The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey (14 page)

Ptolemy gazed paternally at Tolliver, and then he grinned.

“Something funny, Mr. Grey?” the banker asked.

“Here we all are,” he said, repeating word for word something that Coydog McCann had said long ago, “somebody gettin’ on the boat an’ somebody gettin’ off, and a captain in the middle makin’ sure we all get where we goin’ to.”

Robyn took Ptolemy’s hand and smiled for him as Tolliver frowned, wondering what he meant.

Mr. Grey. Mr. Grey.”

Robyn turned quickly on the crowded street. She put her hand in her purse, ready, Ptolemy knew, to protect him with her edge, her six-inch blade.

He heard his name and wondered back through the voices that called him and the things they had to say.

“Mr. Grey,” Felix Franz the German baker would say to him every morning when he came in to buy his coffee and coffee cake on the way to the maintenance office where he and his partners got their orders for the day.

He just said the name and that was the greeting. But this was the voice of a woman, not a German man; not Melinda Hogarth or Sensia or proper Minister Brock.

He turned to see the name-caller and laughed.

“It’s okay, Robyn. That’s my friend. Double-u ara eye en gee.”

She wore tapered black slacks today and a turquoise T-shirt. She still had the green sun visor and the faded cherry-red bag.

“Mr. Grey,” she said again.

“Shirley Wring,” Ptolemy said, gleeful to see her and reveling in the fact that he could remember a name, a face, and something he wanted. “Robyn, this is a woman who offered me a treasure.”

“Uh-huh,” Robyn grunted, and he could see in her the suspicion that had shown on Tolliver’s face.

All around them black and brown people were moving. Shirley Wring’s occluded eyes were gazing at Ptolemy.

“This is Robyn, my niece,” Ptolemy said.

“Your uncle is the treasure,” Shirley said. “He helped me out when I couldn’t pay my phone bill and wouldn’t even take my ring for a guarantee.”

“You could pay him back now,” Robyn said rudely.

“She don’t have to pay me,” Ptolemy said. “She offered me a treasure. You know that was on’y the second time in all my life that somebody offered me a true treasure.”

“I could take you two to lunch,” the small, gray-brown colored woman offered.

“We got to go home.”

“No, baby,” Ptolemy said. “Shirley here, she, I mean, I been comin’ ovah here . . . lookin’.”

“Oh,” Robyn said, and then she smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry, Miss Wring. Uncle been lookin’ for you for a long time. He been havin’ me comin’ down here just about ev’ry other day, hopin’ you show up.”

Shirley Wring smiled shyly, looking at the man who had been looking for her.

“I ain’t had a man searchin’ me down in quite a while,” she said. “Old woman like me lucky somebody don’t run her underfoot.”

“So we all gonna have lunch, right?” Ptolemy asked, looking into the brown and gray eyes of Shirley Wring.

 

 

 

They had sandwiches at a Subway chain store. Shirley paid for the meal.

She talked about when she moved to Los Angeles from someplace up north. When Ptolemy asked her if she was from California she looked away from him and said, “No. I’m from someplace else.”

“You talk real nice,” Ptolemy said, realizing that he had asked an uncomfortable question. “Did you come here to go to school?”

“My mama wanted me to get a education but I met this high-yellah fellah named Eric and I couldn’t think about nuthin’ else.”

“Robyn gonna go to college in the fall,” Ptolemy said, his voice loud to cover all the things he didn’t know.

“Junior college,” Robyn said.

“Junior college is college too,” Shirley declared.

“That’s right,” Ptolemy added. And he and the woman Shirley Wring smiled for each other across the bright-yellow plastic table.

“We got to get back home, Uncle,” Robyn said finally, to fill in and end the silence.

 

 

 

The days passed in a new kind of harmony for the old man. The TV stayed off unless Robyn wanted to watch her shows at night. Ptolemy refused to have her leave it on for him or turn to his news station. He wanted to run the TV himself without any help. If he couldn’t do that, then he wouldn’t ever be able to find his treasure and save his family; he would fail the way he failed Maude Petit and Floppy in that tarpaper house on the outskirts of town.

For the same reason the radio stayed off.

Sometimes Robyn would go out with Beckford Ross, Reggie’s old friend. Some nights she didn’t get in until hours after Ptolemy fell asleep. But the old man did not chastise her. Robyn was looking after him, and she needed to be free, like the birds his father didn’t want him to feed.

Twice a week for three weeks Shirley Wring came over in the afternoon to sit with Ptolemy and converse.

The talks always started pretty well. Ptolemy would tell her about his mother and father and their poor sharecropper’s farm; he’d talk about Coy and a treasure that was lost and her green ring. But after a while he could see in her eyes that he wasn’t making sense. She didn’t frown or get bored, but her smile became soft and her dim eyesight focused on something other than what he was saying. At this point he’d offer her tea and she would say that it was time for her to get home, “before the sun goes down and the thugs come out.”

During this time Ptolemy received a letter from his bank. The letter contained a plastic card that had his name printed in gold at the bottom. Robyn took him to a machine that had a TV screen in it in a shopping mall on Crenshaw. There she put the card in the slot and asked him, “What is the favorite name you like to spell, Uncle?”

“Double-u ara eye en gee?”

“Can you press those buttons?”

He did it twice and the card came back out of the slot.

“From now on all you got to do is remember those lettahs and this machine will give you money,” the child told the old man.

“For free?”

“Naw, Uncle. They take it outta that bank account we started.”

“Oh yeah,” he replied, not remembering and disgusted with himself for the lapse.

At a store called Merlyn’s, in the same mall, using his new bank card, Ptolemy bought Robyn a white wooden bed that sat atop three big drawers with pink handles. There was a padded board at the back of the bed that could be folded up to make the bed into a couch. They also got new sheets and blankets, pillows, and bright-red cushions for when the bed would be used as a couch.

When the bed was delivered the next day, Robyn grinned at the men assembling it.

After they left she took her uncle by the hand and pulled him until he was sitting next to her on the well-made bed.

“Are you gonna marry Shirley Wring and kick me outta here, Uncle Grey? I don’t care if you do. I mean, it’s your house and you could do what you want, but I nevah had no nice new bed before, and I’d like it if I could take it with me if you told me I had to go.”

“You wanna go and here we just got your bed?”

“No. I thought you loved Shirley Wring.”

“I’m too old for that. At this age I can only love chirren . . . like you. I love you.”

Robyn got down on her knees, took her faux uncle’s hands, and pressed her face against them.

They stayed like that for a long while, the man sitting up straight and the girl on her knees.

“Are you gonna leave me, Robyn?”

“No, not nevah, Uncle Grey. Not nevah.”

Robyn cooked and cleaned and slept in Ptolemy’s living room every night after that. They took walks in the neighborhood and never once saw Melinda Hogarth.

Niecie called twice.

“Pitypapa is sick an’ I got to take him to the doctor and give him his medicine,” Robyn told her guardian. “But I’ma come home when he bettah.”

“Bless you, child,” Niecie said.

Things went along like that for three weeks, until it was time for their appointment with Dr. Ruben.

The office was a block north of Melrose, on the west side of town. They took the bus and Ptolemy hummed to himself while one young man after another tried to get Robyn’s attention. She smiled and lied and sometimes just ignored them while Li’l Pea and Coy McCann fished almost a century before in the old man’s mind.

The doctor had a room in a courtyard of professional offices that surrounded a beautiful rose garden. The roses were white and gold, red and bright yellow. Ptolemy smiled while Robyn led him along.

“It’s beautiful here,” he said. “What is this place?”

“The doctor’s, remembah?”

“Oh yeah. Yeah.”

There was no nurse or receptionist, just a large room with a desk on one side and an examining table on the other. Robyn and Ptolemy sat in cushioned chairs before the desk.

Bryant Ruben was a white man of medium height, age, and build. He had a great mustache that made Ptolemy smile and beady green eyes that were not at all off-putting. The doctor’s voice was clear and strong. This made Ptolemy think that even if they were across the Tickle River from each other, he would still be able to understand the smiling doctor’s words.

It started with a memory test.

The doctor would recite a list of words, like
apple
,
tomato
,
pinecone
,
orange
,
sparrow
, and
stone
, and then ask Ptolemy to repeat them.

“
Orange stone
and, and, somethin’,” he answered on the first try.

After eight lists, Dr. Ruben smiled.

“I’m going to ask you to strip down to your shorts and sit on the examining table, Mr. Grey. Would you rather your niece wait in the garden?”

“No. She could see me right here. I don’t mind. I’m too old to be worried about bein’ naked.”

Ruben examined Ptolemy from head to toe with a rubber hammer, a stethoscope, and a pair of magnifying glasses that had double lenses and sat on the end of his nose.

“Ninety-one, eh, Mr. Grey?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re in wonderful physical condition for a man your age. You can put on your clothes and we’ll talk at the desk.”

Robyn helped her charge with his pants and shirt and then got down on her knees to tie his brown shoes.

“Those shoes is older than you, girl,” Ptolemy said, and Robyn stood and kissed his cheek.