All We Know of Love (14 page)

St. Augustine, Florida

9:30 a.m.

Current temperature: 61 degrees

There
was
something inside the package that came from my mother.

It could have been an ugly sweater, out of style and too small. Way too small for me to wear, even if it wasn’t so hideous and ugly. It could have been a book, a baby book. One that I read five years ago or was the kind of book I would never, ever want to read. It could have been a corny CD, something that the Goth boy, the one with the nose
and
eyebrow piercing, leather pants, and purple hair who worked at Sam Goody told her all teenagers love.

But it wasn’t any of those things.

“Whatcha running from?”

I stop. Out of breath. Sweating.

And lost.

I turn to the voice. It belongs to a little boy sitting on top of an old beat-up car. First I notice his southern accent and then the deep, almost blue, dark tone of his skin.

“I’m not running from anything,” I say.

“In this neighborhood you are,” he says. “Or you should be.”

I think this boy couldn’t possibly be older than eight, if that. When I look around, I notice I am in a neighborhood, no longer near the St. Augustine bus terminal or a single palm tree. And I am the only white person I see.

“What are
you
doing here?” he says. He sees the same thing apparently, and from his vantage point up there on that car, he’s most likely accurate.

“I thought I could walk from the bus station,” I say, looking up, as if this were an answer.

“But you were running.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“You were.”

“Well, I’m looking for an address,” I say to the kid, although a couple of others have now gathered around him, sliding up next to the car, leaning on it.

“What is it?” one of the other kids says.

Funny you should ask,
I think.

“Fernando Street,” I say. It is the first time I have said it out loud. “One-seven-one-one Fernando Street.”

Another little kid, a little girl, has moved closer, as if I were the main attraction of the morning. “There ain’t no street called that,” she says almost defiantly. She even juts out her chin. She reminds me of the kind of girl that never likes me, the kind of girl that has an attitude, and I, then, seem to reek of weakness. But at least this girl is younger than me. She’s probably five. Six, tops.

“Nah, I know where it is,” the boy on top of the car says. He jumps down, and his sneakers slap the pavement. “It ain’t far.”

I have no idea whether to believe him or not.

“Maybe there’s someone else I could ask. A grown-up or something?” I say, looking around. There are a group of men, sitting on chairs outside a convenience store, all smoking cigarettes.

There is a woman walking across the street with her child trailing behind. She is wearing shorts, high heels, and massive hoop earrings. She looks younger than me. She will definitely not like me. And there are two older teenage boys walking down the sidewalk toward us. I notice that several of the houses on this street are boarded up. Two spaces down, a car with no wheels is sitting contentedly on concrete blocks.

“OK,” I say, turning back to the boy. “Can you tell me where?”

“Oh, I’ll do better than that,” he says. “I’ll take you.”

“Are you sure you know where it is? Fernando Street.” I start to spell it.

“He ain’t dumb, lady,” the girl with the jutting chin says to me.

It is the first time anyone has ever thought of me as a lady, a grown-up. And funny, it should be now, when I am completely lost and pretty much all alone.

But it seems like a good idea to follow this kid. I don’t feel like making any more decisions, and I don’t feel like getting my ass kicked by a kindergartener.

“OK,” I tell him.

“C’mon, then.” He is already off and halfway the down street, skipping happily, high above the ground.

The neighborhood changes a little as we walk. I finally get the kid to slow down.

“I’m an old lady,” I tell him, and he seems to believe it. “I can’t run that fast.”

There are a few more people around. There is a gas station on the corner. A women’s clothing store. A CVS. I haven’t seen any abandoned buildings in a while.

“Don’t you have to tell your mother or something?” I say. We’ve gone about ten blocks or so.

“My mama’s dead.”

I am having serious doubts about this kid since he’s already told me five or six completely outrageous stories, including one about his cousin Taiesha, who is going out with Jay-Z, and how he himself tried out for
American Idol.
Simon wanted him, but the producers said he was too young. Then Simon and Paula got in a big fight about it.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I say. “About your mother, I mean.”

“Don’t be,” he tells me. “My grandma takes care of me.”

“Well, don’t you have to tell your grandma then?”

“Nah, she don’t care where I am.”

Seven or eight out of the ten things he’s told me so far have got to be lies; I just hope it’s not the one about knowing where we are going.

“Where you live?” he asks me. We pass a post office and what looks like an office building. If he doesn’t know where the Fernando Street is, at least he’s taken me someplace I can probably get a cab or a bus from.

“I live in Connecticut,” I tell him. “You talk a lot, don’t you?”

“Yup,” he answers. “Keeps the devil away. My grandma says that.”

I’m not sure what this means, but we stop walking at the corner and he points. Sure enough the sign that hangs over the intersection and swings in the wind reads
FERNANDO STREET
. The storefront on the corner is number 1681. 1711 Fernando Street can’t be far from here.

“Hey, thanks a lot,” I say. “I wish I could give you something.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know.” I feel that offering him money would be insulting, even though that’s probably the thing he’d want most. I know I would. “But you really went out of your way. I mean, can you get back OK?” I add.

The kid spins around on his toes and starts off back down the way we came. “I’m cool,” he says. “I don’t need nothing.”

He certainly doesn’t seem to. But I do. I look down the block. There are apartments and flower boxes, garbage pails, plastic garbage bags tied, this morning’s newspapers lying on the stoops, waiting to be picked up. I can’t see the doors or the numbers, but I know behind one of them is my mother.

Maybe.

I am still not ready.

I turn back down the street the way we came. “Hey!” I shout. I don’t know his name. “Hey, kid. You. Hey.”

He stops, already a small figure halfway down the block.

I cup my hands and shout, “Wanna get some breakfast? Coffee?”

It takes me a half a second to finish what I am saying, but by the time I do, he’s standing next to me, smiling. He smiles like someone who is always smiling. I think he must have the happy gene, like Sarah.

I like that.

“What’s your name?” I ask him.

“Tevin.”

“I’m Natalie.”

“I knew that,” he snaps. “I can read minds.”

“Yeah, well, so can I,” I tell Tevin.

He looks right at me and I look right back.

Tevin’s mother was not dead.

She was alive and well, and at home, worrying about him.

Where is that boy? He is always running off.

Tevin was her baby, her youngest of four. He was so quick in every way, mind and body, and Theresa loved him dearly, as a mother loves her last child, maybe differently from the way she loved the others. Maybe more freely. For longer, maybe. Hoping to hold on to something, but more able to let go because she knows she has no choice. Like watching a bird, a baby bird, openmouthed and begging for food in the morning, flying from the nest by the afternoon, landing splat in the grass and stumbling forward, flapping and flapping, and one day flying.

Flying away.

Theresa twisted her hands together, rubbing the skin until she could feel the bones underneath, and it almost hurt. She looked down. Her hands were big. They always had been. There was a time, when Theresa was younger, when her hands embarrassed her. She had worn press-on nails in spectacular colors to make them prettier. But now they reminded her of her own mother’s hands, ugly but capable. Not so dainty, but they did the job. Maybe better.

When she couldn’t stand worrying anymore, Theresa got up off the couch, walked past the television, and looked out the window. She saw some of those kids Tevin hung out with: TJ and Christopher, and Victor, and that Williams girl. What was her name?

“Hey, Yvonne! TJ! You seen Tevin?” Theresa shouted down to them.

They had funny looks on their faces.

“Where is he?” Theresa yelled. “You tell me, now, y’hear?”

“He walked off with a white girl,” Yvonne shouted back.

“What?” Theresa yelled out.

Yvonne just stood there with her hands on her skinny little hips, thinking she was all that. She didn’t say another word, and those other boys were being like deaf mutes.

“I’m coming down there. Don’t you move, girl,” Theresa told them.

That Yvonne Williams didn’t know what she was saying.
White girl.
Tevin was probably right there, hiding behind that piece-of-shit car her brother had given them. Still, as Theresa made her way down the stairwell, her heart started beating faster.

What if something
had
happened to Tevin?

Her mouth went instantly dry, and tears stung her eyes with even the possibility. It isn’t like she didn’t have the thought all the time with her older boys, every time they left the house.

What would she do if something happened to Tevin, although God knows he asked for it — wild boy. Always acting too big for his britches. Theresa felt a sharp pain in her stomach, like she had been punched. Like she was going to vomit. And then, funny, as she tried to take the stairs two at a time, she suddenly had the memory of morning sickness. A wave of nausea that was almost like being hungry but, of course, you couldn’t eat. Theresa hadn’t been able to eat anything except Cheerios, with no milk, for nearly three months each time she was pregnant.

Damn, where did that boy go?

Theresa was sweating, out of breath.
A white girl? Walked off with a white girl?

She swore she would never let him out of the house again.

“Nowhere. Never alone,” she mumbled to herself, not believing it but swearing on her life. Safe, that’s all she wanted him to be, until he ran away again. And again.

Safe, this is what she was thinking as she pressed her wide hands against the two outer glass doors and stepped onto the sidewalk. The air assaulted her in one powerful blast of tropical heat. A warm February, even for Florida.

Those kids were gone. Scattered, of course. They had run.

“Tevin!” Theresa shouted. Her eyes smarted, and then there he was, walking toward her along the sidewalk, like nobody’s business.

“What, Ma? I was just having me a free breakfast,” Tevin answered. “Whassup?” He moseyed. There was no other word for it. Swaggered, a full 180 degrees with each step.

Theresa smacked him hard, but not too — right across the top of his head.
Smack.
She loved him that much.