“Because I’m your cousin you’d tell me things you wouldn’t tell other men?” he asked.
He said it real soft. “I guess so,” I said.
“Have you, you know, been getting it?”
I knew what he was talking about. I got up from the table. “I thought you said you’d tell me.”
“No,” I said. “I mean no to your question.” I took a couple of dishes to the sink. “You a virgin?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t mind me astin?”
“Naw.”
He handed me a couple of dishes and I put them in the sink.
I got some glasses.
“How old are you?” he asked. “Seventeen.”
“And ain’t had the meat? Most girls your age had the meat
and the gravy.”
He dried a few of the dishes, and then went in where Mama and Daddy were. When he came back, I was finishing up the dishes. He took the dishtowel from me and dried the last plate.
“I came to talk to you again,” he said. I stayed standing up at the sink. “You got a boyfriend?” he asked. “Naw.”
“Your mama said you stay stuck up in the house all the time.” I said nothing.
“I told her I’d take you around to some of the clubs and introduce you . . . if you want to go.”
I said, “Okay.”
“You don’t sound too enthusiastic.”
“Yeah, I want to go.”
“Yeah, I’ll take you around to some of the clubs. It ain’t right for no grown woman to stay stuck up in the house all the time . . . Why don’t you go in there and get fixed up and then I’ll take you out.”
He was still holding the dish. I took it and put it in the cabinet.
“You too old not to had the meat,” he said.
“Yeah, you too old not to had the meat,” Alfonso said again.
We were sitting in one of his “clubs”. It was really a little restaurant called Bud’s.
“Yeah, you way too old not to had the meat,” he said. I told him I’d get it when I was ready for it.
“You tougher than you let on, too, I bet,” he said. I said nothing.
“If you don’t tell them how old you are, I won’t,” he said. “You look older than your age anyway.”
The waitress came over and he ordered a bourbon for himself and a beer for me.
“You want to tell them we cousins? I mean, if anybody asks.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You don’t have to be so sure about it,” he said, lifting his drink. “I’m as sure about it as you are,” I said.
He drank. I drank my beer.
The man came over and put his plate of pigfeet down. He didn’t ask if he could join us, he just sat down. He went back up to the counter and got a bottle of beer and came back. Him and Alfonso didn’t say anything to each other, but I could tell they knew each other. He looked like he was in his late fifties.
“Who’s at you got with you?” the man asked after a while, pointing to me.
I didn’t notice it at first, but I noticed it then. The thumb on his left hand was missing.
“My cousin.”
“Shit. How did something pretty like that get to be your cousin? You his cousin?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit.”
Somebody passed by the table and asked how we were doing. “I ain’t doing, Alfonso’s doing,” the man answered.
“This is my cousin, man,” Alfonso said.
“If she’s your cousin, I’m your great-granddaddy and your uncle too.”
“Man, I ain’t lying.”
“That Sweet Mama you had in here with you night before last, you said that was your cousin too.”
“Naw, that wasn’t me.”
“Naw, it was Riley Mason and I know she wasn’t none of his cousin.”
Alfonso didn’t say anything. He drank some more of his bourbon. The man sucked on a piece of pigfoot. I kept looking at his thumbless hand. He saw me watching him and I looked away. He put the meat down.
“Yeah, if you married me, I know I’d go somewhere. I know I’d go places, then.”
“Shit, you old enough to be her great-granddaddy,” Alfonso said. “You ain’t none of her cousin neither,” the man with the plate of pigfeet said.
“I done already told you about three times that she’s my cousin. I ain’t gon tell you no more.”
“If she tell me, I believe her. I ain’t gon believe you. You his cousin?”
I said, “Yeah.” Alfonso said, “Shit.”
“Well, you ain’t none of my cousin,” the man said. He sucked on another piece of meat.
When they found the queen bee, it went all around the neighborhood. The cops didn’t know why she did it, but the people in the neighborhood did.
“It’s that man’s fault,” Cora Monday was telling Mama one day.
We met her in the grocery store.
“If he hadn’t been so persistent, and left her alone. I think she really loved the nigger.”
“That’s what I told Billie Flynn years ago,” Mama said. “I told her if that woman met somebody she really loved one of these days, no telling what she might do, the kind of history she’s got. Even if he was the man out a hundred that didn’t nothing happen to, who’d want to take the chance. It’s hard being a woman like that.”
“Wonder what marked her like that?” Cora Monday asked.
Mama said she didn’t know. Somebody told her she came out trying to bite her own umbilical cord.
Miss Cora said that wasn’t nothing but superstition.
“Well, it was three men, wasn’t it? I’m just telling you what Billie Flynn told me.”
The man she had killed herself on account of left town, and nobody knew where he went.
Davis came in and I turned. “What are you doing?”
He went over, pulled me toward him, so I could feel him hard.
“I’m still on,” I said, kissing him. “I’m still doing it.” He patted my belly, touched my navel.
“Where were you?” I asked.
“I had
