“Name’s Hilly, not
“Hilliard, you will speak respectfully to elders in my house,” his mother said.
Hilliard glowered.
“Why you wouldn’t let me in your house when I come all the way ovah there to see about you, Papa Grey?”
“You know why.”
“’Cause you old an’, an’, an’ senile.”
“Hilliard!” Niecie said.
“It’s true.”
“Maybe I was a little forgetful,” Ptolemy admitted, “but I could still count up to three with the best of ’em.”
“You see, Mama? He talks crazy.”
The angry young man’s tone was aggressive. Robyn put her hand in her purse as Ptolemy smiled. The children huddled next to their auntie Niecie’s chair, staring at Hilly as if he were some dangerous stranger.
“I ain’t so crazy I don’t know how to make you listen,” Ptolemy said.
He put his hand inside his breast pocket and came out with a roll of twenty-dollar bills.
The sight of money hit Hilly like a slap.
“What’s that, Pitypapa?” Niecie asked.
“Yo’ boy took me to the bank with three checks, got my signature, but only gave me money for the one,” Ptolemy said. “That’s why he blusterin’, ’cause he feel guilty. But I had Robyn bring me ovah here to bury the hatchet.”
He leaned over, handing the roll of cash to his grandniece.
“That’s six hunnert dollahs, Niecie. I wanna make sure that these kids is gettin’ what they need. I’ma give you sumpin’ like that ev’ry mont’. Lucky I didn’t give yo’ son my passbook or I might not have nuthin’ left ta give ya.”
“My boy does not steal,” Niecie said, clutching the wad in her lap. “You gettin’ old, Pitypapa. You just made a mistake thinkin’ you give him three checks but it was only one.”
Ptolemy noticed then that she was wearing a maroon dress with pink flowers stitched into it. It was faded and worn.
“Madeline Richards made that dress for you, didn’t she?” Ptolemy asked.
Robyn grinned when she saw the surprise on her one-time guardian’s face.
“How did you know that?”
“Sensie introduced you to Maddie. An’ Maddie made clothes for a livin’. She always was partial to flower patterns, an’ when she couldn’t find no cloth with a flower she sewed some on.”
“I remember meetin’ Maddie,” Niecie said. “She made this dress maybe fifteen years ago.”
“When you was a li’l girl your uncle Roger called you Betty Boop because you loved to watch that cartoon on the TV. If you’d sing her boop-boop-pe-doop song he’d give you two nickels.”
Hilda “Niecie” Brown frowned and cocked her head again. Her eyes narrowed to slits, and after a moment or two she nodded.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s right. Uncle Roger. He died in Vietnam and I cried for what felt like a whole week. He wasn’t really my uncle, though.”
“That’s what yo’ mama said, but he was her brother usin’ another name because he had killed a man in Alabama and then took on another man’s identity. He died under a false name. He really was your uncle, but nobody said it so that he didn’t get put on a Alabama chain gang.”
“You remembah all that, Pitypapa?”
“Doctor cured me, baby,” Ptolemy said as he rose to his feet.
Robyn stood behind him, her hand still in her purse, her eye on Hilliard.
“He opened my mind all the way back to the first day I could remembah as a child. I can think so clear that I could almost remembah what my father’s father was thinkin’ the day he conceived my old man. So you could say what you will but that boy there’s a thief an’ if you don’t tell him sumpin’ he gonna go the way that Roger would’a gone if anybody evah breathed his real name.”
Robyn kept her eyes on Hilly while Niecie stared at her uncle, looking for the man she’d seen little more than a month before.
When she didn’t speak, Ptolemy addressed her again: “I’ma give you that six hunnert dollahs for these kids here ev’ry month. As long as they with you I’ma give it to ’em, but I won’t if you send ’em back to they mama.”
Ptolemy gazed down at the children and they cowered. The boy scrunched up his dark face, trying to understand what the money had to do with him and his sister.
“They wit’ me,” Niecie said, and Ptolemy nodded.
He then turned to the brutish boy. “Hilly, you saved me from that crazy woman and so I forgive you. I’ma call on you sometime soon ’cause I need to know somethin’.”
