Joy. Marsha Hunt

      We ain’t nothing but glorified cleaners, and I don’t mind saying it, ’cause though we took on a building this size, the man that interviewed Freddie B down at the real estate agency promised that my husband could keep his construction work as long as he could find time to put out the garbage and see to the halls, stairs and elevators for the sixteen apartments. And I’m the one to do most of that. If we had to mess with all else in this half baked building, there wouldn’t be time to scrub your teeth in the morning. But the hussy in 207 seems determined to want to get my husband down in her place, ’cause she keeps calling ’fore daybreak about that shower of her’n.

      So when I hauled the phone over to my side of the bed, I was right ready to give Miss Gonzales a mouthful, but luckily I didn’t start straight in, ’cause it wasn’t her. It was Tammy. Joy’s mama.

      I peered at the clock thinking that if it was 6:20 in San Francisco where we was, it wasn’t but 9:20 for her over in Richmond, Virginia, and knowing how much she likes to sleep late, I figured she wasn’t calling just to jaw. For a start, she wasn’t pronounciating every word like usual. Though Tammy tries to give off like she’s educated, she didn’t get no further than high school like the rest of us. Don’t make me no difference if she likes to take airs. That’s always been her way, and since Joy told her years ago to stop correcting me all the time, I don’t feel I got to watch every word with Tammy and just say out what I have a mind to.

      ‘Tammy? What ch’you doing ringing my phone at this hour, girl? You ain’t got nothing better to do than to be calling folks at the crack o’dawn,’ I teased her.

      There was a time when she was still living ’cross the bay in East Oakland that she used to try and phone me at least once a day, but ever since she got hitched up with that cop from Chicago after he retired and moved back to his home town in Virginia, she don’t hardly bother to call no more. It’s Joy who keeps me posted on what Tammy’s doing, not that Joy stays in touch with her mama all that much.

      ‘Baby Palatine, are you sitting down?’ Tammy asked me.

      ‘Girl, who are you kidding,’ I laughed, ‘my black behind is still in the bed and I’m proud of it.’

      But me funning and bad talking didn’t put her in no joky mood. ‘Well, I’ve got bad news,’ she said.

      Tammy thrived on bad news and given half a chance could really spin a sad story out, especially if it was about somebody else. Listening to her could be more entertainment than them afternoon soap operas. But that early in the morning I wasn’t ready to hear no long drawn out tale, so I asked her to make it quick ’cause I needed the toilet, which wasn’t altogether a lie.

      ‘I didn’t know if you still turn on Good Morning America as soon as you get up, because I would hate to think you heard it first on the news,’ Tammy said, ‘because that would be terrible.’

      I sat bolt upright and reached for my glasses but they wasn’t where I thought I left them on the sidetable. I can’t think good till I got ’em on. And from her sorry-sounding voice I suspected I needed to be in a clear mind.

      ‘I got an unfortunate phone call a couple hours ago.’

      ‘Tammy, what’s up?’ I interrupted, but what I really wanted to add was that I didn’t need none of her suspense and it was way too early to put up with one of her melodramas. She can turn a cankersore into lip cancer or a pot burning into a four alarm fire and she’s good at getting me going. Freddie B says that she should of been a politician or something, ’cause she’s that sharp at getting folks riled up about nothing. Like the time she had me on the warpath hotfooting it to Alameda with her to complain about the county raising Bay Area land tax, when I didn’t even own no land. When my husband seen me afterwards pacing up and down like a tiger in a cage he had to remind me that it was only Tammy that was gonna have to pay something extra anyway.

      He says the only reason she bothers with me is that she can get me on a rampage so quick, but true as that may be, she’s as much like family to me as her three girls. And I wouldn’t of changed that for nothing even though I wasn’t in the mood to have her calling at no 6:20 in the a.m.

      ‘Tammy, my poor husband is trying to sleep next to me and it ain’t fair me hanging on the phone with the cord stretched so tight across his neck, he’s near to strangling while you don’t say nothing.’ Freddie B sleeps heavy as somebody in a coma, and I could of probably tied the telephone cord around his neck and been choking the breath out of him, and I bet he wouldn’t of stirred. But Tammy wasn’t to know that.

      ‘It’s Joy,’ she said and waited just long enough for the tremor in her voice to give me goose flesh.

      Joy was more like my daughter than she was hers, and for years it was usually me calling Tammy with news of Joy, ’cause Joy came to me ’fore she went to anybody, especially when she got into trouble which wasn’t all that often. But it was often enough to keep me on my toes.

      If I’d of had a child, I reckon it would have made me mad if she had always been rushing with her agitations and whispers to some other woman first. But then Tammy brought that on herself, ’cause there was a time when I was ready to listen to her children and she wasn’t. And from back then, Joy took the habit of coming to me to share both the good and bad.

      I prepared myself to hear Tammy say what I had long predicted which was that Joy’d got herself arrested, ’cause with all that gadding about she did down South with Rex Hightower, that rednecked, toothpick of a so-called boyfriend of hers, I warned Joy that it wouldn’t be long before some of them Okies found reason to lock her up in a backwater jailhouse and throw away the key. She ran around like she thought she was some kinda blue-eyed blonde. ‘Nigger,’ I used to say to Joy and point my finger in her face so she knew I meant business, ‘don’t forget what you are and where you are.’ But she let that good advice slide off her quicker than grease off a hot comb, ’cause she was always slow to listen to what she didn’t want to hear. Miami, Atlanta, Memphis, Alabama … She wasn’t scared to go none of them places, though she wouldn’t always let on that’s where she was calling from ’cause she knew I didn’t hold with it.

      That’s why I figured Joy was in the South when she had phoned me at the weekend and wouldn’t tell me where she was nor where she was headed. Though I’d got used to her being secretive about things like that when it suited her, it didn’t make me feel no easier when she’d call me regular and refuse to say where she was. Being from down South myself, I don’t have no illusions about what goes on. Don’t matter what the newspapers say about how things is changing. They ain’t changed all that much for no colored girl to be flaunting herself with no white man. ’Specially no hillbilly singer that’s rich and famous as Rex and got girls throwing themselves at him. Like that great big fat woman I seen at the Mayfair supermarket wearing one of them ‘Rex Is Better Than Sex’ buttons that they give away with his last record. I was itching to tell her that I knew from reliable sources that he couldn’t get it up, but my better self told me not to ’cause it wasn’t Christian.

      Soon as I knew it was Joy that Tammy’d telephoned about, I didn’t want Freddie B’s clock to tick another second till I knew exactly what was going on. And through my nightclothes, I could hear my heart thudding like a jack rabbit’s waiting on Tammy to get to the point while she coughed a couple of times and cleared her throat. It’s a nervous habit she claims, but I know it’s her ruining her lungs with them cigarettes. Water filters or no water filters.

      It wasn’t but two words she finally eked out to end my Tuesday before it had a good chance to start.

      ‘Joy’s dead.’

      I had to laugh. ‘Say what?’ I hadn’t never heard of no such foolishness.

      ‘Don’t make me repeat it, Baby Palatine, because it was hard enough to say it. You’re the first person I’ve had to utter those words to, because Jesse’s not home and I haven’t been able to contact either Anndora or Brenda. It so infuriates me to have daughters that I can never reach when I need them.’

      I’d stopped listening to what she