“That’s a woman there, boy,” Ptolemy replied, thinking about Coydog talking to him when he was young and didn’t know a thing.
“Wanna go to the store now?” Hilly suggested, putting his hand on his uncle’s shoulder.
“What’s your hurry?” Ptolemy asked.
“Nuthin’. We just gotta go.”
They went to Big City Food Mart and filled a plastic basket with bologna, store brand Oat Ohs, margarine, sour pickles, a bag of mini peanut butter cups, peanut butter, rye bread, orange juice, Big City brand instant coffee and creamer, and six ripe red apples. The total at the cashier came to $32.37. When they got out of line Ptolemy counted the money he had left: $169.04. He counted it three times and was starting on the fourth when Hilly said, “Come on, Papa Grey, we gotta take these things home.”
“Somethin’s wrong with my change, Reggie, I, I mean, Hilly.”
“Nuthin’s wrong,” the boy said to Ptolemy’s shoes. “That’s a lotta money you got there.”
They brought the groceries home to the apartment crowded with everything Ptolemy and his wives and his family and theirs had acquired over more than just one lifetime. Hilly put the food onto shelves and into the ancient refrigerator while Ptolemy counted his change again and again, wondering if somehow Shirley Wring had tricked him.
He thought about his trunk and Sensia, the emerald ring and Reggie—where was Reggie?
“Your money’s fine, Uncle,” Hilly said. “Now we got to get to Mama’s house.”
“Where?”
“Mama need you to come see her,” Hilly said, his brutal face ill-fitting the request.
“What for?”
“She di’n’t say. She just said to tell Papa Grey that Niecie need him to come.”
“Niecie?” All the floating detritus in the old man’s mind sank to the bottom then. The ring and Shirley Wring, the money and Melinda Hogarth, even the fire that killed Maude and the stroke that took Sensia disappeared from his mind.
Niecie. He was only thirty-six when Niecie was born but she was still the daughter of his niece. That’s why he called her Niecie, though her mother had named her Hilda. He was her granduncle and her godfather and she was the coppery color of a year-old Indian head penny. Her mother was sitting in the big chair with Niecie on her lap and Charles, June’s husband, was standing behind her. He stood just like that, like he was posing for a photograph. But that’s the way Charles was: pretty as a picture, and stuffy as a double-starched shirt collar.
“My Niecie?” Ptolemy asked.
“My mama,” Hilly said, nodding.
“Is she in trouble?”
“She need to see you,” the boy said as he put the nonperishable food in the doorless cabinet. “You got cans on these shelves older than me.”
“What fo’?”
“Why you got them cans?”
“Why Niecie wanna see me?”
“She di’n’t say, Papa Grey,” Hilly whined. “She jes’ told me to help you shop and then to bring you ovah. She said to tell you that your Niecie needed to see you.”
“Niecie.”
The number 87b bus moved slowly in afternoon traffic. Ptolemy sat on a turquoise-colored plastic seat facing across the small aisle, while Hilly hovered above him, holding on to the shiny chrome pole.
A middle-aged Chinese woman and a dark Spanish man sat across the way. Both of them smiled at Ptolemy. People were always smiling at him now that he was so old. Even people who looked old to him smiled because, he knew, he looked even older to them.
He could feel the city move by at his back, could imagine the old Timor Cinema and Thrifty’s Drugstore. He thought about jitterbuggers in the juke joints and a small white wooden church that stood on the white side of town.
Sometimes when he’d go by there, on an errand for his mother or a mission for Coydog, he’d stop and gape at the beautiful building with the stained-glass windows of Jesus, John the Baptist, Job, Jonah, and Mary Magdalene. Magdalene was a beautiful name.
One day when he was no more than seven he was standing out in front of that church with a note in his hand. He couldn’t remember on the number 87b bus who that note was for or from but he could feel the dirt under his bare feet and the hot sun on his forehead.
“What you want there, boy?” a man asked in a commanding voice.
Ptolemy was gazing down on the dark Spanish man’s brown leather shoes in the bus but when he looked up he saw that white man standing in front of the white people’s church.
“Lookin’,” he said in a small piping voice.
“Is that note for me?” the man asked.
Li’l Pea thought the word no, but all he did was shake his head.
The white man wore a white suit with a black shirt that sported a small square of stiff white cloth where his Adam’s apple would have shown. He wore a wide-brimmed Panama straw hat and glasses with gold wire frames.
“Speak up, boy,” he said.
“No, suh. This note is from my uncle Coy to his brother Lupo work for the Littletons down on Poinsettia Street,” Ptolemy said, remembering as he did the origins of the note.
“Then why you standin’ in front’a my church?”
The sun was above and behind the church spire so whenever the man in the preacher’s uniform moved his head, bright sabers of light lanced into Ptolemy’s eyes.
“It’s so pretty,” the man, Ptolemy, remembered saying.
The minister paused a moment, his stern visage softened a bit.
“You like this church?” he asked.
“Yes, suh.”
“Did you evah look inside?”
“No, suh. I jes’ seen the whitewashed walls an’ the windahs and the pretty grass lawn.”
The minister squinted as people did sometimes when they were trying to make out words that didn’t make sense to them. Li’l Pea often wondered how narrowing your eyes could make your hearing better.
“You know that you can never, or none of your people can ever, go into this church,” the man said.
“Yes, suh, I know.”
“Is that why you lookin’ at it so hard?”
“No. It’s jes’ when I walk by it, it look so pretty like Letta across the way from Uncle Coy’s windah. You have to look when somethin’s pretty.”
The white man turned his back on the boy and looked at his church. He maintained that position for a few moments, allowing Li’l Pea to admire the building a while longer.
When the white man turned around, his face was completely changed, as if he were a different man inside. He held out a hand to the boy. The child didn’t know what to do, but he was drawn to the gesture. He grabbed the minister’s manicured fingers with his dirty hand and gave them a good shaking.
“Thank you, boy,” the minister said. “You’ve shown me my own life in a new light. It’s like, it’s like I thought it was day but really there was much more to be seen.”
The white man walked away after that.
Ptolemy had often wondered, in the eighty-four years that had passed since that day, what the minister had meant.
“Come on, Papa Grey,” Hilly said in a bus a million miles away, “this our stop.”
They walked down a long street of sad houses and apartment buildings. There were few lawns or gardens, mostly weeds and broken concrete. Some of the houses had no paint left on their weathered wood walls; one or two seemed crooked because they were falling in on themselves from the ravages of termites, faltering foundations, and general rot.
Ptolemy thought all these things but he couldn’t remember how to say them.
“Terrible.”
“What, Papa Grey?”
“Terrible.”
“What? You hurt?”
“My knees hurt when I walk.”
“That’s too bad.”
“But it’s not terrible,” Ptolemy said.
“Then what?”
The old man glanced across the street and saw a big sand-brown woman sitting on a stoop. She was smoking a cigarette and between her fat knees were huddled two toddlers in diapers and nothing else.