The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey - By Walter Mosley Page 0,49
you think about this dress,” she’d ask him, twirling about in something new or used that she’d bought with money he made working for the county maintenance department.
He’d look at her posing, knowing that no man could get between this. She might meet someone now and then that distracted her; like Harlan Norman, who asked her to go to Hawaii with him. They spent a month, and all of Harlan’s money, on the islands, but then she came back, alone, with a big black pearl for Ptolemy.
There were many days that Ptolemy wanted to kill Sensia. He’d bought a short-barreled .25-caliber pistol once when she didn’t come home for the weekend. But then, on Tuesday, she walked through their apartment door and smiled for him. He forgot his mission and they made love and she said she was sorry.
One day she told him, “I will nevah cheat on you again, Papa,” and as far as he knew she hadn’t.
When he woke up that morning next to her corpse he cried for an hour; cried calling emergency; cried while the ambulance drivers tried to resuscitate her.
“Stroke,” the Asian paramedic said.
“She nevah did you right, Pitypapa,” Niecie said.
“Eleven hundred dollars,” the funeral director said.
“Amen,” the preacher said to a room filled with men and women that had been her lovers over the years. Even Ezra Bindle was there. He had a portly wife and seven portly children but he came to say good-bye because Sensia was the kind of woman that lovers pined after even when they no longer felt the love.
Ptolemy was already an old man. He read to Sensia at night and asked her about her day. He made her chicken soup when she was ill—and she was often ill. She was never out of his mind since the first day he’d seen her and she shook off the grip of Ezra Bindle to be his woman.
“Even if I wander, I will always find my way back home to you,” she’d told him.
He’d put those words on her tombstone, sold two of Coy’s doubloons to pay for it and for the flowers to be put on her grave every Valentine’s Day, her favorite holiday.
“Wake up, Uncle,” Robyn said from somewhere beyond the blue, blue sky above the graveyard.
Things began to happen quickly after the death and burial of Sensia Howard: Ptolemy saw himself as a young man with a stout lever under the light of an oil-soaked brand, moving the dark stone that hid the double-thick canvas bags filled with old gold coins; he was working, working, working cleaning out buildings set for demolition, or empty lots where the city planned to build, or the sidewalks in front of courts, office buildings, and police stations; he was talking to Coy in life and death, loving Sensia, missing his children (Rayford and Rayetta), who despised him after their mother had taken them away; and wondering what a treasure could do to save black folks who had been crushed down by a whole epoch of restrictions and pain.
Uncle Grey?” Robyn said for maybe the thousandth time.
“Yeah, babe?” he replied with his eyes still closed.
“Are you awake?”
He raised his lids then, like the curtain from a stage at the beginning of a play that he had wanted to see for many, many years. Robyn was sitting next to him, holding his hands in hers.
“Right here,” he said. “How long?”
“Four days,” Robyn said. “I called Dr. Ruben but his phone was disconnected. I wanted to tell somebody but I didn’t know who. Niecie been wantin’ to come ovah, but I told her that the doctor said that you had this bad flu, that anybody breathe yo’ air could get sick.”
“Help me to sit up.”
He looked around the old bedroom, the room where he awoke to find Sensia Howard dead. He no longer felt the pang of loss when thinking of Sensia, whom he had loved unconditionally. She was gone, off in a lovely dream.
“Help me stand up.”
“I thought you was gonna die, Uncle,” Robyn said as she half-supported him into the living room.
He sat down on the rainbow hammock of his stool and stared at the TV. He reached out and pressed the I/O button and smiled as some comedy show came into view. His fingers felt hot, alive. He could sense the old bones beneath his leathered skin. He could feel the air and smell the sour odor rising from his body. He looked around.