The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey - By Walter Mosley Page 0,81
alive in you.”
Robyn crying, it seemed to Ptolemy, was a woman at war with herself. She couldn’t let herself go completely, but the tears rolled down her left eye, and her beautiful lips trembled.
He tried to put his arms around her but she pulled away.
“Robyn.”
“Your car prob’ly outside, Papa Grey. You bettah be goin’.”
This your family we going to?” Hernandez the driver asked Ptolemy on the way to Niecie’s house.
“Yes, sir. Real blood family too. The kind you can’t shake off.”
The driver, a broad-faced man, laughed.
“What’s your name?” Ptolemy asked from the backseat.
“Hernandez.”
“Well, Mr. Hernandez—”
“No, Mr. Grey, not Mr. Hernandez, just Hernandez. I like that name.”
“You from around here, Hernandez?”
“Fifty years here,” he said. “Forty-eight, really. When I was seven my parents came up from a farm in the south of Mexico.”
“You still speak Spanish?”
“No. I just got this accent is all. I know some words.”
“Remembah back in the old days when we all lived together?” Ptolemy asked. “Mexicans, Negroes, Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese on the one side—”
“And white people on the other,” Hernandez said, finishing the litany.
Both men laughed.
“What happened to us?” Ptolemy asked.
“White man shined a light on us and we froze like deer in the road. After that we all went crazy and started tearin’ each other apart.”
Ptolemy frowned and sat back in his seat. Even the Devil’s fire couldn’t help him to understand why what both he and Hernandez knew was true.
Hernandez dropped him at Niecie’s door with a business card so that he could call if it was time to go home and the driver was off somewhere. The black man and the brown shook hands over the seat.
“Nobody evah put us on the news, huh, Hernandez?”
“What you mean, Mr. Grey?”
“Us gettin’ along ain’t news.”
Hernandez laughed and got out to open the door for his client.
Niecie cried happily and Ptolemy walked in the house. Nina was there with her children. Hilliard was on a couch in the corner, watching a small TV in a pink plastic case.
“Come ovah here and say hi to Pitypapa,” Niecie said to her son.
“Hey,” Hilly said, going so far as to turn his eyes away from the screen.
“Go on back to your TV, boy,” Ptolemy said, waving dismissively.
Niecie and Nina sat with their elder and talked and drank lemonade. Niecie was nervous, not wanting to ask for the money she had already come to expect, had already planned on.
They talked for a while about relatives that Ptolemy had only recently remembered. Many members of his family and his extended family had died. They stopped bringing him to funerals because he seemed to get upset during the services.
“That’s why I send Reggie ovah to your house in the first place, Pitypapa,” Niecie said. “You’d get upset and mad and you didn’t seem to know where you was at.”
Ptolemy appraised his grandniece’s attempt to convince him, and maybe convince herself, that he really owed her something, that she had been there to help him when he couldn’t help himself. He resented her trying to make him feel indebted, but on the other hand he did owe her what she said. She had sent Reggie, and Reggie had tried his best. She had sent Robyn to him.
“You know, one time Reggie lost his job at the supermarket because he wouldn’t come in because he had to take you to the doctor’s,” Niecie was saying. “I told him that blood was thicker than water and that we owed you somethin’. I told him that I’d put him up and feed him and the onlyest thing I expected was that he took care of you.”
“Do you have a checking account at the bank, Niecie?” Ptolemy asked.
“Wha?”
“A bank account. Do you have a bank account?”
“No. I mean, I know I should have one but they need you to maintain a three-hundred-dollar minimum, an’ some months here I cain’t even find three dimes in my coin purse.”
“I’ma get Robyn to go to the bank wit’ you an’ start a account with nine hunnert dollars,” Ptolemy said.
Hilly turned his head away from the TV to look at the old man.
“Then I’ma set it up to put eight hunnert dollars in there ev’ry mont’.”
“You only get two hunnert an’ sumpin’ a week from retirement,” Hilly said.
“That ain’t all I evah got, boy,” Ptolemy replied. “Maybe if you didn’t steal from me right off the bat, you’da learnt sumpin’.”
“How come you let Robyn do your business, Uncle?” Niecie asked. “You know that girl ain’t nuthin’ but trouble. I only took