Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [16]
Now Til was at the counter, banging at it over and over. “You have no right holding a grudge against me over what happened more than thirty years ago,” she yelled. “Everybody knew your brother’s pecker was smashed so no way could he be Clarise’s father, but he kept coming around like some kind of psycho, I was forced to go upside his head. Now you better just turn those girls over to my sister and me or I’m gonna do the same thing to you I did to Larry.”
Vie pressed the security buzzer, laughed out loud in Til’s face, and started backing up toward the door under Lyndon Johnson. “I’m not holding no grudge,” she said, “but I am upholding the law. And as a convicted felon you are unfit, just unfit for those girls to be placed with.”
A crowd had formed in the room, curiosity seekers walking through the corridor. Even Lyndon Johnson leaned as if to see what the commotion was.
Ness picked up Til’s coat, which had fallen to the floor. She squeezed the fox-foot collar to her chest. This was bad, very bad. She tried to hold on to her tears and move faster than the police who had just run through the door, dispersed the crowd, and were now heading with determination toward her ranting sister, Til.
PART TWO
2
The sun was hanging way back in the sky all feisty and red over Sixtieth Street; it could have been on a different hemisphere but was really just on the other side of town from where Clarise and Finch’s heaven of a house stood. It was afternoon on a chilly Saturday, and the doings were at their height. People flitted in and out of their usual Saturday stop-bys: Baron’s Meat and Poultry, Connie’s Cards ’n’ Gifts, Luke’s Good as New Shoe Repair. They were an eclectic mix. Girlfriends called to each other through the throngs of foot traffic, “Hey now, we got to talk.” Men breezed by other men, slapped hands, said things like “My main man, what you know good?” Bow-tied Muslims waved their newspapers with urgent gestures. “Free your minds,” they called; their voices commingling with the high-pitched humming sounds of tambourine-clapping sanctified women in long skirts and little hats doing a holy dance at the bus stop. The blind man held out his tin cup and jostled with the Jehovah’s Witnesses over prime standing space at the foot of the el. And all through here, the tunes of the Impressions floated from the outturned speakers at the Imperial Skating Rink; they lent smooth cha-cha–able rhythms to the mix as they crooned that everything was all right.
Then Ramona, the saucer-eyed, butter-toned West Philly head turner, emerged from Miss D’s beauty parlor, where she’d just gotten a hard press, blond streaks, and a French roll tucked up high and neat with fifty hairpins. She caught the “yeah yeah” rhythm of the Impressions’ song, but she didn’t sway or finger pop; she carried too much pent-up anger for such outwardly fanciful shows of pleasure. She did smirk at the fireball of a sun, though, which looked to her like a hot-behind woman calling on her lover, the night, to come on and blanket her. She liked to imagine how the sun must be undressing herself for the night right now because such imaginings disrupted the predictability about her own life: her Lit Brothers paycheck down to the penny where she worked in the bargain basement as the assistant buyer; the songs her gospel choir sang every Second Sunday; the catcalls of “Hey, foxy lady,” whenever she walked by the opened door of the Swank Club; more foster children arriving from the state for her mother to raise temporarily, like the three Vie was getting ready to drop off. Three girls. Ramona especially hated the girls.
She made quick loops through the assemblages of foot traffic on this five-block commercial stretch that fringed a middling-type neighborhood of the not rich, not poor, but sometimes broke till payday; where the consistent salute of the row houses was comforting to the mostly