“Wanna go to the store now?” Hilly suggested, putting his hand on his uncle’s shoulder.
“What’s your hurry?” Ptolemy asked.
“Nuthin’. We just gotta go.”
They went to Big City Food Mart and filled a plastic basket with bologna, store brand Oat Ohs, margarine, sour pickles, a bag of mini peanut butter cups, peanut butter, rye bread, orange juice, Big City brand instant coffee and creamer, and six ripe red apples. The total at the cashier came to $32.37. When they got out of line Ptolemy counted the money he had left: $169.04. He counted it three times and was starting on the fourth when Hilly said, “Come on, Papa Grey, we gotta take these things home.”
“Somethin’s wrong with my change, Reggie, I, I mean, Hilly.”
“Nuthin’s wrong,” the boy said to Ptolemy’s shoes. “That’s a lotta money you got there.”
They brought the groceries home to the apartment crowded with everything Ptolemy and his wives and his family and theirs had acquired over more than just one lifetime. Hilly put the food onto shelves and into the ancient refrigerator while Ptolemy counted his change again and again, wondering if somehow Shirley Wring had tricked him.
He thought about his trunk and Sensia, the emerald ring and Reggie—where was Reggie?
“Your money’s fine, Uncle,” Hilly said. “Now we got to get to Mama’s house.”
“Where?”
“Mama need you to come see her,” Hilly said, his brutal face ill-fitting the request.
“What for?”
“She di’n’t say. She just said to tell Papa Grey that Niecie need him to come.”
“Niecie?” All the floating detritus in the old man’s mind sank to the bottom then. The ring and Shirley Wring, the money and Melinda Hogarth, even the fire that killed Maude and the stroke that took Sensia disappeared from his mind.
Niecie. He was only thirty-six when Niecie was born but she was still the daughter of his niece.