It's All Love

by Marita Golden

  MR. CATES LAY THERE on the deck, blood staining his shirt collar. But as red as that collar got, no one moved. Lynette remembers how still everyone became. Except for her father, who was cursing into the alley. Mr. Cates's surprise landing had bounced the ribs from the grill into a Dumpster below. Mr. Simmons looked back to Lynette and then glared at Mr. Cates, who wasn't focused on much of anything. Her father threw the grill fork into the alley, and they heard it clatter in the Dumpster.

  That's when it looked like Mr. Cates suddenly knew where he was. He rubbed his head. Blood smeared over half his face. For a moment his eyes got big and then rolled back. He shook himself, got his face straight, and said, “I'm sorry.”

  Berthine began laughing so hard that she fell back in her chair. Then Norman and Odessa busted out laughing. Lynette knew that if her mother was there, no one would be laughing. Avis Simmons was a graceful, serious woman, the kind who, Lynette felt, never did the wrong thing.

  She knew laughing was the wrong thing. She was a quiet girl, a child who would get called out by her teacher for getting lost in pictures in her math book more so than the math or the dove-shaped birthmark on the neck of the girl who sat next to her. She would hear the teacher's voice from far off: Lynette Simmons, close your mouth before a fly moves in! At recess and lunch, kids would stare at her and mock her openmouthed fascination with things they had missed. She wished she could say something to stop Berthine and the rest from laughing, but Berthine had a sharp tongue that Lynette did not want to challenge.

  Lynette's father went to help Mr. Cates. “Sammy Cates! What's in your mind, bustin’ up my damn roof like that?”

  Mr. Cates didn't answer.

  “I just put the damn thing on this past April!” her father was saying, “And look at my chair! How am I gonna fix that?”

  Uncle Norman was saying, “How we gonna eat?”

  Mr. Cates loosened his tie. He was looking at Lynette, and she was reminded of the stares she received from the men at the bus stop on Georgia Avenue, the way they looked her up and down with tight-lipped smiles, feeling something she did not. They weren't like the boys her age, who were too busy rubbernecking at titties to notice anything special about her. Though his lips were tight, Mr. Cates's stare was different.

  Berthine, who was watching this exchange, hooted to Lynette, “Honey, Sammy Cates ain't looking at nothing you ain't even growed yet!” Lynette laughed a little, feeling some tingle there, on the skin of her chest, or maybe just inside, because more than embarrassment or fear, she felt warm with fascination.

  She wondered if he knew who she was. There were times when she felt that only her mother and Berthine noticed her, and that was usually to criticize. Surely Mr. Cates had noticed her in the laundry room, on the elevator, or playing in the courtyard of the building.

  Now, on her deck, Mr. Cates smiled at Lynette—gently, a pastor's smile—as if he could just smile away her troubles. She thinks now how odd that was: him sitting there, bruised and bleeding, looking certain that everything would work out. She smiled back, but then his face got serious, like he was apologizing again.

  THE BLUE LINE HEADS to Springfield. Samuel Cates stands facing the subway door. Lynette sits where she can study his profile. He stoops more than stands. He reminds her of Ever-ton Fox, the weatherman she sometimes catches when she watches the BBC. She's embarrassed that Everton Fox comes to mind—her, a girl from Meridian Hill, Chocolate City born and bred, watching the BBC like some Embassy Row highbrow. If she had a group of Friday-night-at-the-hair-salon girlfriends to trade stories with, she'd tell them, Everton looks like a filled-out Billy Dee. I know he must love him some ribs and greens… and she'd lean into a friend's hip while they both doubled over, so her TV crush would seem more like girl-talk than fantasy. She smiles for a moment, because she'd like some Fridays to be like that.

  But why would Everton Fox come to mind? He's nothing like Mr. Cates—Cates is small-boned and stooped; he has salt-and-pepper hair, with a less satisfied stomach than Fox—and what is she embarrassed about? She can't say for sure.

  She puts her grocery bag between her feet. She has just the one now; the meats, ice cream, and milk she left on the bench. She is not sure where Mr. Cates is headed, but it's sure to be far enough for cold foods to spoil. She's particular about such things, how long eggs are out of the fridge, whether potato salad sits in sun or shade. These concerns she's carried from her mother's house, a place where bed sheets were ironed and hair was always pressed, elbows and knees glistened with Vaseline, and children answered with yes, ma'am rather than yeah. She lives in the same building she grew up in. Sixth floor now instead of fourth. Two bedrooms, with a southern view of downtown. Low-rent high-rise, a few blocks from Malcolm X Park. The city's salary allows her that much. Six floors in Meridian Hill, tallest hill in the city, higher than ten stories near Georgetown. Prime real estate if White folks lived near Brown folks.

  Where does Samuel Cates live now? It's just past rush hour on a Friday, so she figures he must be headed home, somewhere along where the Blue Line snakes through Northwest D.C. or Virginia. Or is it north of Georgetown? Does he got it like that? This is a movin'-on-up step she can't reconcile. She has never known what he did for a living, but she also hasn't figured him as a suburban type. She's known folks who moved into Land-over, Rockville, Prince George's County, where the cul-de-sacs, condo rows, and ranch styles look like the suburbs, but the people lived it like the best and worst of Southeast D.C. Folks moved out to P. G. County, Bowie, Wheaton when they got their money together or wanted to look like they had money to get together. When Lynette was young, she did not think of Mr. Cates as a man with money. He almost always wore white button-down shirts, no tie, no suit. Sometimes his shirts were wrinkled. On weekends he wore blue button-downs. She saw him in a T-shirt only once. Maybe he managed a store or was an orderly in some clinic. None of that matches up with the Mr. Cates headed into Northwest: That didn't feel right, even when she considers the worsted wool and loafers she has dressed him in for twenty years. Folks don't just up and move from the hood to Georgetown, do they?

  But Mr. Cates was always hard to place. He lived alone. He was a well-groomed man but never wore a suit. No one knew how he paid his rent or could pin down his schedule. When Lynette and her mother would see him, her mother always asked him over for dinner or to visit their church. That was Avis Simmons's way; she didn't like to see people lonely. But each time Mr. Cates would start in with some excuse, his voice trailing off into a mumble that no one could understand.

  Lynette used to steal glances as he sorted through his mail at the elevator doors. He had all sorts of mail: cookware catalogs, coupon books, small boxes from music clubs, brightly colored oversize envelopes. Sometimes Lynette would see a stray envelope or catalog on a table or windowsill in the lobby and want to pick it up, but her mother wouldn't allow it.

  SAMUEL CATES STARES INTO THE DARK of the Metro tunnel. Lynette watches his face for signs, a scar, furrowed brow, a furtive look of worry or elation. When she was younger she imagined that after his jump, such a man would have a twitch or would hold his head to one side, eyes leveled at your shoes or just past your face if conversation was unavoidable.

  Now he clutches his Washington Bullets bag. Lynette has not thought of him as a basketball fan. Or perhaps the bag just suits what he has to carry. What's in the bag? Books, old newspapers, empty Tupperware he's left too long in the break room fridge at work, shoes—the loafers, perhaps—uniform, gift for his children, frozen dinner, car alternator, a gun? The bulge against the cloth looks like anything and gives away nothing. Sammy Cates, what's in the bag?

  SHE REMEMBERS how after Mr. Cates had been smiling at her for too long, her daddy said, “Go on inside and change your shirt, girl,” but she knew he said it just to sound like a father. She didn't move.

  Her father then tried to help Mr. Cates to his feet, but Mr. Cates said he was fine. Mr. Simmons said he could give a got-damn about how Mr. Cates felt, and went
on about his lounger and his deck roof. Odessa helped Berthine get up. Uncle Norman picked the last beer from the cooler, went to look at the ribs in the Dumpster, and whistled like he'd just seen a car accident. He rubbed his chest and lifted his nose to the breeze, which brought with it the smell of chicken frying at Wings ‘N Things, over on Georgia Avenue.

  Lynette had stretched the tea-soaked shirt from her skin and bent down to pick up the broken pitcher. There was still a little ice tea left in the bottom half. She poured it through the wooden planks of the deck, watched the liquid trickle away into the shadows, and waited to hear it hit the drain at the edge of the deck. Lynette heard the front door of the apartment close and her mother drop bags on the coffee table before she stepped past Lynette and onto the deck.

  Avis Simmons looked over the scene on the deck and said, “What in the hell is going on?”

  Uncle Norman said, “Sho’ ain't supper,” and tried to keep from laughing.

  Maybe they thought Mrs. Simmons was joking, but she wasn't laughing. She was looking at Mr. Cates, who wasn't laughing either.

  Mr. Simmons helped Mr. Cates lean against a post and then stepped back.

  All the while Uncle Norman was smiling. He eased against the rail and chuckled, “Maybe if you knowed how to stand the fuck up, you might make it to the got-damn alley!”

  You see, Mr. Cates was hard to help. It wasn't that he was overweight or weak, but he was uncoordinated. He was dizzy, and he was bleeding, and he was the quiet man from upstairs whom everyone saw but no one knew. And it seemed to Ly-nette that since Mr. Cates wasn't dead, Norman didn't care if he was hurt or embarrassed.

  Mrs. Simmons said, “Hot today, ain't it?” She could have been talking to anyone.

  But Mr. Cates said, “Yeah. It is.”

  Lynette's father looked up through the jagged hole in the roof and said, “Like that's some damn news!”

  Berthine and Odessa clasped each other's hands to keep from bursting out again.

  “It's Saturday, Samuel,” Lynette's mother said. “Why you wearing your Sunday suit?”

  WHERE HAS HE been all this time? Lynette should know about where he's been. Knowing how people are living is her job. She's worked in Children's Welfare at Health and Human Services a long time, long enough to give more instructions than she gets. Last year they promoted her to an office—same desk in the same corner of the room where she's worked the last twelve years, but now the desk sits behind a metal door and opaque glass partition. Lynette keeps scores of cases in her head. Most are difficult. Many impossible. A dozen or so have set her to crying at the kitchen table before she goes to work. A few she carries with her long after they have grown up, moved away, died young, or been locked down. She watches how people live. Though she swears herself from forecasting, she feels she has a keen sense for how people's lives will turn out.

  There's not a soul Lynette can think of to call on evenings or weekends, but she believes she is a people person. Not the sort who socializes over cocktails and bid whist. The sort who knows people's cousins, godmothers, and deacons. She knows who's in the hospital, who just got out, who's pregnant, divorced, or both. From the time that she moved back into the building, she has followed the passing of elders, families growing, moving in, moving out. She knows well only the people on her floor, but she knows about most who live in the building. Lynette Simmons, who hasn't a gossip mate or phone pal, knows that Elvin and Tracy, the Brevard boys from the second floor, sneak girls into their momma's place during school hours. She knows that the entire fourth floor had been rented by Sal-vadorans until Immigration cleared them out. She knows the gossip on the super's new Lincoln: Somebody's wife bought that car. She has watched the Elkins family move from the back of the first floor to the front of the fifth, and finally to the large corner unit on the third.

  Lynette would like to be certain that she saw Mr. Cates sometimes after the day he jumped. But she has forgotten. After that day she would steel her preteen nerves when entering the elevator and quickly press the button for her floor. Sometimes she hoped for a short trip if Mr. Cates was already in the elevator, riding from the basement where he bundled newspapers or placed wrapped trash at the bottom of the Dumpster. If he wasn't in the elevator, she might hold her arm across the doors for a moment, for sometimes she dared herself to bump into him by chance. But she can't remember when she stopped seeing him in the elevator: Was she twelve? Sixteen? So much of it blurs together.

  She has often tried to pin down when he moved out of the building. Sometimes, when she is preparing for bed, she gets it in her mind that it wasn't that she saw Mr. Cates less but that she simply stopped looking out for him. She remembers that it was sometime in her high school years that she began to imagine her own Mr. Cates—Mr. Cates as a librarian or dentist; grown man with no family, no friends; his weekends spent in the Smithsonian.

  METRO CENTER STATION is approaching. Mr. Cates adjusts his grip on the bag before stepping off the train. Lynette follows, quick steps to keep up, a few moments’ rest on a bench, to ease her eagerness. It's not the forgetting, she comforts herself. Everybody forgets. It's the misremembering that causes the void. Because she's not sure what to think next, she tells herself that she has misremembered this Mr. Cates, mistaken how he should have looked for someone else, Everton Fox, for example—if he were slimmer—or an old professor, or the produce man at the grocery store who smiles but never speaks.

  Mr. Cates heads for the Red Line, bound for Shady Grove. Still traveling west and north. Where's he going? Chevy Chase? Bethesda? That man don't live in no Chevy Chase, she thinks. Folks who live in Chevy Chase don't ride Metro. Rockville makes more sense. Red Line to Rockville or Twin-brook. Ground-floor apartment, she imagines, two-bedroom on a row of cinder-block condos. It's full of old newspapers and clumps of cat hair, which explains why he picks at his blazer like a teen obsessed with zits. She checks her watch to time how long he preens his clothes. Lynette smiles at the intensity of his gestures—traits she would find both annoying and precious in a spouse.

  LYNETTE SAT at the kitchen table while her father and Norman argued in the living room about what to do with Mr. Cates. Berthine and Odessa were on the couch, watching Lynette's father and Norman do little but talk. Her mother was on the deck, with Mr. Cates.

  Lynette watched her mother wipe the blood from Mr. Cates's face. He had taken off his suit jacket, and her mother was working at getting him to take off his shirt, to see if he had any other injuries. He didn't want that. When she reached for his buttons, he took hold of Mrs. Simmons's wrist and wouldn't let go. Mr. Cates looked from her face to her hands and then away, looking for somebody who might be watching. His neck loosened and he ran his forehead along Momma's hand. She gently eased one of his hands from her wrist, and with her other hand she lifted his head up to wipe it.

  Norman was trying to get her father worked up. “What if that crazy nigger try something on your wife?” Norman said toward the TV.

  “Sammy Cates ain't the man to pull that kinda shit.” Her father was talking to the TV too. “ ‘Sides, if he tried anything, way Avis is, he wish he did hit the alley. Crazy-ass Negro, all he is.”

  In all her life Lynette saw her father push her mother only once. When that happened, Avis Simmons picked herself up, went to the bathroom, closed the door, and didn't come out until long after supper. But early Thursday morning, long before he woke, she took the bolt key from his ring. Her father never noticed, and after he left for work in the evening, her mother bolted the front door until Sunday. Lynette never knew where her father went, but he came back with cherry blossoms in his hand, singing Donny Hathaway songs from the alley. All Mrs. Simmons ever said was: “… on the third day, he rose up and came into his right mind,” and Lynette never saw any more pushing.

  Norman and Mr. Simmons sipped at their beer and waited to see what her mother was going to do. Berthine and Odessa were chattering back and forth to each other. Berthine said something about hoping Mr. Cates didn't die or e
lse she wouldn't have a good story to tell after Sunday-morning service, and Odessa said Berthine should be ashamed of herself: God was looking down on all of them. But Berthine was already figuring out, come Sunday, who she would gossip to first.

  MR. CATES GETS OFF at Dupont Circle. This surprises Lynette, so much so that she nearly misses making it off the train. She was settled in for a longer ride. She had been lost in her thoughts, as people often are on long train rides: lost in spy novels, classifieds, and box scores—eyes closed, bopping their heads to the music spinning from disk to headphones—or sitting blank and glassy-eyed, casting their worries and daydreams into the darkness beyond the windows. Lynette, thinking Mr. Cates's stop was a long way off, was somewhere in that darkness. It was Mr. Cates's sudden absence from the train doorway that snapped her back to focus, and then she was rushing between the Metro car's closing doors to follow where he must have gone.

  She stands on the platform, getting her bearings. Mr. Cates is already rising to the top of the first escalator that will take him out of the station. She gives him some time and follows only after he's stepped off the short escalator leading away from the platform. Lynette watches him slip through the exit gates and toward the escalator to the street. With Samuel Cates several steps ahead, she begins to climb the stairs of the escalator, ascending through the long concrete tube of the Metro exit, its end a bowl of dark, bruise-colored sky into which commuters seem to fall as they step off the top of their ride and go their way. Lynette pauses, looks up at the sky, the dimmed haze of city air waiting to meet her as she rises into it. Mr. Cates steps off, and his head dips out of sight.