Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [38]
Ramona didn’t want to hear about Dead Block. Already she was getting that prickly feeling in her spine that always moved to her chest and felt like a slab of granite rising in her chest every time she thought about Dead Block and that missing white boy, Donald Booker. So no, she hadn’t told them about Dead Block; she hadn’t even told them how to get to the library.
She went to the stove and turned on under the hot dogs and baked beans. The sauce around the baked beans was erupting in bubbles. She stirred around in the pot and poked holes in the molasses that was separating from the sauce and glazing over. She thought about how Victoria’s face looked just then, scrunched up in pain. She counted the hot dogs again. If Tyrone stayed for dinner, there would be two extra. “That hurt one could have the extra two,” she said to the pot and the stove and the molasses-scented kitchen air.
7
Tyrone did stay for dinner and made much over the hot dogs and beans, said he hadn’t eaten that well in the months since he’d left his mother’s table. Ramona told him to shut the hell up, he was lying, and he knew it.
“If I’m lying, I’m flying,” he said. “And my feet are on the ground.”
Bliss laughed then, said all the kids in her class used that line. Even Victoria smiled some, despite her newly chipped tooth. Shern didn’t smile, but the ice in her glare melted a bit. The house seemed larger with Tyrone there. The air was wider, less constricted. It felt like the animosity between Ramona and the girls had more room to spread out and, in so doing, dilute. They were looser; Ramona sighed less when Tyrone was in the room. And Bliss was especially affected, latching on to his humor, even laughing openly and loudly at his jokes.
Tyrone stayed late Saturday night. At first Ramona thought he was just waiting for those three to go to sleep so he could scoop her up and carry her to bed. But after he’d taught Bliss cutthroat pinochle, and rechecked the dressing on Victoria’s knee, and tried in vain to get Shern to talk, he got up to leave. “Not proper, Mona,” he said to the question mark in her eyes. “Your room so close to theirs, they might hear our—you know, our sounds. Nice girls, Mona, let’s not offend them in that way.”
Then Ramona asked him why now, he hadn’t resisted staying before. With all the other fosters he’d begged to stay as soon as they went to bed and Mae left to gamble at her Saturday night card party. What was so different about now?
“They were just shadows before now,” he said, “you know, blurs, and now they’re in focus, you know, real people. I wouldn’t be able to be with you with all my heart and soul the way I want to be with you if I’m worrying ’bout them hearing, you know what I’m saying, baby doll?”
Ramona didn’t push. She was relieved. She was reminded too much of her failings lying with Tyrone in that tight bedroom, sometimes not even feeling his manhood as he tried to touch her in places that should make her back arch. Instead she’d be preoccupied with the faded pink roses drooping on the wallpaper; the roses seemed so worn out, tired, like she was always tired, like if she stared at them hard enough, the petals might fall from the roses right off of the wall and cover her as if she were dead. She once thought that she would be a model, but her legs were too big, her hips too wide, and though her hips and legs caused much lip licking among the men when she walked down Sixtieth Street, they wouldn’t work on