Page 54 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“That ain’t kindness. That’s her giving you the benefit of the doubt you may not have earned yet.” She pointed her spoon at me briefly. “Don’t confuse those two things.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She ate. I ate. The television laughed at something in the other room.

“That knocking was been going on since March,” she said. “I called a plumber. He told me it wasn’t nothing serious. Charged me sixty dollars.”

“He was wrong.”

“Evidently.” She looked at me over her glasses. “How much does that part cost?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

She gave me a look that could have peeled paint.

“Twenty-two dollars,” I said.

“I’ll give you twenty-five.”

“You don’t have to⁠—”

“I know I don’t have to. I’m going to.” She got up, went to the counter by the refrigerator where she kept a small jar, counted out bills without rushing, and set them beside my bowl. Twenty-five dollars, exact. I put them in my pocket.

She sat back down.

“Truth’s good,” she said without looking at me. Statement, not a question, but the kind of statement that requires confirmation.

“Yes, ma’am. She’s doing well.”

“Baby’s good.”

“Baby’s strong.”

Delphine nodded once, slowly, and went back to eating. That was the whole conversation. She didn’t need me to expand on it, and she didn’t need me to perform gratitude about being allowed to sit in her kitchen and eat her beans at ten o’clock. She just needed the information and the water heater fixed, and I had provided both. That was what this was.

I finished the bowl. She took it without asking and ran it under the water.

“Same time you heading out,” she said, setting it in the rack, “you can check that light fixture in the hallway. The one by the bathroom been flickering for two weeks, and I’m too old to climb that ladder.”

“I don’t have a bulb.”

“I got a bulb. I just don’t got the ladder sense.”

I fixed the light. It took four minutes. She watched from the hallway with her arms crossed and did not thank me, which was also fine.

Truth called while I was two blocks from her mother’s house.

“Raven said you were at Mama’s.”

“I was.”

“What were you doing over there?”

“Water heater needed a part. Fixed a light in the hallway.”

Silence. A particular kind of silence that meant she was processing something she hadn’t expected and was deciding what to do with it.

“She feed you?” Truth asked.