“Don’t know, Vana … I been in Chi all my life. Ain’t never been nowhere else. Feel like it’s only so far I can go here. Fighting a million other niggas for these goddamn City of Chicago jobs. Throwing gabage, driving buses. Shit, if it was something else for me to do here, I woulda done it. I want to see something different, do different things. But all Renelle wanna do is work, get a house, work some mo’, get a car, work some mo’. I don’t know. It gotta be somethin’ better than this …”

I soaked up him and his sleepy talk.

“Guess she just thinking ’bout the kids,” I said, and I rubbed the back of his neck real soft, real gentle, like he was mine.

That was the mistake. He stopped breathing for a couple of seconds, then twisted out of my arms. After he pulled himself out of me, his pant legs clutched like knowing tripwire around his ankles, I could still feel my pulse beating down there. I closed my thighs tight, tight, tight, and tried to squeeze the feeling out, like I was ringing a dirty wet mop free of all its germy water. A burn filled my chest and I wanted to cry, but then part of me wanted to keep going, to grow that tiny current into a flash of lightning.

I wondered when next Renelle would walk down three flights of stairs and ask me to watch the kids while she worked her evening nurses’ aide shift. Ma never questioned out loud why the Washingtons needed a babysitter when everybody knew Leroy never went to work. I kept it to myself that from three to eleven, Leroy was usually in the streets but sometimes sat in the house and waited for his beeper to go off. And when he was there, shadowy, gaunt men and women always stopped by unannounced—scratching, sweating, and negotiating.