"If I coulda thought about it I woulda killed myself," Ptolemy said. "But instead I met Satan and he injected me with his fire. Here I been runnin' from fire ever since my childhood friend died in the blaze, and when I stopped runnin' they put a fire in my blood."

"And what you gonna do now?" Shirley asked.

"Robyn gonna be my heir," he replied. "I'm gonna ask her to take care'a my estranged children, my family and friends, and, and, and you."

"Me?"

"Yes, you. You and my great-great-grandnephew and niece and their aunt Niecie."

"All them?"

"That's what Coy McCann told me to do and I'ma do it."

Upon the last word uttered the door to the apartment came open. Robyn, loaded down with four shopping bags, stared at the old folks holding each other on the couch.

Ptolemy turned toward his heir and smiled but Shirley gasped and pulled away from him. She disentangled her arms from his and pulled her feet away too.

"What's goin' on?" Robyn asked.

"Me an' Shirley talkin' 'bout our past," the fevered old man said.

"I bet you were."

"I got to be goin', Mr. Grey, Ptolemy," Shirley said.

She got to her feet and looked around, finally seeing her red purse behind her on the couch. Robyn saw it too. She put down her shopping bags and picked up the cherry-red leather sack.

"Thank you," Shirley said.

Robyn grunted and frowned at her elder.

"Good-bye," Shirley said to both of them.

"You don't have to go, Shirley," Ptolemy said, getting to his feet.

"Oh, no, I mean, yes I do. But I will call you," she said. "I'll call."

She scuttled out the door, which Robyn had not closed because her hands were full. Shirley didn't close it either, and so Ptolemy walked to the front. Shirley stopped at the end of the hall and turned back. She smiled across the concrete expanse and Ptolemy waved at her, though he doubted if she could see.

When he turned away, after Shirley was gone, he met Robyn's stony stare.

"Why you got to be rude to my friend?" he asked, unintimidated by the anger in her face.

"Why you got to be makin' out with her on my bed?"

"Girl, I'm ninety-one."

"I know what I saw. You was just movin' back from a kiss when I come in here."

"Kiss?"

"You got your own bed," Robyn said. "You could take her up in there."

He had had this argument many times in his life. Sensia could tell when he was holding back from turning his head to see a fine woman's gait. Bertie, his first wife, once got mad because he left a fifteen-cent tip instead of a dime for a cute waitress.

"But, baby," he'd said to at least a dozen women, "I didn't mean nuthin'."

But he had meant it. He had.

Robyn's hands had become fists and her cheek wanted to quiver.

He turned away, walked into his bedroom, and closed the door on the rippling seas of love.

He went to the bureau and took out one of the Devil's tiny pills. His fever was raging. He could hear it boiling in his ears, feel it huffing like a bellows against his rib cage.

He swallowed the profane medicine and smiled.

Later on, sitting in Sensie's wicker chair by a window that looked out on the barren concrete yard, Ptolemy opened his mind.

A child had come to his door two years after he and Sensia were married. She was eleven years old and her face was his face on a girl-child's head. Her name was Pecora and she had been living in a foster home with five other girls.

"I don't wanna live there no more," Pecora, who was named for her mother, had said.

"Why not?"

"'Cause they nasty an' mean an' you my real father an' my mother have died."

"I cain't take you," Ptolemy said. He didn't question that she was his, one look at that face and he knew it must be true. He and Pecora Johnson had spent a weekend together a dozen years earlier, but she never said anything about a child.

Ptolemy and Sensia had discussed children, and Sensia said that she was no mother and so would have no child.

Ptolemy had girded himself against his own blood frowning at him and Pecora turned away. He watched the child walk down the hall. She got all the way to the door, and he would have let her go into the cold arms of the street except that Sensia came home just then. All she had to do was look into Pecora's eyes and she knew everything: that this was her husband's love child, that she had come seeking shelter, and that Ptolemy turned her away because he didn't want to lose Sensia's love.

"Come on in with me, child," Sensia said.

Pecora and Ptolemy had two things in common: their faces and their love of Sensia Howard.

"I started her out on the road," Ptolemy would say to Sensia, "but you brought her home."

Yes?" he said when she knocked.

"Can I come in?" Robyn asked through the door.

"Come on."

She had been wearing jeans and a red T-shirt when she'd come in from shopping, but now she wore a green dress that made her look younger.

"I'm sorry, Papa Grey," Robyn said from the doorway. "I didn't mean to get all mad. It wasn't my bed right then but just a couch in the livin' room and what you do ain't none'a my business anyway."

"Come on in an' sit down, baby," Ptolemy said to the girl.

Robyn slouched into the room and sat at the edge of the bed across from his wicker chair.

Robyn had her head down while Ptolemy looked at her, thinking that every heartbeat in his chest was like a grain of sand through an hourgla.s.s.

"Every minute I got wit' you is precious," he said at last. "I don't care if you get mad."

"You don't?"

"You bein' mad is just that you love me. At least I'm old enough to know that. But I want you to be nice to Shirley. I need you to take care of her after I'm gone."

"Why you got to talk about dyin' so much?"

"Because I'm dyin', baby. Dyin' just as sure as the sun go down."

"I'm sorry, Papa Grey."

"Sorry 'bout what?"

"Gettin' mad. Takin' you to that doctor."

"If I was fifty years younger and you aged twenty years ..."

Robyn smiled, and then she giggled.

"And then would you only look at my legs?" she asked. "Or would I find you on the couch with Shirley Wring?"

"I might be lookin' but the couch would be all yours."

"One'a my mama's boyfriends used to make me take off my clothes an' lie up on top'a him," Robyn said, answering a question he'd asked days before.

Ptolemy did not reply right away.

Robyn squirmed, turning her left shoulder toward him and averting her face. Then she twisted the other way, shoving her right shoulder in his direction. Finally she got up from the bed, falling down on her knees at his feet. She put her head in his lap and he placed a hand on the side of her face.

"When I was a boy I had a friend named Maude. She was so black that even the darkest little children made fun of her."

"But you didn't?" Robyn asked into his fingers.

"No."

"Did you think she was beautiful?"

"I guess. But even if she wasn't lovely that wouldn'ta mattered because she was my friend. She was my friend and she died in a fire and n.o.body could save her."

Robyn raised her head to regard him.

"You are my girl, Robyn. Everything I have is yours. Everything. Do you understand me?"

She took his hand and squeezed it.

"How do you feel when I tell you about that man?" she asked.

"That I would kill him if ever I saw his face."

"I only ever told you about it."

While they were eating takeout Chinese for dinner a hard knock came on the door.

"Who is it?" Robyn asked while Ptolemy came up behind her, thinking about his pistol.

"Police."

Robyn opened the door.

Two Negro policemen stood there, wearing uniforms and stern frowns.

"Yes, Officer?" Robyn asked.

"Can we come in?" one of the policemen asked. He was shorter, maybe five ten, and lighter-skinned. A plastic rectangle on the left side of his chest said ARNOLD.

"What for?" asked Ptolemy. His throat was filled with phlegm and so he coughed twice.

When the old man spoke up, Robyn moved back, giving him the lead.

"There was a man attacked in front of your apartment building a few days ago," Officer Arnold said. "Darryl Pride. He was seriously hurt, hospitalized, and we're here investigating the a.s.sault."

That was the first time since his coma receded that Ptolemy felt his mind slip. He was confused for a moment, just a moment. He didn't understand the words, or where he was, or why people were complaining.

He tried to speak but the words were caught in his mind, and then these words, his own thoughts, were incomprehensible to him.

"Sir?" the officer named Arnold said.

Ptolemy didn't answer, didn't know what to say.