The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey - By Walter Mosley Page 0,80

him to the hospital ev’ry day. Ev’ry day. An’ Al got sicker, and men would come to the house an’ tell me to pay the rent or the gas bill, or for heatin’ oil, an’ I was only six and half and they left me home ’cause they was at the doctors all the time.

“And Mama and Daddy would fight at night. And then, when Al died, Daddy went out to get drunk and he nevah came back. An’ Mama moved to Memphis and she started gettin’ drunk all the time.

“That’s when I met Mr. Roman. He was the man that lived next door an’ gave me peaches. He would take me in as much as he could when Mama had her boyfriends ovah. An’ we would talk an’ play board games, and I would read to him from my storybooks and he would ask silly questions.

“And one day when he saw that I was scared’a my mama’s boyfriend who would make me lay on top’a him, he came and got me and kept me for a whole day. He gave me hot dogs and sweet potato pie and root beer. And when it got late and my mama still wasn’t home, he gave me hot chocolate and made me a bed on a cot in his den.

“An’ when my mama died and I was supposed to come up here, Mr. Roman took me ovah to his house an’ told me that he loved me. I told him that I loved him too an’ that I was gonna miss him, but he said that it wasn’t the same thing. He said that if I was a young woman, even though he was old, that he would make me his wife and buy me a house with a swimmin’ pool in the backyard and a movie screen in the basement.

“And I wished that I was older and that Mr. Roman could make me his wife. I was even thinkin’ that I’d go back down home when I was eighteen and ask him if he still loved me. And then I met you, Papa Grey.

“Papa Grey, are you awake?”

The old man was breathing heavily, snoring lightly on and off.

“Anyway,” Robyn continued, “when I met you I knew that you loved me like Mr. Roman did but that you wouldn’t let nobody take me away and just hope that I’d come back someday. Even when you couldn’t think so good, and then when you could, you wanted to look aftah me. I don’t need nobody to take care’a me, not no more. I just need somebody to want to.”

While Robyn spoke, Ptolemy could hear himself breathing like a man asleep. He was asleep, but still he heard every word. He imagined the young girl eating peaches and the old man falling in love with her. This seemed natural. Children were there to be loved and looked after and cared for; sometimes you even had to sacrifice your life in order that a child might live.

After a while the girl talked about moving to Los Angeles and about Niecie and Hilliard and Reggie, who was an orphan too. The sleeping man listened with part of his mind, but he was also thinking about Letisha and Arthur and how Reggie was like a son to him.

Now he was an old man and there were children to look after, and one child to avenge.

Ptolemy smiled in his sleep, thinking all the way back to that day the white minister had shaken his hand. He had given that arrogant old white man something, and he had taken something away from him too.

In the morning the sleeping but still-conscious man opened his eyes. Robyn slept next to him, her arm flung over his chest. He rose up on a painful elbow and kissed the child’s forehead. She opened her eyes and hugged him.

“Do you love me, Papa Grey?” she asked.

“More than anything . . . ever.”

Pitypapa!” Niecie exclaimed when he showed up on her doorstep at 12:14 on Tuesday afternoon.

Robyn had hired him a limousine and a driver, a brown man with a Spanish accent named Hernandez. She had wanted to come with Ptolemy, but he told her that she needed to put Coydog’s treasure where nobody could get at it but her.

“But why you got to go see Niecie so bad?” she’d asked him.

“For Reggie.”

“Reggie’s dead, Papa Grey.”

“Ain’t nobody full dead until no one remembah they name. Don’t forget that, girl—as long you remembah me, I’ma be