They came to a sidewalk where three blue-and-red taxis were parked.
“Can you tell the driver how to get to your house, Mr. Grey?”
“I guess so,” he said. “I think I remembah.”
They held hands in the back of the cab.
“How old are you, Mr. Grey?”
“Ninety-one year old. Some people don’t think I can keep count, but I’m ninety-one.”
“You don’t look that old. Your skin is so smooth and you stand up straight. It’s like you’re old but just normal old, not no ninety-one.”
She walked Ptolemy to his apartment door and watched him use the key on the topmost of four locks.
“I only lock the top one when I go out,” he told the girl. “That way I can remember the copper key. But when I go in, I lock ’em all.”
When he was just about to turn away, Robyn kissed him on the cheek and whispered something that he didn’t hear.
The TV news was on and a piano concerto was playing. He turned on a light and shuffled through the papers and boxes until he found a picture of Sensia taken before she divorced her first husband to marry Ptolemy. Her heart-shaped brown face was tilting to the side and she was smiling the smile of someone who had just made a suggestion that he would have liked.
Bombs went off across Baghdad this morning,” said a pretty woman in a blue jacket wearing red lipstick. She was a light-skinned Negro woman but looked more like a white woman trying to pass for colored to Ptolemy. “Thirty-seven people were killed and one hundred and eleven sustained serious injuries.”
A man with a deep, reassuring voice was talking on the radio about Schubert, a German musician who’d had a hard life long ago and made beautiful music, some of which no one ever heard in his lifetime.