Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [33]
He looked beyond her into the living room. Now Sam Cooke was singing “You Send Me,” and the muscles in his arms twitched at the thought of holding Ramona in a close grinding slow drag. He pulled the collar up on his corduroy jacket. “It’s cold out here, baby,” he whispered.
“Well, they dressed warm, I made sure of that, all the coats they came here with got put to some use today. I’ve never seen kids come with so many extra coats, three coats apiece, not counting the suede jackets. Such excess,” she said, shaking her head and sucking in the air through her teeth.
He rubbed his hands up and down her arms. “Come on, let’s get you out of this cold doorway.” He was whispering again. “Can’t have my baby catching no draft.”
“No, I’m just catching hell, saddled with these kids by myself their first month here. And the breaking-in period with any of them is always the hardest. And these three are particularly grief-stricken.” She backed into the doorway, fixing her eyes on Tyrone’s father’s car. Then it was just the closed front door she saw as he pushed it to, then his tan corduroy jacket as he pulled her in close and tried to mash his mouth against hers. She shook herself from him and walked toward the kitchen.
Tyrone tried to hold his good nature against her mood. He’d come to know this side of Ramona that was like splintered wood. Sometimes he wished that she were more like the other women who just blossomed when they were around him. Big smiles, sometimes even a fullness would come up in their eyes and make them appear serious and intense, like if he were to just tap them, their passions would break through in bubbling rivers. He reasoned that Ramona didn’t have to gush like sap oozing from some maple in the spring; she was too beautiful for that, he told himself over and over, with her saucy eyes and healthy legs and fleshy lips. He told himself that now as he watched her walk away.
“Where you say your daddy went?” she asked again. “May be he can give me a ride around the block to see if I see traces of those three.” She talked quickly, hoping to mask the excitement in her voice over riding with his father. “Dummies probably did get turned around. Before they left from here this morning, I told them specifically to be back here before the sun fall.” She said all this with her back to him.
“I don’t know how long Pops is gonna be; Miss Hettie’s probably going through the printing he did line by line. How ’bout if you and me walk and see if we see them?” He caught up with her back and let his hands rest along the side of her hips; her Wranglers were stiff, and he rubbed his hands along the curve of her hips and felt an uncoiling of his essence that was so forceful it surprised him. “I’ll ring Miss Hettie’s bell and tell my pops to go on home without me. That way we can walk as long as we need to. We can snuggle against the wind too.” He tried to nestle his chin against her shoulder.
Ramona yanked his hands from her hips and jerked her shoulder upward against his chin. She thought she heard his teeth snap together. “I don’t want to walk.” The words burst through her lips with much more force than she’d intended and sputtered now through the room like a balloon that’s losing its air and flying and falling fast and unpredictably. “If I had wanted to walk, I would have already walked, okay. I want to ride. I’ll be glad when you can piece together enough money to buy a car that runs longer than a day. I mean, even if you had planned something for this evening, we gonna have to be jumping on and off buses like poor people, and it’s all cold out.” She stopped and exhaled and turned to look at him. “Plus I need you to stay here, I mean, if you think your father’ll take me to go look for them. Won’t nobody be here to let them in if you go too. So I was gonna ask you to do that.”
“Oh, you was gonna ask me to do that?” He