Crescent City Connection

hadn’t known either. “Not for sure,” they said. It wasn’t polite to bring it up. Dorise came from a churchgoing family, and the day Delavon came into the video store with his fancy clothes and his fancy car and his silver tongue, he told Dorise he managed a band she’d heard of, everybody’d heard of. Later, when she asked why he never took her to concerts, he said he quit that job to “take care of some other bi’ness,” and she believed him. He bought her a nice little house, or so she thought. After he died, it turned out they didn’t really own it.
    Dorise was strong, though. She picked up and moved to Gentilly, taking Shavonne with her. She kept applying for jobs until she got one, and because she was such a hard worker, she did well. “Just be nice,” her mother said, “and people’ll be nice to you.”
    Her sister said being nice to white people was bullshit, but Dorise enjoyed it. “Law, girl,” her mother said. “You always had a good disposition. Miss Sunny Smile, yo’ daddy used to call you.”
    She did have a pretty smile, to this day. She had a big butt and big hips, and she sort of floated when she walked. Her husband had picked on her, told her she’d gotten fat and he didn’t want to “have nothin’ to do with her no more,” by which he meant sex (though what he did and what he said were two different things). But other people liked her. “You look like a nice person,” the older lady had said, the one who told her about rugs.
    “I try to be,” she answered, and the woman smiled back. That was all there was to it—that and being careful, respecting other people’s things. She was doing so good she almost didn’t believe it sometimes.
    She had a little apartment, and enough money to buy clothes for herself and her daughter, and her mother had given her her old Chevy. Half the women she knew—other single mothers— didn’t even have cars.
    She didn’t need all those presents her husband used to bring her—stereo systems and bracelets and things. A good thing, too, because she’d had to sell themall. There was no one to be home for anymore. And Dorise liked working. She liked the people she worked with and she liked meeting the clients.
    What she missed was having a man.
    Sometimes she missed her husband, even though he had an evil mouth on him and knew how to hurt her feelings. But when they made love, there was nobody better, nothing sweeter.
    “Mmmm-mmmm,” she told her sister. “Chile, I tell you.”
    Lawrence came in to pick up the equipment. “Just about over?”
    “Seem like it. Few people still drinkin’ coffee.”
    “This some place, huh? How you like to live here?”
    “Would you like to? Tell me the truth.”
    “You kiddin’? I got three kids and four rooms—now what you think?”
    “But I mean here. With all this stuff in it—seem like home to you?”
    He laughed. “Well, I sho’ wish it did.”
    “I rather have a nice place out in the East.”
    “Well, I could see that, but in a pinch.”
    They both laughed. “Okay. In a pinch.”
    Cammie clicked back into the kitchen. “Hey, Lawrence. Y’all hungry?”
    Dorise appreciated the way she always asked. She and Lawrence shook their heads. Dorise said, “I’m tryin’ to lose a little weight.”
    Cammie looked at her watch. “Don’t you have to pick up your little girl?”
    She nodded. “Just soon’s I finish here.”
    “Well, go ahead. I can do the rest of those.”
    Dorise thought Cammie one of the most considerate of the women she worked for, but Lawrence said, “She just don’ want to pay for another hour.”
    She rattled off in her old Chevy, arriving five minutes before school let out. Once she had been twenty minutes late, and her daughter had stood alone in front of the school in the rain, hair soaked, clothes plastered to her body, tears streaming down her face.
    But Shavonne had lied to make her feel better: “These ain’ tears, Mama. They just raindrops.”
    That was worse than if she’d stamped her foot and sassed. Now they had a deal: If Dorise wasn’t there as soon as school let out, Shavonne went home with her friend Chantelle.
    Today she came running out in jeans and a turquoise T-shirt, hair neatly braided and held by clips. She was such a tiny thing!
    Since Dorise had gained weight—shortly after Shavonne’s birth—the idea of unpadded bones was inconceivable to her. Her own mama was heavy and so was her sister. Yet they had all been skinny little kids