“Get me? Yeah, yeah. Come get me and we can go shoppin’. I mean me and Reggie.”
“I can go with you, I guess, Uncle,” Hilly said unenthusiastically.
“Do you know where the store is?” his great-uncle asked.
“Sure I do.”
“I don’t know. I never seen you there.”
“But I do know.”
“Is Reggie coming?”
“Not today.”
“Why? No . . . no, don’t tell me why. Don’t do that. Are you comin’, um, uh, Hilly?” Ptolemy smiled that he could remember the name.
“Yes, Papa Grey.”
“When?”
“One hour.”
Ptolemy peered at the clock on top of his staggering bureau.
“My clock says quarter past four,” Ptolemy told his great-nephew Hilly Brown.
“It’s ten to twelve, Uncle, not four-fifteen.”
“If you add forty-five minutes to that,” the old man said. “I should be lookin’ for you before too much after five. Anyway, it have to be before six.”
“Uh, yeah, I guess.”
Ptolemy could hear fire engines blaring in the distance. There were floods down south and Beethoven was deaf. Dentifrice toothpaste was best for those hard-to-get places.
Maude Petit died in fire. Ptolemy could hear her screams along with the sirens that cried down the street outside and also in the fire bells that clanged way back then in Breland, Mississippi, when he was five and she was his best friend.
Ptolemy started to rock on his solid maple chair. One of the legs had lost its rubber stopper and so made a knocking sound on the parquet floor. He felt like he needed to do something. What? Save his little playmate, that’s what. He was bigger now. He could make it through the fire, if only he could get there.
He could smell the tar roof burning and feel the heat against his face. He rubbed the tears away and then looked at his old weathered hand with its paper-thin, wrinkled skin. Black as that hot tar, black as Maude’s happy little face.