FOR THE NEXT couple of weeks we three became a soundless chord. Ma, Jewel, and I went about the same routine every day, played out in different keys. Ma’s moods both determined and induced the lows. Jewel—always a high note—balanced us. With Leroy locked up, my feelings steadied somewhere in between. Ma rose every day at 5:00 to make her 6:30 A.M. Chicago Transit Authority shift, sleep-driving through the South Side of Chicago on the #4 Cottage Grove bus. She started wearing her hair down and listening to old records, so long as Jewel was there to talk about “the old days” with her. I endured school, got along with the Washingtons’ kids, and waited for Leroy to call collect while I was there. He never did. The unenviable job of explaining Leroy’s predicament to his regulars was dropped into my lap, and pretty soon the timid knocks stopped when the majority caught on and spread the word. Jewel slept until high noon, spent afternoons crafting mismatched meals: steak and flan, chili and sourdough toast, tacos and fresh asparagus; one Sunday, we surprised Ma with real butterscotch brewed from butter, brown sugar, and starch. At the beginning of November, Jewel dragged me to the South Side Armory so I could watch her vote for a White man named “Mr. William Jefferson Clinton” for president. That was the first time I had seen anybody vote for anything other than those prom queens at school who I never knew. When she came out from under the hood of her mysterious black booth—doing the same dance she had done when I saw her that first day I came home from school—I knew she thought she had done just one more thing to save the world.

Every single night at 8:00 sharp, the phone rang. On the other end was her man Hakim’s buoyant New York and West Indian accent. She had showed us a picture of a dark, strong, gap-toothed man with his arms around her, his face beaming like a freshly pressed coin. His eyes were proud, but still had that slight downcast of love. Still the picture severely disappointed us; he didn’t look nearly as good as he sounded. Jewel strung the phone cord between her teeth and curled her toes anyway during their hour-long conversations. Nights at last became worth remembering: tapestries of smoke, liquor, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy movies, old and new love ballads on the radio’s late-night Quiet Storm. Jewel transformed our third-floor hovel into a song uptempo, sealing shut the raw nerves. But the harmony achieved by her coming wouldn’t keep the symphony going. The schism in our composition was soon to come.