“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.