Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [52]
Even though Mae couldn’t feel it as she stumbled through the front door.
Mae was back from Buffalo like gangbusters, two days early, Sunday instead of Tuesday. She had traveled back to Philadelphia with Addison, the eighteen-year-old delinquent son of her ailing sister slung over her arm like he was a good leather purse. She’d had to sneak him out of Buffalo under the cover of night so the daddy of the poor teen he’d gotten pregnant wouldn’t shoot him. “He’s gonna kill me,” Addison had cried in his aunt Mae’s arms. “It ain’t even been proven that it’s mine, and her old man is sitting in his car right in front of this door with his pistol cocked, and I know he’s gonna try to shoot me dead.”
Mae told him to throw some things in a paper bag; they would leave through the kitchen and down the alleyway, bound for Philly that very night to the street whose name he bore.
This nephew, Addison, was Mae’s favorite child in all the world, partly because he was born in her living room back in 1947. She’d just had a major win at a high-stakes poker game, and that, plus what she got from the sale of her tiny ace, deuce, tre on Mole Street, allowed her to buy her dream house on Addison Street: three bedrooms, a porch, a yard, and a concrete basement. She was the first black person to claim that block of Addison Street as home. With her five-year-old cupid doll daughter, Ramona, to help, she kept her mortgage current by taking care of the children of her white neighbors, until the day she unwrinkled the piece of paper one of her charges was using as a toy ball, and she read the bold-lettered flyer that said, “Have you seen your new neighbor? Now is the time to act. Because once the influx has taken hold, the value of your house will plummet. With 25 years in the real estate business, we can sell your home at an attractive price in under 60 days. We urge you to act—Now!”
Mae was so incensed that she was being used to bust the block in that way that she told each mother she could no longer take care of her bad-assed children, and don’t even be thinking about asking her to clean their houses. So she cleaned her own house and loved her little dream house all the more. She taught Ramona how to clean, even how to shine the windows with newspaper and vinegar. She’d show them who the unclean were and how to raise a child. So she took to spanking Ramona too, whenever she misstepped, and even when she didn’t; just as a preventive, she’d smack her soundly around the meaty part of her legs with the ironing cord until she saw the welts that let her know she had gotten her good.
But even with her immaculate little dream house, and well-behaved cupid doll daughter, Mae needed income to keep her mortgage current. So she sought out something half days with the city so she wouldn’t have to pay a baby-sitter to watch Ramona when she got in from school. When the city job didn’t materialize, she waited tables at night after she put Ramona to bed, but she couldn’t tolerate all those hours on her feet. So she settled on just parlaying what scrapings together she had left from the sale of her Mole Street house into future earnings at the card table. She’d always been lucky when she sat down to spread her cards; looked like her father, and as the old folks said, “Girl look like her father always have luck with money, when she look like her mother, money slide between her fingers like a clump