Where Do You Stay (4 page)

“Is something the matter?” Aunt Geneva asks soon as she sees me.

“He's a crybaby,” Damon says.

“Now you just stay quiet,” Aunt Geneva says to Damon, holding me close. “Are you okay? I thought I heard something going on out there.” She gets me a damp washcloth to wipe my face. Then she says, “Was it Damon bothering you again?”

I don't answer.

She turns to Damon. “Next time there's trouble, I'm telling Daddy.”

“Go ahead,” Damon says.

“Stop it right there,” Aunt Geneva says, her voice so deep you can hardly hear it.

“He started it,” Damon says. “You can ask anyone. He punched me first.”

“Not one more word, you hear?” Aunt Geneva's voice is shaking. “Jerome is not a fighting boy, you know that.”

She is holding my arm. I want to tell her it's true, I did punch first. I wasn't a fighting boy before, but I am now. People don't stay the same forever. But the words are stuck in my throat.

“I want you to apologize,” Aunt Geneva says to Damon.

Damon looks down. Aunt Geneva sighs. “He's just going through a stage. Best thing is not to pay any attention to it.” She puts her arm around me. “Now I want you boys to go look in your room. I have a surprise for you.”

There are three beds in our room and new polkadotted sheets on each one. “How do you like it?” Aunt Geneva asks, following us up the stairs.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Thanks,” Monte says. Damon is quiet.

Aunt Geneva pulls me close. “I have three boys now,” she says. “Did you know I always wanted three children? James said two was more than enough, but now I got my way.”

Aunt Geneva smells like soap, not the lemon soap that Mama used, but soap so strong it stings your eyes. I try to scoot away but her arm is heavy on my shoulder. Damon looks at his mom like
Sure, you wanted three boys, but did you ever ask me?
I want to tell him nobody asked me either, but he's turned the other way.

Monte takes the bed by the wall, I take the middle, and Damon takes the end. We lie there not moving and not talking. After a while I can tell from their breathing that they are asleep, but those dots on the sheets are like eyeballs all around. Mama's eyes were gray before she passed, cloudy-like.
That's not the cancer
, she said,
that's cataracts.

I bury my face into the pillow that smells like the candy in a department store. Aunt Geneva said our house sold quick, but she didn't say who bought it. I asked
Can we go back and see who's there?
She said
No use in that, Jerome
. And I said
But I want to visit my friend David who lives across the street
, and she said
Not yet, Jerome, let time go by.
I asked
How much time?
and she said
We'll see, Jerome, how things are going.

Could be whoever bought the house bought my bed too, with the pale blue sheets. Could be another boy is sleeping there now. Maybe he went across the street to play with David. Or maybe he has brothers and sisters of his own.

I sit up and move my fingers on the mattress, right hand harder, left hand soft, Sonata in G Major by Scarlatti. Mom loved that one, the way I played it loud, over the sound of the oxygen.

“Jerome.” Monte's voice is loud. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“How come you're sitting up?” He scoots over to my mattress. I wish he'd just go back to sleep so I could keep on with the Scarlatti. “You're not leaving, are you?” he says.

I shrug. “No place to go.”

He looks at his sleeping brother. “Damon didn't mean anything. He gets mad all the time.” Monte shivers even though it's hot in the room.

“You better go back to sleep,” I whisper.

“You're not leaving, are you?” he repeats.

“You just asked me that.”

“I know. I was wondering.”

“I told you to go to sleep.” My voice is hard.

“I'm trying. But I can't.” Then Monte is crying.

“Stop or you'll wake Damon up.”

He's trying, but the sobs keep coming. Monte doesn't have a thing to cry about. He has his mom, his dad, his brother, when I don't have anyone.
Pity doesn't go too far, Jerome
, Mama said,
and you have a tendency to mull
.

Finally Monte swallows hard and looks toward the window. “I can't believe you found that marble head out there.”

“Mr. Willie found it.”

“Now what are you digging for?”

“Just making a garden.”

Damon turns over on the bed and I think we're talking too loud.

“Can I help you?” Monte's voice is begging.

Monte is leaning against me. We hear the screech of a catfight somewhere behind the house. Then Uncle James's car pulls in.

“I miss your mama too,” Monte says suddenly.

“You do?” I never thought of that.

“I used to wish I could stay at your house.”

“Why's that?”

Monte looks over at his brother. “Your mother said
when I got older, she'd teach me how to play piano just like you.”

“I'll teach you,” I say.

“We don't have a piano.”

“Your mom said we're getting one.”

“And then you can teach me,” he says, lying down on my mattress. Soon his breathing is slow and even. There's a breeze blowing in through the open window. I cover Monte with the sheet.

Mr. Willie cleans Ms. Smith's garage, and she gives him a whole bag of seeds in small envelopes: beans, cucumbers, lettuce, spinach, carrots, tomatoes, radishes.

“Why don't people pay you with money?” I ask.

“They do, sometimes. But trading is simpler. More basic. I used to trade piano playing for haircuts, food, whatever.”

“Mama did that sometimes, like she cooked a chicken for the lady who tuned our piano.”

“Tuning is something I never could do,” Mr. Willie says.

Mama said
Can you hum a C, Jerome
, and I closed my eyes and the C came out low and clear.
That boy has perfect pitch
, she told Daddy,
isn't that a gift?
Daddy said
What's that good for? So he can tune pianos the rest of his life?

“My mother said I have perfect pitch,” I say.

“Now that's a stroke of luck,” Mr. Willie says. “Sharon had it too, even with her hearing as bad as it was.”

I keep on digging, turning over the soil, breaking up the clods. “Where is Sharon now?”

“Last I heard, she was staying down on Reading Road,” Mr. Willie says. “In one of those group homes.”

I pick up a fat worm and watch it wriggle in my
palm. “After Sharon left, did Miss Myrtle still teach you piano?”

Mr. Willie nods. “Every day. She got me ready for my audition.”

“Audition?”

“You had to audition to get into the music conservatory.”

“And you got in?”

Mr. Willie nods. “I was so nervous I could hardly stop shaking and I thought nobody can play the piano shaking like a leaf, but once I got past the first measure, I forgot all about the audition because the music was in me and it was coming out.”

“What were you playing?”

“Bach Invention Number Eleven in G Minor.”

“Me and Mama were working on those inventions.”

“They look simple but they're hard to play. Each hand is separate, doing its own thing, but then they come back together.”

“It's like being with someone even when you're not,” I say.

Mama played the left hand and I played the right, not too loud. Sometimes we got our hands all tangled up.
Our fingers are like spaghetti
, she said, laughing. When she got sick I played both hands, making the melody come out louder so she could hear the tune. She closed her eyes and listened, and I heard her breathe and thought
What if she just stops?

“We'll play those inventions someday,” Mr. Willie says.

We have lunch inside the carriage house. Mr. Willie brings out a loaf of bread, peanut butter, and jelly. He makes three sandwiches, one for him, one for me, and one to share. I'm looking around Mr. Willie's place. The floor is broken-up concrete. There's a mattress in one corner, a few hooks with shirts, and a wooden shelf with Mr. Beethoven on top.

“Hey, Jerome.” Monte's voice is close, coming from outside. “Hey, Jerome, where are you?”

I go out, holding my sandwich. “What do you want?”

“Look.” Monte points to a big white Cadillac parked right in front of the mansion. Three white men in suits get out of the car. They walk up the front steps, but they don't go in. Then they come around back and look at the carriage house and at me and Monte. They poke around for a few minutes in the honeysuckle bushes. Finally they get back into their Cadillac and drive back down the way they came.

Mr. Willie comes out with a thermos. “Someone was looking at the mansion,” I say.

“Looking isn't buying,” he says.

“They might buy it,” I say.

“Might or might not. No matter. We got our work to do,” he says, reaching for the bucket.

“Can I help?” Monte asks.

I wish he wouldn't follow me around, but Mr. Willie says, “I can use all the help I can get.” Then he tells Monte what size stone he needs, small, medium, or large, and Monte gets it for him.

“Mama and Ms. Smith and Ms. Jackson were talking, and they said whoever buys this place is most definitely taking it down,” Monte says.

“You mean the carriage house?”

“I mean everything,” Monte says.

We don't need to hear what's going to happen when Monte has no idea what he's talking about. I didn't need to hear either, how Mama's hair was going to fall out and she was going to get weaker and weaker. Anyway it wasn't true because she dug carrots in our garden the day before she passed. She said
Jerome, don't forget to dig the potatoes out small. New potatoes are better than old ones, you know.

Mr. Willie's working fast, not talking, building that wall up like it was new. I'm using the leftover rocks to divide our garden into four sections.

The Cadillac comes back around. The men are sitting inside with the windows up and the air conditioner on. The driver rolls his window down. “You know anything about this place?” he asks.

“A little,” Mr. Willie says.

“Looks like it's been abandoned for quite some time,” he says.

“Several years,” Mr. Willie says.

The man stretches his neck out the window. “The neighborhood seems a bit rundown.”

Mr. Willie looks that man right in his eyes. “Depends on how you look at it.”

The man drives off without thanking us.

Damon is there, bouncing his basketball. “What they want?” he asks his brother.

“They said the neighborhood is rundown.”

Damon laughs. “Like we need them to tell us.” He moves the basketball around his waist, then pretends to make a shot. “What you digging for now?” he asks.

I don't answer.

“You deaf or something?”

“We're fixing the wall and making a garden,” I say.

“Farmers.” He laughs. “Couple of farmers, that's what you are. Mama's looking for you,” he says to his brother.

“What for?”

“You better go find out.”

Monte and Damon disappear down the hill.

Mr. Willie stoops to pick up a small rock and cleans it off on his jeans. “Well, if this isn't special,” he says, handing it to me. “Know what it is?”

The stone is chiseled and triangular. “An arrowhead?” I ask.

Mr. Willie nods. “A little piece of history. You know, long before they built this mansion, there was forest here, and the Indians hunted deer, turkey, wild boar.” Mr. Willie sets a stone in place. “Like I told you, there's history in everything.”

I breathe on the arrowhead and shine it with my T-shirt. It looks brand-new, like it was made yesterday instead of a few hundred years ago.

“Keep it,” Mr. Willie says.

I put the arrowhead into my pocket to show to Mama. No, Mama's not at home waiting for me, waiting to hear about my day, waiting to see what's in my pockets.
That's a buffalo-head nickel, Jerome. You found it on the sidewalk? You have good eyes, like I used to when I was a girl. Let's go to the library, Jerome, and find a book about coins so we can start a collection.

Mr. Willie gets the thermos and pours us each a cup of cold water. We drink it fast. He starts humming a tune as he rinses our cups in the hose.

“The first movement of the Mozart Piano Concerto no. 23,” I say.

Mr. Willie looks way down the street. “The day I got into the conservatory, Miss Myrtle was so happy she couldn't stop crying.” Mr. Willie shakes his head. “Only thing she didn't consider was that being a black piano player wasn't going to be so easy.”

“Why not?”

Mr. Willie straightens out his back. “People always
assumed I was serving food at the gigs, not playing piano.” He looks down. “One time they told me to go in the back door, and I said I am part of a quintet, sir, I am the pianist.”

Mr. Willie saying that makes me feel funny, like all that history Mama told me about wasn't really so long ago after all, like if it could happen to Mr. Willie it could happen to me too.

“Excuses. Maybe I'm just making up excuses,” Mr. Willie says.

“For what?”

“For why I didn't finish at the conservatory.”

“Do you think you'll be playing the piano again?”

“No doubt,” Mr. Willie says.

“Was it a grand you used to play?”

“Upright,” Mr. Willie says. “A big white upright.”

“Mine was black,” I say.

Mr. Willie gets a longer garden hose from Ms. Sullivan in return for fixing her back steps. He screws it onto the other hose so we can water the garden, since we don't seem to be getting any rain these days and it's been over ninety degrees for more than two weeks straight. The TV calls it an inversion layer. Aunt Geneva says they can call it whatever they want, but, fact is, we are baking to a crisp in Cincinnati.

I'm spraying the little radish plants when a half-falling-apart van pulls up in front of the mansion. A couple gets out, a man with silver hair past his shoulders and a skinny little lady who smiles at me. She takes a crowbar out of the van and hands it to the man. He hands it back. Then she goes to the front door of the mansion and tries to pry the board off, but it's nailed pretty tight. Finally the man helps her and they go on in.

“They're breaking into Miss Myrtle's house,” Mr. Willie says. “Right in front of me, just breaking in.” He looks down the hill. “She would be most unhappy about that.”

We watch for a while, but the man and the lady don't come out. I'm making the paths around the garden out
of the stones Mr. Willie doesn't need for the wall. Monte's helping me, sorting rocks, mostly. He's finding fossils too, like brachiopods and bryozoans.

“These must be more than one hundred years old,” Monte says.

“You mean one thousand,” I say.

“You mean more than five hundred million,” Mr. Willie says.

Hearing those numbers makes me feel small, like we're just a tiny speck in the universe. Mama used to say
Jerome, we got to do the best we can for the short time we're on this earth
, and I said
It's not short because a day has twenty-four hours and there's seven days in a week and fifty-two weeks in a year, so if you multiply all that there's eight thousand seven hundred thirty-six hours in a year, and that's a lot of time.
Mama said
Not as long as you think, in the scheme of things
. I wonder how long Mama had cancer before we even knew.

The man comes out with the lady behind him. “Is this a safe neighborhood?” the lady asks.

“There's no trouble around here,” Mr. Willie says.

Then the man points to the carriage house. “Condemned buildings like this aren't good for a neighborhood.” He talks to the lady like we aren't even there.

“Maybe we can fix it up,” she says. “It's an interesting structure.”

The man shakes his head. “Too far gone.”

They head back to the van. “See you around.” The lady smiles and waves to us.

“What's ‘condemned' mean?” I ask Mr. Willie.

“The building has to be fixed up.”

“What if it's not?”

He makes a flat motion with his hand.

Too far gone
, the man said.
Gone too far
. That's what the doctor said. If it was sooner, maybe they could have done something, but the cancer had gone too far, spread all over, like poison ivy in Aunt Geneva's yard.