identify.
Ptolemy followed her around, looking through every paper and blouse that she threw out. He was very excited by a large iron key that she found between the mattress and box spring.
For four days they filled trash bags, swept, and discarded.
The strong girl also lugged chairs and tables and even the broken bureau out to the street.
At night Robyn slept on the mattress roll under the south table and Ptolemy slept on Sensia’s bed, which Robyn had covered with plastic casing and unused sheets she had found in a closet. Sometimes the girl would come to him and hold him for a while until his teeth stopped chattering and he no longer cried in his sleep.
On the fifth day the apartment was mostly clean. The junk that Ptolemy wanted to hoard was stacked neatly in the deep closet. There were chairs in the living room and laundered blankets on the bed. The kitchen had been swept and scrubbed and disinfected until it almost seemed as if someone might cook in there.
“Uncle?” Robyn asked one day. She had just returned with a basket full of clothes from the laundromat across the street.
“Yeah?”
“What’s this card? It’s got a name and number printed on one side and on the other somebody wrote, ‘For the doctor you requested’ by hand.”
“I don’t . . . I don’t remembah no card. And I ain’t sick, either.”
“It says that this man, this Antoine Church, is a social worker,” Robyn said. “Maybe he gotta doctor help you remembah things like this.”
Grey,” a woman called. “Pee Toll My Grey.”
“That’s us, Uncle,” Robyn said.
“That ain’t my name,” he said, stubbornly anchored to the blue armchair in the hall at social services. “I mean, that’s my last name but she must be callin’ somebody else.”
“Please,” his young guardian whined.
“That’s not my name,” Ptolemy said again.
“Please.”
He allowed the girl he thought of as his child to lift him by the forearms and lead him through the scuffed and stained brown door.
It was a small office with no bookcases or books. The desk was made from pressboard and covered in plastic walnut veneer that had started peeling at the corners.
Mr. Antoine Church was a prissy young black man with straightened hair and a picture of Jesus on the wall. He wore a tan suit and brown calfskin gloves.
“What you got gloves on for on a hot day like this?” Ptolemy asked.
“Germs,” he replied.
“Why’ont you sit down, Uncle?” Robyn said.
He didn’t want to, but the busses and the walks to get to the government office had tired him out. Robyn stood behind the chair.
“How are you two related?” Church asked Robyn.
“My friend Niecie is his grandniece, and she asked me to take care of him.”
“But why call him ‘uncle’ if he’s just a friend?”
“I call my boyfriend ‘honey,’” she said, visibly holding back her anger, “but that don’t mean I’ma put him in my tea.”
“You got germs in here?” Ptolemy asked.
“What?” Church said.
“You got them gloves for germs you say. That mean I’ma get sick in here?”
“No,” Antoine said in an exaggerated, almost yawning, tone.
“Then why you got them gloves on?”
“Why are you here, Mr. Grey?”
“I ...”
It was like falling into a dream for the old man. He wanted Coydog McCann to fish with, and Reggie smiling naturally in his grave. He wanted to show the children how to fly kites and sing songs that Jesus might not want to hear.
Ptolemy sat there in Church’s uncomfortable metal chair, thinking that he’d like to move without his joints aching and to have one full thought all the way through without stumbling over the words and getting distracted by the slightest thing. He didn’t want people to call him
He wanted a job and driver’s license and a hard-on with a girlfriend like he was sure that boy Beckford wanted with Robyn.
Before Robyn came to stay with him, before Reggie came and before Sensia died, Ptolemy might have said these things. He might have talked about going to the bathroom and having sex. But now he just sat there, lost in the jumble of ideas. He knew that somebody like Church wouldn’t understand his words.
