Because there were many nights when I simply was too exhausted to walk the two blocks or so to Kentucky’s, I made a pallet for myself in the back room, which would have been an abomination to Penny. “Work is work, and home is home,” she always said, “and never should those trains meet.”
When Mrs. Baxter came in to buy on credit, which was about twice a day, she would always ask, “How the murderer doin?” I tried to ignore it at first, but began trying to get back at her by reminding her of what her bill was. Generally, she owed about a hundred dollars; and rarely paid more than five dollars on the bill from month to month. Since Penny had told me to wipe the slate clean for Patricia’s mother, Old Lady Baxter became the biggest deadbeat. Baxter always claimed that her retirement check was coming the next day. After I started pressing her about the bill, she stopped bad-mouthing Penny, but I found out that that was only in the store, where I could hear.
When I told her that I wouldn’t give her any more credit until she paid up, she started crying. My mother once told me that in place of muscles God gave women the ability to cry on a moment’s notice.
“I’ll tell,” Mrs. Baxter boo-hooed. “I’m gonna tell.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, loud enough for everyone in the store to hear. “Who you gonna tell? Who you gonna go to?”
“Penny,” she said. “I’ll tell Penny. She oughta know how you runnin her sto into the ground. I’ma tell her you tryin to starve me to death.”
Within a few weeks her account was settled down to the last penny, but I still told her never to step foot in the store again. Surprisingly, the old lady took it like a man. It was a full month before I got the courage to tell Penny what I had done. I could see that she did not approve, but she only had this look that my mother had the day my brother came home with the first piece of clothing my parents allowed him to buy on his own. A look of resignation — Thank God I don’t have to live with it.
At first, with Penny’s blessing, I hired my more trustworthy friends or cousins or a few people in the neighborhood, but either they could only work part time or they didn’t do the job well enough to suit me. Kentucky even helped out some, but after she got into an executive training program at what she called her “real job,” she didn’t want to work in the store anymore.
Then, in the spring of 1965, I lucked onto a Muslim who lived on 6th Street. She was on public assistance and had three children, which made me skeptical about her working out, but I gave her a one-week tryout, then extended it another week. Then extended two weeks more, then I took her on full time, permanent, and gave her two aprons with her named stitched over the left pockets. I was always afraid that I’d find the place overrun with her kids every day, but in all the time I knew her, despite the fact that she lived only a block away, I met her kids only a few times and came to know them only by the pictures she showed me. Her name was Gloria 5X, but before she lost her slave name, the world — and she seemed to know three fourths of it — had called her Puddin. And that was what I learned to call her.
After I got where I could leave things in Puddin’s hands, I was able to take off now and again and spend more time than I had been with Kentucky. We did two weeks in Atlantic City in the summer of 1965, back when the only rep the city had was what the ocean gave it, and that seemed to revive what we had had. That fall I set about redoing the store — repainting, rearranging shelves, and, at long last, getting a new meat case. The renovations left me, again, spending more and more nights on the pallet in the back. There were fewer people buying coal oil and I wanted to tear out the pump, but Penny vetoed that. “Wait,” she said. “Wait till the day after the very last person comes to buy some, then you tear it out.”
I passed the halfway mark in the new work before the end of winter and wanted to celebrate with a good meal and a movie. I was to meet Kentucky at her office one evening in February, but I was late getting there for a reason I don’t remember, for a reason that, when it is all said and done, will not matter anyway. When I did get there, she iced me out and said she was no longer interested in going out, which pissed me off. I kept telling her we could have a good evening, but she insisted we go home.
“You know,” she said as I continued trying to coax her to go, “you spend too much time at that damn store. You act like you own it or something.” I was making $110 a week, had a full-time employee and one part-time worker, and I didn’t particularly want to hear that shit.
“It’s my job,” I said. “You don’t hear me complainin and everything when you come home and sit all evening with your head in those books.”
“It’s not every single day, not like you do. Maybe once every three weeks. You come first, and you know it.”
When we got home, she began to thaw.
“Why are we letting all this come between you and me?” she said. “Between us?” She repeated that “us” three or four times and put her arms around me.
Because she was thawing, I felt I was winning. And I think I got to feeling playful, because the first thing that came to mind after all those uses was that joke about Tonto and the Lone Ranger looking up to see a band of Indians bearing down on them: “What they gonna do to us, Tonto?” “Whatcha mean ‘us,’ Kemo Sabe?”
I don’t think I said that line out loud. Maybe I did. Or maybe she just read my mind. In any case, she withdrew from me, then went to the window, her arms hugging her body. “I thought so,” she said after a bit. “Clean your things out of here,” she said, in the same quiet way she used to tell me to remember to set the clock’s alarm. “Clean everything out as soon as possible.”
Despite what she had said, I left her place feeling pretty cocky and went to Mojo’s. After four beers, I called Kentucky to say we should wipe the slate clean. She calmly told me not to call her again. “You fuckin bitch!” I said. “Who the fuck do you think you are!” After a while I went to my mother’s place. For the most part, I had sobered up by the time I got there. I found my mother at the kitchen table, listening to gospel on the radio. I don’t recall what conversation we had. I do remember noticing that she had lost, somewhere in time, three or four of her teeth, and it pained me that I did not even know when it had happened.
It took me three days to clean out my life from Kentucky’s place. She stayed at work until I had finished each day. And on each of those days, I left a note telling her I wanted to stay.
I suppose any man could take rejection by any woman as long as he knew that the morning after he was cast out, the woman would be bundled up with her best memories of him and taken away to a castle in the most foreign of lands to live there forever, guarded by a million eunuchs and by old women who had spent their lives equating sex with death. No, no, the woman would have to say to the old women for the rest of her life, I remember different.
If you approached Al’s and Penny’s Groceries coming down O Street from 6th you could see the bright new orange color I myself put on, a color announcing to the world an establishment of substance, a place I tried to make as friendly as a customer’s own home. Joy and Tommy and Tommy’s father moved away when the paint was still fresh and bright. And it was still bright when Mrs. Baxter went on to her reward, and though she had not been in the store since the day I told her not to come back, Penny had me send flowers to the funeral home in both our names. The paint was still radiant when the babies I was godfather to learned to walk in the store on their own and beg for candy from me.
One evening — the season it was is gone from my mind now — I let Puddin go home early. Alone in the store, I sat on my high stool behind the counter, reading the Afro, a rare treat. At one point I stood to stretch and looked out the O Street window to see Penny, with shorter hair and in her apron, looking in at me. I smiled and waved furiously and she smiled and waved back. I started from behind the counter and happened to look out the 5th Street window and saw my father coming toward me. When I saw that he too had on an apron, I realized that my mind, exhausted from a long day, was only playing tricks.