“Why do you always keep talkin that way, girl? You comin with me. Everybody’s comin with me.” She squeezed Cassandra’s hand. “I’d sooner forget Alice or Jeffrey than you. And you know I never lie to you.”
Cassandra nodded, but there was nothing behind the nod. She carried in her pocket, each wrapped in tinfoil, articles about Rhonda published in the Afro and the Evening Star. CARDOZO H.S. SINGER ON THE RISE, the Star headline said. FAMILY IS THE SECRET TO SINGER’S SUCCESS, the Afro headline said. And in the photograph accompanying that story, Cassandra was sitting on the couch beside Rhonda’s youngest brother, who sat next to Rhonda. Rhonda was in the middle, holding her daughter Alice on her lap. The child was the only person in the picture who did not look directly into the camera. On the other side of Rhonda was her mother, and behind Rhonda were two older brothers and her father, who peered out through thick glasses. Beside Mr. Ferguson and directly behind Rhonda was Jeffrey Stanford, the father of Rhonda’s child. His hand was resting on Rhonda’s shoulder.
“But if you’re gonna take care of my business for me,” Rhonda said, “you’re gonna to have to get a education. How will I know if they cheatin me if you don’t know more than they know?”
“Thas right, baby girl,” her father said to Cassandra. He was holding the steering wheel in the enthusiastic way a small child would, as if he were playing at driving the car. “We best get on now, so we won’t be late. But you go on by the house. Mabel cookin up a mess of fish and waitin for you. I wanna see you at the house when I get back.”
Rhonda pulled Cassandra’s face down and kissed her cheek. The sidewalk was now full of kids. Rhonda and her father drove down Clifton Street, and all along the way to 11th Street, students, noticing Rhonda, would greet her. Some of them sang bits of the songs she was known for. Some of them danced.
Cassandra decided right then to make nice and return her brother-in-law’s car. But after she started it up, the car would only cough and shake and didn’t seem to want to move. After trying several times to get it going, she thought she’d give it time to make up its mind about going. She passed the time listening to radio music that came out mostly static because she had deliberately damaged the radio five months ago after an argument with her brother-in-law. Toward three thirty, as she was counting her cigarettes, Melanie Cartwright, on her way home, tapped on the roof. Melanie was a friendly sort who seemed to have a new boyfriend, a new “truest love,” every other month. She was good for cigarettes, but she only smoked Viceroys.
“Missed you in school today,” Melanie said. She had her notebook and two books in her arms and her pocketbook was hanging from her shoulder from a long strap. She was a second cousin of Cassandra’s brother-in-law, and at the wedding of Cassandra’s sister, Melanie and another girl had caught the bouquet together and nearly killed each other over who it belonged to.
“Wasn’t up for school today,” Cassandra said. She lit up a Chesterfield.
Melanie was with Anita Hughes, a quiet girl Cassandra had met at Miss Barlett’s apartment. Cassandra knew next to nothing about Anita, but she would forever remember the look on Anita’s face when Anita told the story one evening of how she had trembled and sung for her grandfather one final time at his funeral.
“I see you got Willie’s car again,” Melanie said, laughing. “I bet he don’t know you got it.” Melanie and Anita stood in the street at the driver’s window, and whenever a car passed behind them, they leaned close to the car.
Cassandra blew out smoke and sucked her teeth. “Willie always know when I got his car.”
“Listen,” Melanie said, “you wanna make some money? You know Gladys Harper? She lookin for someone to take her to her father’s in Anacostia.”
Cassandra thought a moment. “I don’t know,” she said. “She gonna pay some chump change or real money?”
“I think she said her mother’ll pay twenty dollars. She gotta take some things over there and they figure it’s cheaper than sendin Gladys alone by cab.”
Anita said that Gladys was still standing in front of Cardozo, and Melanie stepped into the middle of the street and whistled her over. Gladys explained that her mother wanted a few small boxes of stuff taken to Gladys’s father in Anacostia. Cassandra didn’t know Gladys at all, except to see her now and again passing in the school’s halls. Taking boxes from the mother to the father all the way in Anacostia seemed strange to Cassandra, but being an orphan set adrift in the world she had learned that unless it could involve a death mistake, it was best to ask as few questions as possible. And besides, twenty bucks was twenty bucks. Anita and Melanie said they wouldn’t mind coming along: Melanie’s boyfriend had football practice, and Friday evenings Anita’s parents allowed her a bit more leeway than they did on school nights.
“Will this thing hold up down there and back?” Gladys said of the Hudson, looking at it from front to back and up and down. “I don’t want to get stuck out there with my gotdamn father and his bitch whore.”
“It’ll do what I tell it,” Cassandra said, thinking she might get to see a fight. She and Gladys waited while Anita and Melanie took their books home, a short distance away. When they returned, Cassandra started up the car without any trouble and the four drove down Clifton Street to Gladys’s house on 12th Street. The house and the yard were uncommonly immaculate. Such houses made Cassandra nervous, because she associated them with owners who, without warning, smacked the hands of visiting children reaching out with curiosity to touch something.
Mildred Harper set the four girls at her kitchen table and fed them a dinner of reheated fried chicken, string beans, potato salad, and rolls. “My husband and I,” she said to Cassandra as she set out the food, “are separated. My son would take him the things, but he’s out of town right now, and I can’t get any of the other children to take him the stuff. He’s not well enough to come get them.” They sounded like words she had already said a thousand times, had learned to say to get it all out and over with. Anita and Melanie must have heard it before, because they didn’t seem surprised at what the mother was saying. After she had set out the food and told them to help themselves, Mildred Harper gave Cassandra a twenty-dollar bill and three dollars for gas and disappeared into another part of the house.
It was a pleasant Friday evening in early November. The girls set off with an hour or so of the day’s light remaining, and that light came through the last of the autumn leaves still clinging to the trees. The birds, somewhere among those leaves and among the nooks and crannies of buildings, were making a racket as they bedded down. Cassandra felt good, because her stomach was full and she had a little piece of change in her pocket and she had a bed waiting that night at Rhonda’s. At Elson’s at 11th and T she filled up the gas tank. They continued on down 11th Street. As usual when she drove, Cassandra leaned forward, her arms folded over the top of the steering wheel, the cigarette in her mouth bouncing up and down whenever she said anything. Gladys sat in the back, beside Anita, and in her lap was a small box of family photographs, the ones Mildred Harper could bear to part with. In the car’s trunk were two larger boxes, containing the last of her father’s stuff he had left at the house. Melanie, beside Cassandra, was trying to get a decent station on the radio.
“Why don’t you leave it alone,” Cassandra said to her. “You want some music, make your own damn music.”
“I bet not even a hearse radio sound this bad,” Melanie said, and she began to sing “My Guy.”