All of the Above (12 page)
I try to tell Thea that she trusts me to help with Rhondell and I've always been there for her. “Name one time I haven't,” I say.
My sister counts my other problems on her fingers. “And you've had men trouble, and money trouble, and you don't go to church regular like you should, and you live in a place that doesn't have enough room for a kid, let alone you, and you don't keep your place clean enough for my standards.”
She gets up to pour another cup of coffee.
“Don't know why you're even thinking about this, Asia.” My sister stands at the counter with the coffeepot in her hand. “You're just being influenced by what that girl told you.”
“You didn't hear how she asked if she could stay with me,” I argue. “It would have made you cry—I know it would have—the way she asked it.”
My sister shakes her head.
I keep on talking.
“And her hair was a mess,” I try to explain. “Like nobody had cared about her in years. It was like—” I search for the right words. “It was like her hair was tangled up with all the mess of her life,” I say finally. “Like you could almost feel how sad and lonely it must have been for her.”
“Sure it was.” My sister sits down, still shaking her head. “How do you know that the girl doesn't have mental things wrong with her?” she says, looking at me. “That girl's been in foster care and social services most of her life; think about all the burdens she could be carrying. You ready to deal with all those things?”
“Maybe,” I answer, standing up and sticking the box of doughnuts under my arm. “Maybe I am.”
A math problem to solve:
If four students and their math teacher begin the tetrahedron project again in February and they work five days a week, making and adding 150 pieces a day to their structure, how many weeks will it take to rebuild the tetrahedron with 16,384 pieces? Extra credit: What if four hairstylists, one Vietnam vet, and a custodian named Mr. Joe also take part?
“Nothing hard about making those little pyramids,” Willy Q says, once I show him how you fold the three triangles up to a point, glue the sides together, and hold the sides for about a minute until they stick, and you're done.
Willy Q insists he could do a hundred fifty pieces by himself. One hand tied behind his back. Blindfolded.
When business is slow, me and Willy Q sometimes have races at making the pieces. We don't bet money. We bet who has to clean the public bathroom that's outside the Barbecue, or who has to scrub the greasy cooking pans, or who is gonna mop the kitchen floor.
I win, you clean the bathroom. You win, I clean. That's the way we bet.
Or—you win, I wash all the greasy pans. I win, you gotta mop the kitchen floor. On your hands and knees. Twice.
We race making ten at a time. Or twenty. Tetrahedrons go flying across the counter and floor. Willy Q is fast. His fingers don't look fast, but they can move. Sometimes we gotta crawl across the floor and gather up the ones that have flown all over the place.
I win more often than Willy Q. But not much.
Most of the time we have to glue our pieces all over again, or take them apart and refold the sides. “Fast don't always mean good,” Willy Q says. “That's a lesson to keep in mind for life—and for working here, too,” he adds, giving me a look.
A few days into March we get a warm spell. One of those Pretending-It's-Spring-But-Then-Hit-You-With-a-Blizzard warm spells. Business starts picking up again because people think it's spring even though it isn't. We gotta make tetrahedrons in between ribs and barbecue sandwiches and Singing the Blues wings.
Some people see the bowl of shapes on the counter and ask, What's that? Some kinda new barbecue sauce packet?
Then Willy Q tells them how they are called tetrahedrons and how my math class is trying to get in the
Guinness Book of World Records.
For real? they answer, wide-eyed.
Me and Willy Q start handing out pieces for other people to make. Help Washington Middle School get in the records book, Willy Q tells them.
You can always figure out the ones that come from the barbecue. Hold them up to your nose and you can smell the charcoal and wood smoke and barbecue sauce. Better watch your fingers with these, I tell the math club when I bring them in. They're hot, hot, hot.
All the pieces have little Q's written on them, too. “Why you always drawing a little Q on every tetrahedron we make?” I ask Willy Q one afternoon.
He squints at me. “How long you been my son?”
“Thirteen years.”
“And all that time, you haven't noticed my name is Willy—Q?”
I grin and pour one of the little sugar packs into my hand. “Stands for Quincy, right?”
Willy Q smacks my arm. “Don't you go telling nobody my real name, unless you want to be scrubbing the public toilet with a toothbrush till you're twenty-one—and stop messing with the sugar packs.”
“But why put a Q on the tetrahedrons?” I ask.
“Advertising.” Willy Q grins. “For the Barbecue. Willy Q. Williams don't do nothing for free.”
Way back in elementary school, when my brother DJ was in third or fourth grade, he won a basketball jersey signed by four pro players. Half of them don't even play no more, but it's the one thing he's got that means something to him. He always keeps it folded up in a shoebox, taped shut, in the back of the closet underneath a pile of clothes. Nobody's allowed in.
But all rules are off these days with DJ.
One morning, I slip that box out from under the clothes pile, shove it in my backpack, and take it somewhere else. I wait about a week to tell DJ. He's lying on the couch, flipping through channels one night, with a bag of chips sitting on his chest.
“You missing something,” I start by saying, and he flies off the couch like he can read my mind. His hand slams into my chest while he's going past.
“You better not have touched nothing of mine,” he swears.
I'm waiting for him when he gets back. “You keep Markese and the others away from our project this time,” I tell him.
He gets up in my face. “You gimme that shirt back,” he yells.
We keep on repeating the same words over and over, like a CD that's stuck, until my uncle comes slamming out of the bedroom where he was sleeping and tells us both to get out of the apartment, or he's calling the cops.
If I could've drawn a picture of DJ's face as he left the apartment, there would have been flames shooting out of his eyes and smoke coming out of his nose and mouth.
But I'm not gonna take any chances this time, not even with my own brother. I lean over the railing of the stairwell and shout that he'll get his jersey back in one piece when the tetrahedron is done. “As long as it stays in one piece—you know what I mean?” I holler. A door slamming is all the answer I get.
I decide it's time to take a chance. I tell Rhondell that she can hand me the yellow or the blue pieces one afternoon when we're working after school, folding and gluing the little tetrahedrons like usual.
Rhondell gives me a quick look. “You sure?” she says. “Because I've got plenty of purple if you want them.” She pushes a stack of purple shapes toward me.
“No, I'll take the yellow,” I insist. “I'm okay with yellow.”
See, I've been trying to change some of the beliefs I have about things (such as the colors blue and yellow). All blue cars don't cause what happened to my mom. For instance, Aunt Asia drives a blue car, and it's about fifteen years old with 174,300 miles and a lot of rust—and nothing has happened to it yet. People are always honking when I'm riding in the car with her because she drives it so slow. You want to scrunch down in your seat sometimes, when people honk their horns and go zooming past, like you're a big blue turtle holding up the whole road.
And when Aunt Asia took me to see her third-floor apartment (at the top of a house) for the first time, to talk about how I might feel about living there, all I could see was yellow when she opened the door. The walls were the yellowest yellow you could imagine. “Isn't that the color of sunshine?” Aunt Asia said, clasping her hands behind her back and happily studying the walls. “That's why I picked it. If I couldn't have an apartment with lots of windows, at least I'd have sunshine, that's what I figured.
“And it won't hurt my feelings if you don't want to stay here after seeing my small place, so don't you worry about that,” she told me, twisting her bracelets nervously on her arm and giving me an uncertain look. “It's just me and this little place, and I know it isn't much to offer. Other homes they'd put you in would probably be a whole lot nicer than this.”
While she showed me all the things that were wrong with her place—the leaky refrigerator with the towel underneath, and the stove with only one burner that worked, and the rusted bathtub, and the bathroom sink that only ran cold—I thought about how all the things that were wrong with her place were still better than the few things that were right in the other places.
During the tour, I didn't say a word about the yellow walls, either, or tell her how it was my bad luck color. I just said that everything looked fine with me, and I wouldn't mind staying there someday if she didn't mind having me there. (I tried not to sound too hopeful, you know, because hope will get you nowhere.) Aunt Asia gave me a surprised look and said she hadn't made up her mind just yet—that there was still a lot of paperwork to do.…
But maybe yellow was my good luck color after all, because Aunt Asia didn't wait very long (like one or two days) before she decided to go ahead with applying to be my foster mom.
And when I thought about those yellow walls later, and how Aunt Asia loved looking at them, I wondered if maybe my Gram was trying to tell me something. Maybe by sending me to a place that was the same color as the flowers I brought to the hospital when she died, she was finally saying thank you to me and telling me it was time to move on.
We talk all the time at the Style R Us hair salon. You know how it is with women. The other stylists are always asking me about Sharice and how she's doing since coming to stay with me at the beginning of May. She into boys yet? they ask. She talk about her past life at all? She adjusting okay to being with you?
I keep a snapshot of her and Rhondell taped in the corner of my mirror. “Those two are my girls,” I tell my clients. “That's Miss Rhondell, my sister's girl,” I say pointing at Rhondell, who's looking serious in the picture, as usual. “And that's Miss Sharice,” I say, pointing at the girl with her hair done up fancy and a wide smile on her face.
I'm not saying we're nosy people at the salon, but once the other stylists hear how the girls are trying to break a math record with their class at school, they all want to help. Especially after finding out what happened to their first project.
But I have to confess that we have our own sense of style here and we each like to do our own creative things. So after Sharice and Rhondell show us how to make the little pyramids, we can't help giving them a few special touches, like painting them with sparkle nail polish, or giving them purple stripes and gold dots and silver zigzags, or gluing on some rhinestone nail art—just extra little things like that. Sharice says the president of her math club probably won't appreciate our originality. We just laugh and tell her that's all right—most people don't.
My clients are always noticing the pyramids on my counter and asking if they are Christmas tree ornaments. Every time they ask, I have to look at the little piece of paper where Sharice has carefully printed the math word for what they are.
“Tetrahedrons,” I explain. “It's something that the kids are studying in math now.” Then I bring over Kyra, our nail tech, and show them how she's painted little gold pyramids on her nails, in honor of the kids.
My clients always shake their heads and say, “Math sure has changed. We never learned words like that when I was in school. Your girl must be real smart, if she's already learning words like that—”
And whenever they talk that way about Sharice, I always feel proud for one quick minute, as if she's my own daughter. And then I remember who I am and I answer, “I don't know where she gets all her math talents from, to tell you the truth. But she's a real hard worker, just like her cousin Rhondell.”
Sometimes when Sharice is at school and I'm at home, I slip into her room and look at the photograph of the pretty woman in the lavender dress that she keeps on the little table beside her bed. Sitting there on her bed, I wonder to myself what her mom might have been like and if I'm doing a good job in her eyes.
An important fact to remember about tetrahedrons:
As the tetrahedron structure grows larger and larger, the empty spaces within the tetrahedron grow larger and larger, too.
I'm seeing tetrahedrons in my sleep. One thousand eight hundred left to make. The way I figure it, we still got about two more weeks until we're done.
