right,” Ndiya thought, and looked at herself in the window. She nodded in the moment and planned to deny everything later.
She balanced Shame in her memory like the spoon in her right hand. Sugar melted into the tiny veins in each swollen grain of oatmeal. The final bite was light brown, sweet and perfectly hot. She thought, “Last bite in the bowl, perfectly hot and the first bite hadn’t burned my mouth. Is that possible?” She glimpsed 9:15 on the clock as she figured the possibles or not of a perfectly hot, honey brown, last bite of oatmeal in the bowl. “Improbable, at best,” she thought. Fifteen minutes to get dressed and get on the 9:30 bus to work. “But possible?” she weighed the one thing against the other.
Her eyes narrowed, she stared at her reflection in the window. Her bedroom door ajar, its reflection hovered like a dare above the street behind her reflected face. “Yes, OK, it’s possible. It’s also possible that I’ll get the 10:30 bus and Ms. Yvette Simmons”—she’d just begun to think about Yvette-at-work’s actual name—“can do like this,” she said to her double. A thin blade of anger flashed. She knew it was her fault, not Yvette’s. She decided not to care, took a deep breath and puffed her cheeks into her best Dizzy Gillespie in the window until a laugh burst out and fogged the glass. She turned and, in a bright rain of descending minor thirds, Evelyn King chimed her brain. She left the bowl where it was on the table, sing-whispered, All the way down, and walked back to her room. Just then a heavy pendulum swung suspended from a long wire and for a slow moment Ndiya’s body came near, then closer, almost within her reach.
■
Fifty yards from Shame’s door, Ndiya said to herself, “Just get it over with.” She held Melvin by the hand while they walked. An instant from the first date at Earlie’s hung in her mind like a portrait. For the rest of that evening they’d talked. They did all the things that couldn’t be avoided. Ndiya watched herself listen while Shame talked around things, trying as she did, to fill space but reveal nothing. The kind of things people say when they first talk. Granted that those conversations don’t usually begin with a ruptured house-arrest bracelet plummeting its way through the sugar bowl and toothpick box and into your date’s lap. But still, that was the kind of conversation they’d had. She hoped it was anyway, because she couldn’t remember a word of it. The first time, then: a bassline like a thumb in her mouth and down her spine, Malik’s damned bracelet, an open triangle in Shame’s face, and that one phrase, “Bic lighter.” All of that and “maybe I am” hadn’t come near the place. Then the fucking battle of Jericho, date number two when her tongue found a notch in the skin over Shame’s third rib and she felt music smooth as a heavy stream of mercury poured over her waist and down her legs. Afterward, she nearly stepped on a seemingly self-sacrificing spider, which she’d murdered with a huge, hardback biography of Miles. Her thought echoed from when she’d first met Shame, when they first shook hands on the porch outside Renée’s party. Her first thought had been, “Whose hand is this?”
Then, at home, the email she sent to Yvette-at-work. Ndiya wrote: “Didn’t make Maurice’s party, regrets. Ran into Shame. Went home with him. Ran into Shame, girl. Never been anywhere like that. Where have I been? Where am I now? Please advise.” She thought about ending the note there but continued: “Told him: it felt like he’d waited his whole life to touch me. When he dropped me back home, he smiled looking down at the ground and said, ‘That was a risky thing to say to me, Ndiya Grayson.’ I didn’t know what to say, I could barely hear him over the vibrations in my legs. Don’t know why I’m telling you? What now, Yvette? What now?” Send.
Ndiya stared at the screen. She could still taste Shame Luther’s salt when she suddenly regretted writing anything to Yvette. Open confession wasn’t her style at all. It seemed so strange to confide things to someone before she’d really confided them to herself. She was just about to click the screen to reread her sent message again and ease her mind when a new message appeared. There was the sender’s name in her box. She thought, “Even Yvette can’t be this quick.” The new message wasn’t from Yvette. For an instant she looked at the words in the inbox and it was if she knew no one by that name. She blinked hard and looked again at the sender’s name: Ndiya Grayson.
The message Ndiya had replied to had been sent by Yvette to the SnapB/l/acklist, not to her. So, her reply had been to—there it was. Date number one might have been a hot, sweet, last bite of oatmeal. No one knew. Date number two wasn’t supposed to be a date at all, turned out hotter and sweeter than number one. And now everyone knew. Ndiya’s forehead touched down on the keys. “When a fever breaks,” she thought, “it’s like being hit with a bucket from a cool mountain stream. Forget ‘maybe I am’ and the ABP. Here she is everyone: Ndiya Grayson has come back home.”
■
Ndiya and Melvin stood on the steps. This was, indeed, date number three, which everyone but her seemed to know about. Sixty-three twenty-nine in chipped, cursive gold script painted across the top of the glass double doors. She looked at her reflection, soaked skirt, foaming pumps and all. As she reached for the bell she whispered to the window,
–No there or maybe about it, here I am, both of us.
She smiled at Melvin with his goggles on his forehead. He held her hand and pulled it in front of his face. She thought they looked like they’d been playing together in the deep, hydrant-puddle of twilight. Ndiya whispered to the glass,
–Tsunami it is. But he’s going to have to tell me his real name.
She pushed the doorbell with her index finger and they heard nothing. After a moment Melvin said,
–It’s never locked. I think we should go on up.
BOOK TWO: STOLEN HANDS
One day you’ll realize we’re not strangers.
—CHAKA KHAN
He had work and plenty of it. By some measure, at least two jobs. Probably four and maybe more than that. Work was about all he had and that’s how he’d wanted it. And money, he’d saved ten years of wages. Good wages. By the summer we’re talking about, the summer that had waited almost until it was over to begin, when he met a woman named Ndiya Grayson, Shame Luther had steady work during the day around Chicago. The small construction company he worked for as a laborer had found a way to downsize its scale and insinuate its specialty into a wide range of factories and mills in Chicago’s rapidly changing—meaning quickly evaporating—industrial sector. So he had that. That particular summer, the job repairing the acid tanks at Joycelan Steel looked like at least a few months’ worth. Steady, if irregular, work. The mill was operating at as near as possible to full capacity during the repair. So the schedule fluctuated from week to week: four days on, three days off; seven days on, no days off; three and four; five and two; and so on. This was the way it was in the twenty-first century. The days of long jobs on newly constructed factories were, as far as he’d seen, over in Chicago. He’d spent ten years of his life chasing that kind of work through the South and Southwest until it crossed the border and disappeared into Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, or elsewhere. Ten years living on out-of-town expense checks, banking his wages. He’d worked out of his twenties and into his thirties: ten years in orbit. Then back to Chicago to work as he would or wouldn’t in the city. So, that was one job, which he’d decided would be a rhythm around Chicago, or nothing. That was all he wanted, all it made any sense to want.
He had a job as house piano to the alley cats in “the green zone” behind 6329. An hour of twilight, a few nights per week. That paid whatever rent he’d otherwise have owed Junior. That wasn’t exactly true, but that’s all he knew at the time. He had the deal with neighborhood parents, that is, the mothers, to cook dinner weekdays for an ever-fluctuating rack of kids. That didn’t pay anything in cash or otherwise, a fact that the mothers were still trying to figure out. In fact, far from charging, Shame regularly loaned the mothers and their families money. Then, after he’d taken the dare, he had the new job at the Cat Eye across from Earlie’s Café on North Broadway. He played Wednesday nights,