The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

He was flying in his sleep, rising higher and higher until he remembered that men were not made to fly and that sooner or later he would come crashing back down to the ground. The sudden fright woke him and he sat up in the bed in his window-less room in the big blue house across the street from the public library.

Ptolemy considered the dream of flying and fear of the fall. He thought about the picnic he had been to the weekend before with his friends who knew Ezra, who had a wife named Sensia.

It was 6:45 in the morning.

Someone knocked at the door.

There are times in your life when things line up and Fate takes a hand in your future,” Ptolemy remembered Coydog saying. “When that happens, you got to move quick and take advantage of the sitchiation or you’ll never know what might have been.”

“How do I know when it’s time to move quick?” L’il Pea asked.

“When somethin’ big happens and then somethin’ else come up.”

Ptolemy got out of the bed, laughing at the foolishness of his childhood. He’d loved his uncle and cried for days after the old man’s demise but he had come to understand that Coy McCann was a dreamer mostly and that his lessons were either useless or dangerous.

He opened the door, expecting a rooming-house neighbor who needed help of some sort. Everybody in the Blue Bonnet, as they called their home, was up early to go to work at some job cleaning or carrying, cooking or breaking stone.

When he opened the door and saw Sensia Howard standing there, all Ptolemy could think about was Coy and how well he understood even the incomprehensible. Coy became Ptolemy’s religion on that morning, standing in front of the most beautiful woman he had ever known.

Ptolemy gawped at the girl, who now wore a green frock that made her brown skin glow like fire.

“Are you gonna put on some pants, Mr. Grey?” were her first words to him.

He was standing there in boxer shorts, expecting some normal person who shouldn’t expect him to get dressed after being dragged from bed.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Hold on.” And he went back to his closet and pulled out a pair of brown trousers and a yellow shirt.

As he dressed he remembered that he hadn’t asked her in. Maybe she’d think this was an insult and leave. And so he went back to the door without putting on socks and shoes.

Sensia was there, waiting.

“Come on in,” he said.

He only had one chair, and that had a book, a glass of water, and three stones he’d found that day at the park on it. They were blond stones, a color he’d never seen in rock and so he picked them up and brought them home, to be with them for a while. He wondered what Coy would have said about those pebbles as he removed them, the book, and the water glass from the chair.

“Where do you want me to sit?” Sensia asked.

“What are you doin’ here, Mrs. Howard?”

“Howard’s my maiden name and I’m not married no more. At least not as far as I’m concerned.”

“You not?”

“What day is it?” she asked.

“Thursday.”

“And what day did we meet?”

“Sunday. No, no . . . Saturday.”

She smiled, studied the seating arrangements, and sat on the straight-back pine chair.

“You go sit on the bed, Mr. Grey.”

He did so.

She beamed at him and nodded. “It was Saturday, because I left Ezra on Sunday, the day after he manhandled me.”

Ptolemy felt like a bug fixed in amber, caught forever in brilliance and beauty beyond his understanding.

“Mr. Grey?”

“Yes, Miss Howard?”

“Can I come sit next to you on your bed?”

He gulped, which gave the impression of a nod, and so she moved from chair to bed, putting her hand on his knee.

“My mama always told me,” she said, “that a woman must have at least three days between men. Three whole days or people could say that she was loose.”

Ptolemy said, “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,” and they kissed lightly.

“Why you shakin’ your head, Mr. Grey?”

“Because I’m almost forty-six, will be in two months and a half, and I have never seen you comin’.”

“I’m twenty-six,” Sensia said, and then kissed his cheek, “and I been waitin’ to find you every day I been alive.”

“Me?”

“I saw you at that barbecue party and I knew that you would read to me and hold me if I had fever. I knew that you would ask me how I was today and hear every word I said. A year later when I had forgot, you’d still be there to remind me. My man.”

“And that’s why you left Ezra?”

“No. I left Ezra because he pushed on me and grabbed at me. But he did that because he knew how much I wanted to be with you.”

With that, Sensia stood up and took off her green dress and Ptolemy knew that Coy was right.

“Are you gonna take off them pants?” she asked him, and the dream shifted while someone in the room moaned, either in ecstasy or pain.