“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.”