Hanging on a String Read Online Free PDF Page B

getting it all back together,” replied Dahlia in a tone of voice that I knew meant more hope than substance. “He told me that he and Chester had a good, long conversation. I thought perhaps they’d bury the hatchet.”
    When Chester had sent his good-bye fax to me, I’d wanted to kill him, or at least give him a good maiming. I wondered if Wallace had had any of those same urges.
    â€œDo you think Wallace could have had anything to do with Chester’s murder?” I asked.
    â€œJasmine, Chester is dead,” Dahlia replied. “Let the police worry about who killed him. It isn’t your affair. And, no, Wallace may have his issues, but he’s no murderer.”
    â€œWhat issues?” I asked. I’d heard that Wallace had hit the bottle pretty hard after his divorce, and there were rumors of cocaine use. I wondered if this was what Dahlia was talking about.
    â€œStay out of it, girlfriend,” said Dahlia. She had an annoying habit of reading my mind.
    â€œDon’t worry about me,” I replied. “This is one situation that I do not intend to become involved in.”
    Dahlia did not look convinced.

3
    I spent the rest of the day with Dahlia, and by the time I left, I felt better. She fed me, played Billie Holiday and Sade tapes, and listened to me talk about Chester. I wasn’t trying to be maudlin, and I wasn’t trying to rewrite history. I am not one of those folk who give dead people greater credit than I gave them when they were living. I just wanted to remember something good about him. Dahlia helped me go down memory lane, acknowledging but not dwelling on the bad, and accentuating the good times, which, looking back, weren’t that numerous. I remembered the times when Chester let his guard down, particularly the times when his rich, baritone laugh would fill the air, or his eyes would look straight at you as if there was no one else in the world except you and him. He could be charming when he wanted to be, and even though we ended badly, there were some times that we’d had big fun.
    â€œAre you going to be okay?” Dahlia asked as she walked me to the subway station.
    I would be, I assured my best friend.
    The ride from Dahlia’s neighborhood in Brooklyn to uptown can take anywhere from forty minutes to over an hour—depending on several factors, including luck and the rush hour. By the time I rode home, luck was on my side, and the rush hour had come and gone. Fifty minutes after I said good-bye to Dahlia, I was walking on my beloved block, heading home. I live on a street that is about fifteen blocks from where I grew up, where my parents still live. I live in Harlem and so do my parents—only they live on Riverside Drive, in a decidedly more upscale neighborhood.
    My parents lived next to Riverside Park, a beautiful piece of land that overlooks the Hudson. Morningside Park, the park near my home was not as nice as Riverside. When I was a child, Morningside Park was frequented by folks my mother would refer to as “unsavory.” It was not a safe place to enjoy nature. Times have changed and the park has been cleaned up—still, a little bit of it’s past reputation clings to it. I live one block from Morningside Park, in a brownstone on Manhattan Avenue. The brownstone was renovated and divided into three apartments. Three families live there—the owner, Mrs. Tucker, a nurse who has worked in St. Luke’s Hospital since I was a little girl, Zachary Hightower, a jazz musician who was famous back in the Fifties and who still plays jazz clubs in Harlem when the spirit takes him (which isn’t too often) and me.
    Mrs. Tucker lives with her teenage son, Sharif, in the first-floor apartment. Zachary lives in the top-floor apartment, and I live in the basement—otherwise known as the garden apartment. I have lived in this apartment since my divorce. Before the divorce I lived two blocks over in my very own