“And then you cut me up like a slaughtered calf.”
“Science will benefit from your sacrifice, Mr. Grey. Your niece and her generation will not have to suffer as you have.”
Ptolemy smiled at that.
“I’m leaving you a stronger pill,” Dr. Ruben continued. “And Robyn has my phone number. Whenever you feel hot, take a pill immediately. She will call me if you begin to fail.”
“I went to Africa in my sleep.”
“You did?”
“I saw it. Not today, but two thousand years ago, a thousand years before the Great Degradation, by Coy McCann’s reckoning.”
Dr. Ruben didn’t say anything to that. Ptolemy closed his eyes, then realized that he must have fallen asleep, because when he opened them again Robyn was sitting there next to him, holding his hands.
Satan was nowhere to be seen.
“Hi, baby,” he said.
“You look like a baby when you sleepin’, Papa Grey.”
“I got two weeks.”
She kissed his fingers.
“What day is it?” Ptolemy asked.
“Tuesday.”
“I got to go to Niecie’s house at noon . . . Alone.”
“Okay.”
“You been takin’ that gold to the safe-deposit box?”
“Yeah. A little bit at a time, like you told me to do. Shirley Wring come by in the mornin’ to sit wit’ you and I went to the bank. And then I got Beckford and Billy Strong an’ we went to talk to Antoine Church.”
“How soon before all that gold in the box?” Ptolemy asked.
“Three days. It’a be done by Thursday.”
“I’ma sleep now, baby.”
“Can I lie down next to you?”
“Will you tell me sumpin’?”
“What?”
“Anything, child.”
When I was a little girl my mama an’ my daddy and me was happy,” she whispered into the old man’s ear. “We lived in a house that was blue and white and had flowers in the front yard and a vegetable garden in the back. Mama took in li’l black children for daycare, and Daddy worked on a farm outside’a town. He coulda had a bettah job but he liked to be outside and to take time off between the seasons.
“Mama had a baby boy, and Daddy was so happy that he went up and down the block tellin’ everybody that he had a son named Alexander and that his son was gonna do what Alexander the Great did. But then, only a few weeks aftah Al was born, he got somethin’ in his chest and he was sick for five months.
“I think if he had just died right off that it wouldn’ta been so hard on Daddy an’ Mama. But he took off’a work and she went wit’ him to the hospital ev’ry day. Ev’ry day. An’ Al got sicker, and men would come to the house an’ tell me to pay the rent or the gas bill, or for heatin’ oil, an’ I was only six and half and they left me home ’cause they was at the doctors all the time.
“And Mama and Daddy would fight at night. And then, when Al died, Daddy went out to get drunk and he nevah came back. An’ Mama moved to Memphis and she started gettin’ drunk all the time.
“That’s when I met Mr. Roman. He was the man that lived next door an’ gave me peaches. He would take me in as much as he could when Mama had her boyfriends ovah. An’ we would talk an’ play board games, and I would read to him from my storybooks and he would ask silly questions.
“And one day when he saw that I was scared’a my mama’s boyfriend who would make me lay on top’a him, he came and got me and kept me for a whole day. He gave me hot dogs and sweet potato pie and root beer. And when it got late and my mama still wasn’t home, he gave me hot chocolate and made me a bed on a cot in his den.
“An’ when my mama died and I was supposed to come up here, Mr. Roman took me ovah to his house an’ told me that he loved me. I told him that I loved him too an’ that I was gonna miss him, but he said that it wasn’t the same thing. He said that if I was a young woman, even though he was old, that he would make me his wife and buy me a house with a swimmin’ pool in the backyard and a movie screen in the basement.
“And I wished that I was older and that Mr. Roman could make me his wife. I was even thinkin’ that I’d go back down home when I was eighteen and ask him if he still loved me. And then I met you, Papa Grey.
“Papa Grey, are you awake?”
The old man was breathing heavily, snoring lightly on and off.
“Anyway,” Robyn continued, “when I met you I knew that you loved me like Mr. Roman did but that you wouldn’t let nobody take me away and just hope that I’d come back someday. Even when you couldn’t think so good, and then when you could, you wanted to look aftah me. I don’t need nobody to take care’a me, not no more. I just need somebody to want to.”
While Robyn spoke,
