Edward Jones - Lost in the City

And over time as well, nearly all the legal crap was changed so that my name, just below hers, was on everything — invoices, the store’s bank account, even the stuff on the door’s window about who to call in case of emergency. After she had been gone a year or so, I timidly asked about a raise because I hadn’t had one in quite a while. “Why ask me?” she said. We were someplace just off Benning Road and I didn’t know where I would get the strength to drive all the way back to Kentucky’s. “Why in the world are you askin me?”

I went about my days at first with tentativeness, as if Penny would show up at any moment in her dirty apron and make painful jokes about what I had done wrong. When she was there, I had, for example, always turned the bruised fruit and vegetables bad side up so people could see from jump what was what, but Penny always kept the bruised in with all the healthy pieces and sold the good and the not-so-good at the same price. Now that she was not there, I created a separate bin for the bruised and sold it at a reduced price, something she had always refused to do. But the dividing line of that separate bin was made of cardboard, something far from permanent. Every week or so the cardboard would wear out and I had to replace it.

Because there were many nights when I simply was too exhausted to walk the two blocks or so to Kentucky’s, I made a pallet for myself in the back room, which would have been an abomination to Penny. “Work is work, and home is home,” she always said, “and never should those trains meet.”

When Mrs. Baxter came in to buy on credit, which was about twice a day, she would always ask, “How the murderer doin?” I tried to ignore it at first, but began trying to get back at her by reminding her of what her bill was. Generally, she owed about a hundred dollars; and rarely paid more than five dollars on the bill from month to month. Since Penny had told me to wipe the slate clean for Patricia’s mother, Old Lady Baxter became the biggest deadbeat. Baxter always claimed that her retirement check was coming the next day. After I started pressing her about the bill, she stopped bad-mouthing Penny, but I found out that that was only in the store, where I could hear.

When I told her that I wouldn’t give her any more credit until she paid up, she started crying. My mother once told me that in place of muscles God gave women the ability to cry on a moment’s notice.

“I’ll tell,” Mrs. Baxter boo-hooed. “I’m gonna tell.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, loud enough for everyone in the store to hear. “Who you gonna tell? Who you gonna go to?”

“Penny,” she said. “I’ll tell Penny. She oughta know how you runnin her sto into the ground. I’ma tell her you tryin to starve me to death.”

Within a few weeks her account was settled down to the last penny, but I still told her never to step foot in the store again. Surprisingly, the old lady took it like a man. It was a full month before I got the courage to tell Penny what I had done. I could see that she did not approve, but she only had this look that my mother had the day my brother came home with the first piece of clothing my parents allowed him to buy on his own. A look of resignation — Thank God I don’t have to live with it.

At first, with Penny’s blessing, I hired my more trustworthy friends or cousins or a few people in the neighborhood, but either they could only work part time or they didn’t do the job well enough to suit me. Kentucky even helped out some, but after she got into an executive training program at what she called her “real job,” she didn’t want to work in the store anymore.

Then, in the spring of 1965, I lucked onto a Muslim who lived on 6th Street. She was on public assistance and had three children, which made me skeptical about her working out, but I gave her a one-week tryout, then extended it another week. Then extended two weeks more, then I took her on full time, permanent, and gave her two aprons with her named stitched over the left pockets. I was always afraid that I’d find the place overrun with her kids every day, but in all the time I knew her, despite the fact that she lived only a block away, I met her kids only a few times and came to know them only by the pictures she showed me. Her name was Gloria 5X, but before she lost her slave name, the world — and she seemed to know three fourths of it — had called her Puddin. And that was what I learned to call her.

After I got where I could leave things in Puddin’s hands, I was able to take off now and again and spend more time than I had been with Kentucky. We did two weeks in Atlantic City in the summer of 1965, back when the only rep the city had was what the ocean gave it, and that seemed to revive what we had had. That fall I set about redoing the store — repainting, rearranging shelves, and, at long last, getting a new meat case. The renovations left me, again, spending more and more nights on the pallet in the back. There were fewer people buying coal oil and I wanted to tear out the pump, but Penny vetoed that. “Wait,” she said. “Wait till the day after the very last person comes to buy some, then you tear it out.”

I passed the halfway mark in the new work before the end of winter and wanted to celebrate with a good meal and a movie. I was to meet Kentucky at her office one evening in February, but I was late getting there for a reason I don’t remember, for a reason that, when it is all said and done, will not matter anyway. When I did get there, she iced me out and said she was no longer interested in going out, which pissed me off. I kept telling her we could have a good evening, but she insisted we go home.

“You know,” she said as I continued trying to coax her to go, “you spend too much time at that damn store. You act like you own it or something.” I was making $110 a week, had a full-time employee and one part-time worker, and I didn’t particularly want to hear that shit.

“It’s my job,” I said. “You don’t hear me complainin and everything when you come home and sit all evening with your head in those books.”

“It’s not every single day, not like you do. Maybe once every three weeks. You come first, and you know it.”

When we got home, she began to thaw.

“Why are we letting all this come between you and me?” she said. “Between us?” She repeated that “us” three or four times and put her arms around me.

Because she was thawing, I felt I was winning. And I think I got to feeling playful, because the first thing that came to mind after all those us es was that joke about Tonto and the Lone Ranger looking up to see a band of Indians bearing down on them: “What they gonna do to us, Tonto?” “Whatcha mean ‘us,’ Kemo Sabe?”

I don’t think I said that line out loud. Maybe I did. Or maybe she just read my mind. In any case, she withdrew from me, then went to the window, her arms hugging her body. “I thought so,” she said after a bit. “Clean your things out of here,” she said, in the same quiet way she used to tell me to remember to set the clock’s alarm. “Clean everything out as soon as possible.”

Despite what she had said, I left her place feeling pretty cocky and went to Mojo’s. After four beers, I called Kentucky to say we should wipe the slate clean. She calmly told me not to call her again. “You fuckin bitch!” I said. “Who the fuck do you think you are!” After a while I went to my mother’s place. For the most part, I had sobered up by the time I got there. I found my mother at the kitchen table, listening to gospel on the radio. I don’t recall what conversation we had. I do remember noticing that she had lost, somewhere in time, three or four of her teeth, and it pained me that I did not even know when it had happened.