windowsills that had various flower motifs. Moving between the images of flowers were cats. White, black, calico, and blond cats rubbing and mewling and looking at me with sultry half-interest.
“Have a seat, young man,” Dottie told me.
There was a cat on the seat she offered me. He didn’t move until I was almost on top of him.
I counted seven felines and I was sure there were twice that number in and around her house. But none of that bothered me. The cops had not come to the door. I was safely hidden among the flowers and cats in the company of a white woman who didn’t seem to care about anything else.
“Tea?” she asked.
“No ma’am. All I wanted to know was about Harold.”
“What a shame,” she said. “You know he used to come here to my door when he couldn’t take it anymore. That was a long time ago. More than twenty-five years. I’m one of the only people left who remembers it and that’s why Jocelyn hasn’t talked to me in all that time.”
“So Harold and his mother used to live at Jocelyn’s home?” I asked.
“That’s exactly right,” Dottie said. “I think her name was Honey.”
“You wouldn’t happen to remember her last name?”
“Oh yes, I do,” Dottie said in a pixilated sort of way. “Honey May. I’ll never forget that, because she had two first names. I always thought that was peculiar.”
“Honey May,” I said, committing the name to memory.
“That’s right. She seemed like a nice girl but I think she must have had a problem with the bottle.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“She just left one day. Didn’t even take little Harold with her. Left him with Jocelyn.”
She had taken a seat in the middle of the flowery red-and-blue-and-green sofa. Dottie had a long face that was meaty around the jowls. Her nose was hefty and her cheeks round. In that face I saw Jocelyn’s face. I had been distracted by the large ears but now that I remembered it I could see the features of the Ostenberg woman again.
“Jocelyn kept the boy,” Dottie was saying. “I suppose it was very Christian of her but you know, everybody would have been better off if she would have found some nice colored people to take him in.”
“Why do you say that, ma’am?”
“Aren’t you polite, Ezekiel,” she said beaming at me. “It would have been better because Jocelyn was ashamed to have people know that she was raising a colored child. She wouldn’t even take him to school. From the time he was five years old she made him walk the nine blocks to Redman Elementary. She never took him to the park or allowed his friends into the house.”
“What about her husband?” I asked.
“That man she lives with is her second husband,” Dottie said. “He’s only been there for sixteen years. Jocelyn’s first husband left years before. Harold left Jocelyn’s home when he was twelve.”
“Twelve years old?”
“Oh yes. I know because he came here to me the day he left. He asked me if he could cut my lawn for fifty cents and I told him yes. After that I never saw him again. Jocelyn told her neighbors that his mother had come to get him. But I knew better. He wanted that fifty cents for a stake to run away from home. And who can blame him? His mother a drunk who abandoned him and the woman who raised him didn’t even hold his hand when they crossed the street.”
By then I had forgotten the police.
A cat jumped into my lap and started pressing her nose against my hand. I scratched behind her ears absently. I imagined a lonely black boy living out in a white world where even his mother treated him like dirt.
“You like cats, Mr. Rawlins?” Dottie asked me.
“Better than most people,” I replied.
“Hallelujah to that,” she said.
41
Hello?” a man’s voice asked.
It was near four in the afternoon and I was waiting for a ride.
“Who is this?” the man asked me.
“Harold,” I said, “Ostenberg.”
There was a lull and then, “Yes?” a woman’s voice said.
“Was Harold’s father passing too?” I asked. “Or was Harold just a throwback from your side of the family?”
“Who is this?”
“If you don’t want me to have a talk with your husband, you had better tell me how I can get to your son, Jocelyn.”
