Where Do You Stay (3 page)

Mr. Willie puts some water into a bucket, adds a little cement, and mixes it with a small trowel.

“We better hurry and fix this place up,” he says.

“What if they really do tear it down?” I ask.

“That's why we better get fixing,” Mr. Willie says. “So they can see the beauty in the stone work.” He drops a glob of cement onto the top of the wall, sets a stone in it, and smoothes off the extra.

I watch for a minute, then pick up a stone and set it into the next glob of cement. We work like that until we finish the row.

“When the wall is done, we'll work on the vegetable garden,” Mr. Willie says.

“My mother said I have a green thumb,” I say. “We had a nice garden alongside our fence with tomatoes and cucumbers and carrots.”

“A green thumb goes with the music,” Mr. Willie says.

“It does?”

“Piano fingers and a green thumb.” Mr. Willie scrapes the last bit of cement out of the bucket. “Go hand in hand.”

Suddenly there's a question I have to ask. “Mr. Willie?”

“What is it?”

“Where are you going to stay if they really do tear this place down?”

Mr. Willie walks over to the hose and rinses out the bucket. “I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

“But what if you're inside when they come with the bulldozer?”

Mr. Willie sets the bucket upside down to dry. “A bulldozer makes plenty of noise. And my ears are plenty good.”

“But where would you stay after that?” My eyes are burning again and I don't even really know why. Too much mulling, thinking about Mama and our garden and how Mr. Willie could have stayed with us on our foldout cot in the living room with the piano right close by.

“I'll figure something out,” Mr. Willie says.

I wanted to keep on living in my old house. I could have gotten up and fixed myself oatmeal for breakfast, then walked to school with David. I'd need some kind of job to buy my clothes, but I could grow carrots and beans and cucumbers to eat. David's mother wouldn't care if I came for dinner now and then. And if I got good enough, I could play the piano for celebrations like weddings to earn a little money. But Mama said
No, Jerome, you're not grown yet.
Aunt Geneva said I'd be going to a new school anyway for the sixth grade because my old school stopped at fifth.
You're our boy now, Jerome
, she said, without even asking my permission.

Mr. Willie rinses the bucket under the hose. Then we stretch a piece of string to mark the edges of the vegetable garden. Mr. Willie turns over the dirt with the shovel and I break up the clods with the railroad spike.

“We could fix up the mansion,” I say suddenly. Mr. Willie puts his weight on the shovel and turns over the soil, but I can tell he's listening. “We could both stay there.”

Mr. Willie's eyes meet mine. “It's not ours to fix,” he says.

“It's not doing anybody much good just sitting empty,” I say.

Mr. Willie places the shovel again. “You're staying with your Aunt Geneva,” he says.

A lump is growing in my throat. “Nobody asked me what I wanted.”

“Your Aunt Geneva is one of the kindest people I know,” Mr. Willie says. “She's helped me out on more than one occasion.”

I hit the clods of dirt, one after the other with the rail-road spike. I can fix that mansion up by myself, one room at a time, that's what I'll do. I'll live in there where nobody can tell me what to do. I'll find that piano and play all night if I feel like it and all the next day.

The sun's beating down on my back so hot I feel like I'll burn up. Mama used to say she could tolerate the cold
better than the heat because she could put on another sweater but couldn't peel off her skin. Heat waves are shimmering off the asphalt in the street. Suddenly I feel the fish come up in my throat. I sit back and close my eyes.

“Better take a break,” Mr. Willie says, getting me the thermos and pouring some water into the cup. “It's frying hot today.”

I take a small sip and wait for a minute. “What do you think we ought to plant?” I ask.

“Radishes,” Mr. Willie says. “Big red ones.”

“And carrots,” I say, “the sweet kind, short and fat.”

“Beans do well around here,” Mr. Willie says.

“And cucumbers,” I say, getting back to work.

Me and Mama picked them small for pickling. Not vinegar pickles like most people make. Salt pickles, that's what they were. You put the cucumbers into a jar, then the water, then the salt, some dill, and a piece of rye bread on top because of the yeast.

Mr. Willie's shovel hits something hard. I get the railroad spike and start digging for Bach or Brahms, but there's just a plain old ugly rock under there.

“Better stop looking, Jerome,” Mr. Willie says.

I lie down on the bed with Monte, but I can't fall asleep there with him breathing on one side of me and Damon close on the other.

I look over at the clock. Five minutes past four in the morning. I hear Uncle James in the shower. He goes down the back stairs and out to the car to go to work. It would be strange to go to work at night when everyone else is sleeping. Monte says he works double shifts because then he gets paid extra.

Monte moves his feet on the bed the way he does. That boy can't stay still, even when he's asleep. Maybe that's why he stays so small and skinny. His face looks younger too, especially with his eyes closed. You'd never guess he was going on ten.

I tiptoe over to the window. The sky's mostly dark, but you can tell morning is coming. Mama liked the morning too, before the sun, before the heat of the day. Even on school days sometimes we got up early to play our duets before the day really got started. David would stand at the door and wait for me so we could walk to school together.
Can you teach me to play piano?
he asked. Next year David will go to Brown Middle School, but on this side of Vine Street everyone has
to go to Maplewood. By the time we're together again in high school, I might not even recognize him.

I move my fingers on the windowsill like they're on a keyboard. I wonder who has our old piano now. Aunt Geneva said they had an estate sale. Said she didn't want me going just to see people buying our old stuff. When I asked if we could keep the piano, she shook her head.
We need the money, Jerome
, she said.
Raising kids does not come cheap. Soon as we can, Jerome, we'll buy a new piano, a shiny black one, okay? And we'll get lessons for you boys, that's what we'll do. Would you like that, Jerome?
I didn't answer because Mama was my teacher and Aunt Geneva had no business selling our piano that wasn't even hers.

I slip on my shorts, T-shirt, and shoes, and make my way down the stairs and out the front door. The air is warm and damp. Even in the dark I can see the old mansion. Mr. Willie's piano might still be inside somewhere.

I walk up to where the door used to be. To the right is a small window near the ground, filled with glass blocks. I pull at one of the blocks. It's loose. Slowly I work it out with my fingertips, and set it on the ground. The one next to it is loose too, but all the rest are in there solid. I'm too big to fit through that small hole. I crouch down, cup my hands around my eyes, and look inside. Dressers and boxes, doors and screens. The piano could be in the back somewhere. It's too dark to see. There's a noise in the bushes behind me. I hold my breath. Could be a cat. Or a raccoon. There are lots of raccoons around. They used
to come into our garden at night and steal our tomatoes. I put the glass blocks back as quietly as I can.

I cross the gravel parking lot to the carriage house. Mr. Willie is probably sound asleep in there. I can knock on the door and say
Please, can I stay with you now that my mother passed? I don't like sleeping in a crowded room with boys breathing next to me.
I bet we can find a mattress somewhere. That's all I need. A mattress and a plain white sheet. I tap lightly on the board across the doorway and wait. The only sound is a faraway train.

What if Aunt Geneva wakes up and I'm gone? She'll search the house. She'll yell at Damon and Monte about how they treated me bad when it's not even true. She'll cry and say that her sister entrusted me to her, and now look what happened.
Jerome never causes any trouble
, Mama used to say.
You can count on Jerome for that.

I walk slowly down the hill and go in through the front door. When I get to our room, both the boys are still in their beds with their eyes closed. I lie down next to Monte and wait for the sun to come up.

Mr. Willie is sorting stones into piles, big, medium, and small. “We'll extend the wall over to this side.” He stands back. “It'll look better that way, don't you think?” He fills the bucket with new cement.

“Who taught you how to build walls?” I ask.

“Some things you learn by doing,” Mr. Willie says.

I'm extending our garden toward the woods. Twice the shovel hits something and I think
Okay, this has to be Bach
, but both times it's just rocks.

A big white car pulls up the driveway and slows down in front of the For Sale sign. The people stay in the car, looking at the boarded-up mansion.

“What if they buy it?” I ask.

“Then it's sold,” Mr. Willie says.

“But where will you stay after that?”

“You've asked me that before,” Mr. Willie says. He bends over, picks up a stone, considers, tosses it into the small pile.

“You have to make plans,” I say. “That's what my mother said. ‘You can't blow with the wind, Jerome.'”

“I know that's right,” Mr. Willie says. He stands up straight for a minute. “But things don't always go the
way you think they will. In fact, most times they go the other way.”

The white car pulls up a little, then stops again.

“Mama planned on me being a musician,” I say.

“My mother had the same plan for me. Miss Myrtle too. She's the one who paid my tuition and got me the best piano teacher in the state of Ohio. In the whole country, I'm guessing.” He pulls his eyebrows together. “Just some other things got in the way.” He puts a glob of cement onto the wall.

“Other things like what?”

Mr. Willie sets a stone in place. “Like the color of my skin. Same color as yours.” He smoothes the cement and some falls to the ground.

I know about all that, like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. I know the whole
I Have a Dream
speech from beginning to end. Me and Mama used to say it together, just the two of us, getting louder and louder, shouting out those words to nobody.

Mr. Willie puts the bucket down. “But then I made some mistakes too, that's for sure.” Mr. Willie shakes his head. “Maybe I'm just looking for excuses.” He tosses a small stone out of the way. “What I'm trying to say is that plans are fine, but—” Mr. Willie shrugs. “You never know the future, that's for sure.”

The car takes off down the driveway.

Tears come to my eyes, but I'm not really crying. It's thinking about plans that gets me started. I wanted to
stay right where I was with Mama when she had all her hair, sometimes in braids and sometimes in a bun on the top of her head. We each had our own room, and we had a kitchen and a living room with the piano. When I fell asleep at night, Mama would play me that Brahms lullaby. Just once I remember my daddy there, singing in a deep voice, because he had music in him too. “I didn't plan on my daddy leaving,” I say.

Mr. Willie puts a rock in place. “I know that's right.”

“Or my mother passing.”

Mr. Willie nods.

“I planned on having a piano the rest of my life.”

“Your life's not over yet,” Mr. Willie says, straightening out his back. “And mine's not either.”

We divide into two teams, me, Monte, Patrice, and Sandra on one, Damon, Ashley, Marc, and Wesley on the other. We have to find the flag and take it back across no-man's-land without getting put in jail.

“Where's jail?”

“The carriage house,” Damon says.

I want to say
Did you ask Mr. Willie if you could use his place
, but Mr. Willie might not want the whole street to know where he stays.

Patrice assigns each of us a certain territory. “Yours is by the garage,” she says, pointing to the garbage cans across the street.

It's late but not dark yet. Some of the garbage can lids are off. I bet they put the flag in there, in all those rotten banana peels and chicken bones and nasty stuff. I peek inside the first one and gag. No flag there. I look in the other two. Not there either.

Then in the half dark I see it in the sewer, that white rag with the corner sticking out. I look around. Nobody's near. I pull it out all wet and smelly. Then I'm running fast across no man's land with Damon on my tail, grabbing my shirt. I'm fat but I'm fast. I twist and run, he grabs my
shirt again, and this time I feel his nails on my skin, but too late, I'm over the line, trying so hard to breathe, just to get the air. I'm coughing bad but the flag is ours.

Monte pats me on the back. “We did it, Jerome, we won.” He's jumping and giving high fives to me and Sandra. “You're our man, Jerome.”

“You're on our team tomorrow,” Damon says. “He is not,” Monte says.

“He is so.”

Finally I catch my breath. “I don't know if I'm playing tomorrow,” I say.

“What plans you got?” Damon asks. I shrug.

“I asked you a question.” Damon is in my face, his fists clenched, dancing around. “You digging up dead people over there with that bum friend of yours? You talking to the ghosts?”

“Least I got something worth doing.”

“Like what?”

“We're fixing a stone wall and making a garden.”

“‘We're fixing a stone wall and making a garden.'” He mimics my voice that is higher than his. “And where were you the other night, I'd like to know.”

“What night?”

“You know what I'm talking about, so stop acting like you don't.”

Could Damon have seen me taking out those glass blocks? The other kids are standing around, making a circle
like they do on the playground when a fight is about to start. Mama always said
I'm lucky with you, Jerome, because you stay far from trouble.
But Mama's gone now and I have to decide for myself. I feel Damon's fist on my shoulder, not hard really, just firm.

“I saw you out there, trying to break in,” Damon says.

“I was not.”

“What were you doing then, hanging around out here in the middle of the night?”

I punch Damon in his stomach so hard he folds up like a lawn chair, folds and then unfolds, pulls his arm back. Then I feel somebody's arms around me, holding me down. I twist to get free, but he's stronger than I am and he won't let go. “Take it easy now, Jerome.” The voice is Mr. Willie's.

“He started it,” I say.

“Doesn't matter,” Mr. Willie says.

I twist again, but Mr. Willie's arms are like ropes around my shoulders, pinning my arms to my sides. “Why don't you hold him?” I say, moving my chin toward Damon.

“He is not my business,” Mr. Willie whispers.

“I'm not either,” I say. I want to call the words back, but it's too late.

Slowly Mr. Willie loosens his grip. “Game's over,” he says to all of us.

“We could call the police on you,” Damon says to Mr. Willie. He motions toward the carriage house. “You
aren't allowed to just start living somewhere,” he says. “It's against the law.”

Sandra shrugs. “You sound like a lawyer or something.” She turns to her sister. “Let's go.”

I take a deep breath and let it out slow. All those years the boys at school teased me because I play the piano and I talk proper and I'm fat, and all those years I never once got into a fight. Mama said
You know who you are in your heart, Jerome. All that's just words.
But now it seems like I forgot everything Mama ever taught me. I'm crying in the dark and Mr. Willie lets me go.

“Time to come in, boys,” Aunt Geneva calls from the porch.

Mr. Willie's already heading back up the street. I want to run after him and say
I'm sorry for what I said. Can I please stay with you? We'll find a piano somewhere for sure and start practicing a duet just like you used to play with Sharon. I only need a mattress, that's all.

Monte puts his hand on my arm. “Come on.”

Damon is already up ahead. I don't want to go to Aunt Geneva's and sleep in the room with Damon. I want to go to my own house with my own piano.

Monte is pulling me toward the porch light.