“No, Mama.”
“They keep me from having cigarettes. I’m dying for a drink. It’s like prison. I get outta here, I’m gonna get even with Sammy for dumpin‘ me like that.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and then looked at me sharply. “Your daddy send you here hopin‘ I’d come back?”
“Didn’t anyone tell you about Daddy, Mama?”
“They don’t tell me nothin‘ ’bout nobody. All they tell me is what I can eat and drink, when I should sleep, and how I should try to care more about myself. That doctor drives me crazy with all her talk. Makes my head spin. If you got a cigarette and you’re not givin‘ it to me, Phoebe…”
“I don’t have any cigarettes, Mama. Aunt Mae Louise won’t let a cigarette ten feet near her.”
“Mae Louise?” She blew some air between her lips. “She only let that man of hers near her twice, to have those brats, and that was that. I can see it in his face when he looks at me. Man’s starving for some lovin‘,” she said, smiling. “Mae hates it when I’m around.”
She looked at me again, angrily.
“Why didn’t your daddy come here himself? Man has no spine, sending a girl to do his work.”
“Daddy can’t come here even if he wants to, Mama. Daddy’s dead,” I said.
She tilted her head a bit and narrowed her eyes.
“I don’t know why no one has told you that. Maybe they have and you forgot,” I added, more for my own thinking than hers.
“Dead? How’s he dead?”
“He was killed in a car accident, Mama. I’ve been living with Aunt Mae Louise and Uncle Buster since you ran away with Sammy Bitters. Daddy thought it was better than my being alone in the city, only it’s been worse,” I continued, since she looked like she was really listening to what I had to say now. “It’s a snobby place and—”
“You say Horace is gone?”
“Yes, Mama. Daddy’s gone.”
She nodded and then rocked herself.
“He was like dead anyway,” she told herself. Then she stopped rocking and looked at me.
“So who you living with now?”
“I just told you, Mama. I’m living with Aunt Mae Louise and Uncle Buster, but I can’t stand it there so I ran away.”
“Ran away?” She smiled and then chuckled. “I wasn’t much older than you when I first ran away. Runnin‘ is in the blood, I guess.”
“Mama, I want you to get better and come out of here. We could go off together, start a new life somewhere, far away from people like Aunt Mae Louise.”
“You can’t ever get away from people like your aunt Mae Louise. They’re everywhere, like locusts,” she said angrily, and started rocking herself again.
“We can, Mama. Just you and me.”
She looked at me with a smirk.
“You and me? Girl, you don’t even have a cigarette,” she said. “You come here and you don’t even have a cigarette for me.”
“Mama, you can get all the cigarettes you want when you come out of here and we’re together. We’ll get jobs together, maybe even in the same restaurant or something, and we’ll have a nice apartment and take care of each other.”
“Who told you to say all that? Your daddy tell you? He’d try anything to get me to come back.”
“No, Mama.” I squinted at her. “Daddy’s gone. I told you. He was killed in a car accident. Don’t you understand? We don’t have anyone but ourselves now.”