The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey Read Online Free PDF

shuffled off to get on line to pay her phone bill.
    “She a friend’a yours?” Hilly asked.
    “That’s a woman there, boy,” Ptolemy replied, thinking about Coydog talking to him when he was young and didn’t know a thing.
    “Wanna go to the store now?” Hilly suggested, putting his hand on his uncle’s shoulder.
    “What’s your hurry?” Ptolemy asked.
    “Nuthin’. We just gotta go.”
     
     
     
    They went to Big City Food Mart and filled a plastic basket with bologna, store brand Oat Ohs, margarine, sour pickles, a bag of mini peanut butter cups, peanut butter, rye bread, orange juice, Big City brand instant coffee and creamer, and six ripe red apples. The total at the cashier came to $32.37. When they got out of line Ptolemy counted the money he had left: $169.04. He counted it three times and was starting on the fourth when Hilly said, “Come on, Papa Grey, we gotta take these things home.”
    “Somethin’s wrong with my change, Reggie, I, I mean, Hilly.”
    “Nuthin’s wrong,” the boy said to Ptolemy’s shoes. “That’s a lotta money you got there.”
     
     
     
    They brought the groceries home to the apartment crowded with everything Ptolemy and his wives and his family and theirs had acquired over more than just one lifetime. Hilly put the food onto shelves and into the ancient refrigerator while Ptolemy counted his change again and again, wondering if somehow Shirley Wring had tricked him.
    He thought about his trunk and Sensia, the emerald ring and Reggie—where was Reggie?
    “Your money’s fine, Uncle,” Hilly said. “Now we got to get to Mama’s house.”
    “Where?”
    “Mama need you to come see her,” Hilly said, his brutal face ill-fitting the request.
    “What for?”
    “She di’n’t say. She just said to tell Papa Grey that Niecie need him to come.”
    “Niecie?” All the floating detritus in the old man’s mind sank to the bottom then. The ring and Shirley Wring, the money and Melinda Hogarth, even the fire that killed Maude and the stroke that took Sensia disappeared from his mind.
    Niecie. He was only thirty-six when Niecie was born but she was still the daughter of his niece. That’s why he called her Niecie, though her mother had named her Hilda. He was her granduncle and her godfather and she was the coppery color of a year-old Indian head penny. Her mother was sitting in the big chair with Niecie on her lap and Charles, June’s husband, was standing behind her. He stood just like that, like he was posing for a photograph. But that’s the way Charles was: pretty as a picture, and stuffy as a double-starched shirt collar.
    “My Niecie?” Ptolemy asked.
    “My mama,” Hilly said, nodding.
    “Is she in trouble?”
    “She need to see you,” the boy said as he put the nonperishable food in the doorless cabinet. “You got cans on these shelves older than me.”
    “What fo’?”
    “Why you got them cans?”
    “Why Niecie wanna see me?”
    “She di’n’t say, Papa Grey,” Hilly whined. “She jes’ told me to help you shop and then to bring you ovah. She said to tell you that your Niecie needed to see you.”
    “Niecie.”
     
     
     
    The number 87b bus moved slowly in afternoon traffic. Ptolemy sat on a turquoise-colored plastic seat facing across the small aisle, while Hilly hovered above him, holding on to the shiny chrome pole.
    A middle-aged Chinese woman and a dark Spanish man sat across the way. Both of them smiled at Ptolemy. People were always smiling at him now that he was so old. Even people who looked old to him smiled because, he knew, he looked even older to them.
    He could feel the city move by at his back, could imagine the old Timor Cinema and Thrifty’s Drugstore. He thought about jitterbuggers in the juke joints and a small white wooden church that stood on the white side of town.
    Sometimes when he’d go by there, on an errand for his mother or a mission for Coydog, he’d stop and gape at the beautiful building with the