A Deeper Love Inside (34 page)

“It’s late. I seen enough,” I said.

“If you ever need anything ask us two. We’ll give you a good price,” the pass renter said. “We always be somewhere outside the shelter at night,” she pitched. “Next time bring a picture of your mother. I’ll find her for you. You don’t even have to come. Door-to-door service. Just tell me where you want her,” the crack guide said. I stopped walking.

“Cash on delivery,” she joked.

“I didn’t say it was my mother,” I turned and told her, feeling red. The two of them giggled nervously.

“Our bad, we all somebody’s mother. Make sure you check us!” they called behind me as though they were real businesswomen. As I headed down the subway stairs, leaving the same way I came, it dawned on me that they weren’t following behind me. I had supplied them with crack money for the night, and the crack house had plenty of rocks for sale.

When I reached the underground, Momma was back. She had thrown on a dress that was hanging up when I left earlier to go look for her. I guess she thought I was still six. I had seen my ruined Air Maxes, just a flash of fluorescent green running down the Bed-Stuy
crack building stairs. Besides,
me and Momma both stunk.
The smell of the place I couldn’t describe was in my hair, on my clothes, and making my skin crawl.

We showered together. Momma was just standing there in the warm water as I cleaned her body, her butt, vagina, underarms, and hair. It was better in the shower. You couldn’t tell our tears from the drops of water.

We weren’t saying nothing. I turned on some music to make Momma feel better. Oddly, in a frightening way, the first cut that came on was “Dear Mamma,” by Tupac Shakur. It was September 13, 1996, the exact day the bullets finally killed him. I wondered if he felt relieved. Can being dead be a relief? Is there is a possibility that even after death, there would be more pain?

Tupac believed that a crack fiend could still be a black queen. I looked at Momma, hoping his words could possibly be true.

I don’t know if Momma, the music lover, was listening. I don’t know what Momma was thinking. She looked as small as a kindergartner and held her legs with her burnt hands and hung her head to her knees. She was sitting on her bed. It was made up with new sheets and blankets, real pillows and decorative ones. I had not used her bed in eleven nights. I thought she should be the first to enjoy my gifts to her.

She didn’t even notice. She didn’t say nothing. I looked at the roses I had purchased for her almost two weeks ago. They were like me and Momma, I thought: stuck in one pose, one position, dry and dead.

Chapter 31

I had cooked and served eleven organic recipes to Big Johnnie. Each night, I’d have one whole meal left over from mine and Siri’s. It was meant for Momma. Big Johnnie received Momma’s portion every early morning after I was done doing Momma’s job at his store, and before he arrived at 6:06 a.m. After the first meal I left for him he began paying Momma one hundred thirty dollars per week, instead of the one hundred dollars he had agreed to pay Momma when I first met him. I wasn’t sure if it was because he knew it was really me doing Momma’s job, or because he loved my cooking, or because he noticed that I worked weekends even though I wasn’t scheduled and didn’t have to. Thirty extra dollars,
humph
yeah I’ll take it. I wasn’t spending any of the money I was earning. I was still surviving on the money I earned at NanaAnna’s and the seven hundred dollars I kept from my money tree. Plus, I was still walking around wearing my “handwashed in the bathroom sink clothes.”

• • •

“You was touching my stuff,” Momma said to me when I returned from upstairs doing her job.

“Momma, I was trying to figure out where you were for all those days and what happened to you,” I defended.

“What for?” Momma asked strangely.

“I was worried about you. You were gone for a long time,” I explained.

“So,” she said. Silence fell on both of us.

“So I wanted to be sure you were okay,” I said.

“You see me, right?” she asked, as though nothing had happened. But more than that, she talked like she thought that we weren’t even related. Or she sounded like she thought I was the mother putting too much pressure on her, and she was the daughter who had to make excuses.

“I see you Momma, and I’m so happy to see you. Please don’t leave me again,” I asked her with no trace of bossiness or disrespect.

“We can’t go everywhere together,” she said.

“I know. But we can spend
some time
together,
can’t we
? I want to cook a meal for you. Wait till you taste it! Big Johnnie tasted my cooking and every time I clean up, his bowl is empty.”

“Did he bring his big ass down in here?” Momma said, suddenly alarmed.

“No, Momma, after I was done working up there I would leave him the food I had cooked for you, since you weren’t home.”

“That means you got some money,” she said. “You worked. Did he pay you?”

“He did.”

“How much?”

“One hundred dollars.”

“Where is it?”

“I spent most of it.” My first lie to Momma. Then I added truthfully, “I’m going to the market with what money is left. We ran out of groceries.”

“You going out? I’m a wait here,” Momma said.

I didn’t trust her. This was a new feeling between Momma and me, distrust.

“Please come with me?” I asked sweetly.

“No,” was all she said. I wanted to change my mind and stay and watch her. At the same time, I needed to get the ingredients for the healing soup to heal Momma. I wasn’t sure what to choose. Should I stay? Should I go?

“What you standing there for? Go get the groceries,” she said. I left, hoping I wouldn’t regret it.

What are the chances of me seeing Elisha? Probably zero,
I thought as
I walked to the faraway organic market. What did I want to see him for anyway? I asked myself. No answer came to mind.

He wasn’t there. As I pushed my cart around, I looked down at my cheap, ugly sneakers. Then, I looked at myself, the part that I could see. I’m glad Elisha isn’t here, I thought to myself. Look at me. All this time the businesspeople on the block kept calling me “pretty little girl.” I looked a cheap mess.

we are a healthy community was on the message board, which was posted on the wall right before the exit at the organic market. I walked past it with my expensive organic foods packed in expensive organic foods shopping bags. Then I took three steps back, and posted a note:

Elisha it’s me, Ivory. I shop here on Fridays at 3.

I pinned it on the board where there were many postings, and messages.

Momma was gone when I got back. I believed she would return soon. If she didn’t, it would be too cruel to me and too bad for her and too sad for us. She needed the healing soup. She needed me to take care of her.

I washed, peeled, sliced, chopped, and crushed, preparing the ingredients for the soup. In my deep clay pot, I placed a few stalks of thyme and poured in the purified water and, by accident, spilled a few tears.

Chapter 32

October 2, 1996

Big Johnnie,

I know my month is up and I’m supposed to leave. My mom died and I’ll be staying downstairs with Aunty for a lot longer than I thought.

Love Ivory.

That was the big lie tucked inside the little note that I left for Big Johnnie. I laid it on top of a bowl of homemade vegetable stew, made with organic red beans, onions, tomatoes, garlic, ginger, tumeric, sea salt, cumin, coriander, and three big soft organic potatoes. I left a hot, fresh slice of cornbread, made with fresh organic corn for him to dip in the delicious stewed gravy.

I had been dodging a face-to-face with Big Johnnie for a month. Although I cleaned his place thoroughly, organized his inventory, matched up his labels, trashed his expired foods, cut, collapsed, and tied his empty boxes into neat stacks, organized his old newspapers, packaged twenty-five sandwiches per day plus ten buttered rolls and five peanut butter and jellies, and knew his store like the palms of my hands, I did all of that from 3:00 a.m. until 6:00 a.m. each morning. He didn’t see me. He didn’t have to. Purposely, I wanted him to believe that Momma, aka my aunt, was on a good streak. I wanted him to imagine that “Aunt” was doing all those jobs while I prepared the sandwiches. I wanted him to believe that aunt and niece worked together preparing his special morning meals. Big Johnnie would leave my pay each Friday, in a white envelope with my name on it, at the front counter. I’d take it down below with me at 6:00 a.m. when I was finished with my work, and do the same routine the next week.

I wanted to face Big Johnnie at the end of the month with Momma standing at my side, wearing one of the three new outfits that I had purchased for her. Now I would have to face Big Johnnie
myself and alone, and pretend not to be living alone underneath the floor of his store. I knew no adult would allow two eleven-year-old girls, Siri and me, to live underground alone. At least no adult would, except Momma.

Hesitantly, I entered the front door of his store for the first time in thirty days.

“Big Johnnie,” I said.

“Princess Ivory,” he said.

“I’m sorry I had to extend my stay living beneath your store.”

A customer rushed in. He served him. He left.

“Maybe now you can let me know about the rent,” I asked.

“Don’t concern yourself with that. You have a wake and a funeral to attend. When my mom passed away it was the saddest year of my life. It didn’t matter what anyone said or did. Mom was all I could think about. That’s why I can sit in here eighteen hours a day,” he said. “I just think of my mother and how grateful I should’ve been while she was alive, that she didn’t raise me to be one of these crazy fools I see out here every day.”

I began to feel bad about my lie.

“Your momma must’ve been one incredible woman, too. She raised an incredible daughter.” My eyes teared up on their own, with guilt and thoughts of my real momma.

“Thank you,” I said softly. “So is it okay for me to stay?”

“Please, please, don’t leave me,” he dramatized. We both laughed, me wiping away my tears.

• • •

“I heard your mother died,” Mr. Sharp said. He was so sharply dressed in a suit and shoes shined so well I could see them reflecting the sun. He was sitting in his Mercedes outside of his store with the engine running. “Go get Linda. Tell her I said to lock up and come on out.”

I ran in to tell her.

“You get in the back!” he said to me through the window. I got in, surprised and embarrassed by my cheap shoes on his plush interior in his throwback Benz. I fidgeted some. Even Linda looked a little uncomfortable.

“Seat belts,” he said to both of us. “You see the box in the back?” he asked me, as he pulled away from the curb. “Open it.”

I reached over and picked up the gift-wrapped box. I sat staring at it for some moments until I noticed Mr. Sharp was staring at me through his rearview mirror. I peeled the gift-wrapping away. It was a gold-framed picture of Poppa looking like king of the world. Beneath the tissue paper was a gold-framed picture of Momma. Her pose was so mean, she could’ve been a cover girl on
Vogue
magazine. Again, my tears turned on me.

“A woman’s tears are beautiful to me,” Mr. Sharp said. “Every time I see them I’m amazed. Wish I could do that as easily as you all can do that. I’m forty-four. I’ve seen all type of things. I’ve never cried, not even one time.”

He was talking nice, but his words made me have confusing thoughts.
How could tears be beautiful? When a woman is crying it means she’s hurting, doesn’t it?
I thought to myself.

“Whose father is that in the photo in your hand?” he asked. I didn’t say nothing. “Whose mother is that?” I didn’t say nothing. “Is she dead?” he asked. “Is the woman in the picture dead?” I didn’t say nothing.

“I loved your father. It would be my honor to help his daughter. In these times, a black man has to be careful. They always got us walking a tightrope; I find that we just have to become the best tightrope walkers in town. As a man, people look at me suspiciously if I say I love my brother. Men are supposed to love their brothers, work together, and fight together. When one falls, his brother gotta step up and take care of his brother’s wife and family. That’s how it supposed to be. But now, if a man makes any kind of gesture to a woman, he’s viewed as a pervert, someone who wants something, someone suspicious. If a grown man shows compassion to a young girl, he is seen as a molester and a rapist. They’ve closed down all the avenues for real men to express real love as a brother, as a father, as a friend. So we have Linda here, to break up the suspicion. To confirm that I’m just a good man doing a good deed to balance out some other deeds I done that wasn’t so good,” Mr. Sharp said, in a slow, steady, manly voice.

Up until that day, Mr. Sharp had given me plenty of learning lessons, but had not offered me a job, or given me a copy of the photo off
the wall that I asked for the first day we met. He said, “I been watching and waiting to see if you were gonna be sticking around.” Now he was taking me shopping.

“Choose two pairs of shoes, and two pairs of sneakers,” he said. “We used to call it our ‘nice shoes’ and our ‘play shoes.’ ”

In the Saks Fifth Avenue store he said, “Show me your style. Once I know your taste, I can make you something even better.” He was confident.

In the Gucci store, he warned me, “This is a one-time, all-day, shopping spree event. I don’t want to spoil you. I already spoiled my own two daughters. Now they grown spoiled women. I don’t want to rob you of your enthusiasm, your work ethic, or your understanding of the true value of each penny, and every dollar. After today, you’ll come and earn some money working for me after school.”

I wanted to work. I appreciated him. But I didn’t want to be exposed or to admit to anything either. I wanted to refuse the shopping event, but I felt it would ruin everything between me and him if I did.