“I can try, but I don’t know, Aunt Priscilla, I’ve got a lot to do today. Have you talked to Charlotte? She’s right there in Chicago.”

“Suzie Mae just gave me her number, and I left her a message, but she ain’t called me back yet. You know how she is.”

“Look, I really have to go, Auntie. Just check back tomorrow.”

“Wait! These days you can use a credit card and do it over the phone. You ain’t gotta go nowhere!”

“Okay! I’ll do it. But I’ve got to go right now, and I’m glad you’re out. Again. Goodbye!” And I click the phone.

Janelle’s still laughing.

“Don’t ask. Anyway, what are you doing right now?”

“You mean right now?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m out in the front yard counting all the red cars that go by. I’m up to seventeen. I guess I’m trying to decide if I want to have this baby or get an abortion.”

I get a gigantic lump in my throat. “Oh, so . . .”

“So you were right. But I feel kind of weird, Paris. George is gone.”

“For how long?”

“I hope forever. I just don’t know what I’m doing right now. It’s too much. I need to talk to somebody who doesn’t know me. Just to explain how things have transpired.”

“Please don’t go to a psychic for this kind of shit, Janelle. Please.”

“I’m too scared. I went to a Tarot reader and the first card she flipped over was too much, so I left.”

“Out of pure curiosity, what was it?”

“The Hanged Man. Anyway, I just want my daughter to come back home. To be honest, I don’t know how I’m gonna take care of her, and I don’t know if I should have this baby or not.”

“You’re not handicapped, Janelle. You can get a decent job. How far gone are you?”

“A little over two months.”

“Whoa. That’s cutting it close.”

“I know.”

Now here comes Miss Ordelle, standing in my doorway with one hand on her hip and holding a pair of jeans in the other. Something’s wrong. I hired her just to iron, but she insists on washing anyway (when her stories go off she gets bored). We argued about it, but she won. I asked her not to wash my white clothes, because she uses too much bleach and she’s stingy with the softener.

“Hold on a minute, Janelle. Yes, Miss Ordelle?”

“Excuse me, baby. But I don’t know how this happened. See this red stuff, here? I think Dingus musta had something red in his pocket. But it done got on a whole lotta stuff, and I just want you to know—I didn’t do it.”

“It’s okay. Don’t worry about it, Miss Ordelle.”

“You sho’? I mean, I can try to get it out, now,” she says, “but this look permanent to me.”

“If you can, fine.”

“All right,” she says, coughing hard as she heads back toward the laundry room. She smokes like a fiend. Outside the garage door. And it seems like once a month Miss Ordelle has an abscess and has to get another tooth pulled. She was homeless three years ago, even though she’s got grown kids. I found her through an agency. She ironed as good as Mama taught me. But when she told me how much her take was of the fee they were charging, I offered her a few dollars more if she would come once a week on her own. That was two years ago. Since then, every week, when I ask her how she’s doing, it’s gone from bad to worse, so much so that she should’ve been dead about a year ago. “Sorry about that,” I say.