The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey - By Walter Mosley Page 0,39
the way to the maintenance office where he and his partners got their orders for the day.
He just said the name and that was the greeting. But this was the voice of a woman, not a German man; not Melinda Hogarth or Sensia or proper Minister Brock.
He turned to see the name-caller and laughed.
“It’s okay, Robyn. That’s my friend. Double-u ara eye en gee.”
She wore tapered black slacks today and a turquoise T-shirt. She still had the green sun visor and the faded cherry-red bag.
“Mr. Grey,” she said again.
“Shirley Wring,” Ptolemy said, gleeful to see her and reveling in the fact that he could remember a name, a face, and something he wanted. “Robyn, this is a woman who offered me a treasure.”
“Uh-huh,” Robyn grunted, and he could see in her the suspicion that had shown on Tolliver’s face.
All around them black and brown people were moving. Shirley Wring’s occluded eyes were gazing at Ptolemy.
“This is Robyn, my niece,” Ptolemy said.
“Your uncle is the treasure,” Shirley said. “He helped me out when I couldn’t pay my phone bill and wouldn’t even take my ring for a guarantee.”
“You could pay him back now,” Robyn said rudely.
“She don’t have to pay me,” Ptolemy said. “She offered me a treasure. You know that was on’y the second time in all my life that somebody offered me a true treasure.”
“I could take you two to lunch,” the small, gray-brown colored woman offered.
“We got to go home.”
“No, baby,” Ptolemy said. “Shirley here, she, I mean, I been comin’ ovah here . . . lookin’.”
“Oh,” Robyn said, and then she smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry, Miss Wring. Uncle been lookin’ for you for a long time. He been havin’ me comin’ down here just about ev’ry other day, hopin’ you show up.”
Shirley Wring smiled shyly, looking at the man who had been looking for her.
“I ain’t had a man searchin’ me down in quite a while,” she said. “Old woman like me lucky somebody don’t run her underfoot.”
“So we all gonna have lunch, right?” Ptolemy asked, looking into the brown and gray eyes of Shirley Wring.
They had sandwiches at a Subway chain store. Shirley paid for the meal.
She talked about when she moved to Los Angeles from someplace up north. When Ptolemy asked her if she was from California she looked away from him and said, “No. I’m from someplace else.”
“You talk real nice,” Ptolemy said, realizing that he had asked an uncomfortable question. “Did you come here to go to school?”
“My mama wanted me to get a education but I met this high-yellah fellah named Eric and I couldn’t think about nuthin’ else.”
“Robyn gonna go to college in the fall,” Ptolemy said, his voice loud to cover all the things he didn’t know.
“Junior college,” Robyn said.
“Junior college is college too,” Shirley declared.
“That’s right,” Ptolemy added. And he and the woman Shirley Wring smiled for each other across the bright-yellow plastic table.
“We got to get back home, Uncle,” Robyn said finally, to fill in and end the silence.
The days passed in a new kind of harmony for the old man. The TV stayed off unless Robyn wanted to watch her shows at night. Ptolemy refused to have her leave it on for him or turn to his news station. He wanted to run the TV himself without any help. If he couldn’t do that, then he wouldn’t ever be able to find his treasure and save his family; he would fail the way he failed Maude Petit and Floppy in that tarpaper house on the outskirts of town.
For the same reason the radio stayed off.
Sometimes Robyn would go out with Beckford Ross, Reggie’s old friend. Some nights she didn’t get in until hours after Ptolemy fell asleep. But the old man did not chastise her. Robyn was looking after him, and she needed to be free, like the birds his father didn’t want him to feed.
Twice a week for three weeks Shirley Wring came over in the afternoon to sit with Ptolemy and converse.
The talks always started pretty well. Ptolemy would tell her about his mother and father and their poor sharecropper’s farm; he’d talk about Coy and a treasure that was lost and her green ring. But after a while he could see in her eyes that he wasn’t making sense. She didn’t frown or get bored, but her smile became soft and her dim eyesight focused on something other than what he was saying. At this point he’d offer her tea and she would say