“He should have given you the money!” I said.

“Why?” Cal looked up at me. “He didn’t have no more use for me!”

“I’d have wasted the sucker!”

“Yeah, then I would have been in jail. Anyway, Aggie got a job working in a factory down on Varick Street. I couldn’t find nothing. I was staying home with Jeffrey and feeling sorry for myself. It got so that I didn’t want people to see me in the street. I wore dark glasses and let my beard grow. People used to ask me what happened, and I’d say they chumped me off so they could let some white boy on the team. Then one day I heard about this job with a paper company. I asked this girl to look after Jeffrey. I only had a dollar to give her. She wasn’t much, but I thought if I could get the job and make it last a week, we’d have enough money so that Aggie could stay home. I didn’t say nothing to Aggie. The job wasn’t that far away, and I could leave after her and get back home before her. The fourth day, the day before payday, I come home and the street is full of fire engines.

“I knew. Nobody didn’t have to tell me nothing. I knew. We got home from the funeral, and I told Aggie I was going. She didn’t say nothing. She just sat there near the window in front of the crib. We had been looking at beds, you know, the kind with the rails on the side? But we hadn’t got one yet. Aggie just sat there, and I just walked out.”

We finished our order and went out to the subway. By that time I didn’t feel like telling Cal nothing about Paul. On the way uptown he asked me how I felt about the team’s offense, and I said I thought it was okay. He told me that it had one problem.

“What’s that?”

“It’s got to have a leader,” he said. “You know what I mean?”

I nodded.

* * *

That night I went over to my moms’s place and picked up my suit. It looked okay. I took it over to the Grant. When I got there, Mary-Ann was waiting in the lobby, rapping with Harrison.

“You have quite a young lady here,” Harrison said.

“I know,” I said. “She so fine I moved her up from number seven all the way up to number four on my list.”

I gave Harrison a wink and took Mary-Ann on upstairs. I asked her if Tyrone had said anything about his place being busted into. He hadn’t.

“I don’t really understand it,” she said. “Veronica said that when he found out about it, he was really mad, but he hasn’t blown his top. He talked about taking care of it when Juno got back.”

“Who’s Juno?” I asked.

“You know that big dude who hangs around the place? Always blinking when he looks at you?”