The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“An’ when my mama died and I was supposed to come up here, Mr. Roman took me ovah to his house an’ told me that he loved me. I told him that I loved him too an’ that I was gonna miss him, but he said that it wasn’t the same thing. He said that if I was a young woman, even though he was old, that he would make me his wife and buy me a house with a swimmin’ pool in the backyard and a movie screen in the basement.

“And I wished that I was older and that Mr. Roman could make me his wife. I was even thinkin’ that I’d go back down home when I was eighteen and ask him if he still loved me. And then I met you, Papa Grey.

“Papa Grey, are you awake?”

The old man was breathing heavily, snoring lightly on and off.

“Anyway,” Robyn continued, “when I met you I knew that you loved me like Mr. Roman did but that you wouldn’t let nobody take me away and just hope that I’d come back someday. Even when you couldn’t think so good, and then when you could, you wanted to look aftah me. I don’t need nobody to take care’a me, not no more. I just need somebody to want to.”

While Robyn spoke, Ptolemy could hear himself breathing like a man asleep. He was asleep, but still he heard every word. He imagined the young girl eating peaches and the old man falling in love with her. This seemed natural. Children were there to be loved and looked after and cared for; sometimes you even had to sacrifice your life in order that a child might live.

After a while the girl talked about moving to Los Angeles and about Niecie and Hilliard and Reggie, who was an orphan too. The sleeping man listened with part of his mind, but he was also thinking about Letisha and Arthur and how Reggie was like a son to him.

Now he was an old man and there were children to look after, and one child to avenge.

Ptolemy smiled in his sleep, thinking all the way back to that day the white minister had shaken his hand. He had given that arrogant old white man something, and he had taken something away from him too.

In the morning the sleeping but still-conscious man opened his eyes. Robyn slept next to him, her arm flung over his chest. He rose up on a painful elbow and kissed the child’s forehead. She opened her eyes and hugged him.

“Do you love me, Papa Grey?” she asked.

“More than anything . . . ever.”

Pitypapa!” Niecie exclaimed when he showed up on her doorstep at 12:14 on Tuesday afternoon.

Robyn had hired him a limousine and a driver, a brown man with a Spanish accent named Hernandez. She had wanted to come with Ptolemy, but he told her that she needed to put Coydog’s treasure where nobody could get at it but her.

“But why you got to go see Niecie so bad?” she’d asked him.

“For Reggie.”

“Reggie’s dead, Papa Grey.”

“Ain’t nobody full dead until no one remembah they name. Don’t forget that, girl—as long you remembah me, I’ma be alive in you.”

Robyn crying, it seemed to Ptolemy, was a woman at war with herself. She couldn’t let herself go completely, but the tears rolled down her left eye, and her beautiful lips trembled.

He tried to put his arms around her but she pulled away.

“Robyn.”

“Your car prob’ly outside, Papa Grey. You bettah be goin’.”

This your family we going to?” Hernandez the driver asked Ptolemy on the way to Niecie’s house.

“Yes, sir. Real blood family too. The kind you can’t shake off.”

The driver, a broad-faced man, laughed.

“What’s your name?” Ptolemy asked from the backseat.

“Hernandez.”

“Well, Mr. Hernandez—”

“No, Mr. Grey, not Mr. Hernandez, just Hernandez. I like that name.”

“You from around here, Hernandez?”

“Fifty years here,” he said. “Forty-eight, really. When I was seven my parents came up from a farm in the south of Mexico.”

“You still speak Spanish?”

“No. I just got this accent is all. I know some words.”

“Remembah back in the old days when we all lived together?” Ptolemy asked. “Mexicans, Negroes, Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese on the one side—”

“And white people on the other,” Hernandez said, finishing the litany.

Both men laughed.

“What happened to us?” Ptolemy asked.

“White man shined a light on us and we froze like deer in the road. After that we all went crazy and started tearin’ each other apart.”

Ptolemy frowned and sat back in his seat. Even the Devil’s fire couldn’t help him to understand why what both he and Hernandez knew was true.

Hernandez dropped him at Niecie’s door with a business card so that he could call if it was time to go home and the driver was off somewhere. The black man and the brown shook hands over the seat.

“Nobody evah put us on the news, huh, Hernandez?”

“What you mean, Mr. Grey?”

“Us gettin’ along ain’t news.”

Hernandez laughed and got out to open the door for his client.

Niecie cried happily and Ptolemy walked in the house. Nina was there with her children. Hilliard was on a couch in the corner, watching a small TV in a pink plastic case.

“Come ovah here and say hi to Pitypapa,” Niecie said to her son.

“Hey,” Hilly said, going so far as to turn his eyes away from the screen.

“Go on back to your TV, boy,” Ptolemy said, waving dismissively.