What's Mine and Yours(2)

Linette arrived at seven a.m., just before they were set to open. Gee was counting out quarters into the register, Ray listing the day’s pastries on the chalkboard menu. He had named his doughnut Gee’s Devil’s Food, which had given the child a thrill.

Linette came in carrying an armload of gardenias in waxed paper. She looked ready for battle. Ray liked to tease her that he’d be an old man before she retired and left him the shop. She drank, on average, six cups of coffee a day, and she never stopped moving. She was all muscle and fat, gray haired, her face painted in a different palette of bright colors every morning. She brought in with her the scent of perfume and hair oil, a pair of shears sticking out of her purse.

“You look tired, Raymond. Didn’t you know they were going to take our picture? I was counting on your face to bring in the ladies.”

Linette laughed at her own joke, and Gee went running to meet her. He stopped short, waiting for her to react to him, to put her arms around him or pick him up. He could be like this—hesitant—as if he didn’t expect to get the things he wanted. Ray didn’t like to see him that way.

“Go on and give Ms. Linette a hug,” he said. “Say good morning.” He measured coffee into the grinder and started the machine.

“What’s my big boy Gee doing here?”

“Daddy needed my help.” Gee pointed proudly to the sign with the name of his doughnut.

“Devil’s food? But you’re too sweet. Does that mean this doughnut is going to be too sweet?” Linette sent the boy, laughing, off to wash his hands. When he was out of earshot, she turned to Ray. “Today of all days?”

“He didn’t slow me down, I promise.”

Linette shook her head and started putting the gardenias in tiny bloom vases she’d brought along in her purse.

“Doesn’t that boy have school today?”

“I won’t be gone more than five minutes when I run him there.”

“I thought that was his mama’s job.”

“He’s my son, too.”

“What are his mama’s responsibilities exactly? Or were they done the day she pushed him out and handed him over to you?”

Ray didn’t contradict her. He didn’t want to fight about Jade this morning.

“That’s why I never had children, you know,” Linette said. “I didn’t want to take care of anyone but myself. I got enough of that when I was young. My mother—”

“Birthed five children, and you raised them all. I know.”

Linette liked to tell this story, as if everything there was to know about her had been decided when she was a girl, missing days of school to take care of her siblings and ferry them to the doctor. “Did you ever think that with all the things you do for the two of them all the time, you could be doing something for yourself? You could be taking a class. Getting your degree.”

“Why do I need my degree? You’re still leaving me Superfine, right? Or are you going to cut me loose, Linette?”

Linette polished the tables in the front room, somber now. “You can’t count so much on other people, Ray. Not even me. One day I’m going to die. Everybody dies.”

“Well, hold off on dying until after that reporter comes.”

Linette smiled and snapped her cleaning rag in Ray’s direction. He kissed her on the cheek, triumphant, and started setting the table for just the three of them.

They sat by the window, drinking the fresh coffee, devouring biscuits. The whole shop smelled of devil’s food: thick chocolate, sugar, and starch. By seven thirty, the two front girls, Michelle and Michaela, arrived. They fawned over Gee, put on their hairnets, and a feud ensued over what to play on the radio. Linette settled it by putting on the gospel station, although she wasn’t religious. She did it to bring a blessing down on the shop, and all of them. They were all humming along by the time Ray withdrew to the kitchen and left Gee in the window seat, looking forlorn. The boy was one child with him—easy, bright—and another without him.



The shop was full when Jade burst into Superfine, her sunglasses on, her hair folded into a side braid already coming apart at the ends. She was still wearing the gray leggings and Bad Brains T-shirt she’d slept in, underneath a tan trench coat. Gee leapt up to kiss her, and Jade let him and then held him away and asked where she could find Ray.

“Why’d you take him?” she asked as Ray emerged from behind the counter. Her voice was high and thin, and the customers turned in their seats to look at them. “I know how to take care of my son.”

Ray took her by the arm and steered her out to the street.

“You all right?”

“My head,” Jade said, pressing her fingers to her temples. She didn’t explain where she’d been last night, but Ray could figure. There was a restaurant off the freeway that she liked to go to with the girls from her class. They served frozen jack and cokes.

“I had an alarm set. I was ready to take him. But I woke up, and everybody was gone.”

“I didn’t want him to miss another day of school.”

“I would have done it,” she said.

Jade pushed her sunglasses up, and he saw last night’s eyeliner thick around her downturned eyes. Her nails were painted black, and she was wearing her lace-up boots. How pretty she was, how small, was all the more obvious in her dark, clunky clothes. He’d seen the pictures of her from high school right before she got pregnant with Gee—a black-girl goth who read comic books and hung out with nerds, dreamed about going to punk shows out of town if she could ever find a ride. It was a much older boy who’d gotten her pregnant, someone at the community college where she was taking a math class. He’d wanted nothing to do with Gee, so Jade lived with her mother until she met Ray and he said to her, Let’s find a place, the three of us.