“He didn’t kill nobody on account of you?” Davis asked. I said nothing.
“Alfonso said he wasn’t a bad man, he just had a bad temper,” I said finally.
“Alfonso shit. I can feel you want me now, don’t you? I can smell you want me.”
“I can’t now, Davis.” He got away from me.
“I’d like to, but I start getting pains afterward if I don’t wait.”
“Yeah, some women are like that,” he said.
I played with Miss Billie’s wooden bracelet until I lost it. I came home crying because I lost it. I went back looking for it, but I couldn’t find it.
“You should’ve left it here,” Mama said.
“Miss Billie told me to wear it all the time. She said I shouldn’t take it off.”
“Well, ain’t nothing you can do about it now.”
“I’ma keep looking for it.”
“Somebody else probably got it now.”
“If I see it on em, I’ma take it off.”
“You won’t know if it’s yours.”
“Yes I will. I’ll know if it’s mine.”
“Eva, hush.”
I was eight years old when I lost Miss Billie’s bracelet.
2
What I remember about the musician was that he was ten years younger than my mother. He was shorter than my father, and a half an inch shorter than my mother. When my mother and the musician started going together, my father said nothing. He knew what was going on, but he didn’t say anything at all. My mother knew he knew, but she would bring the musician home when my father wasn’t there. My father would know he’d been there, though, because the musician used to open his packets of cigarettes upside down. He wouldn’t open them where the red string was, he’d always turn them over and open them. I asked him why once. He said he didn’t know why, he’d just always been opening them like that. And so when my father came home, whenever he’d been there, there’d always be an empty packet of cigarettes in the house, opened upside down. After a while it got so every day there was that packet of cigarettes. Once I saw my father pick up the packet and put it down again. I couldn’t see the expression on his face. I was twelve. I’d just come back in the living room with my homework. When he turned around and told me hello, he didn’t have any kind of a look on his face. He just looked like a man who was going
about his business. He sat down and read the paper.
The musician’s name was Tyrone. Mama met him when she went out to this dance-hall with some girlfriends.
My father worked in a restaurant and didn’t get home till real late in the evening. Around eight or nine some nights, and on Friday nights about eleven or twelve. He did different things. Sometimes he bartended, sometimes he’d work in the kitchen. The first time I saw Tyrone I didn’t know who he was. I came home from school and there was this strange man sitting there. Mama wasn’t in there. He was sitting in the kitchen by himself. I just stood there. He looked like he was a little afraid of me too. “Cat got your tongue?” Mama had come in. “Where’s your
manners?” she asked. “This is Tyrone.”
I said hello and then took my books back in the living room. That was the first time I’d seen Mama with a man other than my father.
“I better leave,” I heard Tyrone say. “No, it’s okay.”
Then I heard her getting out pans.
I lay on the couch on my belly. I kept waiting for them to say something, but they didn’t. I was thinking maybe they didn’t want to say anything because I was there.
Finally he said, “When you came in there with your girlfriends, I didn’t think you were married.”
“I had my ring on.”
“I never notice rings.”
“Then it’s your fault.”
“That’s all right, Marie. I’m going,” he said. “When am I going to see you again?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
There was silence. He was going to the door and she was going with him.
“I didn’t mean to find you either, you know,” she said, and then he went out the door.
Mama came back there where I was. I looked around at her. She just looked at me. She didn’t even have to tell me that she would be the one to say anything to Daddy if anything was to be said.
“Why don’t you come peel the potatoes?” she asked.
I got up off my belly and followed her in the kitchen.
When we were in the kitchen and I was standing at the table peeling the potatoes on old newspapers and she was cutting up the chicken, I kept thinking that she would start explaining things, but she didn’t. She just stood there cutting up the chicken. The only thing she said was “You can peel them closer than that. look at all those potatoes you’re wasting.”
I said, “Yes ma’am.”
And then she would just see him. The musician was in this band that would play different places around. They played at the dance-hall for about two weeks and then they would play somewhere else. After they’d been going together a little over a month, the man that owned the place where Daddy worked wanted them to play out there. It wasn’t a big place, but they had a little dance floor. Daddy took me out there one Sunday when he was cleaning up, that’s how I knew how it looked inside. And then I could come around to the back through the kitchen. By the time they wanted Tyrone and his group to come out there, Daddy already knew Mama was seeing somebody, and he already knew who it was she was
