145th Street Read Online Free PDF Page B

the crowd was noisy, cheering. It had started to rain. Billy decided to take the subway home. He didn’t deserve a cab. On alternate stations he tried to figure out what he had done wrong against Vegas and then what he had done wrong in life that had him in a half-empty train trying not to throw up.
    He remembered his promise to pick up some ice cream for Johnnie Mae, but the grocery store on the corner was closed and he didn’t feel like walking down to 142nd Street to the one that was open.
    Johnnie Mae was awake. When she saw him she knew that he’d been fighting and that he’d lost. She didn’t say anything, just helped him undress.
    Outside, the rain picked up and now beat hard against the window. From down the street a tinny-sounding radio oozed out a slow blues. Johnnie Mae was crying, but she didn’t say anything. Billy took the money out of his pocket and threw it on the table. Johnnie Mae picked it up and threw it on the floor. Then, realizing that she had hurt him, picked it up and put it carefully back onto the dresser.
    Johnnie Mae wiped the traces of alum from his face with a wet, cool cloth. It should have been left on, but he let her do it anyway.
    “I love you, baby,” she said. “I love you so much.”
    Later Billy, lying in the darkness, listened to the even sounds of his wife’s breathing. He wondered if somewhere in the city Vegas was lying in bed dreaming about fighting, about their fight. Billy checked the time; it was a little after two. He found Johnnie Mae’s hand and held it. Even in her sleep she took his hand and squeezed it gently. He needed that squeeze, that gentleness, the knowing that the gentleness would always be there, that through all the nights of pain to come, she would be there for him. He closed his eyes and hoped he wouldn’t dream.

T he wind, whistling across the vacant lots and through the redbrick and fire escape canyons of the neighborhood, had taken another summer. Old men brought out their faded suit jackets and moved their domino games inside. Theresa, the mother of Angela Luz Colón, finally emerged from her grief and called the factory where she had worked before her husband, Fernando, had been killed. They told her she could come back to work, and she did.
    That is not to say that she had stopped crying against the wall at night or stopped reaching out her hand in the darkness to where he had lain by her side for so many years. It was just that she had also begun to rise, once she had watched the gray mist of twilight give way to early sun, and leave for work.
    “You should go out more, too,” she told her daughter. “Remember what the priest said about putting aside sorrow.”
    She left out the part about rejoicing that another soul had found peace in the Lord.
    Angela did go out more. She went to her seventh-grade classes, to the store, sometimes for walks alone in the park. These things she did when it was time for them to be done. She still spent a lot of time thinking of her father. The thoughts often came to her as she sat alone in the kitchen waiting for her mother to come home in the evenings. She would think of his laugh, the way his brown face would wrinkle around the eyes and the wide smile would fill their small kitchen. On weekends he would rise early, shower, and prepare breakfast for Angela and her mother. The comforting sounds of ham frying would announce that he was ready for them to come to the table even before he knocked on her door.
    Then the dreams began.
    It was Poli, the old man that worked in Mr. Rodriguez’s bodega, that Angela first dreamt about. She dreamt that she was at school when suddenly her father walked into her classroom. Then it was not her father who stood before the class, but Poli, stoop-shouldered beneath his white hair. His sad, dark eyes seeming to look into her very soul. Angela felt the same sadness for him that she had felt for her father. Later, when she went into the bodega to buy olive oil, she saw Poli