I just nodded, wondering if the wrinkled, shrunken, micro-waved hamburger I had for lunch was responsible for my nausea. The chicken, Jewel, the nearby garbage room—I had smelled all of it more powerfully than I should have. I should have wondered if I was pregnant then, but the signs are always missed by a young girl who knows she ain’t got no business being knocked up. I welcomed the knock on the front door as my excuse to go downstairs for air.

“I’ll get it,” I shouted as they droned on.

“Annette, how are we supposed to open up the world for our kids if the powers that be refuse to cultivate their minds?”

“Who you askin’?”

“See, this is the problem … Black kids need to learn how to imagine, to create! All these schools want to do is give these kids a ball or a microphone. Pipe dreams! No real futures. They did the same thing to us and look at what our options turned out to be. Shivana’s a bright girl. She can do anything in this world she wants to do. She deserves better …”

“What the hell you ’spect me to do about it without no money to send her nowhere else? Now Jewel, don’t come up in my house with that old-fashioned Panther shit…”

“This is not the Panthers talking—I been over that stage for a long time. This is me. Your sister. Jewel. Annette, you ought to let me take that child to New York.”

“Hold on—now you’ve lost your ever-loving mind.”

“You want her to sit here in Chicago all her life, up under you? Same way Mama tried to make us sit here up under her? This life is too short, Ann …”

“Now see, you ain’t gotta bring Mama into this …”

“Yes I do! I loved her just as much as you, but she didn’t want us to do shit but sit here up under her and keep her company while Daddy was out doing God knows what. Died before her time but looked years ahead of it.”

“How you know what she looked like when you wasn’t nowhere to be found?”

“Mama sat in Chicago all her life walking around the same two blocks!”

“Everybody ain’t like you, Jewel…”

“What do you mean by that?”

My eavesdropping ended with a louder knock on the door.

“Girl, would you get that damn door!”

Above the music and Ma’s scolding, I heard the cough grown to a shaking hack. Renelle Washington and her kids stood in the hallway. Renelle had been crying and the boy’s nose was running. Renelle didn’t ask if she could barge in.

“Shivana, I’m gonna need you to watch the kids all this week. I might not be able to pay you ’til next month though …” She could barely get the words out before she broke down, shuddered, and dropped both babies’ hands.