ice.
Then Constance Baker regaled them with stories about her day. It mostly concerned trading and investments. A terrorist bombing in Saudi Arabia caused a flurry because of a bus manufacturer. Only Eric seemed to understand what she was talking about.
But Constance was a good host. She asked Clea about NYU and then if Thomas was in school too.
“I wanted to go to school,” Thomas said, “but it wouldn’t make no difference.”
“Why not?”
“It just wouldn’t.”
“Hm,” Constance mused. “Eric, will you come into the other room for a moment please?”
They went into her bedroom, and she closed the door.
“I think she likes your brother,” Clea said.
“Everybody likes Eric. When we were kids he used to go to parties all the time.”
“Didn’t you go?”
“Not too much. No. I coulda gone, I guess, but I liked stayin’ home with my mother. We used to talk a lot.”
“Is that Eric’s mother too?”
2 5 8
F o r t u n a t e S o n
“Not by blood. But she loved Eric and me.”
Clea took Thomas’s big hand in both of hers, and for a while they sat there looking out the window.
Then there came a low feminine moan from the bedroom.
“I was going to go away with a boy named Brad this weekend,” Clea confessed.
“How come you ain’t goin’?”
“Because I had to come get you outta jail.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“I’m glad I didn’t go anyway.”
“How come?”
“He’s nice and everything, but I like you. I don’t want to like you, but I do anyway.”
“Oh, yeah!” Connie declared loudly. “Oh my God!”
A heavy thumping began to sound through the wall.
“Why you like me?” Thomas asked.
“I think it’s your big hands. At first you look so small and weak, but then when I hold your hands it’s like you’re the strongest person I ever knew.”
Clea kissed Thomas, and Connie squealed.
“Do you have protection?” Clea asked.
“What’s that?”
“You don’t use a condom when you have sex with your girlfriends?”
“I never had no sex with a woman,” the young man said.
The thumping got louder, and Connie cried out clearly,
“Do it, do it, do it!”
“You’re not serious.”
“Yes, I am. I never had no girlfriend to have sex with.”
“But you used to take drugs to prostitutes; you lived with a woman and her child for three years.”
“But I ain’t never had no sex. One time, on my twelfth birth-2 5 9
Wa l t e r M o s l e y
day, Monique played with my thing. I mean, sometimes there was women who said that they would if I wanted, but I was too shy. And that was when I was livin’ in the street an’ I was dirty all the time. You know, it didn’t sound right. And anyway . . .”
“Anyway what?”
“Nuthin’.” Thomas didn’t want to say that he felt that his mother was watching him and that she would have been upset to see him with some prostitute or drug addict.
“Oh, baby, yeah,” Connie said through the wall.
“Do you want to sleep with me?” Clea asked. Her tone was both serious and soft.
“I’d like to try,” Thomas said.
“I bet we could find some condoms in Connie’s bathroom.”
