once.
“Many men have told you they loved you,” he’d said. “They thought they really meant it too.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“They say it,” he said, holding up one finger, “they mean it” — he produced another large digit — “but in the end they will cheat on you, lie to you, and rob you blind. And that’s just the momentary kind of love, where there’s no blood involved.”
“Some man think he love me ’cause he want my ass,” I said, disdaining the made-up lover and the remembered husband. “My mother love my soul.”
“So did your father,” Theon had once said. He’d been drinking and, as always when he was high, he went too far.
“Don’t you talk about my father, Theon Pinkney.”
“It’s the strongest love that makes the greatest treachery,” Theon said, instead of backing down like he should have done. I remember being surprised that he even knew how to use the word treachery. “The worst thing you can say to somebody is that you will be there no matter what and then fail to show.”
I felt the pain in that car the same as I had felt when Theon first said those words.
My daddy was always supposed to be there. Why was he out that night instead of at home with us? Why did he have to catch that bullet, live that life, make it so that my mother cried for an entire year?
“Love makes you blind to your own survival,” Theon went on when I was too hurt to fight him. “And if it doesn’t then it’s not love at all.”
I pulled into my driveway after returning from the bosom of my mother’s home. I should have been happy about the love of my son, but instead Theon’s words were in my head.
The man grabbed me when I was closing the door to my car. As I was being slammed against the garage door I wondered if Theon was trying to warn me on the drive. Was he trying to tell me that the love of my family might blind me to danger?
“Bitch,” Coco Manetti said. “You think you could disrespect me like that?”
He hit me in the midsection and I threw up the butter-basted chicken and canned cranberries.
“Fuck!” he shouted when the vomit hit the left knee of his trousers.
As the backhand slap connected with my face I tried to figure out where my handbag had gone. I was no longer holding it.
“Mothahfuckin’ bitch,” the white mobster said, mouthing words he’d learned from the part of town I’d just come from.
I took a breath but he hit me in the stomach again and so I lost it. I fell to the concrete and rolled up into a ball. He kicked me and I inhaled while looking around for my purse. He kicked me again and I saw the bag but it was well beyond my reach.
Then Coco Manetti made a mistake. Instead of kicking me more he reached down to lift me up by my arm. I don’t know why he did that. Maybe he wasn’t getting enough satisfaction from kicking my legs and sides.
I didn’t resist the pull.
One thing about my business was that we had to stay in good shape. Our thighs and calves, butts and abdominals had to be strong to keep up those pulsing, derricklike beats hour after hour.
I kicked Coco in the knee and hollered for all I was worth.
Someone shouted, “Who’s out there?”
Coco’s fist slammed into the side of my head. There was a very bright light in my eyes as a murmuring of fear whispered in the air around my head.
“Over here,” a voice called. It was a familiar voice — the one that cried out when I screamed.
Time skipped forward then. I suppose I went unconscious but it didn’t feel like that in my head. I thought I had fallen to the ground, heard the various sounds and calls, and almost immediately opened my eyes. But instead of being on the driveway pavement I was lying on a couch in an all-white room with people moving around me. I was in the middle of a conversation with someone but had no idea what we were talking about as I came to awareness within a kind of semiconsciousness.
“Was this the man who attacked you?” Lieutenant Perry Mendelson was asking.
It was hard to concentrate on the kindhearted cop. My vision wasn’t blurred but fragmented, like looking through a broken crystal. I turned in the direction that the policeman was pointing. There I saw two discrete images of Jude Lyon standing with his hands bound behind his back.
“Jude?” I said.
“Hey, Deb.”
“Is this the man?” Perry asked again.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t get a good look at the guy but he was much taller and... I know Jude. I’d know if it was him.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“We have him in custody, Mrs. Pinkney. He can’t hurt you now.”
I was reminded of the cops trying to reassure Theon’s mother about me.
I forced myself to sit up. There was the smell of vomit rising from my ruined Sunday dress suit.
Four paramedics and three uniformed policemen were moving around the polar bear room. One cop released Jude, who came immediately to my side. I was embarrassed by the way I smelled but grateful to be alive and comparatively unharmed.
“What happened?” Jude asked. His countenance was serious and very masculine. Usually Jude was shy and withdrawn, sometimes petulant, but at that moment he was protective and even a little aggressive.