Love by Toni Morrison Read Free Book Online Page B

planned some kind of cooperative: small businesses, Head Start, cultural centers for arts, crafts, classes in Black History and Self-defense. At first Cosey was willing, but he stalled the deal so long the decision was left to his widow. She sold it off before his tombstone was set. When Sandler and others moved to Oceanside, he was still of two minds about Cosey. Knowing him, watching him, was not so much about changing his mind; it was more like an education. At first he thought Cosey was a dollar man. At least people said he was, and he certainly spent his money as though they were right. Yet a year or so into those fishing trips, Sandler began to see Cosey’s wealth not as a hammer wielded by a tough-minded man, but more like the toy of a sentimental one. Rich people could act like sharks, but what drove them was a kid’s sweet tooth. Childish yearnings that could thrive only in a meadow of girlish dreams: adoration, obedience, and full-time fun. Vida believed a powerful, generous friend gazed out from the portrait hanging behind the reception desk. That was because she didn’t know who he was looking at.
    Sandler climbed the stairs from the basement. The early retirement he’d been forced to take had seemed like a good idea at the time. Walking malls at midnight rested the mind without slowing it. Now he wondered if there was brain damage he hadn’t counted on, since he was becoming more and more fixed on the past rather than the moment he stood in. When he entered the kitchen, Vida was folding clothes and singing along to some bluesy country music on the radio. Thinking, maybe, of those cracked-glass eyes rather than the ones in the painting, he grabbed her shoulders, turned her around, and held on tight while they danced.
       
    Maybe his girlish tears were worse than the reason he shed them. Maybe they were a weakness the others recognized and pinpointed even before he punked out. Even before the melt had flooded his chest when he saw her hands, curving down from the snow white shoelaces that bound them. They might have been mittens pinned crookedly on a clothesline, hung there by some slut who didn’t care what the neighbors said. And the plum polish on nails bitten to the quick gave the mitten-tiny hands a womanly look and made Romen think she herself was the slut—the one with no regard for what people might think.
    He was next in line. And ready, too, in spite of the little hands and in spite of the mewing in her throat. He stood near the headboard charged by Theo’s brays and his head bobbing above the girl’s face, which was turned to the wall and hidden beneath hair undone by writhing. His belt unbuckled, anticipation ripe, he was about to become the Romen he’d always known he was: chiseled, dangerous, loose. Last of a group of seven. Three had left as soon as they were finished—slapping fives on their way out of the bedroom and back to where the party raged. Freddie and Jamal sat on the floor, spent but watching as Theo, who had been first, took seconds. Slower this time, his whinny the only sound because the girl wasn’t mewing anymore. By the time he withdrew, the room smelled of vegetables and rotten grapes and wet clay. Only the silence was fresh.
    Romen stepped forward to take Theo’s place, then watched in wonder as his hands moved to the headboard. The knot binding her right wrist came undone as soon as he touched it and her hand fell over the bedside. She did not use it at all—not to hit or scratch or push back her hair. Romen untied the other hand still hanging from the Pro Ked laces. Then he wrapped her in the spread she was lying on and hoisted her into a sitting position. He picked up her shoes, high-heeled, an X of pink leather across the front—good for nothing but dancing and showing off. He could hear the whooping laughter—that came first—then the jokes and finally the anger, but he got her out of there through the dancing crowd and onto the porch. Trembling, she held on