Rhode Island Red by Charlotte Carter

shit.”
    â€œAs a matter of fact, miss, I think 31G is unoccupied.” His expression was serene and vacuous.
    â€œYes,” I said at last, “you got that one right.”

CHAPTER 9
    Blue monk
    Why hadn’t I been more shocked when the door opened onto Henry’s vacant apartment?
    Because I knew—somewhere inside me—I knew. The great lover with melting eyes who was too good to be true. The Bird-struck musical naif who lived only for my black womanly wisdom. Who boiled milk for my coffee. Massaged my feet. The lonely Greek émigré, who had, he said, like me, bummed around Europe. Who late at night reminisced with me about the cakes in this patisserie in Montmartre and the blood sausages at the brasserie next to the jazz joint on the Rue de Buci. Kind, sensitive, generous. My Henry. Whose mouth I dreamed about. The mafia lackey. Ha ha. Gotcha, Nan. You dumb bitch.
    Too bad for him, his scam got blown before he got what he wanted from me. Too bad for me, I’d never really know what that was.
    Was Henry dead or alive now? Had those creeps in the van gotten to him? Was he a real criminal whose scene with me was part of a mob plan? Or was the thing with me for real and somehow interfering with what he was supposed to be accomplishing for the mob? Either way, I guess he had fucked up. And he must have been pretty scared to pull up stakes that quickly.
    Scared. Like that old bastard, Wild Bill. Who had clearly put those people in the van onto me. I wished I had him in my hands at that moment. I could have shown him a couple of things about playing the blues. And I’d have begun by shoving that fucking harmonica up where the sun never shines.
    Mom called. I know because I listened to her leave me a message.
    Aubrey called to find out what I had wanted yesterday at the Emporium.
    My prospective music coach called to invite me to a party on the Upper West Side, a party for Monk.
    Walter called to say what’s happening? His voice faltered then and he hung up.
    I drank vats of camomile tea. And when that didn’t work I found and played the Carmen McRae album that she had autographed for my pop back in 1959. And when that didn’t work I made a rogue’s gallery of the faces of all the tenor players whose records I had been collecting for the past ten years. And when that didn’t work I paced.
    The knocking at the front door was loud and desperate. I stood in the middle of the room as the pounding continued. What would I do if it was Henry? I realized how much I wanted it to be him. How much I wanted him to walk in here and laugh at me for thinking my weird nightmares were reality. To tell me I’d been asleep for two days—dreamed all of it—and he was here to wake me with some sprightly Beaujolais and hundreds of kisses on my eyelids.
    It wasn’t Henry Valokus I saw through the peephole. It was Walter. And he was holding a bunch of flowers.
    When I let him in, I could see that the flowers were only part of the deal. He had brought take-out fried chicken and sweet potato pie from a place we used to frequent, up on Amsterdam. He had also brought a couple of arcane Irish beers. Finally, he was toting a huge cardboard box that carried the Hugo Boss label; he had obviously bought a new suit.
    I suppose Walter could see how crazy and depressed I was, but he never said a word about it. He just set the table quietly, and when the meal was over, he asked, equally quietly, whether “my thing was over now.”
    â€œYeah, it’s over,” I confirmed.
    I did the dishes while he searched the TV guide, looking, I knew, for exhibition basketball games. For the past year and a half he’d been paying for cable service, which was kind of a waste given my crummy black and white set, but there was no way he was going to miss a single Knicks game. I watched him fiddle with the channels, his sleeves rolled up.
    Mom liked Walter, she always had. I guess he looked like