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skinned. It looked likeall the help at Evergreen were colored and the residents were all white. She had a little gold tooth on one side of her mouth. It looked a little strange, but she had a nice smile.
    “I have a cousin who looks just like you,” Simi said as we walked up the steel stairs. “Only he’s got good hair.”
    “That’s nice,” I said, which sounded stupid even before it got all the way out.
    The rooms on the rest floor looked a little like our quarters at Progress. They weren’t small but they weren’t huge, either. Each room had a bed, a sink, a chest with drawers, and a smaller room, about the size of a closet, with a toilet. They also had at least one window, which was cool. The beds were the kind I had seen in hospitals. If you pressed a button, the head or foot would come up.
    Some of the rooms had oxygen tanks in them. We had an oxygen tank at Progress in the nurse’s office.
    Simi, who looked okay, kind of Spanish and kind of black, gave me a big plastic bag and told me to go to each room and collect any garbage they might have.
    “Six rooms. We had patients in seven rooms butMr. Cloder died,” Simi said. “You get used to that. All of these people here are very old. After a while they die and you say amen and you move on. After you collect all the garbage, then you go and you stay with Mr. Hoof. He’s not feeling good and he might need some help. Anything he wants you to do, you do it.”
    “Which one is Mr. Hoof?”
    “Can you read?” Simi asked.
    “Yeah.”
    “Okay, so when you go into the rooms, you look at the nametags on the inside of the door. When you see one that says Mr. Hoof, then you know who he is. All right?”
    “Yeah.”
    “And knock before you go in, even if the door is open,” Simi said.
    My conversation with Mr. Cintron kicked back in and I wanted to impress Simi with all the work I was going to do. I wanted to impress Mr. Hoof, too, but I didn’t know who he was yet.
    I went to each room, knocked, and when whoever was in the room asked me what I wanted, I said I was supposed to collect the garbage.
    “Why isn’t Simi doing it?” a man asked me. Thename on his door read GONDER .
    “I don’t know, sir,” I answered. “She just told me to do it and she’s in charge of me, so…”
    “Don’t take my newspapers,” the man said. “Sometimes I read them over to see if I’ve missed anything.”
    “I do that sometimes too,” I said.
    “Where do you live?” Mr. Gonder turned his head as if his neck was stiff.
    “Just past the Bronx,” I said.
    “Where past the Bronx?” he asked.
    “Near the warehouses,” I said, not wanting to tell him I was at Progress.
    “You should move to Harlem,” Mr. Gonder said. “They’re fixing it up nice. My uncle lived there years ago when it was a really good neighborhood.”
    “Oh.”
    “I don’t think you live up there,” Mr. Gonder said. “You look like you’re from Brooklyn. You from Brooklyn?”
    “No, sir.”
    “I can tell where people come from by the way they talk, too,” Mr. Gonder said. “They got a certain way of talking in Brooklyn. I don’t like it.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Mr. Hoof’s room was the last one I went into. I saw his name on the door but it wasn’t Hoof , as I thought—it was Hooft.
    “Hello, sir, I came to collect any garbage you have,” I said.
    “Where’s the colored girl that was doing it?”
    “She’s in charge of me,” I said. “And she told me to collect the garbage.”
    He was sitting on a chair near the window. He had a book in his lap and I thought it might be a Bible. I found a newspaper on the floor and asked if I should throw it away.
    Mr. Hooft motioned with his hand and I put the paper in the plastic bag. He looked really old and thin. His face was white but he had a lot of dark marks on his cheeks that looked like birthmarks. I thought maybe he had a disease.
    I finished picking up the stuff in Mr. Hooft’s room and took it out to where Simi was sitting at a