LITMIR.BIZ

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always happen. Of course it may be that she just thought it was a good story and didn’t see that it sort of ruined the tooth fairy. Some people don’t know how to tell a story and don’t know when.

      But when I thought of the story I thought of where Ambrosia’s mind spends its days. I looked at Layla. She sat there for the longest time looking at that tooth like she was deciding whether or not to eat it. Ambrosia wouldn’t have noticed and wouldn’t have minded if she did notice. She just rocked and turned the pages of her cardboard book.

      The Closed World

      While Rose worked on whether or not she was gonna die I worked on a jigsaw puzzle of Paris, France. A thousand and one pieces laid out on the card table in Rose’s room. She felt better when I was near.

      I always liked jigsaw puzzles. I used to have a girlfriend Mattie who said, What’s the use of putting all the pieces together if you already have the picture on the front? I never knew what to answer her. Then she would ask me what I was gonna do when I finished? Just stand there and look at it? Ask somebody else to look at it? No, I’d say, maybe I’ll put it on cardboard and hang it up on the wall like I read about in a hobby magazine. And she’d say, Why? You didn’t paint it. All you did was put the pieces together somebody else had cut out. And for a while I wouldn’t have so much fun putting a puzzle together. Then I’d start again. And what I figured out was a few things. First, I liked finishing a thing. Second, if you pick a good puzzle you see a lot more about the picture by watching it form and by picking pieces with the right colors.

      Anyway, I was working on Paris, France. I had the four edges finished, which is always the easiest part, and I was sorting the pieces by color looking at the picture on the front.

      Rose said, “Yslea?”

      “Yes, ma’am,” I said with my tongue between my lips. I was concentrating on blue.

      “What you making for dinner tonight?”

      It seemed the less she ate the more she was interested in food. “Squash and fried okra.”

      “Squash and fried okra,” she said. And seemed to think it over. “You know how many meals I’ve eaten? No matter, I never get tired of fried okra.”

      I found which blue pieces went next and had some luck finally placing their shapes into their opposites.

      She lifted up her hand with her palm to heaven and the flesh just hung off her arm like a loose sleeve. “I hope Jimmy takes care of you and that baby.”

      I didn’t say anything. I hadn’t even decided if I wanted him to. And after seeing what all he found on that computer—it was just too much. Why would I want my baby around that? And it wasn’t just the things he found on the computer. Those things are part of the world and you can’t get away from the world because where would you go? But it was the way he liked to see those things so much and liked to be by himself when he looked. You can’t have a family if you can’t even walk into the room whenever you want, especially if you only have a couple of rooms. But I didn’t go on about this to Rose.

      “Anyway,” she said, like she understood, even though I didn’t say it, “you can stay here as long as you want after I’m dead. I won’t have much use for the house then.”

      I didn’t know what to say to her. Was she giving me the house? I wondered. I didn’t think to ask if it was hers in the first place because that seemed rude. But I thought about four walls of my own even if it only had three rooms and a bathroom. When somebody who’s lucky to own a dress and a pair of shoes finds out all of a sudden they might be able to own a house, they can’t be blamed if they act strange. I put down my puzzle piece and took the yellow dress she wanted to be buried in out of the closet. She only moved her eyes to look at it. Then she looked away.

      Why did I pull out that dress? I think to tell her not to worry after she was dead because I would take care of her, which was what I could give.

      But her eyes told me something like “I’m not dead yet.”

      And I felt bad. Because it was true that I felt happy about the house, even though it meant she had to die. Sometimes a thing can go from good to bad in no time. But I am lucky that, even though sometimes when my brain chatters to me it makes it hard to concentrate on sermons, sometimes when it chatters to me it gives me good advice and tells me when to just be quiet and see if things pass. That’s what it did. The other thing I am lucky about is that instead of being stuck on the inside of my life all the time, which is what can happen when you feel a lot, I usually seem to be watching myself do things, like I’m sitting in the corner nodding yes or shaking my head no.

      I put the dress back and sat down again. My worry was that now anytime I was kind to her it might seem like I wanted her house. I didn’t know what to do, so I waited. Everything had suddenly gotten so strange. But she knew what to do. “Yslea,” she said.

      “Ma’am?”

      “You might get Jimmy to paint the walls a color the baby’ll like.”

      “Yes, ma’am.”

      And then just to make sure everything was clear she said, “But not ’til I’m dead. Paint fumes make me cough.”

      I wanted to laugh but didn’t know if I could. So I looked over at her.

      She was grinning so I laughed, and part of why I was laughing was that Rose always knew what to do and I wanted to be like that for my baby, with plenty of room to take any of my child’s mistakes and just hide them away inside myself so she can keep starting over until she gets it right. Which was a strange thing because until I thought that thought to myself I didn’t know I thought my baby was a girl.

      “Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”

      Things beneath the Grate

      But that did make me start thinking about the house in a new way because I started thinking about the baby living in it for a long time instead of just thinking about me living in it for a bit. Even though my baby was still little I felt enough of her inside me that I started thinking more about what it would be like for her to be in my arms, about where she might sleep, about the locks on the doors and about the heat of summer and the cold of winter. People in Memphis are better at hot than they are at cold so once I started thinking about this my main worry about Rose’s house was the heater, which Rose said was gonna be a problem that winter since it sometimes didn’t come on the winter before. I don’t like to be cold and I sure didn’t want to be cold and pregnant. Who knows what cold does to an unborn baby? I thought. And I thought when my baby finally was born I just wanted not to worry about locks and heat and cold. I wanted not to worry about food.

      Once I started thinking about it, though, it didn’t take long before I realized the problem might not be as big as I thought at first. I decided not worry about a problem that was not a problem yet. The ducts and vents and all were there. And these days machines like heaters work much better than in the old days.

      But while I stood there mulling the house in general I stared down into the grate over the dark duct that snaked up to the middle of the house. My toes were on the edge and I looked down past my belly where my baby was growing and for the first time in a long time I thought about some of the things that used to scare me and thrill me and make me feel safer when I was a girl and for a minute or so I let it all just be one thought and suddenly I was both happy and sad that I was not a little girl anymore. And I wanted to cry, which was happening more and more often.

      I kept looking down trying to work the thoughts all the way to the end. It was a kind of tunnel down there, with its own wind, where the house breathed. When I was a kid I stared and stared down through our grate, even though the adults stepping over me told me to get on up off that floor, girl. But there was a whole history of dropped things down there—candy wrappers, Band-Aids, bits of cereal, dust. But what I always saw as a kid about the things beneath the grate was that they were so different down there matted in the dark tunnel. They were the kinds of things you would poke at with a stick like a bug or dead thing you didn’t want to

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