“Bye.” He slipped two ice cubes down her dress and chuckled as he left, flipping the light switch and closing the door, leaving her to yell and laugh in the dark.

“Fire … Fire … you better come back here! Oh you’re gonna get it so bad. Revenge is sweetest when cold, y’know. If I were you I’d take mine now. Fire … Fire … Fire, you bomboclaat!”

* * *

They sat in the living room watching television while he dried her hair with a soft white towel, he on the couch and she on the floor between his legs in a light yellow summer dress with a scoop neck and spaghetti straps and buttons down the front to the hem.

She inhaled deeply.

“Do you know what this feels like?” she asked, reaching back to wrap her arms around him.

“Tell me.”

“When I was a little girl, I had to spend some time in the hospital because of a breathing problem. And at the hospital I used to make up all these things that I wanted to happen to me, like having a grandmother who would do my hair for me. I had grandparents, obviously, but I never met them. They died before I was born.”

She cracked her neck.

“Anyway, when I came home—I was about seven or eight at the time—there was a new family living in the yard. I can’t remember where they were from. But now that I think about it, they might have been from Haiti. The grandmother—they were a big clan—was an old woman … black like ink, and her back was curled like a question mark. She didn’t speak a word of English, didn’t speak much at all, and she smoked a pipe nonstop. Gosh—when I think about it now she might have been smoking weed.

“One day my father was struggling with my hair, pulling on my scalp clumsily, trying to loosen my plaits to wash my hair—wow, all this is coming back now—and out of nowhere she just came and took me away from him and led me to the standpipe, pulled the plaits out in no time, and washed my hair for me. Then after that she took me to her back step. She sat first, then she gathered her skirt and put me between her legs and dried my hair for me, and parted it and oiled my scalp with Sulfur 8, and combed my hair with a sparkly comb … and brushed it. It was so beautiful. She began to comb my hair every day. I would just go stand outside her house and she would call me in with her fingers. And I began to call her Granny. I would sit with her on her back step every day without speaking, just sit there motionless while she did my hair …”

“Knowing that if you moved you’d get the back o’ the brush on your leg.”

“Oh, but you know it … and although she never said it or showed it in a huggy kinda way I knew she loved me.”