LITMIR.BIZ

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DeAndre,” Rose said, turning her attention to him, “your attendance has certainly improved from last year.”

      He was out of his depth and he knew it, hiding behind a mumbled, “Yes’m.”

      “So now that you’ve settled your little score, I guess we won’t be seeing very much of you around here anymore.”

      “No, I’m going to go,” he insisted. “I’m going to go.”

      “Well, let’s just write that down.”

      She handed him her little account book, the repository for so many handwritten promises, all duly signed. Some were kept, most were forgotten, but all were used to try to bind her students to her, to put it on a personal level.

      DeAndre had signed that promise, but as the fall days grew shorter, he felt the ache of his poverty, the desolation of the rear bedroom on Fayette Street and the lure of the nightly action. Slowly, inexorably, he slipped off to Fairmount Avenue.

      Now he’s back. And of course, Rose Davis will take him on the rolls, give him another chance, promise even to promote him if he can pull himself together. She sees no other choice. Like so many of her students, DeAndre is keeping a foot in both camps, straddling for a brief moment the two disparate worlds. If she can keep him coming to school four days out of five—three days a week, even—she might have a shot. If he stops entirely, then she has lost another one—a gifted one, in fact—to the corner.

      The door to Rose Davis’s office opens. She acknowledges DeAndre with a rueful nod.

      “Hey,” he says, breaking the ice.

      “You can come in,” she tells him.

      DeAndre rises, glancing again at Rose as he steps past her in the office doorway. To his surprise, she is smiling.

      Ella Thompson prepares herself slowly in the back bedroom of her apartment. Black dress, black hat, dress heels, gold earrings—she’s getting better at this drill than any person ought to be. Last month, the service was at March’s; today, the homecoming is at New Shiloh, and next week, it will be at Brown’s on Baltimore Street for a neighbor’s son. And Ella is always in the middle of it, measuring out a little more of herself for each eulogy, for each gospel hymn, as if sitting demurely in these pews and bearing witness to tragedy is some kind of career.

      She pauses at the mirror with her makeup, listening for signs of life in the room across the hall. Nothing. Her youngest, Kiti, is pretending to be up and running when she knows he’s still face down in his pillow.

      “Kiti?”

      Silence.

      “Keee-Teee! Are you up?”

      She begins moving toward his bedroom door, but the click-clack of her heels gives warning. Before she can knock, her son greets her, bleary-eyed, at the bedroom door.

      “Ma, I’m up.”

      She smiles. “I’m serious now. You’ve got to get yourself dressed or we’ll be late.”

      The seventeen-year-old nods, then pads to the bathroom. Ella goes back to the mirror, peering into the glass at a face that has somehow managed to keep a look far younger than forty-six years. Ella is very dark, with the deepest of brown eyes and perfectly straight, jet-black bangs that give her face a girlish quality. Even after five children, she has kept her figure, so that among the children of Fayette Street, the general consensus is that Miss Ella might be more than thirty, maybe even thirty-five if you count carefully.

      On the other hand, such agelessness is wasted on Ella Thompson, who seems to concede nothing to her own vanity. She doesn’t work at looking younger, at changing her appearance or at obscuring her status as a middle-aged grandmother. Instead, she works at nearly everything else, and somehow, in a rush of well-spent days and months and years, she has forgotten to age.

      But on this morning, quite naturally, the mirror gives Ella back a hint of fear. Today is for Dana Lamm, but her son, Tito, is the young man most on her mind.

      The two had been inseparable since childhood. It had been a threesome, really—Tito and Dana, and then Gordon—three fine boys who were always rambling in and out of her rowhouse apartment, sharing with her their earliest triumphs, seeking her comfort when they stumbled. Ella had nurtured her son and his friends alike, encouraged them as she did everyone, watched with a cautious joy as each turned away from the corner. She had seen all the possibilities in those three boys and she had fought for those possibilities, inoculating each with her own unlikely optimism, her unwavering Christian purposefulness. School, work, respect, love, responsibility—from most any other soul on Fayette Street, such things were easily marked down as platitude. But from Ella Thompson, these things were life itself. With God’s own grace those three boys raised themselves up and got out. Her son to the navy, Gordon with him, and Dana to the marines.

      Victories, she thinks, hunting down her black purse.

      But then what is today? A victory emptied of itself, with Dana lost despite it all, dead from an electrocution at Camp LeJeune. A training accident. To survive a childhood in West Baltimore and then fall by random chance as a peacetime warrior—where in such an ending do you put your faith? Ella shakes her head. It makes no sense.

      Worse still, Tito has disappeared. When Gordon called her with the news of Dana’s death, her thoughts jumped to her oldest son. She phoned Tito in California that night and listened as he poured out his grief, the hurt turned bitter because the navy had denied him permission to fly home for the funeral. His pain was fierce, and she let him rant and cry, absorbing as much of his suffering as she could. She consoled and counseled, finally eliciting from him a promise not to go absent without leave. But since then, it has been four days of silence.

      Last night again, she had stayed up late trying to reach him, fretting away the three-hour time difference. Tito’s roommate was solicitous, but had no answer: “Haven’t seen him. Sorry, ma’am. I don’t know where he is.”

      She knows her son. He is strong-willed. He would jeopardize everything to be with Dana today, and there is a part of her that wouldn’t be surprised to see Tito at the church an hour from now.

      She pulls back from the mirror, brushing a few specks of lint from the dark fabric. Inspection complete.

      “Kiti?” she calls, sending her voice down the narrow hallway to his room.

      “In a minute,” he answers.

      She waits for him in the living room, a cluttered but clean space at the front of the first-floor apartment. The walls are filled with pictures of family and friends, and she pauses at the door to seek out Tito’s portrait, the one of him in uniform. She vivdly remembers the day the picture was taken. Dana was supposed to be in the portrait, too, but he couldn’t find his dress pants, so he begged off while Tito and Gordon, decked in their military finery, went to the downtown studio. And next to that picture, the shot of Tito at his high school prom, and below that, a photo of her children—all of them—clustered together on a sofa. For a moment, Ella lets her eyes gaze on the face of her youngest, Andrea, who is about ten in the photograph. Then Ella quickly looks away, fighting down the wave of emotion that inevitably rolls over her when she thinks of Fatty Pooh.

      Finally, Kiti joins her. She looks to him fondly as she adjusts his tie. She is a tall woman, but Kiti, a high school senior, towers over her as he submits to mothering.

      “You look nice,” she says.

      He smiles awkwardly. They go out the apartment door and onto the steps, where Ella surveys the Fayette Street strip as she pulls the front door closed. No one is hanging here in front of 1806, though just down the hill, Bruce Street is bustling. A look out slouches along Fulton Avenue.

      Two regulars glide past, heading down the hill from Monroe. “Morning,” says the one closest.

      “Good morning,” she replies. Her tone is open, a careful effort to avoid judgment; it’s Ella’s way to exclude no one. “How are you today?”

      Both

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