nervous to see the baby lolling on the slick, hard surface.
'She's pretty,' she said tentatively, not sure if that was the appropriate word. More puckish, really, making a fish mouth that reminded Tess of Harpo Marx, but what mother wanted to hear that?
'You got any?'
'Uh-uh,' Tess said politely, trying to project the kind of longing she knew mothers expected of nonmothers. She didn't have much of a baby jones. Still, there was something appealing about this chubby girl, a life-of-the- party light in her eyes, a way of churning her arms and legs as if ready to dance.
'This is Laylah,' Keisha said, making the baby wave a tiny hand at Tess.
'Lay-lay-lay-lah,' Tess sang a little riff to the baby, then felt embarrassed. 'I guess people do that all the time.'
Keisha looked puzzled. 'There's a song with my baby's name? Isn't that something? I'd sure like to hear that sometime.'
'Yeah, Derek and the Dominoes.' Keisha looked blank. 'You know, Eric Clapton.'
'Oh yeah, that guitar player. The one whose little boy fell out the window. The one who did the song with Baby-face.'
Funny, the different contexts people brought to the world. Then again, Tess hadn't known Toni Braxton was from Severna Park. 'How old are you, if I may ask?'
'Just turned thirty-one this past April.'
'So when you had Donnie you were'-Tess stopped, in part to do the math, in part because the math made her feel rude.
'Fifteen. Yes'm. But what do you want to know about Donnie for? Sure was a long time ago.'
'I'm trying to find the other children who were with him at the Nelsons', and I thought you might know where they were.'
'Why? I mean, why do you want to find them?'
'Because someone asked me to.' That sounded a little sinister, so she added, 'There may be some money coming to them, because of what happened.'
'Money for them, but not for Donnie?'
'No, I'm afraid not.' She didn't owe Keisha any further explanation, but decided to make one up, in case Keisha was distracted by her own grievances. 'Because of your lawsuit, I guess. Double jeopardy and all that.'
'Oh,' Keisha said. The baby's diaper was the kind with tape, and Laylah wasn't a squirmer, but it still took Keisha quite a bit of time to fasten the sides. 'Well, I don't know where they are. I never even met 'em.'
'What about the trial? Weren't you at the trial?'
'Uh-huh.'
'They were there, too, weren't they? I know they were called as witnesses.'
'Oh I s'pose we might have spoke, once or twice. But we didn't meet in any real way.'
Keisha reminded Tess of the weight you had to pick up from the bottom of the pool to pass Junior Lifesaving. Sometimes, if you didn't come at it just right, you had to surface, take a breath, and make another pass. 'Why was Donnie in foster care?'
'I don't s'pose that's anyone's business now, is it? It wasn't right, I'll tell you that much. It was all a stupid mix-up. They took my boy from me for no reason and they got him killed, and they didn't have to pay.'
'They put him in foster care just like that, with no hearing?'
Keisha hugged Laylah to her, dropping her head so she could sniff the back of her daughter's neck. She smiled, as if the baby's scent was a kind of aromatherapy. Tess wondered if you had to be a mother to smell it, or if babies' necks smelled good to everyone.
'Look, that was all a long time ago, and I don't remember much about it. I don't want to remember much. I got Laylah and I'm a good mother now, a real good mother, and my baby's father is good to me. What's it to me, you do something for those other chil'ren?'
In the front room, one of the sleeping nephews whimpered like a puppy. Keisha Moore didn't move, just stood in the shadowy dining room, rocking Laylah in her arms.
Tess put her card on the freezer/changing table. 'Just in case,' she said. 'For what it's worth, Laylah really is a cutie.'
When she passed through the front room, the two little boys slept on, their cheeks patterned by the rough weave of the old sofas, their clothes twisted and wrinkled on their skinny, compact bodies. She hadn't noticed before that they were wearing their shoes, high-top athletic shoes with Velcro fasteners at the ankles, shoes that had cost someone dearly. They had probably been too tired to take their sneakers off when they went to sleep. But why hadn't Keisha or her sister-in-law followed behind, undoing the straps and sliding the shoes gently down their ankles so as not to wake them?
Tess remembered running barefoot through her summer days, careless and free, a stubbed toe or a dropped jar of fireflies her biggest fears. On Washington Street, the children couldn't even afford the luxury of running barefoot through their own dreams.
Chapter 6
Almost a decade had passed since Gramma Weinstein had given up her big old house in Windsor Hills and moved into a cramped apartment in the suburbs northwest of Baltimore. 'So urban,' she had said, and the family had been pleased at this uncharacteristic rhetorical restraint on Gramma's part. But in the end, the changing neighborhood was less important to her than the cost of maintaining the house, a rambling wreck of a place with rotting wooden shingles and a weed-choked yard. 'I am a woman of reduced circumstances,' she liked to tell her children and grandchildren. 'You know, Poppa didn't leave me that well fixed.' They knew, they knew.
Yet Gramma still wanted to entertain on the scale to which she had become accustomed when Poppa was alive. For Judith's birthday dinner, she had invited all five of her children, their spouses, the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren. It added up to twenty people, which would have made her apartment feel like an overcrowded elevator, an elevator filled with tsotchkes and china springer spaniels, each one with its own name and history.
Her children had handled the situation as they always did, by going behind her back. Tess's mother, Judith, called her four brothers and they agreed to draw straws for the dinner. The losers attended, while the others made up credible excuses for why they could not attend. Even Tess's own father ended up wiggling off the hook, claiming a work conflict. The Monaghans and the Weinsteins still didn't get along that well. So the guest list was limited to Gramma, Uncle Jules and Aunt Sylvia, their daughter Deborah and son-in-law Aaron, Uncle Donald, Uncle Spike, Tess and, of course, the guest of honor, Judith, who had organized it all.
'Where is everybody?' Gramma asked, as Judith sliced her birthday cake and passed pieces around the table.
'Commitments,' Judith said. 'People's lives are so hectic now.'
'Well, Isaac and Nathan were always so driven. That's why they're successful. But I'd think your husband might have been here, at least. Don't the Monaghans celebrate birthdays? God knows, they celebrate everything else.'
'Patrick's taking me to the Inn at Perry Cabin this weekend.' Judith broke off a piece of cake with her fingers and crammed it into her mouth.
'A cabin? He takes you to a cabin for your fiftieth birthday?'
'It's a five-star restaurant and hotel, Gramma,' Tess said, as her mother's mouth was still full of cake.
'Very fancy, I'm sure. I just can't understand why things can't be like they used to be.'
Tess could. It wasn't just the loss of the house, although it had been a wonderful place for parties, that overgrown Victorian perched on a hill above the Gwynn's Falls, full of secret places, like an old dumbwaiter and the remains of a wine cellar. No, it was the loss of Poppa that had changed the nature of their family gatherings. Overworked and overextended, he had still managed to throw his love at them with both hands, like a little kid
