And Do Remember Me Read Free Page B

around her feet like unwashed, unruly children of whom she was ashamed. As Lincoln signed the registry, the elderly woman behind the desk, tall, angular, white-haired, looked at Jessie through narrowed, censorious eyes. Then she led them upstairs to the second floor, saying, “No cooking in the rooms, no loud music after ten o’clock, and yall have to check out by noon or I charge for another day.”
    The pink and white wallpaper was water-stained and dingy, its tiny white flowers as cheerless and abused as the chipped and scratched desk and the three-legged table at the foot of thebed. Last year’s calendar from a local funeral home and a tiny framed picture of Jesus ascending to heaven graced the walls.
    “There ain’t but one bed,” Jessie said after Lincoln had brought their bags and boxes up to the room.
    “How bout that,” he said, scanning the room quickly, then dismissing it.
    “I’ll sleep on the floor,” he told Jessie, sitting down beside her on the bed, which was covered by a spread whose washed-out, faded colors vainly attempted to match the wallpaper.
    “Well, that ain’t fair.”
    “Yes, it is. Don’t worry. I’ve slept in worse places.… I’m gonna go get us something to eat. I saw a place on the corner.”
    When Jessie heard the front door close on the first floor, she ran to the window and watched Lincoln walk toward the tiny corner restaurant that advertised barbecue and chitlins. Lincoln moved like a man who knew where he was going, but didn’t need to hurry to get there, Jessie thought, watching him nod politely to the people he passed. Turning from the window to once again face the room, she decided not to think about what she had done—wounded her father, run away, hitched a ride with a stranger, checked into a rooming house to spend the night with him, with plans to wake up in the morning to go off and do things that could get her arrested, beaten or killed. No, she decided, a shiver seizing her, threatening to unsettle the contentment she had fashioned from the cloth of this day. She wouldn’t think about any of that now.
    By the time Lincoln returned, Jessie had bathed, had dressed in clean clothes and lined their boxes neatly against the wall. They ate fried-fish sandwiches and french fries spread out on the tiny desk. Then Lincoln went to take a bath, while Jessie cleared away the remnants of their meal. But the sound of water filling the tub, Lincoln flushing the toilet, his rich baritone humming “Amazing Grace,” made Jessie so nervousthat she decided it wasn’t proper for her to stay in the room with only an unlocked door separating her from a naked man she didn’t know. She couldn’t bear the thought of sitting in the front room, under the landlady’s disapproving gaze. So Jessie sat on the steps outside their door.
    When she entered the room Lincoln had made a pallet on the floor, using blankets he’d found in the closet. He wore a tee shirt and a pair of old pajama bottoms. Jessie claimed the bed, scurrying beneath the covers fully dressed.
    “You gonna be awful hot sleeping in your clothes,” Lincoln laughed.
    “You just let me worry bout that, Lincoln Sturgis.”
    “You gonna tell me why you’re running away?” he asked, stretched out on the floor, gazing up at Jessie.
    “Maybe one day I will.”
    Lincoln turned on his back and said, “I used to run away too. But I wasn’t running away from home, I was running to try and find one.”
    Then in a quiet, dispassionate voice, almost as though he were talking about someone else’s life, Lincoln told Jessie who he was. His parents were killed in an automobile accident when he was three and for the next six years he was shunted between the homes of relatives unable or unwilling to care for him. Finally he was put in a Negro orphanage. Lincoln was a gregarious, quick-witted boy who, in order to survive, had learned to read people like books. The head administrator, J. R. Sturgis, took a liking to him and