by Andrea Cheng
“I miss your mama too,” Monte says suddenly.
“You do?” I never thought of that.
“I used to wish I could stay at your house.”
“Why’s that?”
Monte looks over at his brother. “Your mother said when I got older, she’d teach me how to play piano just like you.”
“I’ll teach you,” I say.
“We don’t have a piano.”
“Your mom said we’re getting one.”
“And then you can teach me,” he says, lying down on my mattress. Soon his breathing is slow and even. There’s a breeze blowing in through the open window. I cover Monte with the sheet.
13
Mr. Willie cleans Ms. Smith’s garage, and she gives him a whole bag of seeds in small envelopes: beans, cucumbers, lettuce, spinach, carrots, tomatoes, radishes.
“Why don’t people pay you with money?” I ask.
“They do, sometimes. But trading is simpler. More basic. I used to trade piano playing for haircuts, food, whatever.”
“Mama did that sometimes, like she cooked a chicken for the lady who tuned our piano.”
“Tuning is something I never could do,” Mr. Willie says.
Mama said Can you hum a C, Jerome, and I closed my eyes and the C came out low and clear. That boy has perfect pitch, she told Daddy, isn’t that a gift? Daddy said What’s that good for? So he can tune pianos the rest of his life?
“My mother said I have perfect pitch,” I say.
“Now that’s a stroke of luck,” Mr. Willie says. “Sharon had it too, even with her hearing as bad as it was.”
I keep on digging, turning over the soil, breaking up the clods. “Where is Sharon now?”
“Last I heard, she was staying down on Reading Road,” Mr. Willie says. “In one of those group homes.”
I pick up a fat worm and watch it wriggle in my palm. “After Sharon left, did Miss Myrtle still teach you piano?”
Mr. Willie nods. “Every day. She got me ready for my audition.”
“Audition?”
“You had to audition to get into the music conservatory.”
“And you got in?”
Mr. Willie nods. “I was so nervous I could hardly stop shaking and I thought nobody can play the piano shaking like a leaf, but once I got past the first measure, I forgot all about the audition because the music was in me and it was coming out.”
“What were you playing?”
“Bach Invention Number Eleven in G Minor.”
“Me and Mama were working on those inventions.”
“They look simple but they’re hard to play. Each hand is separate, doing its own thing, but then they come back together.”
“It’s like being with someone even when you’re not,” I say.
Mama played the left hand and I played the right, not too loud. Sometimes we got our hands all tangled up. Our fingers are like spaghetti, she said, laughing. When she got sick I played both hands, making the melody come out louder so she could hear the tune. She closed her eyes and listened, and I heard her breathe and thought What if she just stops?
“We’ll play those inventions someday,” Mr. Willie says.
14
We have lunch inside the carriage house. Mr. Willie brings out a loaf of bread, peanut butter, and jelly. He makes three sandwiches, one for him, one for me, and one to share. I’m looking around Mr. Willie’s place. The floor is broken-up concrete. There’s a mattress in one corner, a few hooks with shirts, and a wooden shelf with Mr. Beethoven on top.
“Hey, Jerome.” Monte’s voice is close, coming from outside. “Hey, Jerome, where are you?”
I go out, holding my sandwich. “What do you want?”
“Look.” Monte points to a big white Cadillac parked right in front of the mansion. Three white men in suits get out of the car. They walk up the front steps, but they don’t go in. Then they come around back and look at the carriage house and at me and Monte. They poke around for a few minutes in the honeysuckle bushes. Finally they get back into their Cadillac and drive back down the way they came.
Mr. Willie comes out with a thermos. “Someone was looking at the mansion,” I say.
“Looking isn’t buying,” he says.
“They might buy it,” I say.
“Might or might not. No matter. We got our work to do,” he says, reaching for the bucket.
“Can I help?” Monte asks.
I wish he wouldn’t follow me around, but Mr. Willie says, “I can use all the help I can get.” Then he tells Monte what size stone he needs, small, medium, or large, and Monte gets it for him.
“Mama and Ms. Smith and Ms. Jackson were talking, and they said whoever buys this place is most definitely taking it down,” Monte says.
“You mean the carriage house?”
“I mean everything,” Monte says.
We don’t need to hear what’s going to happen when Monte has no idea what he’s talking about. I didn’t need to hear either, how Mama’s hair was going to fall out and she was going to get weaker and weaker. Anyway it wasn’t true because she dug carrots in our garden the day before she passed. She said Jerome, don’t forget to dig the potatoes out small. New potatoes are better than old ones, you know.
Mr. Willie’s working fast, not talking, building that wall up like it was new. I’m using the leftover rocks to divide our garden into four sections.
The Cadillac comes back around. The men are sitting inside with the windows up and the air conditioner on. The driver rolls his window down. “You know anything about this place?” he asks.
“A little,” Mr. Willie says.
“Looks like it’s been abandoned for quite some time,” he says.
“Several years,” Mr. Willie says.
The man stretches his neck out the window. “The neighborhood seems a bit rundown.”
Mr. Willie looks that man right in his eyes. “Depends on how you look at it.”
The man drives off without thanking us.
Damon is there, bouncing his basketball. “What they want?” he asks his brother.
“They said the neighborhood is rundown.”
Damon laughs. “Like we need them to tell us.” He moves the basketball around his waist, then pretends to make a shot. “What you digging for now?” he asks.
I don’t answer.
“You deaf or something?”
“We’re fixing the wall and making a garden,” I say.
“Farmers.” He laughs. “Couple of farmers, that’s what you are. Mama’s looking for you,” he says to his brother.
“What for?”
“You better go find out.”
Monte and Damon disappear down the hill.
Mr. Willie stoops to pick up a small rock and cleans it off on his jeans. “Well, if this isn’t special,” he says, handing it to me. “Know what it is?”
The stone is chiseled and triangular. “An arrowhead?” I ask.
Mr. Willie nods. “A little piece of history. You know, long before they built this mansion, there was forest here, and the Indians hunted deer, turkey, wild boar.” Mr. Willie sets a stone in place. “Like I told you, there’s history in everything.”
I breathe on the arrowhead and shine it with my T-shirt. It looks brand-new, like it was made yesterday instead of a few hundred years ago.
“Keep it,” Mr. Willie says.
I put the arrowhead into my pocket to show to Mama. No, Mama’s not at home waiting for me, waiting to hear about my day, waiting to see what’s in my pockets. That’s a buffalo-head nickel, Jerome. You found it on the sidewalk? You have good eyes, like I used to when I was a girl. Let’s go to the library, Jerome, and find a book about coins so we can start a collection.
Mr. Willie gets the thermos and pours us each a cup of cold water. We drink it fast. He starts humming a tune as he rinses our cups in the hose.
“The first movement of the Mozart Piano Concerto no. 23,” I say.
Mr. Willie looks way down the street. �
�The day I got into the conservatory, Miss Myrtle was so happy she couldn’t stop crying.” Mr. Willie shakes his head. “Only thing she didn’t consider was that being a black piano player wasn’t going to be so easy.”
“Why not?”
Mr. Willie straightens out his back. “People always assumed I was serving food at the gigs, not playing piano.” He looks down. “One time they told me to go in the back door, and I said I am part of a quintet, sir, I am the pianist.”
Mr. Willie saying that makes me feel funny, like all that history Mama told me about wasn’t really so long ago after all, like if it could happen to Mr. Willie it could happen to me too.
“Excuses. Maybe I’m just making up excuses,” Mr. Willie says.
“For what?”
“For why I didn’t finish at the conservatory.”
“Do you think you’ll be playing the piano again?”
“No doubt,” Mr. Willie says.
“Was it a grand you used to play?”
“Upright,” Mr. Willie says. “A big white upright.”
“Mine was black,” I say.
15
Mr. Willie gets a longer garden hose from Ms. Sullivan in return for fixing her back steps. He screws it onto the other hose so we can water the garden, since we don’t seem to be getting any rain these days and it’s been over ninety degrees for more than two weeks straight. The TV calls it an inversion layer. Aunt Geneva says they can call it whatever they want, but, fact is, we are baking to a crisp in Cincinnati.
I’m spraying the little radish plants when a half-falling-apart van pulls up in front of the mansion. A couple gets out, a man with silver hair past his shoulders and a skinny little lady who smiles at me. She takes a crowbar out of the van and hands it to the man. He hands it back. Then she goes to the front door of the mansion and tries to pry the board off, but it’s nailed pretty tight. Finally the man helps her and they go on in.
“They’re breaking into Miss Myrtle’s house,” Mr. Willie says. “Right in front of me, just breaking in.” He looks down the hill. “She would be most unhappy about that.”
We watch for a while, but the man and the lady don’t come out. I’m making the paths around the garden out of the stones Mr. Willie doesn’t need for the wall. Monte’s helping me, sorting rocks, mostly. He’s finding fossils too, like brachiopods and bryozoans.
“These must be more than one hundred years old,” Monte says.
“You mean one thousand,” I say.
“You mean more than five hundred million,” Mr. Willie says.
Hearing those numbers makes me feel small, like we’re just a tiny speck in the universe. Mama used to say Jerome, we got to do the best we can for the short time we’re on this earth, and I said It’s not short because a day has twenty-four hours and there’s seven days in a week and fifty-two weeks in a year, so if you multiply all that there’s eight thousand seven hundred thirty-six hours in a year, and that’s a lot of time. Mama said Not as long as you think, in the scheme of things. I wonder how long Mama had cancer before we even knew.
The man comes out with the lady behind him. “Is this a safe neighborhood?” the lady asks.
“There’s no trouble around here,” Mr. Willie says.
Then the man points to the carriage house. “Condemned buildings like this aren’t good for a neighborhood.” He talks to the lady like we aren’t even there.
“Maybe we can fix it up,” she says. “It’s an interesting structure.”
The man shakes his head. “Too far gone.”
They head back to the van. “See you around.” The lady smiles and waves to us.
“What’s ‘condemned’ mean?” I ask Mr. Willie.
“The building has to be fixed up.”
“What if it’s not?”
He makes a flat motion with his hand.
Too far gone, the man said. Gone too far. That’s what the doctor said. If it was sooner, maybe they could have done something, but the cancer had gone too far, spread all over, like poison ivy in Aunt Geneva’s yard.
16
Aunt Melinda is visiting from New York. Aunt Geneva has us cleaning every corner of the house. I scrub the bathroom and Monte vacuums the rugs. Damon’s supposed to be washing the floors, but Miss Geneva says he’s sloshing water all over and just moving the dirt around. “Don’t you know how to clean better than that?”
“First you tell me to clean and then you tell me I can’t do it right.” He throws the sponge into the bucket.
“You better not talk to me like that,” Aunt Geneva says. She looks at me. “Now I know your mother never put up with that kind of talk.”
I swallow hard. Once Mama tried to help me tuck in my shirt and I said Leave me alone, and she said Jerome, I never talk to you that way and I don’t expect you to talk to me that way either.
“Get on your knees and finish this f loor,” Aunt Geneva says to Damon.
He’s breathing deep, just standing there. I want to say You better get on all fours and at least look like you’re cleaning.
“You heard me,” Aunt Geneva says.
Damon kicks the side of the bucket, spilling out some water, then runs down the stairs. We hear the front door slam shut.
Monte is vacuuming the rugs over and over even though they’re already clean. I know he’s afraid to stop, afraid of how mad Aunt Geneva might be. She turns the volume on the radio up real high, then takes the sponge out of the bucket, squeezes out the excess water, and starts cleaning the floor herself and mumbling all kinds of things about what she’s going to do when Damon comes back.
“You never talked back like that, did you, Jerome.” Aunt Geneva is emptying the bucket into the toilet. “And to think that she raised you by herself.” Aunt Geneva shakes her head.
I’m scrubbing the bathtub and the tile around the faucets. I told Mama I wasn’t going to scrub the toilet because it was nasty, and she said Are you going to leave the nasty work for your mother? Is that what you have in mind?
Aunt Melinda has a bag of clothes her son outgrew. She dumps them on the clean rug and says, “Now you boys see what fits who. No sense buying new clothes when you’ll outgrow them before the year is out.”
I want to go see Mr. Willie, but Aunt Melinda says, “Go on, try them on.”
“Now?” Monte asks.
“No time like the present,” Aunt Geneva says, handing him a small button-down shirt.
“That’s a size seven,” Aunt Melinda says.
“Monte’s not much bigger than a seven-year-old,” Aunt Geneva says, and sure enough, it fits just right.
“Where is Damon?” Aunt Melinda asks.
“He stomped off somewhere,” Aunt Geneva says.
Aunt Melinda shakes her head. “It’s hard to raise boys right anymore.”
“Sy didn’t seem to have a problem.” Aunt Geneva puts her arm around me.
Sy. Most people called Mama Sylvia, all except for her two older sisters. They said when Mama was a baby she couldn’t pronounce Sylvia, so they shortened it to Sy, even though that sounds more like a man’s name to me. My daddy called her Sy too, that’s what I remember. Sy, sit over here by me. Okay, Sy?
Aunt Melinda hands me a flannel shirt. It’s so hot but I still have to try it on. “Too tight under the arms,” she says. She hands me a T-shirt that says Broncos on the front. I pull it over my head and she straightens out the front. “Not bad,” she says.
“Now can I go out?” I ask.
“It’s time for lunch,” Aunt Geneva says.
After Aunt Melinda leaves to visit a friend, we have to clean up. Then Uncle James comes home and we have an early supper. I’m so tired of being in this house, but it doesn’t seem like I’ll have any chance to find Mr. Willie.
“Where’s Damon?” Uncle James asks.
“We had a little altercation,” Aunt Geneva says.
“Is that right?” Uncle James looks out the window. “He may have another not-so-little altercation when he gets home.”
“Can I take it to Mr. Willie?” I ask.
Aunt Geneva considers. I know she’s thinking What about saving some for Damon, but then she puts all of it into an empty cottage-cheese container and says, “Sure, Mr. Willie could use some meat on his bones.”
I knock on the door, but Mr. Willie isn’t home. I go inside and wait for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. Everything is in order, the way Mr. Willie likes it, his mattress with the sheet pulled smooth, his shirt on a hook, the shelf with Mr. Beethoven. Something rustles in the corner. A squirrel maybe, or a mouse. Damon says this place is haunted, but Mama said there’s no such thing as ghosts. What about when someone dies? I asked. Then they are part of the soil, she said. What about fossils, I said. They come from dead things and they aren’t part of the soil. Mama said You have a point there, Jerome. Maybe someday Mama’s bones will be fossils so I can keep them forever.
I leave the chili in the middle of the table for Mr. Willie.
17
When we go to bed, Damon is still not home.
“What if he never comes back?” Monte asks.
“He’ll be back soon as he’s hungry,” I say.
Monte’s sniffling and rubbing his eyes.
“Stop it,” I say. “He’ll be back.”
“He’ll get hisself into trouble.”
“What trouble?”
“He always gets into some kind of trouble.” Monte’s trying not to cry. “Daddy’s going to beat him when he gets home.” Monte has his face in the pillow, muffling his voice. “I told him not to get into trouble all the time. I told him.”
Our room is stuffy and my chest feels tight. I go over to the window and raise it as far as it will go. There’s a slight breeze blowing like it might finally rain. But it could just as well pass us by. I move my fingers on the windowsill, playing an old tune that I know from I don’t know where.
Monte is there, his hand on my shoulder, looking out the window. “Where do you think Damon went?”