No Time to Die Read Free Page A

ice. Ain’t no maid service in here!”
    He remained silent, thinking:
It ain’t about no maid service. It ain’t about that and she know it. Not the way her room lookin’. Even the roaches ’fraid to step in there
 …
    She turned away and he watched her waddle back down the hall. He could hear her moving through the living room past the battered sofa resting on the six cinder blocks; the two milk crates with the thin piece ofFormica tattooed with cigarette burns that served as a coffee table. The tattoos were no longer visible beneath the pile of Chinese takeout cartons and moldy pizza boxes.
    He heard her curse and kick empty beer cans out of her path. The television, broken for the last three days and resting on a pyramid of plastic crates, would probably be the next target. She had cursed at it too many days. It was time to do more.
    He heard the crash and didn’t move, but waited to find out if she had fallen. Even if she had, he didn’t intend to do anything. Except to step over her on his way out of the dark smelly place. But the other, private voice was quiet. Nobody told him he had to go out.
    So he crept forward only far enough to close his bedroom door and muffle the sound of the cursing. Then he sprawled back against the greasy pillows.
Naw. Ain’t goin’ nowhere. Not tonight. I’m on the news. How ’bout that. Just like last time. I’m on the news … Keep this up, I be on Geraldo
!

I stood with Elizabeth near the curb outside of Benta’s Funeral Home less than two blocks from where Claudine had lived and watched a bank of clouds scatter before the light wind. The sun broke through in white, midday brilliance, and I knew if Claudine were alive, we’d be planning a quick run out to Jones Beach. Instead, we were about to head uptown to Woodlawn Cemetery. Woodlawn. With a sealed bronze box covered with bouquets of roses, wreaths, sprays of lilacs.
    Last year around this time Elizabeth and I had gone to a weekend party at Sag Harbor where Claudine had finally agreed to wear a thigh-high two-piece swimsuit while Elizabeth and I sported the thong thing. Claudine was five-six with braided hair so thick that folks thought she’d had someone else’s hair woven in. She had walked along the beach that day in her deep orange two-piece with her hands on her hips and her head bent against the breeze, smiling.
    The water eddied around her ankles, and her brown skin had sparkled where the spray hit. Two guys, mid-thirties but just entering adolescence, it seemed, trailedbehind her, emerging from their trance long enough to playfully elbow each other out of the way.
    They must have called out or said something because she’d turned to face them and her laughter drifted back to where Elizabeth and I sat on the blanket. We looked at each other, then at Claudine again. She was laughing, soft and spontaneous, not so much at the antics but finally laughing her way out of the box that her husband had beaten her into.
    She had shone, had actually begun to move away from what she’d gone through with James. The two guys came back with her to the blanket, and when Claudine pulled a bottle of Veuve Clicquot from the cooler and couldn’t find extra glasses, Brandon, the one who’d introduced himself first, must have set a record racing to the beach house to get some. Claudine had watched him and laughed again, laughed until her eyes filled.
    “You think it was James, don’t you?” Elizabeth said, interrupting my reverie. “I can see it in your face that you think it was him. You know how wild he’d gotten when she had him served with the papers.”
    She’d suggested this several times over the last few days, even as we went through the motions of helping Claudine’s parents with the funeral arrangements. I even contacted Brandon, who had opened the champagne that day and who had been e-mailing her every day since then. He’d been shocked into silence, and when he caught his breath, he said, “Not Claudine.