curtain.
I couldn’t find another drop of blood anywhere. Then I remembered that she was shot after being murdered.
Nola’s window looked down on Grape Street. The youth in the overalls was back on the corner with three or four others. Juanda wasn’t there. I was angry at myself for noticing her absence. I wasn’t looking for a woman to play around with. Bonnie was my woman. We nearly broke up over her African prince but then we’d decided to stay together.
I intended to honor that decision.
There was no address book among Nola’s things. That was odd. Such a neat and organized woman would have a place where she kept her phone numbers and addresses. I found her purse. She had a wallet with eight dollars and a silver chain with a broken clasp.
I searched for an address book for ten minutes. No one, especially a stranger, would have taken it, so I thought that it must be someplace obvious—staring me in the face. Finally I gave up. Maybe Nola was a loner and didn’t have to jot down the few numbers she called regularly.
As I walked out of Nola’s apartment I was thinking about Juanda’s yellow-and-white dress. It fit her figure perfectly. I speculated that she was in her early twenties and unmarried. Her skin was dark and she had big nostrils. Her face had an animal quality, like a fairy-tale fox.
I shook my head, dislodging the image. But when I walked into the hallway, there she was.
“Mr. Rawlins?”
“Yes, Juanda, what is it?”
“Um.” She was looking at me with hungry eyes. She expected me to embrace her. I was feeling it too but I didn’t give in.
“Yeah?”
“Newell went to get some’a his friends. They drivin’ around now lookin’ for you.”
“How did you find me?”
“I went to ask Bobby.”
“Why didn’t Newell ask him?”
“’Cause I told him that I’d go over and ask and when I told him Bobby didn’t know he believed me.”
I couldn’t seem to take a satisfying breath. The clamor of new love was rattling around in my chest in spite of my intentions.
I knew it was an effect of the riots, that the passion of release had let something go in me. And Juanda was a black woman looking out for me, taking chances for me. She was a poor man’s dream. And I was still, and always would be, a poor man in my heart.
“Why’d you do that?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I like you, I guess.”
“I’m parked over on Graham,” I said. “What’s the best way for me to get there without having to kick Newell’s ass again?”
My brave words thrilled Juanda.
“Down out the back way. We could go on a Hundred and Thirteenth Street across Willow Brook and over to Graham.”
“You comin’ with me?” I asked.
“Maybe, if you don’t mind. I need a ride to my auntie’s over on Florence.”
I gestured for her to lead the way and she smiled. Everything we did seemed to be important. I knew that any step I took, either toward her or away, I would regret in the morning.
“WHAT’S NEWELL’S PROBLEM with people?” I asked as we crossed Willow Brook. “I mean, I didn’t start this thing with him.”
“He just jealous.”
“Of me? He don’t even know me.”
“Naw, it’s me,” Juanda said. “He think if he say I’m his girl enough times, it’a wind up bein’ true. But you know I might have other ideas.”
“But what do I have to do with you?”
“You stood up to him and he got embarrassed, that’s all.” Juanda gave me a sidelong glance that made my heart flutter.
I led her to my car.
“This new car is yours?” she asked.
“Yeah. Jump in.”
She squealed and hopped in. For the next few minutes her talk followed a meandering line starting with how her uncle had a car like mine. Her uncle was a plumber for the city, he’d married her mother’s sister twenty years before when Aunt Lovey (whose house we were going to) was only seventeen. Everybody thought it was scandalous for a thirty-eight-year-old man to wed a teenager but Juanda thought that it was okay. She liked older men. But not men like Newell. Newell was always complaining about how people did him wrong, white people mainly, but he didn’t like black bosses, ministers, store owners, or policemen either. When a man got older, she said, he should feel comfortable with the world and not mad because things didn’t go his way. That’s why she liked me. I stood up for myself but still didn’t lord it over people when I had the upper hand. For instance, I could have
