“I’m Thomas.”
“Do you know Harold?”
“I know your mother,” the escapee said.
“Mom!” Lily shouted, and then ran into the house.
Monique came lazily to the door wearing a big blue robe. When she saw Thomas her eyes opened wide.
“Lucky?”
“Hi, Monique.”
“Lucky, what you doin’ here?”
“I wanted to see you and Lily. She’s big.”
While Monique and Thomas talked, a shadow came up behind her.
“Who’s this?” a man’s voice said in a tone neither friendly nor unfriendly.
“This is Lucky, Harold,” Monique said.
“What does he want?”
“He’s my friend.”
“He looks like a bum.”
Harold was a tall man with bronze skin, a receding hairline (even though he didn’t look much over thirty), and a large, powerful-looking belly. He had no eyebrows at all, small eyes, and large hands.
“He’s my friend,” Monique said with authority.
“What does he want?”
“Come on in, Lucky, and go have a seat in the living room.”
“Oh, no,” Harold said. “I ain’t havin’ this ratty-lookin’ niggah sittin’ on my new furniture.”
Thomas held back, but Monique said, “Come on in, Lucky. Harold ain’t gonna touch you if he know what’s good for him.”
“Monique,” Harold said. That one word carried a whole chapter of information.
“Don’t you ‘Monique’ me, Harold Portman. I put up with your thievin’ sister, your drunk father, and them three friends’a yours leave my house in a shambles every other Saturday night. Your mother lived with us for six months, so either my one friend is gonna come up in here or you’n me gonna talk.”
Harold turned on his heel and walked from the room.
“Wait for me in the living room, Lucky,” Monique said, and then she went after Harold.
They had nice green furniture on a golden carpet. The TV was tuned to a cartoon show, but Thomas didn’t watch. He sat down on a straight-backed wood chair and clasped his hands on his lap. Looking down, he could see that his hands were dirty and his light-blue pants were stained by alley grease.
The TV tinkled, and Monique’s and Harold’s voices boomed from somewhere in the house.
“Do I know you?” Lily asked. She was standing at a sliding-glass door that led out into the backyard.
“Do you remember me?” Thomas asked.
“How come you don’t sit on the couch?” she asked then. “It’s more comfortable.”
“I’ve been walkin’ so far and sleepin’ outside,” Thomas said. “I wouldn’t want to get your fancy couch all dirty.”
Lily was staring hard at Thomas.
“Did we go to a secret green park once?” she asked.
“You remember that?”
“Was there a big pile of rocks?”
“Cinder blocks,” he said.
“And a secret clubhouse?” Lily’s eyes were open wide at the memory.
“We would go there when your mother was at the supermarket working.”
“I remember,” she said. “I used to think about it, but then I would think that it was a dream.”
“No,” Thomas assured her. “We went there all the time when I took care of you while your mother was gone.”
“An’ we used to all sleep in a big bed, and there was a bathtub in the kitchen.”
“You have a good memory for a little girl,” Thomas said.
“I know.”
Just then there was a loud yell from somewhere in the house.
“Your parents can really fight,” Thomas said.
“Harold’s not my dad,” Lily told him. “Only my mama is my parent.”
“Oh.”
“Go to your room, Lily,” Harold said.
The child and Thomas turned to see Harold standing in the doorway. His voice was now definitely angry.
“But Lucky used to take me to the secret green park.”
“I said, go to your room.”
The big man came in looking around, as if searching the golden floor around Thomas for crumbs or dirt he might have dropped.
While Harold stared, Monique came in wearing a long maroon dress. She was still big-boned and thick, but Thomas thought that she was good-looking. She stared at Harold.
“Well?” she said.
Harold turned his hateful gaze to her, but he soon looked down.
“Monique tells me,” Harold said to the floor, “that you, that you put yo’ life on the line feedin’ her an’ Lily when you was just a boy. She says that you was on the street buyin’ her food an’ payin’ her rent.”
He looked up at the skinny boy. Thomas had seen that hateful stare every day through the bars of the cells at the desert youth facility.
“An’ because you did that you are welcome in this home. You can, you can... You are welcome to stay as long as you need to.”
Lily hadn’t gone to her room. She was staring with amazement at the man who was not her father. Monique had her eyes on him too.
“I’ma go out,” Harold said, no longer able to bear the scrutiny.
And soon it was only Monique, Thomas, and Lily in the house.
They talked about the old days for a long time. Lily had lots of questions about half-remembered adventures she’d had all those long child-years ago.
Monique told Thomas that she met Harold when she was a checkout girl at Ralph’s.
“He’s a plumber an’ he liked it how I worked so hard. An’ I liked him because life was so normal in his world. No shootin’s or drugs or tiny li’l ’partments.”
“No bathtubs in’a kitchen,” Lily said a little wistfully.
Monique served baked beans and white bread in their large eat-in kitchen. She poured lemonade squeezed out of fruit from their own tree.
After a while Monique said, “Do you wanna see your room, Lucky?”
They went out the back door to a pine hut that had a tar-paper roof. Inside there was a very comfortable, if small, room that had a single bed, a maple bureau, and a window that looked out on the green yard. The floor was covered by an eggshell shag carpet, and there was a radio and a door that led to a bathroom with a real bathtub.
“Harold built this for his mother whenever she wanna stay. But she’s in Houston now with her new husband.”
“She lived with us for six months,” Lily said in an exasperated tone that Thomas recognized from his years living with Monique.
“You can stay here as long as you want, Lucky,” Monique said.
She moved near to him and kissed his forehead. She moved back a bit and crinkled up her nose.
“If you put your clothes outside the door I’ll wash ’em,” she added. “Come on, turnip. Let’s leave Lucky to wash up an’ rest.”
He hadn’t taken a bath since the days he lived with Monique and Lily in that one-room apartment on Hooper. Thomas turned on the water and took off his clothes. He was about to step into the tub when he remembered Monique’s offer to clean his soiled pants and shirt. So he went to the front door of his hut and placed the clothes outside in a neat pile. On his way back to the bath, he saw someone moving in the room and he jumped — a natural reflex for a small boy among so many predators in the juvenile criminal system.
But there was no one there. What he had seen was his own reflection in the full-length mirror that hung from the bathroom door.
Thomas couldn’t remember the last time he had seen his naked image in a mirror. He knew that it had been years before, when he lived with Eric and Ahn and his mother.
Thomas was still short among boys his age. At his last visit to the infirmary he’d been told he was five foot five. He was slender and lopsided because of his shorter left leg. His face too had its abnormalities — a twice-broken nose, three scars, and a network of lines around his eyes from wincing at the light. There was the crater of flesh in the center of his chest from being shot in the drug bust, and then the various wounds he’d received in the street and at the facility. Thomas saw that his arms were long and that his hands were strong like Harold’s. His ribs were visible, and his skin was near-black, with ashen patches here and there.