She approached with a pep in her step, but then she paused. She took me all in, her eyes treating me like something that could break if mishandled.
“Nick. My cousin!” she said, hugging me carefully but no less warmly. “It’s so good to see you.”
“You too,” I said, forcing a smile.
She looped her arm through mine as if I were a designer bag and led me to a cab that was waiting on the street.
I didn’t speak during the ride into Harlem. I felt bad for it, but Daisy didn’t press. Our shared silence was an oasis of peace.
The car stopped on Amsterdam Avenue in front of a two-story, peach-colored wooden house. It was almost joined to a tall brick apartment building on its left and another on its right. The house was jam and the two buildings bread, coming to squeeze its walls in.
I followed Daisy up the porch’s tiny staircase and through the front door. She didn’t give me a tour of the house—just showed me straight to my room on the first floor.
She asked me how I felt. I lied and said I was fine.
I could tell Daisy didn’t believe me. “I’ll give you space,” she said. “But let me know if you need anything.”
I needed everything and nothing, so I chose silence again. And she left me about my silent business.
I curled into bed and slept for hours and hours. When I woke at night, I heard Daisy and Auntie Lorraine whispering outside my door.
“Poor thing must be in pieces,” Auntie said. “His father was a heck of a man.”
“We’ll just give him more time?” Daisy returned.
Auntie Lorraine then knocked and opened the door to bring me my toothbrush, towels, and some of Uncle Beet’s old clothes. She was tall and sturdy with a crown of springy curls half tamed beneath a colorful headscarf, and she wore an apron with faint stains on it.
All she did when she came in was say, “I brought you some things,” and then she pulled me into a long hug. The hug was so long and tight it made me weightless. I forgot about gravity. In those moments, the world wasn’t dragging me down.
And when she let go, I was alone in my room again, facing the mundane and unfeeling passage of time.
As the days passed, my cousin and Auntie left silent offerings at my door—sandwiches and soups, but the food didn’t hit like it should’ve. My stomach was always hurting.
I spent my waking hours staring outside. I wrote poetry by the window, which faced a brick alley wall, where people had left their mattresses and unwanted furniture leaning. A stray autumn leaf skittered across the hem of the bricks.
I felt as lonely as that leaf. Lonely as the homeless man digging through the garbage can and the three boys who came to throw a rubber ball against the wall so hard it seemed the air inside the ball would rip out of its horsehide prison.
Pop!it said.Pop!
My eyes flew periodically to the money bags resting at the foot of my bed, until I mustered up the strength to assess them. I kneltbeside the bed and opened the bags, pulling out the wrapped bundles—folds of bills smelling brand-new, untouched by the smoke and fire that took Greenwood.
Who did all this belong to? A bank? A crooked man? Someone who’d earned it honest?
I didn’t know, and that thought made my hands sweat as I handled the bills. I felt like a bandit, wrong as I sorted through the outcome of someone else’s labor. Two hundred dollars total—enough to eat for a few months and disappear again, if I needed to.
I emptied the money into the bottom drawer of the room’s dresser as if it were a secret worth hiding. At the bottom of one bag—underneath the bills—I came across Mr. Wallace’s tin of grease. The only trinket I had to remember the man by.
I pulled it out. Screwed the lid off. Gave it a sniff. The chemical stench sliced at my nostrils, sharp and burning, as if pulling me into a toxic trance. This stuff was deadly.
Knock knock knock.
Someone was at the door. I froze, waiting for the knocking to stop. And when I was sure I wouldn’t be pressed with questions, I went to open it.
At my feet, just beyond the threshold, was a small shopping bag, the scent of laundry detergent drifting up from it.
Laundry. A harmless chore that could be an excuse to creep outside, tiptoe down the stairs, and go to the garage where the Wash ’N’ Fold was, just to check things out. That’s where Auntie and Uncle served the community all its laundry needs.
I packed my sweat-stained clothes into the money bags and wentout back. I walked past Auntie’s crop garden to get to the garage door that was left half open. I curled underneath it to get inside. There were two large laundry machines with giant cranks, and clothes folded in carts or strung up on thin wire hangers. A couple of dryers stood against the far wall, their mouths open as if waiting for me to feed them.
