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  Then Madeline would go off on how people who never been slaves got no comparison, and Ura Lee would go off on how the last slave in her family was her great-great-grandmother and then Madeline would say all black people were still slaves and then Ura Lee would say, Then why don't your massuh sell you off stead of listening to you bitch and moan. Then it would start getting nasty.

  Thing about living next door to somebody for all these years is, you already had all the arguments. If you were going to change each other's minds, they'd already be changed. And if you were going to feud over it, you'd already be feuding. So the only other choice was to just shut up and let it go.

  "So you saying you going to cut them a little slack even though you know they scored some weed and they going up to that open space at the hairpin turn to smoke it," said Ura Lee.

  "Up to the 'slack,' that's what I'm saying. How you know they got weed?"

  "Cause Ceese keeps slapping his pocket to make sure something's still there, and if it was a gun it be so heavy his pants fall down, and they ain't falling, and if it was a condom then it be a girl with him, and Raymo ain't no girl, so it's weed."

  "It's a good window," said Ura Lee. "I paid extra for this window."

  "I paid extra for the rope swing in my yard," said Madeline. "You know how fast boys grow out of a rope swing? About fifteen minutes."

  "So I got the better deal."

  "And you sure they going up to that nasty little park at the hairpin turn."

  "Where else can kids in Baldwin Hills go to get privacy, they can't drive yet?"

  "You know what?" said Madeline. "You really should be somebody's mama. Your talent being wasted in this one-woman house."

  "Not wasted—I'm here to give you advice."

  "You ought to get you another man, have some babies before too late."

  "Already too late," said Ura Lee. "Men ain't looking for women my age and size, in case you notice."

  "Nothing wrong with your size," said Madeline. "You one damn fine-looking woman, especially in that white nurse's uniform. And you make good money."

  "The kind of man looks for a woman who makes good money ain't the kind of man I want raising no son of mine. They enough lazy moochers in this world without me going to all the trouble of having a baby just to grow up and be another."

  "Thing I appreciate about you, Ura Lee, you live next door to my Winston all these years and you never once make eyes at him."

  Madeline seemed to think everybody saw Winston Tucker the way she did—the handsome young Vietnam vet with a green beret and a smile that could make a blind woman get a hot flash. Ura Lee had seen that picture on the wall in the kitchen of their house, so she knew all about what Madeline had fallen in love with. But that wasn't Winston anymore. He was bald as an egg now, with a belly that was only cute to a woman who already loved him.

  Not that Ura Lee would judge a man on looks alone. But Winston was also an accountant and a Christian and he couldn't understand that not everybody wanted to hear about both subjects all the time. Ura Lee once heard Cooky Peabody say, "What does that man talk about in bed? Jesus or accounts receivable?"

  And Ura Lee wanted to answer her, Assets and arrears. But she didn't know a single person well enough to tell nasty puns to. So she still had that witticism stored up, waiting.

  Anyway, Madeline thought her husband was so sexy that other women must be lusting after his flesh, and she'd be the one to know. They were lucky they had each other. "A woman's got to have self-control if she expects to get to heaven, Madeline," said Ura Lee.

  "Meanwhile your boy Ceese is going to have his first experience with recreational herbology."

  "If heredity is any guide, he'll puke once and give it up for good."

  "Why, is that what happened to Winston when he tried it?"

  "I'm talking about me," said Madeline testily. "Cecil takes after me."

  "Except for the Y chromosome and the testosterone," said Ura Lee.

  "Trust a nurse to get all medical on me."

  "Well, Madeline, I say it's nice to have some trust in your children."

  "Trust, hell," said Madeline. "I going to tell his daddy when he gets home, and Cecil's going to be sitting on one butt cheek at a time for a month."

  She got up from the couch and started for the kitchen with her coffee cup. Ura Lee knew from experience that the kitchen was worth another twenty minutes of conversation, and she didn't like standing around on linoleum, not after a whole shift on linoleum in the hospital. So she snared the cup and saucer from Madeline's hand and said, "Oh, don't you bother, I want to sit here and see more visions of the future out of my window anyway." In a few minutes the goodbyes were done and Ura Lee was alone.

  Alone and thinking, as she washed the cups and saucers and put them in the drying rack to drip—she hardly ever bothered with the dishwasher because it seemed foolish to fire up that whole machine just for the few dishes she dirtied, living alone. Half the time she nuked frozen dinners and ate them right off the tray, so there was nothing but a knife and fork to wash up anyway.

  What she was thinking was: Madeline and Winston have about the best marriage I've seen in Baldwin Hills, and they're happy, and their boys are still nothing but a worry even after they get out of the house. Antwon, who is doing fine, still had somebody shoot at him the other day when he was collecting rent, and twice had his tires slashed. And the other boys had no ambition at all. Just lazy—completely unlike their father, who, you had to give him credit, worked hard. And Cecil—he used to be the best of the lot, but now he was hanging with Raymo, who was studying up to be completely worthless and had just about earned his Dumb Ass degree, summa cum scumbag.

  Last thing I want in my life is a child. Even if I was good at it—no saying I would be, either, because as far as I can tell nobody's actually good at parenting, just lucky or not—even if I was good at mothering, I'd probably get nothing but kids who thought I was the worst mother in the world until I dropped dead, and then they'd cry about what a good mama I was at my funeral but a fat lot of good that would do me because I'd be dead.

  Of course, maybe I'd have a daughter like me, I was good to my mama till she got herself smashed up on the 405 the very day I had finally decided to take the car keys away from her because her reaction time was so slow I was afraid she was going to kill somebody running a stop sign. If I had taken the keys away from her, then she'd be alive but she'd hate me for keeping her from having the freedom of driving a car. What good is a good daughter if the only way she can be good to you is make your life miserable?

  It only means that I'll never have a son like him, or a daughter foolish enough to marry a man like him, and that makes me about as happy a woman as lives on Burnside, and that's saying something, because by and large this is a pretty happy street. People here got some money, but not serious money, not Brentwood or Beverly Hills money, and sure as hell not Malibu beachfront money. Just comfortable money, a little bit of means. And only a block away from Cloverdale, and that street have real money, on up the hill, anyway.

  She only got into Baldwin Hills herself because the earthquake knocked this house a little bit off its foundation and her mama left her just enough money to get over the top for a down payment—a fluke. But she was happy here. These were good people. She'd watch them raise their children, and suffer all that anxiety all the time, and thank God she didn't have such a burden in her own life.

  Chapter 3

  WEED

  Ceese saw Miz Smitcher looking out her window at him and saw how she was talking to somebody, and he knew without even thinking about it that the person she was talking to was his mother. "Maybe this ain' such a good idea, Raymo."

  "What you saying, Ceese, you just getting scared."

  "You never seen my daddy when Mama gets mad at me."

  "Your daddy don't care if you smoke a little weed."

  "He care a lot my mama gets upset. Whole house jumpy when mama get mad."

  "So go on home to mama."


  "Knows what? That you and me walking up the street with skateboards? Anybody want to look out they window, they know that. Ain't against no law."

  "Miz Smitcher, she know."

  "You tell her? That how she know?"

  "You know Miz Smitcher! She just look at you, she know what you been doing for the last three days."

  "Everybody know what you been doing, you been hiding under your bed, slapping the monkey."

  "That's just dumb."

  "You haven't figured out how to do it yet?"

  "Too much stuff under my bed, nobody can get under there."

  They laughed about that for a moment.

  "I think Miz Smitcher, she call the cops," said Ceese.

  "She call the cops on us, I just have to pay her a visit later."

  Raymo always talked that way. Like he was dangerous. And grownups took him at his word—treated him like he was a rattler ready to strike. But in the past few months since Raymo's mom moved into one of the rental houses owned by Ceese's brother Antwon, they'd been together enough that Ceese knew better. Truth was, it surprised him that after all his brag, Raymo actually did score a bag of weed.

  That was Ceese's problem now. It was easy to tell Raymo that if he scored some weed, Ceese would smoke it with him, because he thought it was like the girls Raymo was always bragging about how they liked him to slip it to them in the girls' bathroom at school or behind the 7-Eleven. All talk, but nothing real. Then he shows up with a Ziploc bag full of dry green leaves and stems, along with some roll-your-own papers, and what was Ceese supposed to do? Admit it was all fronting?

  So now he had to think, was Raymo putting on when he threatened to do something bad to Miz Smitcher?

  "Look, Raymo, Miz Smitcher, she okay."

  "Nobody okay, they call the cops on me."

  "Let's just ride down Cloverdale before the cops come and do the weed another time."

  "You got it in your pocket, Ceese. You decide," said Raymo. But his smirk was saying, You chicken out this time, you ain't with me next time.

  "I heard that," said Raymo.

  "You spose to," said Ceese.

  "You telling me I can't tell weed from... weeds?"

  That's what I'm telling you all right. "No," said Ceese. "How would I know?"

  "So you don't get high, you going to start telling everybody I couldn't tell weed from daffodils?"

  "You can't help it, you buy fake weed."

  "Just give me the bag and fly on home to Mama," said Raymo. "Dumb little—"

  "No, I'm okay with it, I'll smoke it with you."

  "I don't want you to," said Raymo. "You a virgin, I don't want to be your first time."

  Ceese hated it when he twisted everything to be about sex. "Let's just smoke it," said Ceese, and he started walking through the wildflowers growing profusely between the road and the lawn.

  "Not here," said Raymo. "Somebody pack your head with stupid?"

  "You said we going to smoke the weed up by the pipe."

  "On the way back down the hill."

  "We got to walk all the way up to the top?"

  "When your daddy call somebody to see if you really go to the top, they say yes, they saw us go up there, we rode back down."

  "My daddy don't know anybody higher up Cloverdale than his own house."

  Just then an old homeless man came out of one of the houses on the downslope side of Cloverdale, carrying a bunch of grocery bags, some full, some empty. The old man winked at them and Ceese couldn't help it, he waved and smiled.

  "You know that guy?" asked Raymo.

  "He told me he your long-lost daddy, come to see how you turn out, decide if your mama be worth—"

  "Shut up about my mama," said Raymo.

  admitted that—Ceese only knew because his own mama told Miz Smitcher once.

  They walked farther up the hill.

  Word Williams was standing at the curb, looking down the street.

  "Look at that kid, wishing he was us," said Raymo.

  "He ain't even looking at us," said Ceese.

  "Is so."

  But he wasn't. As they got closer, he moved back onto his yard so he could look around them, down the hill.

  "Whazzup, Word?" said Ceese.

  Word looked at him like he'd seen him for the first time that moment.

  The door to Word's house opened and his older sister Andrea leaned out and called to him.

  "Get in here, Word, it's time to eat."

  Word looked back down the road, then glanced at Ceese as if he wanted to ask a question.

  "Word!" said Andrea. "Don't act like you don't hear me."

  Word turned and walked back toward the house.

  Raymo was a half-dozen steps ahead. Ceese ran to catch up.

  "What you talk to that boy for?"

  "Look like he was having some kind of problem," said Ceese.

  "Just a little kid."

  "My mama used to tend him and his little sister in the summer," said Ceese.

  "She ever tend that older sister?" asked Raymo. "She hot."

  "She wasn't then," said Ceese. It was weird to think of Andrea being "hot." Or maybe it was just that Raymo never thought that any girl was too rich or too smart or too pretty for him. Nothing out of reach for Raymo.

  "Keep up," said Raymo.

  They got to the top of the hill but Raymo insisted they walk right to the end of Cloverdale, where a fence blocked the road off from the upper part of Hahn Park. You could see the place where the golf course bottomed out, like a big green bowl. Or more like a green funnel, because at the lowest point you could see where a big culvert split the grass to capture all the runoff from the rain. Ceese didn't know if that water was piped down to the little valley by the hairpin turn where the drainpipe stood up like a totem pole. So he asked Raymo.

  "How could it?" said Raymo.

  "It's got to go somewhere."

  "They got that huge drainage up there, you think they dump it down in that little valley so that one little pipe carry it all away? That little pipe just for the runoff from below the park."

  Like you know everything, thought Ceese. But he didn't say it, because there was no reason to make Raymo mad, and besides, he was probably right.

  "All right," said Raymo. "People seen us up here. Now they see us ride down."

  "You know I can't make that hairpin turn."

  Raymo looked at him like he was the stupidest kid in the world. "We don't want to make the hairpin turn, Cecil. We want to get off the road and onto the grass and up into the trees to smoke that weed you're carrying. Or did you think you just started growing weed in your pants?"

  "I just don't want to fall down on the asphalt," said Ceese. "Scrape myself all up."

  "Well, here's what you do," said Raymo. "You go real slow, back and forth across the road.

  And then tomorrow, when you get down to the hairpin, you can wake me up and we'll go smoke the weed for breakfast."

  With that, Raymo pushed off and scooted along the level part of the road until he could turn and start down the slope of Cloverdale.

  Ceese was right behind him. Hating every minute of it. Not because he didn't like the exhilaration of speed, or the rumble of the asphalt under his skateboard wheels. What he hated was Raymo going faster than Ceese ever could, while waving his arms and squatting down and standing up and even raising one leg like a stork, all the while whooping and calling out to Ceese. And though Ceese could never understand the words, since Raymo was facing away and his voice was mostly lost in the noise of the skateboard, he got the message just fine: You always a loser compared to Raymo.

  He only want me around so they somebody to watch him be cool.

  Why can't he ever do something just because it's fun?

  Son of a bitch. I'm going to stop hanging with him. Smoke this weed, that's it, I find somebody don't think I'm dumb.

  Of course, Ceese had made this resolution before, about a dozen times, but so far he'd never actually gone so far as to
say no when Raymo showed up and told him what they were going to do that day.

  Ceese never even hesitated. That's what his decisions were worth.

  I got no spine. Had me a spine, I'd be cool too. Not cool like Raymond, my own kind of cool.

  The guy who didn't need nobody. Stand alone, stand tall. Stead of tagging along like a little brother.

  That's what I am. Always somebody's little brother. Got plenty of brothers, but what do I do?

  Go and find me another.

  By the time Ceese got to the hairpin, Raymo was nowhere in sight.

  This was the part that Ceese always dreaded: stopping. He liked the kind of hill where at the bottom the road just goes straight for a long time. He liked going for the distance. But here, that wasn't possible. One way or another, he was going to end up off these wheels. He could do it all splayed out in the street like roadkill, or he could do it by running up into the grass and falling all over himself like a dumbass.

  Better to be a dumbass on grass than... than...

  He searched for a rhyme, even as he steered toward the place where the grass looked softest.

  Than a toad in the road.

  His board hit the edge of the road and flipped on the rocks before reaching the grass. Which meant that he was off the board before he had a chance to jump high enough to make sure he landed on the grassy slope. This was not going well. All he could do was try to stay airborne and roll when he hit, so he didn't come home grass-stained. Better bloody than grass-stained, he learned that long ago. Grass stains got you whipped, but blood got bandaids.

  He landed on his face in the grass and flipped kind of sideways, twisting his neck so that when he finally stopped rolling down in the tall grass, he lay there for a few seconds, wiggling his toes to make sure his neck wasn't broke. He wasn't sure why that worked, but that's what the guy at school said, Don't move your neck, that just makes it worse. Instead, wiggle your toes to make sure you can.

  "Look like you trying to mow the grass with your chin, fool," said Raymo.

  "Where were you?" asked Ceese.