“You little squirt,” I said to him. “If you break that window, I’m gonna make your daddy pay for it.” I’d pulled down the door shade to an inch or so of where the glass ended, and I could see the kid’s eyes beaming through that inch of space. “Can’t you read, you little punk. We closed. We closed!” and I walked away. Kentucky was standing near the door and the more the kid shouted, the closer she got to the door.
“He’s hysterical, honey,” she said, unlocking the door. She walked out, and I followed.
Penny’s lavender Cadillac was stopped in the middle of 5th Street, one or two doors past O Street. From everywhere people were running to whatever had happened. Penny was standing in front of the car. I pushed my way through the crowd, and as I got closer I saw that her fists were up, shaking, and she was crying.
“She hit my sista,” Tommy Turner was saying, pounding away at Penny’s thigh. “This bitch hit my sista! This bitch hit my sista!” Some stranger picked the boy up. “All right, son,” the man said, “thas anough of that.”
Patricia Turner lay in the street, a small pool of blood forming around her head. She had apparently been chasing a rolling Hula Hoop, and she and the hoop, now twisted, had fallen in such a way that one of her arms was embracing the toy. Most of what light there was came from the street lamps, but there were also the Cadillac’s headlights, shining out on the crowd on the other side of the girl. “You should watch where you goin with that big ole car,” Mrs. Baxter said to Penny. “Oh, you know it was a accident,” a man said. “I don’t know no such thing,” Mrs. Baxter said.
The girl’s eyes were open and she was looking at me, at the people around her, at everything in the world, I suppose. The man still had hold of Tommy, but the boy was wiggling violently and still cursing Penny. Penny, crying, bent down to Patricia and I think I heard her tell the child that it would be all right. I could tell that it wouldn’t be. The girl’s other arm was stretched out and she had a few rubber bands around the wrist. There was something about the rubber bands on that little wrist and they, more than the blood perhaps, told me, in the end, that none of it would be all right.
Soon Joy, the girl’s mother, was there. “You murderin fuckin monster!” she kept yelling at Penny, and someone held her until she said that she wanted to go to her baby. “Look what that murderin monster did to my baby!”
The police arrived, but they did not know what else to do except handcuff Penny and threaten to arrest the man who held Tommy if he didn’t control the boy. Then the ambulance arrived and in little or no time they took the girl and her mother away, the flashing light on the roof shining on all the houses as it moved down 5th Street. A neighbor woman took Tommy from the stranger and took the boy inside. Wordlessly, the crowd parted to let them by, as it had parted to let the ambulance through. The police put Penny in the back of the scout car and I followed, with Kentucky holding tight to my arm. Through the rolled down window, she said to me, “Bail me out, if they’ll let me go.” But most of what she said was just a bunch of mumbles, because she hadn’t managed to stop crying. I reached in the window and touched her cheek.
I opened the store as usual the next day, Saturday. The child died during the night. No one, except people from out of the neighborhood, spoke when they came in the store; they merely pointed or got the items themselves and set them on the counter. I sold no meat that day. And all that day, I kept second-guessing myself about even the simplest of things and kept waiting for Penny to come and tell me what to do. Just before I closed, one girl, Snowball Patterson, told me that Mrs. Baxter was going about saying that Penny had deliberately killed Patricia.
Penny called me at Kentucky’s on Sunday morning to tell me not to open the store for two weeks. “We have to consider Pat’s family,” she said. I had seen her late that Friday night at No. 2 police precinct, but she had said little. I would not see her again for a month. I had parked the Cadillac just in front of the store, and sometime over the next two weeks, the car disappeared, and I never found out what happened to it, whether Penny came to get it late one night or whether it was stolen. “Pay it no mind,” Penny told me later.
She called me again Monday night and told me she would mail me a check for two thousand dollars, which I was to cash and take the money to Patricia’s family for her funeral. The police were satisfied that it had been an accident, but on the phone Penny always talked like old lady Baxter, as if she had done it on purpose. “Her mother,” Penny said, “wouldn’t let me come by to apologize. Doesn’t want me to call anymore.” All that month, and for some months after, that was the heart of the phone conversation, that the mother wouldn’t allow her to come to see her and the family.
Joy came in one day about three months after Pat died. Tommy came with her, and all the time they were in the store, the boy held his mother’s hand.
“You tell her to stop callin me,” Joy said to me. “You tell her I don’t want her in my life. You tell her to leave me alone, or I’ll put the law on her. And you”—she pointed at me—“my man say for you not to bring me no more food.” Which is what Penny had been instructing me to do. The boy never said a word the whole time, just stood there close to his mother, with his thumb in his mouth and blinking very, very slowly as if he were about to fall asleep on his feet.
About once a week for the next few years, Penny would call me at Kentucky’s and arrange a place and time to meet me. We always met late at night, on some fairly deserted street, like secret lovers. And we usually met in some neighborhood in far, far Northeast or across the river in Anacostia, parts of the world I wasn’t familiar with. I would drive up, park, and go to her car not far away. She wanted to know less about how I was operating the store than what was going on with the people in the neighborhood. She had moved from her apartment in Southwest, and because I had no way of getting in touch with her, I always came with beaucoup questions about this and that to be done in the store. She dispensed with all the questions as quickly as possible, and not always to my satisfaction. Then she wanted to know about this one and that one, about so-and-so and whoever. Because it was late at night, I was always tired and not always very talkative. But when I began to see how important our meetings were, I found myself learning to set aside some reserve during the day for that night’s meeting, and over time, the business of the store became less important in our talks than the business of the people in the neighborhood.
And over time as well, nearly all the legal crap was changed so that my name, just below hers, was on everything — invoices, the store’s bank account, even the stuff on the door’s window about who to call in case of emergency. After she had been gone a year or so, I timidly asked about a raise because I hadn’t had one in quite a while. “Why ask me?” she said. We were someplace just off Benning Road and I didn’t know where I would get the strength to drive all the way back to Kentucky’s. “Why in the world are you askin me?”
I went about my days at first with tentativeness, as if Penny would show up at any moment in her dirty apron and make painful jokes about what I had done wrong. When she was there, I had, for example, always turned the bruised fruit and vegetables bad side up so people could see from jump what was what, but Penny always kept the bruised in with all the healthy pieces and sold the good and the not-so-good at the same price. Now that she was not there, I created a separate bin for the bruised and sold it at a reduced price, something she had always refused to do. But the dividing line of that separate bin was made of cardboard, something far from permanent. Every week or so the cardboard would wear out and I had to replace it.