her to it. A minute later she poked her head out the door. “Is it safe?”
Yolanda took one look and guffawed. “You won’t be winning no beauty contests like that, girl. Fit two of you in there.” She gestured to the end of the bed. “Hand me my purse.” When Lisa Fay came around the side Yolanda had scribbled a name—Belle—and an address on the torn back of a card. She handed the scrap and the flannel bundle to Lisa Fay and rustled in her handbag, drew out two five-dollar bills. “All I’ve got right now,” she said, passing them over. “Go by Mama Belle’s and she’ll take you in. You and little …”
Lisa Fay nodded her thanks. Tucked the address and the banknotes in her sock and settled the baby in her arms. “I’ll pay you back.”
“You better. And I want that skirt back, girl. Clean. Don’t go sitting in no grass like y’all do.”
Lisa Fay grinned and saluted. Turned and slid secretively into the hall.
Yolanda’s voice floated after her: “André. Jubilee. Harrison.”
She called him HeyBoy or BigBoy or Beauty; she called him Honey and Sweetie and Champ. For a whole year she called him Luxe, for Deluxe, meaning the best and luckiest thing that had ever happened to her. When she was angry with him she called him Son, and he held his neck stiff and waited to hear what he had done wrong. One day, gazing around at the trail of broken things strewn in his wake, she said, “Kid! Can’t you leave off wrecking things, for once?” And he turned his round face, his plum lips, to her and said, “I a wrecker.” It made her laugh. “A Wrecker?” And he nodded his head, serious, sure, and on that day it was settled.
There was a man on the moon. All across America children sat cross-legged on shag rugs and watched F Troop and Gilligan’s Island, Gigantor, Bewitched. Lisa Fay didn’t own a TV. She worked the swing shift at the Hills Brothers coffee factory on Second Street at a job Yolanda scared up for her, lived in a room with a hot plate and a cast iron bathtub above a Greek grocery, took the bus every weekday afternoon to leave Wrecker with Yolanda’s mother, Belle, in the Fillmore and the late-night bus back to pick him up after work. Weekends belonged to them. Lisa Fay was put together in a marginal way, and anybody could believe that the stress of caring for a baby—a big, rowdy baby like Wrecker—might wear her past the tolerances machined in. Instead, it worked the other way. Lisa Fay took to raising Wrecker like a boat takes to water; he gave her the ballast she needed to ride steady; he was rudder and anchor and sail. Sunday mornings she’d load him in the secondhand stroller and push the boy all the way to the Presidio. Wrecker never missed a parade. He learned to walk and quickly to run and terrorized the ducks in Golden Gate Park. Towheaded, blue-eyed, brawny as the Christ child in a Renaissance oil, Wrecker feasted on delicacies from the Greek grocery below and wore the love of the bums on Townsend—the ones who clustered each afternoon for a hot meal at the Salvation Army—like a coat of armor to shield him from the cruelties of life.
Which cruelties? Lisa Fay didn’t abandon Wrecker as a baby in a trash bin. She didn’t force him to spend long hours alone in a dark closet, nor hold his small feet in boiling water, nor use the sharp end of a safety pin to inscribe his skin, nor forbid him food when he was hungry, nor force him to eat sand or clay or feces. She did not touch his small body in damaging ways or allow others to do that. She loved her son more than she loved her own life.
But she didn’t always know what to do when he cried. Wrecker was a healthy baby, and still sometimes he cried so hard it made him throw up. Some mornings—once in a while—he woke dull-eyed and coughing and his nose ran green and his forehead and the skin of his arms and his chest were much too hot. Lisa Fay thought she should take him to a doctor but she didn’t know where to find the right kind or how she would pay for it. She fed him the little orange dots of aspirin. Time and the candy-flavored pills seemed