“Person can’t be waiting around out here in the open anymore.” She reached for a handbag. “Not with our young ones gone this mean. How’d they turn so bad so quick, I’d like to know. We’d best take the little elevator, if you can stand to wait. A poky thing, but no pokier than me now.” I said I’d walk, meet her up one landing.

“You must be younger than you look.” Out came a flick of the edge I had expected. On the stairs, clear of her sight, I shed my tie and, for good measure, half-mussed my hair. I stood waiting as her coffin-sized portholed elevator, lino-lined, cranked to a rattling halt. Much fuss with her purse, then keys. I saw Naomi wore her suit jacket overtop the shoulder bag’s strap. She noted my taking this in. “Broke my best girlfriend’s hip and got her Social Security and the pocketbook. Either/or, I say. They’d just as soon kill you as look at you round here … and I’m talking homeboys.”

•  •  •

She pointed me toward her galley kitchen. Its smell bespoke leftover meatloaf, new playing cards, every kind of Tupperware, one very clean old lady. A large studio, much sunlight, forties furniture. I scanned her many framed photos hoping for familiar faces. Instead, I found groups of G-5 picnickers, Rock Creek outings; official events, good-lookers, pale-skinned “Negro” professionals lined in half-smiling rows, all wearing office clothes even during leisure hours. They seemed tired of being credits to their race twenty-four hours a friggin day. But not a snapshot of Sutie, much less Clyde.

As she unjacketed herself to free the purse and find a tip, I spied above her tan foldout couch (Naomi sleeps here? it’s just a studio?), among her diplomas from high school to Howard, beside an ugly beaten-copper 1950s plaque of some long-necked Nubian princess, one certificate frame holding six four-leaf clovers.

How to do this? Ease into it? She, cane first, stumped toward me. I slid my hand inches under hers. Two quarters fell. “Not enough, hunh …” She scanned my face.

“No, fine,” I said. “Fine, if you’ll let me practice on you. Do you believe some people are psychic? Cause, I’m taking a course in that.”

“Where, Georgetown? I bet.—‘Psychic’? Idn’t that just another word for ‘nosy’?”

“For instance, Miss Delman, ma’am, I look at you and what I get …” Between a thumb and index finger, I press my nose’s bridge as if to judge the scale of some incoming migraine. “For you, I get ‘a cabin covered in beautiful tin ads, the four-leaf clovers growing all along that creek.’—Now, I mean, why is that?”

Her face revealed nothing except the will to reveal even less. Then, in a deed that made me think so damn much of Clyde, she reached into her purse and handed me thirty extra cents. Exactly my Sunday “chauffeur’s” salary.