really. Maybe slightly hostile. Not a poem he would have recited to the pastor. Tuuro knew what he could say to people or not. He had a daughter, Lanita, who lived with her mother outside Chattanooga. Tuuro had lived with Lanita’s mother, Naomi, for almost seven years, and the relationship had split up, not, Tuuro had come to realize, over his lack of ambition, as Naomi had told him at the time, but because of the way Naomi had come to picture Tuuro. He knew how he looked: tall, darker than mahogany, dignified, with a face something like a cat’s, high cheekbones and alert eyes. On the street mothers jabbed their daughters to take a look. But the Tuuro Naomi saw looked nothing like this man: her Tuuro was smaller, and he was cringing. He looked to Naomi, Tuuro realized, the way he looked to himself.
Not that he wasn’t a good man, as Naomi liked to say, but Naomi wanted something more. No, she wanted something other: lust, scenes in front of the neighbors, a man who would twist her against the wall and say, Shut up, woman. She found that man. She and the wild man fled Ohio, landing in Chattanooga when a wire burned out in their car. Then something happened, Tuuro was never clear what. The original wild man was now in prison, and a new, slightly less wild man lived with Naomi. Tuuro was under no obligation to do so—the court had sided with him—but he deposited money in Naomi’s account monthly to help cover Lanita’s expenses. He lived for the rare days he saw his daughter. She was six.
“Can’t she stay with me when you’re back in Ohio?”
Naomi’s sigh seared through the phone. Naomi was coming to visit her sister in Columbus.
“I send you money every month, Naomi,” Tuuro said. “What more do you want?”
“Oh, I know, Tuuro. You’re so good.”
Tuuro bit his lip. “Why can’t Lanita stay here with me while you’re at your sister’s?”
“Is it safe?”
“Of course it’s safe. It’s fine here. It’s normal.” Safer than Columbus, he was thinking. The quickest way from Dayton to Columbus was driving through the Grid, on one of the walled-off interstates.
“It is not normal.”
“Naomi. Cleveland is far away.”
Naomi gave another heavy sigh. “All right, she can stay with you. I’ll bring her by Thursday late and pick her up Sunday. But don’t you be feeding her a lot of sweets. I’ve got her off sweets.”
“Did the sweets hurt her? Is she fat?”
“Sweets always hurt,” Naomi said. “Always. Nothing hurts like sweets.”
“WHAT DO YOU want for breakfast? Cereal? Eggs?” Tuuro’s apartment was the entire second story of a small frame house. His kitchen and living room stretched across the back, and the two bedrooms took up the front. His landlady lived downstairs. The house was two houses away from the house in which Paul Laurence Dunbar, the great African American (although people didn’t use that term now; the preferred word now was Melano) poet, had been born. The Dunbar house was a historical site that had never gotten much traffic, and since the Short Times its windows had been boarded up and its grass rarely mowed.
Lanita, Tuuro’s daughter, sat in an old wooden chair at the kitchen table, her feet swinging. Tuuro had sweet rolls in the breadbox, but thinking of Naomi he didn’t dare offer them.
“I want an egg that’s scrambled.”
It took Tuuro a moment of rummaging in his refrigerator to realize he had no butter. “I can’t cook that, Muffin. I don’t have the butter to cook it in.”
Lanita regarded him solemnly, and he saw her mother’s contempt in the wrinkling of her forehead.
“I’m disappointing you,” he said. She didn’t deny it. “How about a three-minute egg?” Tuuro asked, inspired. “You don’t need butter for that.”
“A three-minute egg?” Her voice was skeptical.
“You boil it three minutes. It’s good. You’ll see.”
Maybe six minutes later the egg was on her plate, chopped up and runny, and Lanita was eating it with a large spoon, eyes down and face serious, concentrating on every drip, and Tuuro, watching her, felt not swept, not washed, but swamped with love for her, so sloshily heavy he could barely stand.
She pushed the empty plate away and looked up with her luminous eyes. “Another one.”
She ate three, one by one, which Tuuro told her was nine-minute eggs, and when he picked her plate up from beside the sink he almost asked her, “Did you wash this?” before he realized the plate had been truly licked clean.
“You liked it,” he said. “You liked what I made for you.” The gratitude in his voice almost embarrassed him. To cover himself he made one of his silly rhymes:
Three-minute eggs Three-minute eggs My baby begs For three-minute eggs
“Nine-minute eggs!” Lanita complained, smiling. She came over to him and wrapped her arms around his waist, and then she stood beside him, hand hanging on the back of his belt, a silent companion as he washed the dishes.
AND THEN LANITA was gone, back to Chattanooga, and the pastor was standing behind the desk in his office saying, “Tuuro, how are you?” and stretching out his hand. Tuuro reached out warily to shake it. Once the pastor’s hand had held a tiny pillow that made a fart, once a device that snapped Tuuro’s fingers, once a live toad. The pastor didn’t play these tricks on his parishioners. “Don’t worry,” the pastor chuckled now. “Vera cut off my access to the Magic Source.”
“Good,” Tuuro said—a remark as close to rebellion as he dared go.
The pastor waved Tuuro to a chair, then sat behind his desk and abstractedly tugged at his ear. “Tell me, did you have any bread left over from the Palm Sunday potluck?”
It was almost July, and Palm Sunday had been in April. Did the pastor think Tuuro’s memory was that good? It had been a cold spring, with several late snows. The weather experiments of the early thirties had, as an unexpected side effect, resulted in “old”-style winters and hot summers: it often snowed by Thanksgiving. “If I did I fed it to the birds.”
“That’s Christian, I suppose. Our brethren birds. How about after the Easter reception? Tequila Huntington said there was a whole sponge cake and half a loaf of lemon bread in the cupboard by the fridge.”
Maybe it was his race, or his temperament, or some forgotten trauma of his childhood, but Tuuro was always steeling himself for news of what he had done wrong. It made him cringe to think of himself cringing, but there it was. And he did do things wrong, didn’t he? He wasn’t perfect, although there were moments, turning to inspect the Sunday school classrooms before he flicked off the light, he felt he was. “Are you the janitor did the bathrooms?” someone would ask, and Tuuro would freeze, wondering what he had missed. “That’s the cleanest bathroom I ever seen!” the person might say, and Tuuro would be flooded with gratitude and relief and, yes, surprise; his face would light up in what he knew was a rewarding way. He got hundreds of compliments. He was a kind and conscientious man and he did his work well. But he could never quite believe that people would praise him and not find the fault.
So when someone found a fault, Tuuro accepted it. Hearing his mistakes was almost a relief. “I didn’t see
