knocked on his door and asked for weed. (Trisha. She was babysitting the boys at the time.) And Jafaris had been caught dropping something out their third-story window. “If things don’t get better, we are going to ask you to go.”
Outside, on her way to New Pitts Mortuary, Arleen shook her head. “If it ain’t one thing it’s another,” she said. Besides trying to stay in Pana’s good graces, Arleen was having a problem with her food stamps. She had submitted the necessary change-of-address form, but there was some holdup. Then there was the problem of getting everything out of storage. She needed to find a way to move her things fast or, come the first of the month, she would fall behind on payments—either that or fall behind in rent. And now T was gone and, in a way, so was P.A. Poverty could pile on; living it often meant steering through gnarled thickets of interconnected misfortunes and trying not to go crazy. There were moments of calm, but life on balance was facing one crisis after another.1 At least Arleen had a home, a floor of her own to sleep on.
Arleen hesitated in front of the door at Pitts. Built in the 1930s, the funeral home on West Capitol Drive was a North Side institution. Fashioned in the French Revival style, the Lannon stone building was adorned with an octagonal stair tower; thin, elegant windows; a deep-maroon entrance canopy stretching across the sidewalk; and steep roof lines, with a towering chimney. Jori drew up next to his mother, and they walked in together. The sanctuary was packed. Teenagers and children huddled together wearing personalized shirts with T’s face or the face of someone else who had been cut down young. Grandmothers and grandfathers were there in cream and brown suits with matching felt hats. Big C, T’s brother, was up front in a crisp blue T-shirt with matching bandanna and sunglasses. Uncle Link showed up with a half-finished cigarette behind his ear. A towering man walked down the aisle slowly as his wife leaned her face on his back and wept. Arleen took a seat at the rear, reflecting her status in the family.
T looked good, dressed in a long-sleeved black T-shirt and a new Oakland Raiders cap. He had almost made forty. The preacher looked down on him. “It seems like every time I come over here, I see someone who looks like me, lying in a casket, gone too young,” he said, shaking his head above a fat Windsor knot. Then he boomed, raspy and impassioned, “What has happened to the love amongst us? What has happened to the concern?…Can’t nobody help us but us!”
“Go on!”
“Tha’s right.”
“That was my baby!”
After it was over, Arleen joined Uncle Link and a few others outside. Someone handed her a can of Olde English malt liquor, and she poured it out for T, making pretty amber circles in the snow. At the repast, the family ate fried chicken on bread, greens, and mac and cheese in the basement of the Wisconsin African American Women’s Center, on Thirtieth and Vliet. Through it all, Arleen was embraced and kissed and welcomed. She felt held by her people. They weren’t much help if you needed a place to stay or money to keep the heat on, but they knew how to throw a funeral.
—
The next day, no one was calling, and Arleen got back to making her apartment a home. She enrolled the boys in new schools. She got her stuff out of storage and hung pictures on the wall. A neighbor gave her a couch. Arleen’s old apartment on Thirteenth Street was usually messy because cleaning didn’t do it much good, what with its cracked windows, ravaged carpet, and broken bathroom. But Pana’s father kept a nice place. It could look respectable if Arleen kept it nice. She did. Over the sink, she wrote a little note to Jori: “If you don’t clean up after yourself, we are going to have problems.” On the counter she set out a candle for St. Jude, patron saint of difficult cases. When people saw Arleen’s apartment, they would say, “Your house so pretty.” Some even asked if they could move in. Arleen would feel proud and say no.
Jori tried to adjust to his new school. He was technically in eighth grade but so far behind that he might as well have been in seventh. It was frustrating. And on top of that, T’s death had
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