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Carolina with Ray for a while. I knew that because his sister told me. But then he played the same shit on my mom and she went out to Los Angeles to work in makeup for Hollywood. Every once in a while she tries to get in touch, but I won‘t talk to her. She‘s a cunt and I hate her."
    And she did—I could tell.
    I was amazed by the amount
of
destruction that Sasha laid out around her. Her father‘s life and her brother‘s as well as her mother‘s.
    I thought about Sasha running out and her mother, who probably hadn‘t ever had sex like that before, unwilling or maybe unable to turn away from the teenage mechanic.
    “Do you hate me now?” she asked.
    That made me laugh, and laughing felt good.
    “ No , “ I said. “How could I hate you? You haven‘t done anything to me. You haven‘t tried to hurt me."
    “I like you,” she said with real feeling in her words. “The only reason I haven‘t come knocking on your door is because you said about your girlfriend and you seemed to want to be with only her."
    “Wow. Really?"
    “Why wouldn‘t I?” Sasha asked. “You have those big beautiful lips and those long fingers. Anyway, I like a man who you know wants to be looking at you but then he gets kinda shy."
    For a moment or two I forgot how to breathe.
    “I‘d like to see you too,” I said. “But can you give me a few days to work this shit out in my head?"
    “Sure. My brother‘s gonna visit anyway. Maybe we could go out for dinner or something next week."
    She took my injured hand in both of hers very gently, moving the tips of her fingers around the swollen knuckles.
    “That would be nice,” I said.
    I must have looked down because she touched my chin so that I‘d look back into her dark eyes.
    Slowly she began to increase the pressure of her caress. Outside people were walking. In the booth next to us an old couple was arguing about something having to do with a cousin. My hand, especially between the knuckles, began to throb with pain.
    “Do you like pain, Cordell?” she asked, staring into my eyes.
    My hand was hurting, but I didn‘t pull away.
    “Does this hurt?” she asked me.
    “Yes,” I whispered.
    “You can trust me.” She squeezed harder.
    My shoulders rose in response.
    “All you have to do is pull away,” she said, a demure smile on her lips.
    I closed my eyes and let my head nod slightly. My breath became a staccato like huffing, and my neck shortened like a penis in the cold.
    Suddenly Sasha let go of my hand. I opened my eyes to see her still gazing at me.
    “Why didn‘t you yell at them?” she asked me.
    “I don‘t know."
    “Go
on,” she said, dismissing me. “Go to the doctor, and next week we‘ll see what else you like."
    “I‘ll pay,” I said.
    “No. I‘ll get this one,” she responded. There was no room for argument in her tone.
    When I stood up from the table, I stumbled, almost fell. Outside I looked back into the restaurant and saw Sasha waving at me, smiling like she always did.
    Walking down the street, I realized that I was afraid of my neighbor. She had gripped my injured hand with a good deal of force. She was trying to hurt me, daring me to pull away.
    After a few blocks I realized that I was jogging down the street.
    Dr. Charles Tremain had been my physician for more than twenty years. I had gone to him for fevers, headaches, and sporadic checkups. This wasn‘t the first time I‘d just dropped by the office on 69th Street between Madison and Lexington avenues. His receptionist, Maya, smiled when she saw me, and then reacted in shock when I showed her my hand.
    She put me in a private room right away. There the new young nurse from Ghana, Aleeda Nossa, told me to take off my clothes and put on a pale-green paper robe that lay on the examination table.
    “But I‘m just here for my hand,” I explained.
    “Dr. Tremain wants you to take off your clothes,” she replied.
    She was a lovely young woman with exceptionally dark, almost blue-black skin and