“Yeah?”

“This check was stolen from the mailbox,” Mary-Ann said. “I remember it was raining on the Friday after check day, and she said she had to go downtown and see about getting an emergency digit because her check and some others had been stolen.”

Some of the checks were from the same date as that one, and others were from different dates. They were all signed with the name on the front of the check, but you could tell they were all signed by the same person. I looked at the name of the store that was stamped on the back. It was over near Highbridge.

We counted the money we had taken—$160. Mary-Ann told me to keep it. We took everything else and put it in a bag and threw it down the garbage chute. We talked for a while, and I tried to get next to Mary-Ann, but she said she wanted to go back over to the club to sleep, just so everything would look normal. I told her she could go over later, but she still wasn’t in the mood.

“You going to check out that store tomorrow?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

On my way to the Grant I felt every eye on the street was on my back. It wasn’t a good feeling.

When I got up, it was nearly eleven o’clock. I remembered I was supposed to go over to my moms’s pad. I got dressed and went downstairs.

“It’s about time you got your butt up,” Harrison said. “I called you nearly an hour ago!”

“You called me?”

“Yeah, I shook your shoulder, too,” he said.

“What I say?”

He made a funny noise like a guy that didn’t want to wake up, and I figured it sounded like me. It sounded pretty funny, too. Only when he saw me smile, he started running it into the ground. I asked him what he was trying to wake me up for, and he said my mother was wondering where I was.

I went over to her house and listened to her mouth about how she could be laying up there with a heart attack and die before I came to see her.

“The rats be done eat me up before you come to see me!” she said. “Don’t you come crying when they lay this old gray head down beneath the ground, boy. You hear that?”

“Yeah, I hear that.”

“When I’m dead and gone, you go on and ignore me just like you doing now,” she said, “because as God is my secret judge, I can’t stand to see nobody crying and carrying on at no funeral when they didn’t give two cents for the body when it had life in it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“But soon it will be done …” she went on.

I knew the rest of the sermon by heart. Trouble of this world.

“Trouble of this world …”