Remembering these words in the bed, Eric sat up and turned the lamp on.
Eric believed that Tommy understood things. Even now, after years, he listened to his brother’s words. Ahn knew what she was talking about. It was her job to see trouble coming.
With the sun rising over his dead mother’s garden, Eric decided that he would stay out of trouble as much as he could and that he would never put anybody in danger again.
7 8
6
The morning after Elton and May were arrested, and Thomas was put in the holding cell, Madeline Beerman came to retrieve her grandson. She brought him home to her fourth-floor apartment on Denker and served him cornflakes for lunch. Thomas didn’t mind the breakfast food. He hadn’t eaten since the afternoon before because May and Elton were away at dinnertime and there was nothing he could eat in the refrigerator or the cupboards.
“I don’t want you thinking bad about your father because of what happened last night,” Madeline told him at the pine dining table that was crowded into her tiny studio apartment.
“Uh-huh,” Thomas replied, gulping down cereal.
“It’s really that May that’s the problem,” Madeline continued. “She’s been a bad seed ever since a long time ago when she was friends with Branwyn. She wants every man she sees.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I went to visit Elton in jail. He’ll be out in a few days. He says he wants you to come back and live with him and that he’s showing May the door.”
Thomas stopped eating and turned his eyes to Madeline.
He wondered what violent act occurred when you were shown the door, and he knew that he didn’t want to go back to live with his brutal father. But he understood that he 7 9
Wa l t e r M o s l e y
couldn’t say what he wanted. Whatever he said would cause trouble, and so he kept his mouth shut.
It was just as well that he did so. After three days in Madeline’s house, Thomas would have gone to live anywhere else.
There was only that one room besides the kitchen and toilet.
Madeline slept on the sofa, and Thomas was given a mat on the floor. Madeline watched television day and night, and the boy couldn’t get to sleep or look for his mother with his eyes closed because there was always somebody talking on the tinny TV speaker.
Madeline even kept the TV on when she was asleep.
“I use it for my sleeping pill,” she told Thomas on the first night. “I leave it on and it drowses me.”
When Elton came on the fourth morning, Thomas was actually happy to see him.
Elton wore his mechanic’s overalls. There was a bump on his right temple, and two fingers on his left hand were bandaged together.
“You ret to go, boy?” Elton asked.
Thomas stood up from his chair and nodded. He’d hardly slept in the past three days, and he hadn’t left the apartment at all because Madeline said the streets were full of hoodlums.
So he was ready to go anywhere.
In the car Thomas sat in the passenger’s seat and was barely tall enough to peek out of the window.
“I’m sorry about what happened with that bitch,” Elton said.
Thomas giggled to hear a man say a curse word that the bad kids used on the playground.
“I didn’t mean to get so upset on your first night there. But you know she made me mad goin’ out with her old 8 0
F o r t u n a t e S o n
boyfriend an’ tellin’ me through you. But I got my head together ovah that shit. I was gonna leave May for your mother anyway. I sure was.”
Thomas got up on his knees and looked out at Central Avenue. He liked this street more than Wilshire or Sunset, near to where Dr. Nolan’s house was. The stores looked more inviting, with bright colors and chairs outside. There were children playing on the street too. And almost all of the people were brown or black like him and his mother.
“Watch it!” Elton cried.
A boy on a skateboard had veered out in front of the car.
Elton hit the brakes, and Thomas’s face slammed into the dashboard. He felt the pain mainly in his nose. It was like a bright red flame in the center of his face.
His eyes were closed, but he heard Elton open his door and then scream, “What the fuck is wrong with you, boy? You almost got killed!”
He yelled for a while, and Thomas held his nose trying to keep the blood from spilling out onto Elton’s car seats. He knew that his father would not want blood in his car.
“What happened to you?” Elton cried when he tired of screaming at the skateboarder and came back to the car. “You bleedin’?”
At th e e m e rg e nc y room the nurse asked Thomas if somebody had hit him.
