“Elton!” the blond black woman cried. “The boy’s scared.”
She leaned over and picked Thomas up in her arms.
“What’s he got to be scared about? I’m his father. He bettah not be afraid’a me.”
“If you his father then act like it,” she said. “Tell him you happy to have him here. Buy him some ice cream.”
“I’m his father,” Elton said. “He should know I’m happy.
Why the hell I take him away from them people ain’t no blood to him if I didn’t love him? Why I’m’a add his mouth to the ones I’m feedin’ if I didn’t want him?”
The woman sucked on a tooth, making a loud crackling sound.
“Don’t you have sumpin’ to do?” she said. “Me an’
Tommy gonna get acquainted.”
With that she carried the small boy back through the door she’d come from. They went down a long hall and into a large 5 9
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kitchen that was painted gray and lit by a bulb shining through green glass.
They heard the front door slam, and Thomas breathed a sigh of relief that his father had gone.
The woman carried Thomas to a wooden chair at a table in the center of the big room. She sat with him nestled in her lap.
Thomas liked her soft warmth and sweet odor. When she put her hand to the side of his cheek, he pressed his head against her palm.
“You a sweet boy, huh?” she said, hugging him closer. “My name is May. I used to know your mother a long time ago, before you were born.”
“I thought Daddy said that you moved away?” Thomas said then, remembering the conversation at the hotel restaurant.
“He did? When did he say that?”
“When we had lunch.”
“You had lunch with him before today?”
“Uh-huh. Me and my mama did.”
“Elton had lunch wit’ Branwyn and you?”
“Uh-huh.”
For a moment Thomas thought that he’d said something wrong, but then May smiled. She had a beautiful smile, and for the first time in many days the boy forgot that he was sad.
“We don’t have a proper bedroom for you yet, Tommy,”
May said. “But there’s a cot out on the back porch, and it’s gonna be pretty warm for the next little while. You wanna see it?”
Thomas nodded and put his hand against May’s cheek.
When he did this she swelled up, taking in a deep breath. She put him down on the floor and kissed his cheek before she 6 0
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stood up, and then, hand in hand, they walked through the back door and into the screened-in back porch.
The floor was made of unfinished wood planks, a few of which had spaces between them so that Thomas could see down through to the ground underneath. The porch was about twelve feet long and only five feet wide. Three of the walls were made of corroded metal screening, and the roof was layered with white aluminum slats. There was a broken lawn mower in the corner and three decomposing cardboard boxes spilling out rags and papers along the screen walls. The cot supported a bright blue-and-green vinyl-covered mattress that belonged on a chaise longue near a pool.
“I got a sheet that you can have,” May said. “And there’s some pillows and blankets in the cabinet in our room. An’
don’t you worry about Elton. He ain’t mad at you. Him an’
me just fight sometimes.”
After that May showed Thomas her and Elton’s bedroom and then her “sewing room” at the end of another long hall.
They got the sheet and a blanket, a pillow and a lamp —
which had a ceramic mermaid as a base — for his back-porch room. Thomas had learned to make his own bed from his mother, and so he told May that he could make up the room on his own.
She went to make a phone call, and when she got off she told Thomas that she was going out and to tell Elton, when he got back, that she was going to have dinner with August Murphy.
Thomas wasn’t worried to be alone. All he could see out of his screen walls were the trees of their yard and the yards of their neighbors. Beyond the trees there was a dark area and then the houses of the people behind.
Thomas threaded the cord for his lamp through a small window that led from the kitchen to the porch. He plugged 6 1
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