“Why you got to be makin’ out with her on my bed?”
“Girl, I’m ninety-one.”
“I know what I saw. You was just movin’ back from a kiss when I come in here.”
“Kiss?”
“You got your own bed,” Robyn said. “You could take her up in there.”
He had had this argument many times in his life. Sensia could tell when he was holding back from turning his head to see a fine woman’s gait. Bertie, his first wife, once got mad because he left a fifteen-cent tip instead of a dime for a cute waitress.
“But, baby,” he’d said to at least a dozen women, “I didn’t mean nuthin’.”
But he had meant it. He had.
Robyn’s hands had become fists and her cheek wanted to quiver.
He turned away, walked into his bedroom, and closed the door on the rippling seas of love.
He went to the bureau and took out one of the Devil’s tiny pills. His fever was raging. He could hear it boiling in his ears, feel it huffing like a bellows against his rib cage.
He swallowed the profane medicine and smiled.
Later on, sitting in Sensie’s wicker chair by a window that looked out on the barren concrete yard, Ptolemy opened his mind.
A child had come to his door two years after he and Sensia were married. She was eleven years old and her face was his face on a girl-child’s head. Her name was Pecora and she had been living in a foster home with five other girls.
“I don’t wanna live there no more,” Pecora, who was named for her mother, had said.
“Why not?”
“’Cause they nasty an’ mean an’ you my real father an’ my mother have died.”
“I cain’t take you,” Ptolemy said. He didn’t question that she was his, one look at that face and he knew it must be true. He and Pecora Johnson had spent a weekend together a dozen years earlier, but she never said anything about a child.
Ptolemy and Sensia had discussed children, and Sensia said that she was no mother and so would have no child.
Ptolemy had girded himself against his own blood frowning at him and Pecora turned away. He watched the child walk down the hall. She got all the way to the door, and he would have let her go into the cold arms of the street except that Sensia came home just then. All she had to do was look into Pecora’s eyes and she knew everything: that this was her husband’s love child, that she had come seeking shelter, and that Ptolemy turned her away because he didn’t want to lose Sensia’s love.
“Come on in with me, child,” Sensia said.
Pecora and Ptolemy had two things in common: their faces and their love of Sensia Howard.
“I started her out on the road,” Ptolemy would say to Sensia, “but you brought her home.”
Yes?” he said when she knocked.
“Can I come in?” Robyn asked through the door.
“Come on.”
She had been wearing jeans and a red T-shirt when she’d come in from shopping, but now she wore a green dress that made her look younger.
“I’m sorry, Papa Grey,” Robyn said from the doorway. “I didn’t mean to get all mad. It wasn’t my bed right then but just a couch in the livin’ room and what you do ain’t none’a my business anyway.”
“Come on in an’ sit down, baby,” Ptolemy said to the girl.
Robyn slouched into the room and sat at the edge of the bed across from his wicker chair.
Robyn had her head down while Ptolemy looked at her, thinking that every heartbeat in his chest was like a grain of sand through an hourglass.
“Every minute I got wit’ you is precious,” he said at last. “I don’t care if you get mad.”
“You don’t?”
“You bein’ mad is just that you love me. At least I’m old enough to know that. But I want you to be nice to Shirley. I need you to take care of her after I’m gone.”
“Why you got to talk about dyin’ so much?”
“Because I’m dyin’, baby. Dyin’ just as sure as the sun go down.”
“I’m sorry, Papa Grey.”
“Sorry ’bout what?”
“Gettin’ mad. Takin’ you to that doctor.”
“If I was fifty years younger and you aged twenty years ...”
Robyn smiled, and then she giggled.
“And then would you only look at my legs?” she asked. “Or would I find you on the couch with Shirley
