Читать книгу Loving Donovan - Bernice L. McFadden - Страница 15

AGE FIFTEEN

The apartment was empty when they arrived. Trevor snatched a white piece of paper from the door that said Notice of Eviction across the top before grabbing her arm and tugging her over the threshold.

It was a small one-bedroom, like Luscious’s place, except the floors were covered in cranberry shag, and the walls were painted white instead of the standard housing-issued egg cream. There were framed pictures of Trevor’s father placed here and there on every wall. “What’s his name?” Campbell asked.

“Ray Vaughn,” Trevor replied, and pushed his chest out when he said it.

Ray Vaughn posing on one knee, bare chest, tight jeans, dark shades, making the peace sign with his fingers. Ray Vaughn posed somewhere in a park, green army fatigues, black beret, and dark shades, cradling an AK-47 in his arms.

Ray Vaughn with some other men in a tight space with bunk beds, magazine cutouts of naked women pasted on the wall behind them. This time he didn’t wear the dark shades, and there was something missing from his eyes, something lost years before the judge banged down his gavel and sentenced him to life.

The apartment was filled with the same scent that lingers in the stairwells when the housing patrol takes a night off and there is no one available to chase away the reefer-smoking hoodlums.

Trevor’s bed is a twin rollaway folded up neatly in the corner of the living room beside the black leather sofa. Trevor will pull that bed from its corner and ask Campbell if she might like to sit down.

Later, Campbell will focus on the flowered sheet that covers the mattress, that and the brown metal rail of the bed. She focuses on those things hard, and for as long as she can, until he pushes her legs apart and is able to get his fingers all the way down between her legs and then up inside her.

Her eyes let go, and her neck goes weak, and the only strength she has left in her body must be in her arms because she embraces him. He wants to put something else inside her. He needs to put something else inside her, he says.

“Please,” he coaxes. “C’mon,” he begs.

She can stay only an hour at a time; anything over that and Luscious will place a call back to the house to find out what time she left—any more than that and she can’t explain where the time has gone, and Millie will cut out the visits altogether.

She shakes her head, pushes his hand away, and sits up. Trevor groans in frustration before getting up and disappearing down the hall and into his mother’s bedroom. When he comes back, he’s holding a lit joint between his lips.

“You ever done this?” he asks before he takes a hit and holds it in.

Campbell shakes her head again.

Trevor moves beside her now, puffing and blowing smoke in her face. “You want to try it?”

She thinks about the friends who have. The ones who tease her sometimes and call her square, and she shakes her head. Slowly this time, like she might want to but needs a little push.

“Just take one hit. Just to see how it feels,” he says. She coughs the first few times, but by the sixth pull she is able to hold it in, and her body becomes heavy, but her head light.

Campbell would remember laughing, laughing so much that her sides began to ache, and she fell over and onto the black leather couch. She could see Trevor grinning above her, the foldaway twin bed unfolded and resting in the center of the room.

She didn’t know how much time had passed, but when the laughter finally settles into giggles and the giggles leave her with just a twitching mouth, she’s naked and spread out on the bed, and Trevor is already on top of her, pushing up inside her.

“I’m a virgin,” she whimpers into his neck.

“I know. I know.” He moans and kisses her cheek.

Campbell can hear the radiators whistling and knocking, the windows blanketed in steam, but her body is cold, convulsing against the chill.

She thought she must have been screaming, because his hand is over her mouth, his mouth whispering, “Shhhhh, baby, shhhhh,” in her ear.

There is pressure building inside her, moving up above her waist and into her chest until it’s all in her shoulders and trapped in her head. Campbell thinks that if she could scream—if she could scream, she could get some release, but he won’t remove his hand.

Campbell hears the song in her head, her theme song, climbing, climbing, “Somewhere over the rainbow . . .”

Suddenly, everything around her is too loud, the singing voice in her head, Trevor’s breathing and groaning. She wants it all to stop, wants everything to end, and she manages to get her hands free to press against his chest, pushing, pushing.

Tears welling up in her eyes, streaming down her cheeks, and then suddenly a snapping sound, and her whole body goes quiet.

Trevor breathes for both of them, and moments later the pressure takes its leave of her and snakes down through her body and drips out from between her thighs.

They part ways on the landing. She never does get to Luscious, but chooses instead to head back home. Luscious has a keen eye and sharp nose. She’ll know about Campbell as soon as she walks through the door.

She decides to take her chances with Millie instead. Millie’s mind is always on Fred. She’ll have a better chance with Millie.

* * *

On Christmas Day, right after Luscious called for a third helping of pie and Great-Uncle Nate decided just to go head-on and set the bottle of bourbon down between his legs instead of hoisting his heavy frame up off the couch each time he needed to refill his glass, the doorbell rang.

They weren’t expecting any more people, but it was Christmas, and Millie didn’t care if the whole world stopped in. She was happy that Fred had finally bought her those diamond earrings from JCPenney and Luscious hadn’t picked on her too badly and the turkey had turned out perfect and so had the yams, so Millie was smiling when she answered the door.

There weren’t any leaves left on the trees by the time December arrived, but there they were, floating in with the winter wind, like it was October or even the second week in November.

Millie’s smile just vanished. It didn’t fade, slip, or crumble; one second it was there, and the next it was gone.

“Yes?” Millie asks, and she might as well have said, What you want, bitch? because that’s how deadly it sounded.

“Fred here?” the woman asks, and Campbell moves closer, because the leaves and the sound of Millie’s voice have her all confused, and she sees a glimpse of that faux-fur wine-colored collar.

Fred pushes Campbell aside, and she looks into her father’s face to try to understand what this is all about, but it’s blank—and when his eyes lock with the woman’s, he’s so cool he don’t even blink, and even the woman is taken aback, and she squints at Fred to make sure this is the same man who’d held her in his arms just two days ago and assured her that he was leaving his wife and child to be with her.

“Fred,” she says, and his name is like worn velvet on her tongue.

“Yes?” Fred responds, and squints at her like he’s never brushed her hair and stepped in behind her in the shower and kissed her in places on her body he hadn’t even considered on Millie in months.

Millie is breathing so hard that Campbell can see the tops of her breasts pushing out from below the scooped neck of the red pullover she’s wearing.

The little girl, with her sweet round eyes and smiley face, is looking at Fred the way Campbell looks at him, and her heart speeds up, and she starts taking breaths like Millie because she knows what’s happening now; she understands completely.

“Did you tell her?” The woman leans on one big leg and tilts her head to the side like she’s tired. Campbell knows if they all weren’t there, all of them around the door, Fred would have stepped forward and rubbed the fatigue from the crook of her neck.

He doesn’t say anything, and Millie’s hands are busy pulling at her pants, her head swinging between Fred, the woman, and the child.

Fred just sighs and pulls out his pack of cigarettes from his pocket. He looks down at the child and kind of smiles, and once again Campbell feels that if they all weren’t there to see, he would have leaned down and tweaked her tiny button nose.

He pops a Winston in his mouth and then strikes a match, careful to cup the flame with his hands, protecting it from wind and Millie’s heavy breathing.

“Close the goddamn door!” Great-Uncle Nate slurs from the living room, and the toilet flushes upstairs—and Campbell knows that Luscious will be down soon and Fred better get to talking quick, ’cause Luscious don’t warn nobody; she just surveys the situation and commences to swinging.

“Fred, what this woman want?” Millie manages to say. Her words bounce off each other and then seem to echo.

Fred just puffs on his cigarette, and the smile he offered the little girl is looking kind of strained now, and his left eye has begun to tic.

“I said, what this woman—”

“She belong to him. He ain’t tell you?” The woman cuts Millie’s words off and pushes the little girl an inch closer. “You ain’t said nothing to them, Fred?”

All eyes fall on Fred.

Luscious, already down the stairs, takes a moment to digest what she’s just heard before reaching past Campbell for Fred’s throat.

There’s a lot of commotion then. Fred struggling to get Luscious’s fat fingers from around his neck, Campbell hollering, “Daddy! Daddy!”

The little girl hollers the same.

Millie’s eyes roll between Luscious’s back and the surprised face of the woman. She don’t know who to hit first, but she wants to hit somebody, and so Campbell jumps up on the stairs and moves three steps up and out of the way.

Great-Uncle Nate gets up, red-eyed, bottom lip fat and hanging, bourbon bottle in hand, and zigzags across the room, swinging the bottle up and into the air, taking drunken aim at Fred and missing him by a mile, the glass shattering on Luscious’s shoulder.

“You asshole!” Luscious screams, still holding on to Fred’s throat, while using her free hand to snatch the broken bottle out of Nate’s hand.

“Luscious, let go of him. He ain’t worth it,” Millie says, real soft. Because the way Luscious’s eyes looked, if Mama screamed her words, all it would do was add fuel to the furnace that was boiling inside of Luscious’s body. “You kill him, and they’ll send you back,” she adds.

Campbell hears those words and takes a step down. Back where? she wonders.

Luscious hears her sister’s words, and her eyes seem to clear—and after a while she lets go of Fred, and he falls, coughing, to the floor.

“You’re an animal, Rita! They needed to have kept you—”

Luscious takes a threatening step toward Fred, and his mouth clamps right up. “You ain’t nothing but a sorry piece of shit,” she says, and then she spits right in his face.

Campbell looks to the open door to find that the woman and child are gone; all that’s left are the swirling autumn leaves.

For days there is only the sound of the television, footsteps, and the drip-drip of the kitchen faucet Fred never seems to have time to fix.

Millie takes to bed, and Fred takes up residence on the couch.

Campbell survives on cold-cut sandwiches until one day Luscious calls and tells her to come over after school.

“They still ain’t talking,” Campbell says as she looks through the bag of precooked food Luscious has packed up for her.

“Yeah, well, that’s better than them yelling, screaming, and beating each other up,” Luscious says as she reaches into the freezer, allowing her hand to move over three packs of chicken and two boxes of chocolate ice cream before finally coming to rest on a box of cherry popsicles.

“That woman been back?” Luscious asks as she pulls out two pops and hands one to Campbell.

“Nah.”

“That’s your father, but what he done is a bad thing. Very bad.”

“You think that really Daddy’s child?” Campbell asks, even though she knows it is. They have the same mouth and eyes.

“Yep,” Luscious answers a little too quickly.

Campbell looks down to the floor and shuffles her feet in embarrassment for her father.

“Men ain’t shit,” Luscious says, and shakes her head in disgust.

“What Mama mean about you going back?” she asks because she wants Luscious to feel the same shame she feels. “Going back where? Detroit?”

Luscious blinks like something smarts or like she’s got a gas bubble in her chest. “What you wanna know?” she says, and pulls the chair out from the table.

Campbell’s tongue clucks, and the words get caught behind her teeth. She expected resistance. “W-What Mama was talking about,” she says, trying to keep the surprise out of her voice.

Luscious looks down at her ice pop and then back to Campbell, and when she does the green of her eyes is black and Campbell’s not sure anymore if what Luscious has to say is anything that she wants to know.

Luscious smiles a bit, a crooked sneer, really. It would be wise, she thinks, to tell Campbell everything. Tell her about the evil men do to young girls and women. She bites off the head of her ice pop and leans back into her chair. It would be good, she thinks again, and her head bounces in agreement.

* * *

Before she was Luscious, she was Rita.

Little wide-eyed Rita, daughter of Erasmus and Bertha Smith, hardworking people who knew God, but not every Sunday.

They drank some and sometimes too much. Played their Billie Holiday records for the neighborhood, whether their neighbors wanted to hear them or not. Loved more than they fought, but fought just the same, had the scars and broken knickknacks to prove the latter, Rita to prove the first.

Before she was Luscious with a number and a cell mate, she was Rita of Detroit. Rita of Cadillac Avenue. Tall, redboned Rita, who swayed down the street on long lovely legs so well oiled, they gleamed. Rita with the green eyes and good hair that touched the middle of her back. Rita so fine, the white people forgot her thick lips and broad nose.

Before she was Luscious of Brooklyn, Luscious of Stanley Avenue, she was just Rita, minding her own business, who one day looked up into the eyes of her father’s best friend and saw something there that she’d seen only in the eyes of schoolboys and lately strange men who beckoned her and sometimes brushed their fingers against her arm when she ignored their calls.

Manny Evans, raven-colored, bald-headed, broad- smiling, pockets-heavy-with-nickels Manny.

Manny Evans, who had bounced Rita on his knee, had patted the top of her head, dropped nickels into her savings jar, the old mayonnaise jar Bertha had cleaned and put aside for just that purpose.

Manny Evans, who had women on corners and a .22 in his sock. He wore taps on the heels of his shoes, and the nickel-jingle-clickety-click sounds he made when he walked down the streets told everybody he was coming, but no one messed with him because they were sure about the .22 in his sock but suspicious about the breast pocket of his jacket or the nickel-free pocket of his pants.

Rita had always liked the way his head shone, but as she got older she began to appreciate his color, so black and smooth. She found herself thinking about his shoulders and the gold pinky ring he wore, the one with the black onyx stone. “Black like me,” he said, “strong like me.”

Rita filling out in places, eyes greener now, hair loose instead of pulled back, stockings replacing kneesocks, ears pierced, and Rita all the time licking her lips, keeping them moist, keeping them shiny.

Manny Evans dropping paper money in her savings jar instead of nickels, wanting to pat her ass instead of the top of her head, wanting to bounce her on his knee again and maybe on something else.

He visits on Saturday nights. Comes by with a bottle of whiskey after checking on his women, collecting money, and laying his hands on people who’ve allowed their eyes to slide over and past him when he called out to them, “You got my money, niggah?” Erasmus and Manny drink, smoke Pall Malls, and play dominoes while Bertha talks to Adele from next door. Adele, tall like a man, with hands that wrinkled early and callused two years ago on the palms.

Before she was Luscious on parole and scrubbing floors for white folk in Indian Village, she was Rita, and that’s what was written on her bedroom door in big black letters so Manny couldn’t have mistaken it for the bathroom. But he did.

His fly is down, and his dick is already in his hands when he stumbles in, stinking of liquor and bleary eyed. He apologizes when he walks in on her in the middle of drying her just-bathed body, but he don’t jump back and close the door or drop his eyes in shame. He just stares at her, and his hand, the one not holding on to his dick, reaches behind him and pushes the door shut.

His eyes enjoy her face and then her naked breasts and finally the thin line of black hair that begins two inches below her navel.

Before she was Luscious, she was Rita, confused and held down in her own bed by strong hands. Those same hands covering her mouth, roughly touching and rubbing. Those hands are rough, like the steel wool Bertha scrubs the pots with, and Rita believes that her skin will shred beneath them. She can’t imagine a more painful feeling, and then she doesn’t have to because he’s inside her, pushing into the place where only her index finger had ever been.

Rita, before she was Luscious, her mind bending and her body coming apart on the inside and Manny not allowing her to scream or breathe, and when he’s done he don’t even look at her—he just looks down at the bloodstains on his pants and tucks back in the paper money sticking out of his pockets, but he leaves the nickels that have fallen onto the bed.

Manny Evans finds the bathroom just fine now and returns to Erasmus, his Pall Malls, and liquor, and proceeds to win three more domino games.

* * *

Rita buds in the spring along with the knurly limbs of elms and oaks. Her belly pushes out in mid-April, coinciding with the tulip and daffodil blooms, and all the beauty of the season rests in the glow of her skin, but her eyes are as cold as the long-gone winter.

“Who?” her parents ask, even though their minds have wandered over the young men who have spent time with Rita on the porch, the ones who called out to her from open car windows, music blasting, Rita’s name lost in the lyrics and strain. They assume Jake’s son Marshall or the Tompkins boy, Pierce.

“Coca-Cola man,” Rita says, rubbing her stomach and looking off at nothing. Erasmus can’t stop smoking, and Bertha keeps moving her hands up and down her arms.

“The Coca-Cola man?” they say together, and exchange glances before looking back at her.

“Hmmm,” Rita sounds, and looks down at her swollen bare feet. “Mama, where the pail at?” she asks as if the conversation is over.

Bertha remembers her own pregnancy and her feet, swelled up and burning at the bottoms, but she can’t go for the pail because Erasmus is reaching for another cigarette—even though the one he lit a moment ago is still burning in the ashtray.

“White man, then?” Erasmus asks, and holds his breath.

Rita’s eyes roam around the kitchen and then look up at her father. “No. Colored man,” she says, and her eyes move to the ceiling and then down to the floor and then to the window that looks out into the yard.

“Girl, have you taken leave of your senses?” Erasmus laughs before lighting his cigarette and inhaling. His laughter is reeling, and it makes the hair on Bertha’s neck stand.

“Why you say that, Erasmus?” Bertha asks, moving closer to Rita.

Erasmus’s laughter rocks him, and his cigarette falls from his mouth.

“What’s so funny? Why you laughing so?” Bertha’s head swings between her husband and her child. “Man, you crazy or something?” she asks, rubbing at the hairs on her neck and taking another step that puts her right next to Rita.

Erasmus composes himself and bends down to retrieve his cigarette from the floor. Both women see the thin sheath of hair on the top of his head, and Rita thinks that in a few years he will be bald like Manny. She shivers.

“This here is 1942,” Erasmus says, wiping the tears from the corners of his eyes and sticking the cigarette back between his lips. “And I ain’t never seen no colored man driving no goddamn Coca-Cola truck!” Laughter consumes him again, and the house seems to shake with it.

It’s too late to sit her in a tub of mustard water. Rita is too far gone for that, so they send her over to Fenton, over to Mamie Ray’s place.

* * *

Mamie Ray, black, short, and stout, with a tangled mass of orange hair that spread out around her head like a feathered hat imparting her with a buffoon-type peculiarity. She had a dead right foot that was larger than her left and hands too small for her body, or even a five-year-old, for that matter.

When Rita stepped off the bus, Mamie Ray, body lopsided from years of dragging around her dead foot, was standing on the curb, waiting.

“You Rita?” Mamie asked as she grabbed the girl’s elbow with her tiny hands. She hadn’t really had to ask that question; Bertha had described her child to a tee, and all Mamie needed to look for were the eyes. “Ain’t seen another pair like ’em, ever,” Bertha had said to Mamie on the phone.

“Yessum,” Rita replied, her eyes struggling with the woman’s orange hair and twisted body.

“How far along you think you is?” Mamie asked, looking down at Rita’s stomach.

“Don’t know.” Rita took a step backward.

“Well, you know when you ’llowed him on top of you. What month it was?”

“I ain’t allow nothing,” Rita mumbled. “Cold month, I suppose,” she added, and chanced a glance at the oversized foot.

Mamie bit her lip and scratched at her head. “After Thanksgiving but before Christmas and New Year’s?”

“I dunno,” Rita said, and her eyes moved to the tiny hands.

“Uh-huh,” Mamie sounded, and then, “You look strong; you can carry that suitcase.” She wobbled away.

The women who came to see Mamie Ray came fruitful, bellies still flush, hips spreading though, and breasts heavy and sensitive to the touch. They came dry mouthed, light-headed, always spitting puke, and always scared.

Rita thought most of them were ignorant­­—not ignorant about how it had happened, but how it had happened to them.

Some came wearing the cheap pieces of jewelry their lovers had given them, tacky tokens of affection that bent and turned colors, the mock gold fading and flaking away over time. Just like the men, just like their love.

Rita was too far gone for an abortion; she would stay through delivery and then return home, no one the wiser.

The other women, the ones who wore shame on their faces like masks, they would be gone, if things went well, within twenty-four hours.

Millie Blythe arrived just as June slipped into its last day. She was much younger than Rita, pale skinned with thin reddish-brown hair and large empty eyes. Feeble looking and thin, and Mamie took one look at her and was about to turn her away when her mother shoved roughly through the doorway and into the house.

“She look sickly,” Mamie said after taking another glance at Millie.

“She fine. Always look that way,” the mother said, and then hastily slapped Millie’s hands away from her mouth. “I done told you ’bout that,” she snarled.

Mamie peered at the mother and then down at Millie’s fingers. The child had chewed her nails clear down to the cuticle. “How far along is she?” she asked, her eyes moving to Millie’s vacant ones.

“Just about a month.”

“How old is she?” Mamie squinted at the girl. Millie’s body didn’t have a curve to it.

“She old enough,” the mother spat, and then shot Millie a look of disgust.

“Fourteen?” Mamie asked, ignoring the woman’s sarcasm.

“Eleven,” the woman said, and then cast a cold eye on Mamie.

Mamie didn’t stumble back in surprise, but the hand that held her cane did begin to shake. “Eleven? Lord,” she whispered. She’d never had one that young. “She still a baby,” Mamie said more to herself than to the woman.

“Look, you gonna do it or not?” The woman’s tone was like steel.

“I—” Mamie started to decline again and took a step toward the door; her fingers brushed against the doorknob just as the woman moved toward her.

“I’ll pay you double what you usually charge,” she said, and shoved three crisp fifties in Mamie’s face.

Mamie liked the horses, loved to watch them run. She knew some of the jockeys and had had the opportunity to move her hands across the strong backs of the animals, down their muscular limbs and through their shining manes. In the stands, her body quivered at the sound of their hooves galloping against the soft dirt of the track, making her feel a way no man was ever able to do.

She was a week behind with Otis the protector, who came to collect once a month. He had connections with the police department, and she had to pay him to make sure they would leave her be.

The oil tank had been empty since Memorial Day, but she was careful to keep up with the electric bill, because she did most of her work at night. For now, meals would be cooked on the hot plate, and showers would be taken in cold water. She’d straighten the mess out with the oil company in the fall just before the first frost hit.

So the money that Millie’s mother was dangling in her face could have been used wisely, but the sounds of hooves beating like a hundred hearts were already pounding away in Mamie’s ears.

“Come and get her tomorrow ’round noon,” Mamie said, snatching the money from the woman’s fingers.

The heat that followed Millie’s arrival was stifling and generous, filling up every inch of the house. So intense, the old paint bloomed and puckered in places on the walls, and the doorjambs swelled and buckled.

Even though there were three empty bedrooms in the house, Mamie Ray put Millie in the room with Rita.

“There,” Mamie said, indicating the empty bed next to Rita’s even though there was one on the other side of the room.

In order to better handle the heat, Rita had stripped herself down to her drawers. She stretched out across the bed on her back, her belly and breasts like mountains of flesh.

“That there is Rita,” Mamie said, and walked out of the room.

Millie stood in the doorway, her eyes wide at the sight of Rita.

“You ain’t never seen no naked woman before?” Rita asked as she lifted each heavy breast and wiped at the perspiration that had formed beneath it.

Millie’s hand shot up to her mouth, and her eyes dropped to the floor as she moved to sit down on the bed. Rita’s eyes moved with her.

Rita watched Millie’s head bob and her neck twist and listened to the soft chewing sounds her mouth made as she devoured her cuticles.

When she couldn’t take any more, she rolled onto her side, eased herself up on her elbow, and said, “Ain’t you been fed?”

Millie took a moment to answer. She slowly raised her eyes, and they immediately settled on Rita’s heavy breasts, so she dropped them again. “Yes ma’am,” she whispered.

“Ha!” Rita laughed. “I ain’t nobody’s ma’am, girl!”

Millie said nothing.

Rita cocked her head. “How old you is?”

“Eleven,” Millie squeaked, and her eyes came up again.

“Eleven?” Rita eased her free hand down between her legs and scratched.

“Uh-huh.”

“What’s your name?”

“Millie,” she said, coughed, and then, “Blythe.”

The child was soaked through with sweat. The fine red hairs curled against her forehead and dangled around her ears. She wiped at her face and then the back of her neck.

“Go on and take off your clothes. Ain’t nothing but females in this house,” Rita breathed, and then looked off to another part of the room in order to give the girl some privacy.

Millie looked around the room and then hesitantly started to unbutton the delicate white blouse she wore.

Rita waited until the blouse was off and then the gray pleated skirt. When she turned to look at the girl again, what she saw was a pale thin line of a child with knocked knees and swollen ankles.

“You pregnant?” Rita was perplexed.

Millie’s eyes rolled around in her head and then moved to the tattered window shutters. “Swallowed a watermelon seed.”

“What?” Rita laughed.

“Watermelon seed. Swallowed one.”

“Why you here, then?”

“Mama say Mamie gonna take it out so’s that it won’t grow inside of me.”

Rita bit her bottom lip. “You get your monthly?”

Millie looked down at her hands. “Come January till May, and then I swallowed the watermelon seed and it stopped.”

Rita eased herself up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. “Who gave you the watermelon?”

“Clyde.”

“Who’s that?”

“My mama’s boyfriend.”

“Uh-huh. Sliced it up for you, took it out of the rind and all?”

“Yeah. Most times.”

“Other times?”

“We played a game.”

“I play games too. What kinda game? Maybe I knows it.”

“He pops the watermelon in his mouth and then pass it to me.”

“Pass it how?”

“He press his lips to mine, and push it into my mouth.”

“I don’t know that game.”

“We play it all the time.”

“That’s how you got the watermelon seed?”

“Uh-huh.”

Millie scratched at her nose and then rubbed her eyes before falling back onto the bed.

“He ever put the watermelon seed anyplace else?”

Millie said nothing.

“Y’all play other types of games?”

“Mama said I wasn’t to talk about those.”

Millie laid herself down and soon after was fast asleep, her loud snores filling the hot room.

Mamie came for her in the evening, just past eight, when the streets outside began teeming with people. There was a jazz club two blocks down, a bar across the street, and a chicken and rib shop next door. A Friday night in July on Pearl Street could seem like Saturday midday anyplace else in the country.

“C’mon, girl,” Mamie Ray called out, and walked away.

Millie stirred from her sleep. “Okay, coming!” she yelled back as she reached for skirt and blouse.

“You ain’t gonna take no bath, you know,” Rita said, suddenly mad. Mad at Clyde, Millie’s mother, and Mamie Ray.

“What?”

“You answering like Mamie just ran your bath water.”

Millie looked confused.

“It’s serious what’s Mamie’s about to do to you,” Rita whispered.

Millie cocked her head. “Mama said it wouldn’t hurt a bit.” Her bottom lip began to tremble.

Rita was already sorry. “I—I . . . Don’t mind me,” she said, waving her hands at Millie. “The heat makes me mean.” She offered her a grin.

Millie leaned forward and looked real hard at Rita’s face.

“Go on, a little ol’ watermelon seed ain’t gonna hurt none.” Rita’s grin wavered behind her lie. There was an awkward moment, and then she stepped forward and embraced Millie.

“C’mon, girl!” Mamie Ray screamed from down the hall.

When Millie came back to the room, escorted by Mamie Ray, she was ashen, almost bleached-looking, and seemed smaller, thinner. Her mouth hung open on one side, and her eyes, glassy and moist, rolled about in their sockets.

Rita shifted her gaze to the floor and then the window. As nice as Mamie Ray had been to her, she hated her at the moment.

Always hated her after the abortions. Hated the smell of ether and the screams that followed. Hated her even more the next day after the sheets (soiled yellow in places where the blood had been scrubbed away) were hung out to dry.

Mamie Ray laid Millie down onto the bed, and without a word turned and left the room.

Rita had heard Millie’s screams, heard the child howl out in pain, the pleas for God and Mama and then the pitiful, confused, Why, why, why!

Millie had lost the very last bit of her childhood, the small piece that her mama’s boyfriend hadn’t been able to kill, the part of her that still looked forward to ice cream, doll babies, and Christmas.

Now Millie lay there, whimpering, clutching her stomach, and whispering for her mother.