said Ura Lee, "because you best remember I chose not to give you advice. You just guessed what I was thinking, but I refuse to be blamed for meddling when I didn't say it."
"And I refuse to be blamed for persecuting you when I didn't say it either."
"You know," said Ura Lee, "we'd get along a lot better if we wasn't a couple of mind readers."
"Or maybe that's why we get along so good."
"You think those two boys really going to hike up Cloverdale and ride down on those contraptions?"
"Not all the way down," said Madeline. "One of them always falls off and gets bloody or sprained or something."
"They a special way to walk for that?"
"Jaunty," said Ura Lee. "Those boys looking sneaky."
"Ah," said Madeline.
"Ah? That's all you got to say?"
Madeline sighed. "I already raised Cecil's four older brothers and not one of them in jail."
"Not one in college, either," said Ura Lee. "Not to criticize, just observing."
"All of them with decent jobs and making money, and Antwon doing fine."
Antwon was the one who was buying rental homes all over South Central and making money from renting week-to-week to people with no green card so they couldn't make him fix stuff that broke. The kind of landlord that Ura Lee had been trying to get away from when she saved up and bought this house in Baldwin Hills when the real estate market bottomed out after the earthquake.
They'd had this argument before, anyway. Madeline thought it made all the difference in the world that Antwon was exploiting Mexicans. "They got no right to be in this country anyway," she said. "If they don't like it, they can go home."
And Ura Lee had answered, "They came here cause they poor and got no choice, except to look for something better wherever they can find it. Just like our people getting away from share-cropping or whatever they were putting up with in Mississippi or Texas or Carolina, wherever they were from."
Then Madeline would go off on how people who never been slaves got no comparison, and Ura Lee would go off on how the last slave in her family was her great-great-grandmother and then Madeline would say all black people were still slaves and then Ura Lee would say, Then why don't your massuh sell you off stead of listening to you bitch and moan. Then it would start getting nasty.
Thing about living next door to somebody for all these years is, you already had all the arguments. If you were going to change each other's minds, they'd already be changed. And if you were going to feud over it, you'd already be feuding. So the only other choice was to just shut up and let it go.
"So you saying you going to cut them a little slack even though you know they scored some weed and they going up to that open space at the hairpin turn to smoke it," said Ura Lee.
"Up to the 'slack,' that's what I'm saying. How you know they got weed?"
"Cause Ceese keeps slapping his pocket to make sure something's still there, and if it was a gun it be so heavy his pants fall down, and they ain't falling, and if it was a condom then it be a girl with him, and Raymo ain't no girl, so it's weed."
"It's a good window," said Ura Lee. "I paid extra for this window."
"I paid extra for the rope swing in my yard," said Madeline. "You know how fast boys grow out of a rope swing? About fifteen minutes."
"So I got the better deal."
"And you sure they going up to that nasty little park at the hairpin turn."
"Where else can kids in Baldwin Hills go to get privacy, they can't drive yet?"
"You know what?" said Madeline. "You really should be somebody's mama. Your talent being wasted in this one-woman house."
"Not wasted - I'm here to give you advice."
"You ought to get you another man, have some babies before too late."
"Already too late," said Ura Lee. "Men ain't looking for women my age and size, in case you notice."
"Nothing wrong with your size," said Madeline. "You one damn fine-looking woman, especially in that white nurse's uniform. And you make good money."
"The kind of man looks for a woman who makes good money ain't the kind of man I want raising no son of mine. They enough lazy moochers in this world without me going to all the trouble of having a baby just to grow up and be