Begging for Change Page 5

  Come two o’clock in the morning, I tell Momma she should call Dr. Mitchell or Odd Job.

  “No. You want them hurt? These kids just looking for trouble tonight. Anybody that comes by here’s gonna find it too.”

  I sit by the window and peek out under the curtain. Miracle’s sitting on our car. Some boy is holding her around the waist, kissing her hard. Her girlfriend asks her if she got a light. A cigarette lighter flies from her hands over to the steps.

  “We should burn the whole place down. The whole street,” Miracle says, pushing the boy away. Walking up our steps and sitting down.

  Momma tells me to get away from the window.

  “Shiketa’s my girl. We like this,” Miracle says, crossing her fingers. “That witch,” she says, pointing to our house, “act like she owns the neighborhood and everybody gotta do things her way.”

  The wine’s getting to Miracle, I guess. ’Cause all of a sudden she starts to cry. “Shiketa and me like sisters. She don’t make me pay rent. Just cook and clean. Now I’m gonna get kicked out unless money start coming in.”

  Miracle’s girls tell her to stop acting like a punk. Then somebody reminds her that landlords can’t throw you out even when you don’t pay up. “Not for six or eight months, at least.”

  Momma sits down on the floor by me and looks out the window too. We hold our breath when Miracle walks up to the door and kicks it. “Y’all come out here! Now!”

  Momma’s eyes get big.

  It’s Miracle’s fist on the door now. Bam. Bam. Bam.

  “I’m calling the police,” Momma says, heading for the kitchen on her hands and knees.

  I’m right behind her. Crawling like a baby. Telling her the police will come but Miracle won’t go nowhere. “She still gonna be living up the street tomorrow.”

  We go back to the window. Peek out under the blinds.

  “Y’all crazy over there, making all that noise.” It’s Miz Evelyn, Momma’s friend from across the street. She got a phone in her hand. “I’m calling the police. Don’t think I’m playing.”

  Miracle backs off. “We just having a little fun. Dag.” She sits down on the top steps again.

  “Why don’t you go to your own building? Leave that nice woman alone.”

  One of Miracle’s friends cusses. Tells Miracle she’s bored anyhow and they need to get going. Miz Evelyn slams the door shut. Me and Momma don’t move.

  It’s three o’clock in the morning and Momma’s still sitting at the window. She’s asleep. Her arms are holding her legs and her head’s leaning against the windowsill. Every once in a while, I gotta push her up straight, so she don’t fall over.

  Now Miracle’s friends are joking ’round with her about being homeless. “You gonna be living in a shelter? Well, don’t worry, Boo. We’ll come over and visit you,” one of them kids says.

  I can’t see Miracle living in a shelter or on the streets. She too cute for that.

  “I’m going to bed,” Momma says.

  I stay at the window till Miracle’s gone, an hour later. Then I go to Momma’s room to cut off the light. She’s asleep. There’s a pen in her hand and balled-up stationery all over the floor.

  Dear Shiketa:

  I don’t like you. I don’t like your friend Miracle. I try to live a decent life and all you do is make things dirty and loud. I’m tired of the both of you.

  Dear Shiketa,

  Your friends scared us tonight—but we’re still here. Nobody can make us leave before we’re ready.

  You are smart—I know, we used to talk a lot. But you need different friends if you want a different kind of life once you get out. Remember—you deserve better.

  I want to wake Momma up and tell her to cross off the sweet stuff she wrote and rewrite the part that says she don’t like Shiketa or Miracle. I want her to not be nice to them. To take a stick and hit them good. To make Shiketa’s mom cry at night, like I do sometimes thinking about what happened, and what could’ve happened to me if Momma had died or something.

  Momma wakes up. Rubs her eyes and asks what I’m doing in her room. I’m holding the letter behind my back. Telling her I just came to kiss her good night.

  “I love you,” she says pulling me into bed with her.

  “Love you too,” I say. I drop the letter to the floor. Momma’s so close and warm.

  “Raspberry,” she says, yawning.

  “Yeah, Momma?”

  “One day, things will settle down for us. All this craziness will be over. You wait and see.”

  I tickle her. She tickles me back. “I know, Momma,” I say laughing, not hardly paying no mind to the sirens screaming as a fire truck races up our street.

  Since the trial and Miracle’s party, Momma’s changed her mind about a few things. First off, she wanna move. Now. Not just ’cause Daddy knows where we live, or ’cause she’s tired of dealing with Shiketa and Miracle. “Just ’cause I want you safe and not filled with worry all the time,” she says.

  So Momma talked to the lawyer again. Told her she wants us in that Section Eight house in Pecan Landings before school starts up in September. It’s June 3rd now.

  I don’t know what’s gonna happen with the new house or Miracle or my father neither. All I know is, can’t nobody take care of me and Momma, but me and Momma. So when Momma leaves the house to go to her job pressing clothes at the dry cleaners, I hit the streets. Knock on every door on our block. All twenty-five of ’em.

  People ’round here sleep late on Saturdays. So some folks never do answer the door when I show up wanting to know if they’ll pay me to sweep or hose down their sidewalks. Other folks just hang their heads out the window and call me every name they can think of. But six people, mostly old dried-up women, say for me to go ahead. I make me thirty dollars in two hours. Not as much as I want, so instead of going to Mai’s house and heading for the mall like I planned, I knock on one more door. I ask the man who answers if he wants his pavement done.

  “What?” he says, coughing and hacking. Spitting yellow snot onto the pavement.

  “My name is Raspberry Hill,” I say, repeating myself again. “I live up the block. For ten dollars, I’ll clean your walk. Wash it down. Scrub it clean. You know.”

  This man ain’t old like the women. He’s like, thirty. Got a black do-rag tied ’round his head and big gold hoop earrings on. “I oughta . . .” he says, making a face so mean I take a step back. “Girl, I just got to bed. And you out here hustling . . . waking me up for some stupid stuff. If you don’t get . . .”

  I’m down his crooked steps and two houses over before he slams the door shut. “Forget you!” I yell, crossing the street and knocking on Miz Evelyn’s door.

  “Your momma want something?” she says, holding her hand over her eyes to block the sun.

  I shake my head no. Say I was just wondering if she needed any help doing stuff around her place.

  “Ain’t you nice,” she says, grabbing my cheek and pinching it. “Just like your mother.”

  When Miz Evelyn walks, one leg goes high up in the air, then down again like she trying not to step on poop or something. She’s pretty, for somebody her age. Got long silver-blue hair past her shoulders. Big, fat teeth—fake ones, probably. Her skin is the color of pecan shells.

  “I was thinking just the other day,” she says, taking me ’round back to the yard, “somebody needs to clean this here alley.”

  She holds her nose and unlocks a gray wooden fence with faded red apples painted all over it. Garbage is everywhere— like somebody threw trash bags out the windows, just to see how far the food would fly when the bags smashed to the ground like water balloons.

  “It’s a shame, ain’t it?” Miz Evelyn says, taking my hand. “The junkies be back here sometimes, you know, sleeping in all this filth.”

  I think about Daddy. Wonder if he hanging out in places like this.

  “Your mother send you?” she asks, bending down and picking up a rusty corn can. “’Cause she said she would, you
know.”

  I stop following her, ’cause it’s too nasty out here. “No,” I say, checking the bottom of my sneakers.

  “Poor thing. Musta forgot. Said she was gonna send you by a few weeks ago. To help me spray flowers. Bugs like the roses, you know.”

  I tell Miz Evelyn I was just out trying to make some money. Wanted to know if she needed help with something. But I can’t clean up the alley. “You need a bunch of people to do that.”

  She uses her skirt for a trash bag. Holds up the bottom and drops old cans and pieces of paper in it. “I do what I can.”

  I let her know that I can’t stay long. ’Cause I got stuff to do. She keeps walking up the alley, saying she’s seen the alley behind our house. How clean it is. That’s ’cause Momma been doing it since we moved here last year. Even made Dr. Mitchell and Odd Job come help one weekend. “It’s easier to keep it clean, once you get it good and clean,” she says.

  “Well, I gotta go,” I say, telling her she needs to go inside too ’cause it ain’t safe back here.

  Miz Evelyn doesn’t follow me. She says for me to let myself out. And to take a few quarters out the candy dish in the hallway, “’cause your family’s been so nice to me.” She got a whole bunch of quarters, too. So many that they running over the sides of the dish and piling up on the table and floor. I stand there awhile, counting ’em in my head. I stop at twenty-five bucks, but there’s way more than that. I pick up about twenty dollars’ worth and walk out the door, jingling the change in my pocket like I ain’t got a care in the world.

  Sato called. It’s the first time that boy ever picked up the phone and dialed my number. I am so happy. Momma’s working out back in the garden. We haven’t seen Miracle for two whole weeks and things are going pretty good. So him calling makes this week extra special.

  “I was thinking ’bout you,” he says. “And I didn’t have nothing else to do, so I called.”

  “Good.”

  Sato says he’s on his front porch watching two little girls jumping double Dutch.

  I walk outside. Look up and down the street for Miracle. She ain’t there.

  “You get your money back from the class trip?” he asks.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  Not enough people signed up for the trip, so they canceled it. I gave Dr. Mitchell’s money to Zora, so she would know I’m not a thief.

  Sato covers the phone and talks to somebody else for a minute. “I wasn’t going nohow. Here.”

  He hands the phone to somebody. It’s a boy. A little one. His brother, I guess. He is so small, all he says in the phone is “Hi. Hi.”

  “That’s my baby brother. He’s three. A twin.”

  I walk over to the snapdragons and pull three out the dirt. Hold ’em under my nose and smile at how sweet they are. Sato asks about Momma. How she’s doing. I tell him about the letters.

  “I wouldn’t write to somebody that smashed me in the head,” he says.

  I walk down the steps and over to the back fence. Momma’s carrying a big plant with its roots hanging out like thin, white veins. “I don’t think she mails ’em.”

  Sato says that’s worse. “To write letters you know you ain’t sending. So what she writing ’em for?”

  I go back to my seat and look at Miz Evelyn waving at me. I turn around and go inside. “They shoulda let us go on the class trip. I wanted to go someplace different. Not be around here all the time.”

  It turns out that Sato didn’t have enough money to go. He says he was gonna have a party all by hisself when we took off for Canada. “I already started stashing things. Chips. Cookies. Pop.”

  I ask Sato how it feels to have other people in the house besides grown-ups. To not be the only child. He says it ain’t bad. But he’s the oldest, so it feels like he’s the only one sometimes. “My ten-year-old brother shares a room with me. He’s too young for me to talk to about guy stuff. But if my mom gets on my nerves, or my dad is gone too long, me and him talk about that.”

  Usually I talk to my girls about everything, but since I took Zora’s money, I don’t feel right calling Ja’nae and Mai up. Or telling ’em that I’m scared something else bad is gonna happen to Momma and me. They might ask me about the money. And I don’t want to talk about that.

  “When I’m grown, I’m gonna have two kids. A boy and a girl,” Sato says.

  “I’m having six.”

  “And I’m gonna live in a big house, with four bathrooms, eight fireplaces, and a refrigerator so big it’ll have four doors on it.”

  I go to my bedroom, lay across my bed, and put my feet up on the wall. “My house is gonna be all by itself. Not attached to the next house, like this one. And it’s gonna be in the woods.”

  “In the woods? Don’t ask me to visit you.”

  “Well. Maybe not in the woods. But surrounded by trees. Bad things don’t happen to people in houses with lots of trees nearby.”

  Sato says I’m nuts. “In the movies, it’s the houses in the woods where people end up cut to pieces and—”

  “Oh, yeah. I forgot. Then I want to live in the city, in a house not connected to another house. I want lots of flowers and lots of children . . .”

  “And a husband, right?”

  “Right. And Momma, too. She’s gotta be there.”

  Sato’s back to talking ’bout his house. How his wife ain’t gonna work, like his mother. “She’s gonna stay home.”

  “What if she don’t want to? What if she wants to be a lawyer, like Zora’s mom? Or have two jobs, like my mother?”

  “Your mother likes working all them jobs?”

  I have to think a minute. “No. But if she had one good job, not two that don’t pay all that well, she would like it, I bet.”

  Sato’s mind is made up. His wife’s gonna stay home and take care of the kids. “Not work and cook and clean and care for a million kids, like my mom.”

  I tell Sato that I’m gonna do both. “Work, take time off and have kids. Then go back to work when they’re ten.”

  Sato says he could be down with something like that. But he ain’t sure. I lay on my stomach and quarters fall out my pocket. For a minute, I want to tell Sato everything about the money I stole off Zora and Miz Evelyn. How sometimes I really do wish my father was here living with us. Taking care of us.

  Momma calls me. She needs help in the garden. “I gotta go.”

  “Me too, Raspberry Curl.”

  I bite down on my lip. “You gonna call me back sometime?”

  Sato’s quiet. “Sometime,” he says, laughing. “Sometime I just might call you again, Raspberry Swirl.”

  I don’t hang up when he does. ’Cause I can still hear him, saying my name.

  We only got two weeks of school left, and Mai wants to cut class today. She wants to go hang out at Daddy Joe’s restaurant. “And get something good to eat.”

  “You coming?” she asks me.

  We standing out front of the school, watching everybody else go in. Talking to Ming while Ja’nae is braiding his hair.

  “Y’all going or not?” Mai asks.

  Ja’nae ain’t going. She’s scared her grandfather will find out and she’ll really get into trouble.

  Ming tells Mai she better take her butt to class. “’Fore you get shipped off to California sooner than you want.”

  We ask him what that’s supposed to mean. He says Mai’s gotta go live with their father’s people for the summer.

  I make this face, like I smell something rank. “You gonna be living with Koreans?” I ask Mai. “Just you and all of them?”

  Mai bends down and plucks Ming upside the head. That hurts. I can tell by how red his face is now.

  “If you wasn’t my sister . . .” he says, balling up his fist.

  “Man, you can hit sisters,” Sato says, walking over to us and bobbing around like he’s in a boxing ring. “You just can’t hit girls outside your family. But sisters, they always got it coming to ’em.”

  Ming slaps him five. Says Mai�
�s getting on their parents’ nerves. “So she’s gotta go,” he says, ducking. Mai pops him again. “Anyhow,” he says, looking over his shoulder at us. “My father says it’ll help her figure out who she is.”

  Mai gives Sato and Ming the finger. Then points to her tattoo. “This is who I am.”

  Ming shakes his head. “She hates Koreans. Hates ’em, and she’s one too. Now do that make any sense?” He stands up. Grabs Mai’s arm and presses it to his. “You know what, Mai?” he says, pushing her away. “You ain’t a hundred percent nothing. So get over it.”

  Ja’nae tells Ming to chill. I tell him to get off Mai’s case. “And just let her be who she wanna be.”

  Ming says I should mind my own business. Then he turns to Mai and says something to her in Korean. “Ni-gah noo-go in jial myun, pal-eh-gah ahn ssuh do dweh jah nah.” I don’t know what it is, but it makes Mai cry. Next thing we know she’s across the street, all up in this boy’s face. He’s new to our school. So quiet, we call him Q.

  “We better go talk to Mai,” Ja’nae says, putting Ming’s hair in one big braid and telling him she’ll finish it later.

  Ming ain’t happy with Ja’nae. He says he ain’t thinking ’bout Mai ’cause she’s always mad ’bout something. Ja’nae keeps walking. “We all like sisters,” she says. “So I gotta go.”

  I don’t want to go over there ’cause Zora just got off the bus. She’s headed Mai’s way.

  I stay behind a minute and ask Ming what he said to Mai. He rubs his forehead. “I said, ‘If you really knew who you were, you wouldn’t have to write it on your arm.’”

  Ming walks off, not even saying goodbye. I head for Ja’nae and Zora.

  “Hey,” I say to Zora in a tiny little voice.

  She don’t speak to me, but she got a whole lot to say to Ja’nae. She asking her what’s up with Mai. Then says Ja’nae needs to talk to Ming and get him to stop being so mean to Mai.

  “It ain’t all Ming’s fault,” Ja’nae says. “He likes being mixed. He don’t know why she don’t.”