Sonny and Ida were in the kitchen, Sonny running scales on his clarinet and Ida practicing a dance I was afraid might be a jitterbug. She stopped as soon as she saw me and ran straight into my open arms.
“Aunt Pea!” she said, “Mommy told us you’d take us to see the bear!”
“Bear?” I said to Gloria, over Ida’s shoulder.
Gloria shrugged. “The Central Park Zoo. I told them you might not have the time—”
“Definitely the bear,” I said, and put Ida down. “And the merry-go-round and ice cream, too.”
This roused Sonny from his meditation of escalating flats and we all headed down the stairs and onto the street, which shimmered with the sticky heat of late July. Mrs. Montgomery was sitting on the stoop, playing gin with her sister, Miss Reynolds—who always insisted on being called “Miss” no matter how many gray hairs she pushed under that church hat on Sundays, because she never married, and she wasn’t ever gonna be anyone’s missus. They tutted when they saw me and carried on for a while about how long it had been since I’d shown my face around these parts.
“But you’re looking good, child,” pronounced Mrs. Montgomery, after I had duly begged their pardon for forgetting to visit. “That downtown life still treating you all right?”
I fiddled with the hem of my skirt. I knew what they were asking. Ida kept quiet around her elders—Gloria wouldn’t have anyone calling her children ill-mannered—but she was squeezing my hand to say that she wanted to go already and didn’t care about what these aunties were going on about. Sonny, though, Sonny’s chin twitched and he held the rest of him very still.
“Oh, it’s all right, Mrs. Montgomery. Enough to live on,” I said, as though she’d just been asking about money.
“Well, at least you come back sometimes. I remember when you were just a girl, collecting all the numbers for the building—when I hit that time I remember you came running to tell me before anyone else had seen the mutuels! That boy we have now, he’s little Ronnie’s kid, Ronnie from Holiness—”
At this, Miss Reynolds interjected in a sotto voce that the whole block could hear, “He’s become Mohammedan now, Lord knows what we’re coming to—”
Mrs. Montgomery, who had lived with her sister all their lives, just kept going: “The kid’s all right, but he isn’t as fast as you were, Phyllis. Takes his good time at Walker’s bar before he bothers to come around here for the payouts.”
“You ran numbers, Aunt Pea?” Sonny said, suddenly.
The sisters stopped talking, and glanced up at the building.
Gloria Green Perkins, dedicated missionary at Abyssinian Baptist, didn’t approve of playing policy any more than she approved of the rest of her younger sister’s extralegal exploits.
“Not really, Sonny,” I said, “I just collected for the building.”
“Well,” said Miss Reynolds, after a silence that bagged like the waistline of an old dress, “the rents up here are higher than ever and the jobs scarcer than hen’s teeth. I can’t blame you for getting out, since you can. But at least you haven’t forgotten us, Phyllis.”
I blew out a laugh. “It’s never a good idea to forget where you came from, and I never could besides.”
I said my goodbyes and headed out before the sisters could incriminate me with any more reminiscences. I’d done more than collect numbers back then, and they both knew it. Back when she ruled Sugar Hill, Stephanie St. Clair, Madame Queen of Policy, had offered a lot of opportunities to a young Harlem girl willing to bend the law and pin it with a knife.
Ronnie’s boy ran past us as we waited at the bus stop; he was just a few years older than Sonny, but he’d found himself a suit for that skinny frame and a good wool cap so he looked more than half-grown, sharp pleats and padded shoulders around a tender middle. He was flushed and grinning, and I figured that someone on his rounds had hit and he was putting in extra for his ten percent. I remembered days like that: even when the hit was for five dollars, it felt good to think you’d had your part in their bit of luck. And your own. The ones like the Reynolds sisters, who knew I had the hands and believed in them besides, always wanted me to touch their slips before I passed them to the bank.
While we waited I pulled the lighter from my pocket and did a few of the tricks that Ida loved: whipping it through my fingers, tossing it in the air, and balancing its thin edge on the bony ridge in the back of my neck. Ida clapped.
“I wish you could teach me how to do that, Aunt Pea,” she said.
Sonny, twelve to Ida’s ten and older than the world, put his hands in his pockets. “Daddy says you shouldn’t.”
“And why shouldn’t she?”
He puckered his lips at his sister and said, hesitating on the first syllable, “’Cause it’s unnatural and devil’s work.”
Ida stamped her foot. “Sonny! Thomas Perkins, take that back!”
My hand froze with the lighter between my pinky and middle finger, precariously balanced, and without the slightest chance of falling. I contemplated Sonny, still a head shorter than me but with a look in his eyes like his father’s. Would the day come when Sonny treated me with as much formal wariness as Tom Perkins? I forced my fingers to move again, slid the lighter smoothly down the back of my hand, and let it drop into my bag.
“I’d think it’s a slow day if the devil has time to bother with my little tricks,” I said. “Ain’t you ever seen a juggler before, Sonny?”
Sonny shook his head slowly; the solemn, considerate boy I’d always known, now torn between his father and his aunt. But I wasn’t stupid. I knew who would win that battle, and who should. So I would steal the
