“Grown men scared to go see about somebody that’s sick,” Mama said.
I looked at her. She turned her head away from me and went in the kitchen.
Mr. Logan was in the hospital a week, and then he died.
Daddy never did tell us what it was he had.
The queen bee turned her head a bit and looked at me. We were crossing the street at the same time. She was dark around her eyes, but I couldn’t tell if it was mascara or her eyes. She smiled a bit but didn’t say anything. I was afraid to smile at her. It was summertime. She had on a short-sleeved dress and a silver bracelet on the upper part of her arm. She was as old as my mother. “Does the queen bee have any children?” I asked Mama when I got home.
“I don’t know. I don’t even know her. Miss Billie was the one that knew her . . . Why do you ask a question like that?”
“I don’t know. I saw her today. I was just wondering.”
I wanted to ask how could they make love to her if they knew they were going to die.
Miss Billie said, “Because they don’t think that anything can touch them.”
I let the queen bee go across the street first. She smiled at me like people smile at you when they’re afraid you won’t smile back. She had a little waist and big hips.
“You got the kind of ass that a woman should show off,” Davis said. “You ought to wear those tight skirts with the little ruffles around the hem.”
I laughed. “I’d look crazy.”
“Naw you wouldn’t. If a woman got a beautiful behind, she ought to show it off.”
“Davis, you crazy.”
“Yeah, I could just sit back and watch you walk,” he said.
I said he was crazy again. He slid his hand between my thighs.
“Yeah, we gon both be crazy in a couple more days,” he said.
“Yeah, I was scared to go in there,” Floyd Coleman said. He was sitting in the kitchen talking to Daddy. “Cause I had a bad experience once. I went into this man’s house to see about him, you know, and he wasn’t even no man no more. Decomposing, you know.”
“Well, it’s over now,” Daddy said, wanting to change the subject.
“Yeah, well ever since then I just get scared like that.”
“Well, it’s over now,” Daddy repeated.
Miss Billie put her wooden bracelet on my wrist. Then she said, “Let me see your hand.”
I held my hand out. “Naw, the other way.”
I showed her my palm.
“Some people think you just got the future in your hand. You got history in it too,” she said.
When Daddy found out that Miss Billie was going to north Carolina, he said he was glad, because she just wasn’t “right” anyway.
I was sitting in the park when she came and sit down beside me. I didn’t want her to sit beside me because I was afraid of her.
“Hi, again,” she said.
I said “Hi,” but I didn’t say anything else.
She sat there not saying anything else. I could smell a little bit of perfume, not a lot of perfume like some women wear.
I didn’t want to sit there with her, and I didn’t want to get up, because I didn’t want her to think I was getting up because she was there, so I stayed sitting there. I stayed sitting there until the man came.
“What do you want?” she asked. She sounded cold. “You know how I feel about you,” he said.
The woman looked over at me and then got up quickly. She was walking fast, but he was walking as fast. When they got to the sidewalk, they stood talking. I could see her face but not his. She looked sad. When the man turned, he was frowning. She started to take his arm, but didn’t. She walked away from him quickly. He stood there for a moment, and then walked in the other direction.
“Why do you let him treat you like that?” Mama asked Jean.
Me and Mama went to see Jean one afternoon when Alfonso and Otis were at work.
“I told Otis not to talk to you,” Jean said. “I knew he would, though.”
“He’s worried about you and Alfonso. He doesn’t understand.”
“Nobody understands. I don’t understand.”
They had moved out of the hotel finally and were living in a building a few blocks away from us.
“You stay with him,” Mama said. “The way Otis talks about it, he’s been beating on you for years.”
Jean said nothing. She was a heavyset but delicate-looking woman who didn’t straighten her hair. It was somewhere between being wavy and what they called nappy then. She had fixed me and Mama and herself some coffee.
“It’s none of my business, is it?” Mama said after she’d waited for Jean to speak.
“Otis coming to you made you feel it was your business,” Jean said. “I don’t mind. It’s just . . .”
“What?”
“I did go away once,” she said. “He came and got me. He came and got me and brought me back.”
Mama frowned. “Otis didn’t tell me that.”
“Otis didn’t know that,” Jean said.
“You haven’t tried to go away again?” Mama asked.
“No,” Jean said. Then, “You want to know something? When he came and got me, I was ready to go back.”
“You a good woman,” Mama said.
“Naw, I ain’t good,” Jean said. “I love him a lot.” Mama stood up, saying nothing.
“You know you can take as much beating away from a man like that as you can with him,” Jean said.
When we got out in the street, Mama asked, “Did you see all up under her eyes?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“It ain’t no sense in a man treating a woman like that, is it?” I said, “No ma’am.”
Alfonso stayed with me in the kitchen. He’d come over one Saturday and ate with us, and then Mama and Daddy had gone in the living
