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start to get more confidence in herself and start to get out of order, even try one and two acrobatics in the bed. And when she start act like she want to rise up to me like this now, I felt I had to overpower her, break her down right back to where she was lower than me. And to do that I just had to imagine she was Cynthia. And this would get me murderous. And every push I push into Deloris was like I was giving her a stab.
    One night, about a week of carrying on like this, I felt I had to tell Deloris I was in love. I just rolled over in the bed one morning and said it quiet and plain. No, it wasn’t a week. It was more than that. About, say, nine days, because in truth I’d found out where the man was a few days before that.
    Deloris get vex, of course, but what surprise me is when she never fight to keep me or nothing like that. No, sir. She just pack her things and leave. No, is lie. As she was closing her grip she say, “The woman out of your class, you know, Brownie? You is the biggest fool I know.”
    Yeah, that was kinda true.
    Maybe, but I couldn’t see that then cause here was my thinking. Cynthia living with her daughter in that small dingy place in Portmore, and I know she made for better than that. I could see her comfortable in Constant Spring. Come uptown, live comfortable, me and she, put the girl in Immaculate, beautiful. Well Deloris had to leave for that to happen. And even though I never ask her to, well, to my mind she react perfect.
    I wait to hear from Cynthia that Deloris call her or go by to fight her. But nothing like that happen.
    So after a few days—a Thursday—I decide that it is time for me to seal the deal, as them say. I call Cynthia from the office and tell her I was going to find her husband over the weekend. I tell her I would come look for her Monday with all the information about him, and if she want I would take her to look for him on Tuesday. Then I tell her what I told Deloris. I was about to tell her that Deloris move out, but her reaction stop me. First I couldn’t hear anything. Then she talk to me soft-soft.
    “Why you do something like that, My Lord?”
    “You know why.”
    “You shouldn’t do that, My Lord.”
    “I had to …”
    “You shouldn’t do that,” she say again. “No, you really shouldn’t do that.”
    After that she never say a whole lot, so I promise her that she will understand and we will be all right. It wasn’t the time to tell her how Deloris leave and how I already work out when she and the girl were going to move in. That would look too callous—like Deloris was disposable or something. I am not that kinda man at all. Now, if Deloris had started some foolishness, I would have to tell the woman, but Deloris, God bless her, deal with this thing with dignity, and the few times when I see her, is not vexation I see in her, but pity, a terrible kinda pity for me that was a new kinda punishment.
    Be that as it may, at the time, I was in a zone. Love, man. Love. I hang up and start make plans.
    Well, how did I find the man? Come on, that man wasn’t difficult to find. Cynthia had done told me that he had family in St. Elizabeth. So all I had to do was to get to Santa Cruz, where she said his people was from, and the rest was easy.
    I had some old police friends in the area. And when you’re doing certain kinds of things you have to figure in the police. So I called my good squaddy One Drop one night and ask him to meet me at five the next morning in Santa. One Drop’s name is really Wilson, but he’s the kinda police that each time he has to draw his Glock, a man is going to fall.
    So Drop met me outside a patty shop, in plainclothes as usual. Everything was closed. The place was still dark. But is country, so one or two goat and cow was loitering. We talked in the parking lot. Turns out he was looking for the husband too. It was one of the first things he said when the subject came up.
    Some complaints had been coming in from prostitutes in