“You know that you can never, or none of your people can ever, go into this church,” the man said.
“Yes, suh, I know.”
“Is that why you lookin’ at it so hard?”
“No. It’s jes’ when I walk by it, it look so pretty like Letta across the way from Uncle Coy’s windah. You have to look when somethin’s pretty.”
The white man turned his back on the boy and looked at his church. He maintained that position for a few moments, allowing Li’l Pea to admire the building a while longer.
When the white man turned around, his face was completely changed, as if he were a different man inside. He held out a hand to the boy. The child didn’t know what to do, but he was drawn to the gesture. He grabbed the minister’s manicured fingers with his dirty hand and gave them a good shaking.
“Thank you, boy,” the minister said. “You’ve shown me my own life in a new light. It’s like, it’s like I thought it was day but really there was much more to be seen.”
The white man walked away after that.
Ptolemy had often wondered, in the eighty-four years that had passed since that day, what the minister had meant.
“Come on, Papa Grey,” Hilly said in a bus a million miles away, “this our stop.”
They walked down a long street of sad houses and apartment buildings. There were few lawns or gardens, mostly weeds and broken concrete. Some of the houses had no paint left on their weathered wood walls; one or two seemed crooked because they were falling in on themselves from the ravages of termites, faltering foundations, and general rot.
Ptolemy thought all these things but he couldn’t remember how to say them.
“Terrible.”
“What, Papa Grey?”
“Terrible.”
“What? You hurt?”
“My knees hurt when I walk.”
“That’s too bad.”
“But it’s not terrible,” Ptolemy said.
“Then what?”
The old man glanced across the street and saw a big sand-brown woman sitting on a stoop. She was smoking a cigarette and between her fat knees were huddled two toddlers in diapers and nothing else.
“Her.”
Two blocks away they came to a small house that was once painted bright blue and yellow, Ptolemy remembered, but now the colors were dim and dingy. There were cars parked in the driveway and at the curb at the house across the street. Men and women in their Sunday best were standing on the brown grass and up beyond the cars.
“What’s today?” Ptolemy asked Hilly.
“The fifteenth,” the young man replied.
Four rose bushes had died under the front window. A fifth rose was still alive. It had nine or eleven bright green thorny leaves and a bud that might one day blossom. Ptolemy noticed a spigot behind the struggling plant and realized that it was a leak that made it possible for that rose to survive.
Hilly held Ptolemy’s elbow as they went up the wooden stairs that had worn down into grooves from the heavy foot traffic over the years. As they approached the screen door, Ptolemy could see that there was a party going on. Dozens of people were crowded into the living room, talking and smoking, drinking and posing in their nice clothes.
Hilly reached for the screen door but it flew inward before he touched it.
“Pitypapa!” a woman yelled. “Pitypapa, I ain’t seen you in six and a half years.”
Big, copper-brown, and buxom Hilda “Niecie” Brown folded the frail old man in a powerful yet cushioned embrace. For a brief span that extended into itself Ptolemy was lifted out of his pained elderly confusion. He floated off into the sensation of a woman holding him and humming with satisfaction.
She kissed his forehead and then his lips. When she let him go he held on to her arm.
“Oh, ain’t that sweet?” Niecie said. “You miss me, Pitypapa?”
Ptolemy looked up at her face. Her skin was smooth and tight from fat. Her mouth was smiling, showing two golden teeth, but in spite of the brave front Niecie’s eyes were so sad that he felt her agony. He raised his hands through the pain of his shoulders and placed them on the sides of Niecie’s arms.
“Niecie,” he said. “Niecie.”
“Come on in, Pitypapa. Come on in and sit with me.”
The crowded room smelled of food, cigarettes, and booze. Four children were playing on a green couch but Niecie shooed them away.
“Sit with me, Papa,” she said. “Tell me how you been doin’.”
Ptolemy sat looking around the room, remembering the house. He had come here for Niecie’s wedding and later, when her mother, June, had died. June was his oldest sister’s child, he remembered. She died of pneumonia, the doctor said, but anyone could have told you that she really died because she went wild with drink and dance
