Miracle's Boys Read Free Page B

look a little bit like her in that picture, but I’m much darker—like Mama said my daddy was. There used to be a lot of other pictures but they got burned. Newcharlie had a fit one Saturday and burned them all, but we’re not allowed to talk about it.
    Sometimes I wonder what happened to that lady and that dog my daddy saved. There’s always stories about people getting saved and then giving the people who saved them money or people coming along years later and naming their kids after the people, but none of that ever happened to us. My daddy’s name was Lafayette too, and I wonder if there’s a little white kid somewhere named after him. Maybe the lady is still jogging around Central Park. Maybe she keeps her dog on a leash now though. And maybe once in a while she sees in her head my daddy running toward her on a half frozen lake. Or maybe she didn’t have any kids and doesn’t remember my daddy at all.

THREE
    AFTER NEWCHARLIE AND AARON LEFT, I WENT into the living room and turned on the television. On Friday nights Ty‘ree let me watch it as much as I wanted as long as I took one weekend day for homework. I usually chose Sunday—usually starting in the late late afternoon or the minute Ty’ree started getting after me—whichever came first.
    I flipped through the channels for a while, then sat back against the couch and watched music videos. I couldn’t really tell one from the other. Most of them had some guy standing there rapping and a lot of pretty girls dancing around him. Or the guy was driving a fancy car with pretty girls in it. Once in a while the guy would be in a swimming pool with pretty girls. That was the one on now—a guy with a lot of rings on his fingers rapping to some pretty girls in bikinis.
    Newcharlie liked listening to music and said he was gonna be a rapper. Aaron said he was gonna be one, too. Either that or a car salesman. I guess he figured he’d sell cars to rappers who would fill them with pretty girls. Thing about rapping though, Newcharlie said, is you gotta do it now. Most rappers weren’t much older than him. Sometimes he and Aaron sat in our room all day long, making up rhymes and slapping each other five when something came off sounding right. But I hadn’t seen them taking any real steps—like making some tapes and calling up a radio station to ask for a few minutes on the air.
    I turned the volume down low. The apartment felt big and quiet with nobody in it. It’s not that big—just four rooms: me and Newcharlie’s room, then Ty’ree’s room right next to us. His room used to be Mama’s. Then there’s a long hallway leading to one big room that’s both the living room and the dining room. If you go right, there’s a dining-room table and chairs. If you go left, there’s the couch and stuff. The door to come in and out is between the couch and dining-room table. You walk through the living-room side to get to the kitchen. You have to walk through the kitchen to get to the bathroom.
    Newcharlie had put plants in all the windows—spider plants and ferns and some other ones I don’t know the name of. He’d learned a lot about plants at Rahway. It was strange to see him messing around them on Saturday mornings, taking off the dead leaves and giving them water. Sometimes he put these little sticks of plant food in the dirt. Once I even caught him talking to them, telling this sickly-looking fern that it better toughen up if it wanted to make it in the world.
    The sun had come out again, and I watched it bounce off the plants and sprinkle itself over the dining-room table. When I closed my eyes to just a sliver, I could see Mama sitting at that table, playing with her eyebrow the way she did when she was worrying, her hair coming loose from its braid. I watched my ghost mama for a while. She looked peaceful sitting there even if she was worrying.
    â€œHey, Mama,”