Mouse was so angry that he stormed out of Mabel’s house and didn’t talk to her again for a week.
Feather usually laughed at this story, but that afternoon she fell asleep before I got halfway through.
I hated it when she fell asleep because I didn’t know if she’d wake up again.
w h e n i g o t b a c k to the living room Jesus and Benita were at the door.
“Where you two goin’?” I asked.
“Uh,” Juice grunted, “to the store for dinner.”
“How you doin’, Benita?” I asked the young woman.
She looked at me as if she didn’t understand English or as if I’d asked some extremely personal question that no gentleman should ask a lady.
Benny was in her mid-twenties. She’d had an affair with Mouse which broke her heart and led to an attempted suicide. Bonnie and I took her in for a while but now she had her own apartment.
She still came by to have a home-cooked meal now and then.
Bonnie and she had become friends. And she loved the kids.
Lately it had been good to have Benny around because when Bonnie and I needed to be away she’d stay at Feather’s side.
Jesus would have done it if we asked him to, but he was eighteen and loved being out on his homemade sailboat, cruising up and down the Southern California coast. We hadn’t told him 1 6
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how sick his sister actually was. They were so close we didn’t want to worry him.
“Fine, Mr. Rawlins,” she said in a too-high voice. “I got a job in a clothes store on Slauson. Miss Hilda designs everything she sells. She said she was gonna teach me.”
“Okay,” I said, not really wanting to hear about the young woman’s hopeful life. I wanted Feather to be telling me about her adventures and dreams.
When Benny and Jesus were gone Bonnie came out of the kitchen with a bowl full of spicy beef soup.
“Eat this,” she said.
“I’m not hungry.”
“I didn’t ask if you were hungry.”
Our living room was so small that we only had space for a love seat instead of a proper couch. I slumped down there and she sat on my lap shoving the first spoonful into my mouth.
It was good.
She fed me for a while, looking into my eyes. I could tell that she was thinking something very serious.
“What?” I asked at last.
“I spoke to the man in Switzerland today,” she said.
She waited for me to ask what he said but I didn’t. I couldn’t hear one more piece of bad news about Feather.
I turned away from her gaze. She touched my neck with four fingertips.
“He tested the blood sample that Vicki brought over,” she said. “He thinks that she’s a good candidate for the process.”
I heard the words but my mind refused to understand them.
What if they meant that Feather was going to die? I couldn’t take the chance of knowing that.
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“He thinks that he can cure her, baby,” Bonnie added, understanding the course of my grief. “He has agreed to let her apply to the Bonatelle Clinic.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“In Montreux?”
“Yes.”
“But why would they take a little colored girl in there? Didn’t you say that the Rockefellers and Kennedys go there?”
“I already told you,” Bonnie explained. “I met the doctor on an eight-hour flight from Ghana. I talked to him the whole time about Feather. I guess he felt he had to say yes. I don’t know.”
“What do we have to do next?”
“It’s not free, honey,” she said, but I already knew that. The reason I’d met with Mouse was to raise the cash we might need if the doctors agreed to see my little girl.
“They’ll need thirty-five thousand dollars before the treat-ments can start and at least fifteen thousand just to be admitted.
It’s a hundred and fifty dollars a day to keep her in the hospital, and then the medicines are all unique, made to
