Just One Day(72)

“Well, yeah! And you can text me back from Hawaii. And does this thing have a photo function?” I peer at the camera. “I’ll send you pictures.”
“You will?”
“Of course I will.”
By the look on her face, you’d think I’d given her the present.
_ _ _
Penn Station is mobbed, but I find Dee right away, under the departure board, wearing a pair of lemon-lime paneled nylon shorts and a tank top with UNICORNS ARE REAL emblazoned on it. He scoops me up in a big hug.
“Where’s your suitcase?” he asks.
I turn around, show off the olive backpack I got from the Army-Navy surplus store in Philadelphia.
Dee whistles. “How’d you fit your ball gown?”
“It folds down really small.”
“I thought you’d have a bigger bag, and I told Mama we’d come back home before we went out exploring, so she made lunch.”
“I like lunch.”
Dee throws up his hands. “Actually, Mama planned a surprise party for you. Don’t tell her I told.”
“A party? She doesn’t even know me.”
“She thinks she does by how much I talk about you, and she’ll use any excuse to cook. My family’s coming, including my cousin Tanya. I told you about her?”
“The one who does hair?”
Dee nods. “I asked her if she’d do yours. She does white-girl hair too, works in a fancy salon in Manhattan. I thought maybe you could get a bob again, go all Louise Brooks. Look just like you did when you met. You gotta do something with that mop.” He fingers my hair, up, as usual, in a clip.
We take the subway all the way uptown, to the last stop on the train. We get out and transfer to a bus. I look out the window, expecting the rough-and-tumble streets of the South Bronx, but the bus passes a bunch of pretty brick buildings all shaded by mature trees.
“This is the South Bronx?” I ask Dee.
“I never said I lived in the South Bronx.”
I look at him. “Are you serious? I’ve heard you say a bunch of times that you’re from the South Bronx.”
“I only said that I was from the Bronx. This is the Bronx, technically. It’s Riverdale.”
“But you told Kendra you were from the South Bronx. You told her you went to South Bronx High School. . . .” I pause, remembering that first conversation. “Which does not even exist.”
“I left the girl to her own jumped conclusions.” He gives me a knowing smirk. He rings the bell to get off the bus. We exit onto a busy street full of tall apartment buildings. It’s not fancy, but it’s nice.
“You are a master pretender, D’Angelo Harrison.”
“Takes one to know one. I am from the Bronx. And I am poor. If people want to translate that as ghetto boy, that’s their choice.” He smiles. “Especially if they want to throw scholarship money my way.”
We arrive at a pretty brick building with cracked gargoyles hanging over the front entrance. Dee rings the buzzer—“so they know we’re coming”—and then we take one of those ancient caged-in elevators to the fifth floor. Outside the front door, he looks at me and tucks some strands of stray hair behind my ear.
“Act surprised,” he whispers and opens the door.
We step into a party, about a dozen people crowded into the small living room where there’s a BON VOYAGE ALLYSON sign tacked up over a table laden with food. I look at Dee, eyes wide in shock.
“Surprise!” he says, twinkling jazz hands.
Dee’s mother, Sandra, comes up to me and wraps me in a gardenia-scented bear hug. “He told you, didn’t he? That was the worst look of surprise I ever saw. My baby couldn’t keep a secret if was stapled to him. Well, come on, then, meet the folk, have some food.”
Sandra, introduces me to various aunts and uncles and cousins and gives me a plate of barbecued chicken and mac and cheese and some greens and sits me down at a table. “Now you hold court.”
Dee has pretty much told everyone about Willem, so they all have advice on how to track him down. Then they start peppering me with questions about the trip. How I’m getting there—a flight from New York to London and then on to Paris—and where I’m staying—a youth hostel in the Villette area Willem and I hung out in, twenty-five bucks a night for a dorm—and how I’ll get around—with the help of a guidebook, and I will brave the Metro. And they ask about Paris, and I tell them about what I saw last year, and they’re very interested to hear how diverse it was, about the sections that were full of Africans and then this starts a big debate about which African countries France colonized until someone goes for a map to figure it out.
While everyone pores over the atlas, Sandra comes up with a plate of peach cobbler. “I got you a little something,” she says, handing me a thin package.
“Oh, you shouldn’t—”
She waves away my objections like stale air. I open the package. Inside is a laminated map of Paris. “The man at the store said this would be ‘indispensable.’ It has all the subway stops and an index of major streets.” She opens the map to show me. “And D’Angelo and I spent so many hours looking at it, it has our good blessings coursing through it.”
“Then I’ll never get lost again.”
She folds the map up and puts it in my hands. She has the same eyes as Dee. “I want to thank you for helping my boy this year.”
“Me helping Dee?” I shake my head. “I think you have it the other way around.”
“I know exactly the way I have it,” she says.