The first bad note sounded when Renelle unexpectedly stayed overnight at the hospital where she worked and she had to beg Ma to let me skip school to care for her kids. She had miscarried in a staff toilet. A few days later, the baby’s lone repast occurred at our kitchen table, over Budweiser, fried chicken, and spaghetti offered in remembrance.

“It just slipped out of me,” Renelle told us. No amount of consolation could stop her dry heaves. “It sounded like a penny plopping in a wishing well. I begged everybody not to flush it, but I know somebody eventually did.”

Jewel cried like she had lost her own. Me, secretly jealous of the thing further binding her to Leroy, could not find the emotions. Ma hit on a diagnosis I’m sure the doctors missed: “All this damn stress these men put us through.”

Once Renelle left and the only light in our place came from the cars and flashing signs of King Drive, Jewel asked me to sleep in my twin bed with her. I had taken up on the couch while she was there, the back pains that resulted better than the bruises when Ma and I were alone. Jewel had told us she needed music or a man to fall asleep, so my alarm clock radio supplied the former. She kept it so low I couldn’t tell if Chaka Khan or Mary J. Blige sang “Sweet Thing.” I folded into Jewel, my behind cupped into her virgin womb and her hands atop my squid-soft belly.

“I think Leroy don’t care the baby gone,” I said out loud. “And I don’t think he love Renelle.”

“And what, girl, do you know about how a man loves a woman?”

“I know he cheats. On her. All the time.”

“How you know?”

“Ummmm … women call and stop by,” I lied.

“He cheats and he stays?”

“Well… yeah. They still together.”

“Oh, shit. They ain’t together bit more than me and the man on the moon.”

“I mean, they’re still married.”

“And that’s all they are. Just holding on to love taped together with pity and friendship,” Jewel hissed.

“He says he there for the kids,” I offered, hoping Jewel would have more answers, hoping I wasn’t telling on myself by revealing his confidences. But Jewel’s right brow shot out like a tangent.

“Why is he talking about her with you?”

Had she been on the outside of the bed, I would have broken away and clung to my white wall, curling into myself.

“Don’t ignore me girl.” Jewel was a Golding, after all. She moved back far enough to flick a couple of fingers at my behind. First warning, and there wouldn’t be a second before Ma was called in to get answers.

“Ow …”

“I said, why is that grown Negro telling his babysitter about his marriage?”

“Alright fine, he ain’t tell me nothing …”