He raised his lids then, like the curtain from a stage at the beginning of a play that he had wanted to see for many, many years. Robyn was sitting next to him, holding his hands in hers.
“Right here,” he said. “How long?”
“Four days,” Robyn said. “I called Dr. Ruben but his phone was disconnected. I wanted to tell somebody but I didn’t know who. Niecie been wantin’ to come ovah, but I told her that the doctor said that you had this bad flu, that anybody breathe yo’ air could get sick.”
“Help me to sit up.”
He looked around the old bedroom, the room where he awoke to find Sensia Howard dead. He no longer felt the pang of loss when thinking of Sensia, whom he had loved unconditionally. She was gone, off in a lovely dream.
“Help me stand up.”
“I thought you was gonna die, Uncle,” Robyn said as she half-supported him into the living room.
He sat down on the rainbow hammock of his stool and stared at the TV. He reached out and pressed the
It had been decades since that room had been so clean and neat.
“Robyn?”
“Yeah, Uncle?”
“You are a gift from God, you know that?”
“Are you okay?” she replied.
“Nevah bettah, nevah once in all my years.”
“Yo’ skin is hot,” she said.
“Burnin’ bright,” he said with depth to his raspy voice.
“Maybe we should see a doctor.”
“We already seen the doctor,” he said. “What we gotta do is make things right, make things right ...” He stalled for a moment, then found the thread of his thoughts again. “Because there’s a lot to do for you and Reggie’s kids, for Niecie and black folks all ovah the world.”
“Like what?”
Instead of answering, Ptolemy looked at his child savior. She didn’t have the magic of Sensia or the deep, crazy accuracy of Coydog, but Robyn was the best of them . . . Ptolemy dawdled over this thought a moment. Here he was, sitting on a folding chair in his home after years of sadness and careless loss. His mind had fallen in on itself like an old barn left unmended and untended through too many seasons.
“What, Uncle?” Robyn asked.
“A gift from God,” he said again. “Without you I wouldn’t even be here.”
“Somebody else woulda come,” Robyn said, bowing her head.
“Yeah. They’da come, but I still wouldn’t be here. It’s me that’s the lump’a clay and you that’s the hand of God.”
Pitypapa!” Niecie exclaimed when Ptolemy and Robyn showed up at her door three days later.
He’d needed twenty-four hours to recover from the weakness four days in bed had put on him. The next day he bathed and pondered, read a book called
“That the way you used to dress when you was a playah, Mr. Grey?” Robyn had asked him while he stood before the store’s triple dressing mirror.
“No, baby. That’s Coydog McCann I see in the mirror—the classiest man I evah knew.”
After donning his new clothes Ptolemy took Robyn to the ladies’ shop next door, and then to the taxi stand on Normandie. From there they went to Niecie’s home.
“Hey, Niecie,” the old man said in a tone he hadn’t known for decades. “How you doin’, sugah?”
Niecie stopped there in the desolate living room, cocking her head to try and get a bead on the voice she was hearing.
“I’m all bettah now, Niecie,” Ptolemy said. “Robyn done took me to a doctor near about killed me, but then he pulled me back from the night.”
“You can, you can think bettah now, Pitypapa?” Niecie asked, stumbling on her own tongue. “Like when you was young?”
“Mmmm,” Ptolemy said, smiling and nodding. “But I’m still old in my bones, so you gonna offah me a seat?”
After Robyn got the lemonade from the kitchen, big-bodied Hilliard came back from a run to the store with Letisha and Arthur in tow. The big thief frowned when he saw Ptolemy sitting there with his legs crossed and a glass of lemonade in his hand.
“Boy,” Ptolemy greeted. He wasn’t mad at the young man anymore.
