The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

Ptolemy noticed then that she was wearing a maroon dress with pink flowers stitched into it. It was faded and worn.

“Madeline Richards made that dress for you, didn’t she?” Ptolemy asked.

Robyn grinned when she saw the surprise on her one-time guardian’s face.

“How did you know that?”

“Sensie introduced you to Maddie. An’ Maddie made clothes for a livin’. She always was partial to flower patterns, an’ when she couldn’t find no cloth with a flower she sewed some on.”

“I remember meetin’ Maddie,” Niecie said. “She made this dress maybe fifteen years ago.”

“When you was a li’l girl your uncle Roger called you Betty Boop because you loved to watch that cartoon on the TV. If you’d sing her boop-boop-pe-doop song he’d give you two nickels.”

Hilda “Niecie” Brown frowned and cocked her head again. Her eyes narrowed to slits, and after a moment or two she nodded.

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s right. Uncle Roger. He died in Vietnam and I cried for what felt like a whole week. He wasn’t really my uncle, though.”

“That’s what yo’ mama said, but he was her brother usin’ another name because he had killed a man in Alabama and then took on another man’s identity. He died under a false name. He really was your uncle, but nobody said it so that he didn’t get put on a Alabama chain gang.”

“You remembah all that, Pitypapa?”

“Doctor cured me, baby,” Ptolemy said as he rose to his feet.

Robyn stood behind him, her hand still in her purse, her eye on Hilliard.

“He opened my mind all the way back to the first day I could remembah as a child. I can think so clear that I could almost remembah what my father’s father was thinkin’ the day he conceived my old man. So you could say what you will but that boy there’s a thief an’ if you don’t tell him sumpin’ he gonna go the way that Roger would’a gone if anybody evah breathed his real name.”

Robyn kept her eyes on Hilly while Niecie stared at her uncle, looking for the man she’d seen little more than a month before.

When she didn’t speak, Ptolemy addressed her again: “I’ma give you that six hunnert dollahs for these kids here ev’ry month. As long as they with you I’ma give it to ’em, but I won’t if you send ’em back to they mama.”

Ptolemy gazed down at the children and they cowered. The boy scrunched up his dark face, trying to understand what the money had to do with him and his sister.

“They wit’ me,” Niecie said, and Ptolemy nodded.

He then turned to the brutish boy. “Hilly, you saved me from that crazy woman and so I forgive you. I’ma call on you sometime soon ’cause I need to know somethin’.”

“What you wanna know from me?”

“Later.”

Ptolemy touched Robyn’s shoulder and they walked out the door and away from the house, moving slowly, like royalty surveying the plight of the poor.

“Why you wanna get Hilly all mad, Uncle?” Robyn said on the bus ride home.

She was wearing the yellow dress that he’d bought her at the women’s clothes store. He knew it was wrong, that the dress reminded him of the day he met Sensia Howard, but he couldn’t stop himself—he loved both women so.

“Yellow’s my favorite color,” he’d told her, “and you my favorite girl.”

But on the bus he just nodded and said, “I need a inroad.”

“What you mean, Uncle Grey?”

“The men just come to you, don’t they, girl?” he asked instead of answering her question directly.

“Huh?”

“Men,” he repeated. “They just come to you—on the street, in the bus, at the movies. They all wanna know you, want you to smile at ’em.”

“Nobody I wanna know.”

“Imagine if nobody evah looked at you twice,” Ptolemy said.

His mind straddled two worlds. He no longer needed a translator to decipher what was going on around him, but he was still sitting by the Tickle River, talking to Coy and making plans for a future eighty years from then.

“What you mean?” Robyn asked.

“Some people got a magnet in ’em,” Ptolemy said, pulling his mind away from the deep-blue past. “No one understands why, but there’s people you just wanna know. You might be quiet and shy, but that someone walk by you and you climb right ovah your fear an’ say, ‘How you doin’?’ just like you was old friends. That’s you, Robyn. I know, ’cause my Sensie was like that. Men, and women too, would come up to her and ask her to be wit’ them. She met this schoolteacher one time, Mrs. Gladys Pine. Gladys told Sensie she loved her and for a week or two they’d meet in the afternoons at a motel on Slauson.”

“When she was married to you?” Robyn asked.

“Sensie told me she liked Gladys’s mind and she didn’t feel like she was cheatin’ ’cause it was a woman and not a man.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Anyway, Gladys finally told her husband that she was leavin’, that she had fount her true love. The next day Sensie told her that they’d have to stop meetin’ at the motel. The day aftah that, Paul Pine put a bullet in his head.”

“Damn.”