The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey - By Walter Mosley Page 0,15
knows?” Robyn said. “You hungry, Arthur?”
“Tisha is.”
“What she want?” Robyn asked with a smile.
“Cake.”
“Did you have some dinner?”
“No, but we want some cake.”
“Okay,” Robyn said, “but jes’ this one time now.”
“Okay.”
“You wait here with your sister and I’ll get Big Mama Niecie to bring you some’a the cake Auntie Andrews brought us.”
She held out her hand and Ptolemy took it. They walked down the hall, back into the crowded room where people had come to mourn and laugh, give their condolences and eat and drink. Ptolemy’s skin hurt as he passed through the confused and confusing mob.
When Robyn told Niecie that Nina had left with Alfred Gulla, the older woman sucked her tooth.
“The kids said they want some cake,” Robyn added.
“I get it. Poor angels. Did you get somethin’ to eat, Pitypapa?”
“I have to go to the toilet,” he said.
“I’ll show you. After that you want me t’get Hilly to take you home?”
“I’ll take him,” Robyn said. “I gotta get outta here anyway.”
Niecie kissed the girl and smiled.
“You are a blessing, child.”
They walked down the street together, hand in hand. The sun was hot and Ptolemy had so many thoughts in his head that he couldn’t say very much. But Robyn, once she was out of the house, talked and talked. Ptolemy heard some of what she’d said. She’d come from down south somewhere when her mother died. Robyn’s mother and Niecie were good friends and so Niecie offered to take the orphan in. They weren’t related by law but Niecie felt like they were blood and let her sleep on the couch in the living room.
“Who’s Alfred?” Ptolemy asked after a long spate of listening to the calming words of the child.
“He’s Nina’s boyfriend.”
“But I thought she was Reggie’s . . . I mean, I mean . . . his wife.”
“He did too. But Nina kep’ on seein’ Alfred from back when she went out with him years ago. I think he went to jail or sumpin’ an’ Nina met Reggie an’ got pregnant with Artie an’ so she stayed with Reggie, but when Alfred got outta jail she was still seein’ him too.”
They came to a sidewalk where three blue-and-red taxis were parked.
“Can you tell the driver how to get to your house, Mr. Grey?”
“I guess so,” he said. “I think I remembah.”
They held hands in the back of the cab.
“How old are you, Mr. Grey?”
“Ninety-one year old. Some people don’t think I can keep count, but I’m ninety-one.”
“You don’t look that old. Your skin is so smooth and you stand up straight. It’s like you’re old but just normal old, not no ninety-one.”
She walked Ptolemy to his apartment door and watched him use the key on the topmost of four locks.
“I only lock the top one when I go out,” he told the girl. “That way I can remember the copper key. But when I go in, I lock ’em all.”
When he was just about to turn away, Robyn kissed him on the cheek and whispered something that he didn’t hear.
The TV news was on and a piano concerto was playing. He turned on a light and shuffled through the papers and boxes until he found a picture of Sensia taken before she divorced her first husband to marry Ptolemy. Her heart-shaped brown face was tilting to the side and she was smiling the smile of someone who had just made a suggestion that he would have liked.
Bombs went off across Baghdad this morning,” said a pretty woman in a blue jacket wearing red lipstick. She was a light-skinned Negro woman but looked more like a white woman trying to pass for colored to Ptolemy. “Thirty-seven people were killed and one hundred and eleven sustained serious injuries.”
A man with a deep, reassuring voice was talking on the radio about Schubert, a German musician who’d had a hard life long ago and made beautiful music, some of which no one ever heard in his lifetime.
“Three American soldiers died in the attacks. President Bush expressed his regrets but said that we were making progress in the Iraqi peace initiative.”
Ptolemy had been searching for Coydog’s treasure for days. He knew that he’d put it away somewhere amongst all the furniture and tools, newspapers and broken toasters, books, magazines, clothes, and sealed cellophane bags containing plastic cutlery wrapped in ancient paper napkins.
His deep closet was piled high with boxes of papers that went all the way back to his grandfather’s handwritten birth notice on the Leyford rice plantation in southern Louisiana.