“You been to his place?” Aggie asked.

“Yeah, he ain’t there,” I said.

“I’ve got a key. Let’s look around inside,” she said. “You know where it is?”

“Yeah, ain’t you been there?”

She shook her head no.

At Cal’s apartment Aggie gave me the key. I opened it and went in. Aggie came in and looked around. She looked at everything real slow. At first I thought she had found something when she sat down and stared at a picture. But she was just like going over the past. When she started crying, I wasn’t even surprised. She went through some of the stuff on his dresser. It was a mess, really, not much better than I keep my stuff. There was an empty bottle of wine in his closet and a few dollars. I was glad to see the money. Aggie handed me a picture that she had found in Cal’s closet. It was a picture of her in an evening gown. It said that she had just released a record.

“How come you ain’t still singing?” I asked.

“How come?” Aggie lit up a cigarette, took a deep puff, and let the smoke out slowly between her lips. “Lonnie, I go to sleep at night with ‘how come,’ and when I wake up in the morning, it’s still right there next to me. And you know, I don’t mess with it too much because I’m not really sure I want to know ‘how come.’ Can you get next to that?”

“Yeah,” I said.

She shook her head and kept on looking around his things. I tried thinking about why she didn’t want to know more about how come she wasn’t singing. It didn’t make any sense to me, even though I had said I could understand it.

“You ever get into Ebony magazine?” I asked.

“Ebony? No, why?”

“You must have been like—the perfect Ebony couple, you know. “Sports hero marries famous singer—”

“I wasn’t famous, believe me.”

“Cal played me one of your records,” I said. “Something about a rich woman …”

“Hurry home, sweet Daddy,” she started to sing.

An’ don’t take your time

If you wait too long

Your mama will be gone.…

She was singing through tears, but the tears took over and she just broke down. I sat there for a minute trying to figure out what to do, and then she snapped out of it, just like that. Wham! One minute mama was messed around and the next she was okay.

“You got straight real quick,” I said.

“It’s something black women learn,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

I took her home, and she asked me to sit with her for a while. She sat and thought, and we made a little small talk. I was sitting on the couch. First she sat at the table; and then she came over and sat with me. She leaned against me, and I put my arm around her. I figured she needed to be with somebody. I held her for a long time, and it was nice. I must have fallen off to sleep after a while. I woke up on the couch, and it was dark. My sneakers were off, and I figured Aggie must have taken them off. Her bedroom door was open, and I went over and saw she was asleep. When I laid back down on the couch, I felt I was guarding her. It was a good feeling.