“I got a son in Angola. He’s just a li’l-bitty boy. One of the wolves put him on the stroll.”
“What’s he down for?”
“Murder. During a robbery, him and another guy. The other guy pulled the trigger, but it didn’t matter. I went to see Harold two days ago. He cain’t hardly walk. That what the wolves are doing to him. They don’t use no grease, nothing.”
“I can make a call.”
She nodded and put a Kleenex to her nose as though she had a cold. She went into the kitchen. I followed her and sat at a table by the window.
“I got enough for two here,” she said.
There was a live oak in the backyard, a broken swing hanging from a limb, an alleyway strewn with trash and spiked with banana plants. “I already ate,” I said.
“I thought you wanted to go to breakfast.”
“Not really.”
“You just wanted to pump me about Frenchie Lautrec.”
“No. You’re nice to talk to.”
There was a beat. She worked the spatula in the frying pan, her back to me. “How long your wife been dead?”
“Three years.”
“Ain’t been nobody else?”
“No.”
She put a piece of browned toast and a cup of coffee in front of me. She filled her own plate and sat down across from me. “I got to say this: I was raised up to believe a redbird don’t sit on a blackbird’s nest.”
“That’s what white people taught your ancestors, then forgot their own admonition. I saw the chain on your ankle. What kind of charm is that?”
“A cross.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“From Hilary Bienville.”
“Where’d she get it?”
“Don’t know, didn’t ax. No matter what you say, you ain’t here about me, are you?”
“I like you and admire you, Miss Bella. Believe what you want.”
She got up and raked her food into a trash can, then washed the plate in the sink and set it in a drying rack. She leaned on the counter, her face covered with shadow. I stood up and spread my hand on her back. I could feel her breath rising and falling, her heat through the T-shirt, her blood humming.
“Are you all right?” I said.
“No, I ain’t ever gonna be all right. They gonna kill him in there. That li’l boy that never had no daddy and no real mama.” She turned around and took my hand and placed it on the scar on her neck. It felt as firm and thick as a night crawler. “A policeman in New Orleans done that. A black one. I was seventeen. I killed him. I done it with a razor blade. Ain’t nobody ever knowed about it.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“?’Cause I ain’t never tole nobody. ’Cause my li’l boy is paying for my sin, if it was a sin. I didn’t think it was one at the time.”
“You’re not a sinful person.”
She stepped close to me, then buried her face in my shirt and put her arms around me and pressed herself against me. “Hold me.”