The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

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.