Ptolemy felt like a bug fixed in amber, caught forever in brilliance and beauty beyond his understanding.
“Mr. Grey?”
“Yes, Miss Howard?”
“Can I come sit next to you on your bed?”
He gulped, which gave the impression of a nod, and so she moved from chair to bed, putting her hand on his knee.
“My mama always told me,” she said, “that a woman must have at least three days between men. Three whole days or people could say that she was loose.”
Ptolemy said, “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,” and they kissed lightly.
“Why you shakin’ your head, Mr. Grey?”
“Because I’m almost forty-six, will be in two months and a half, and I have never seen you comin’.”
“I’m twenty-six,” Sensia said, and then kissed his cheek, “and I been waitin’ to find you every day I been alive.”
“Me?”
“I saw you at that barbecue party and I knew that you would read to me and hold me if I had fever. I knew that you would ask me how I was today and hear every word I said. A year later when I had forgot, you’d still be there to remind me. My man.”
“And that’s why you left Ezra?”
“No. I left Ezra because he pushed on me and grabbed at me. But he did that because he knew how much I wanted to be with you.”
With that, Sensia stood up and took off her green dress and Ptolemy knew that Coy was right.
“Are you gonna take off them pants?” she asked him, and the dream shifted while someone in the room moaned, either in ecstasy or pain.
He woke up to find her dead twenty-two years later. She hadn’t put on a pound, smoked, or drunk to excess, but she died of a stroke in her sleep while he dreamed of waking up to her smile. She wasn’t yet forty-nine, would never be. She’d had lovers and times away, but Ptolemy couldn’t bring himself to leave her (except once), nor could he bar her from their door. In the decade before she died she had begun to hoard things: suitcases and clothes, newspapers and books. She’d go to secondhand stores and buy hat racks and jewelry boxes, furniture and musical instruments that she meant to learn to play but never did. The kitchen had fallen into disrepair and they ate take- out food from pizza kitchens and Chinese restaurants that were no more than holes in the wall. Ptolemy would get up every morning and buy them coffee in Styrofoam cups at the diner two blocks down.
And he loved her.
“What do you think about this dress,” she’d ask him, twirling about in something new or used that she’d bought with money he made working for the county maintenance department.
He’d look at her posing, knowing that no man could get between this. She might meet someone now and then that distracted her; like Harlan Norman, who asked her to go to Hawaii with him. They spent a month, and all of Harlan’s money, on the islands, but then she came back, alone, with a big black pearl for Ptolemy.
There were many days that Ptolemy wanted to kill Sensia. He’d bought a short-barreled .25-caliber pistol once when she didn’t come home for the weekend. But then, on Tuesday, she walked through their apartment door and smiled for him. He forgot his mission and they made love and she said she was sorry.
One day she told him, “I will nevah cheat on you again, Papa,” and as far as he knew she hadn’t.
When he woke up that morning next to her corpse he cried for an hour; cried calling emergency; cried while the ambulance drivers tried to resuscitate her.
“Stroke,” the Asian paramedic said.
“She nevah did you right, Pitypapa,” Niecie said.
“Eleven hundred dollars,” the funeral director said.
“Amen,” the preacher said to a room filled with men and women that had been her lovers over the years. Even Ezra Bindle was there. He had a portly wife and seven portly children but he came to say good-bye because Sensia was the kind of woman that lovers pined after even when they no longer felt the love.
Ptolemy was already an old man. He read to Sensia at night and asked her about her day. He made her chicken soup when she was ill—and she was often ill. She was never out of his mind since the first day he’d seen her and she shook off the grip of Ezra Bindle to be his woman.
“Even if I wander, I will always find my way back home to you,” she’d told him.
He’d put those words on her tombstone, sold two of Coy’s doubloons to pay for it and for the flowers to be put on her grave every Valentine’s Day, her favorite holiday.
“Wake up, Uncle,” Robyn said from somewhere beyond the blue, blue sky above the graveyard.
Things began to happen quickly after the death and burial of Sensia Howard: Ptolemy saw himself as a young man with a stout lever under the light of an oil-soaked brand, moving the dark stone that hid the double-thick canvas bags filled with old gold coins; he was working, working, working cleaning out buildings set for demolition, or empty lots where the city planned to build, or the sidewalks in front of courts, office buildings, and police stations; he was talking to Coy in life and death, loving Sensia, missing his children (Rayford and Rayetta), who despised him after their mother had taken them away; and wondering what a treasure could do to save black folks who had been crushed down by a whole epoch of restrictions and pain.
Uncle Grey?” Robyn said for maybe the thousandth time.
“Yeah, babe?” he replied with his eyes still closed.
“Are you awake?”
