Tempest Rising by Diane Mckinney-Whetstone Read Free Book Online Page A

didn’t sway or finger pop; she carried too much pent-up anger for such outwardly fanciful shows of pleasure. She did smirk at the fireball of a sun, though, which looked to her like a hot-behind woman calling on her lover, the night, to come on and blanket her. She liked to imagine how the sun must be undressing herself for the night right now because such imaginings disrupted the predictability about her own life: her Lit Brothers paycheck down to the penny where she worked in the bargain basement as the assistant buyer; the songs her gospel choir sang every Second Sunday; the catcalls of “Hey, foxy lady,” whenever she walked by the opened door of the Swank Club; more foster children arriving from the state for her mother to raise temporarily, like thethree Vie was getting ready to drop off. Three girls. Ramona especially hated the girls.
    She made quick loops through the assemblages of foot traffic on this five-block commercial stretch that fringed a middling-type neighborhood of the not rich, not poor, but sometimes broke till payday; where the consistent salute of the row houses was comforting to the mostly black folks who lived there and made them feel communal and blessed that they owned these patches of property to refinance to send their children to a teachers’ college. Ramona felt neither communal nor blessed, so she avoided conversation with the men who’d want to flirt, the women who’d want to gossip, the children who were never cute to her.
    She looked straight ahead as she walked. She felt as she imagined the sun did right now: itching for the night to come, needing to break the routine, be blanketed herself after her hardworking week. Except that Ramona didn’t have the expanse of the sky to put on her seductress dance, only the tiny row house on Addison Street where she lived with Mae, her mother, who had a lazy eye and who made her living by taking in foster children from the state. Nor was the one who Ramona would beckon as powerful as the night. Tyrone. Nice enough, seemed devoted to her, but lacked a city slickness she had come to expect in her men.
    She walked fast, deliberately, trying to get what she needed from Sixtieth Street and make it home intime for her appointment with Vie to receive this new crop of foster children being dropped off. For once Ramona wished her mother would be there—these three girls would most likely be severely traumatized, and Ramona never knew what to do about the traumatized—but her mother, Mae, had gone to see about her ailing sister in Buffalo, so Ramona was left not only to cook and clean and otherwise care for the girls but also to be a pillow for them to cry into when their grief came down. That part she just couldn’t do, especially for the girls.
    She turned into Darlene’s hosiery, where they were throwing in a garter belt with the purchase of six pair of nylons. She chose the black garter belt from among the inducements Darlene offered and managed a hurried “uh-huh” and “just fine” to Darlene’s queries about Mae.
    “Hear she’s gone to Buffalo to see after her sister,” Darlene said. “Keeping her in prayer, you tell her that; tell her I’m holding her Playtex Eighteen Hour stretch too. Don’t forget now, Ramona. Just came in in that beige color she wanted. A month from Tuesday she’ll be back, right? You minding the foster kids, for her, huh? Better her than me taking that ride; I’d rather walk through Dead Block at twilight and deal with the ghost of Donald Booker than suffer through ten hours on a Trailways bus.”
    Ramona didn’t interrupt Darlene as she went on to talk about Donald Booker, the bad seed white boy who had disappeared in the park almost twenty years ago, and to say there’d been another sightingearlier that day. Ramona hated ghost stories, and this one made her chest go tight. She rushed to get to the door as Darlene’s voice ushered her out, and she left clutching her box of smoke-colored hose. Even though