Read Those Bones Are Not My Child for Free Online

heard the wheeze of the cot, Kenti turning over. Kofi muttered; then his bedsprings squeaked. She went into the kitchen, skirting the drawer of the cupboard. She’d left it just as Sonny had left it, pulled all the way out on its runners. The food stamps were gone and a good fork was missing.
    She leaned over the ironing board. The clothes she had sprinkled and balled up for church were now bone dry. The backyard was deserted. But once before, when she’d grounded him for running off with his singing friends who swore they were the Commodores, he’d pitched a tent under the dogwood near the other half of the duplex. She hurried into the bathroom. That was the window he’d used that time to lure Kofi and Kenti out to join him under her one good bedspread for a feast of raw hot dogs.
    The nails were secure in the bathroom window. And nothing was moving in the yard. It made no sense. The counselor should have brought him home in time for dinner, then taken the others onto the campsite. How could they take Sonny without her permission? She’d always made a point of phoning the Boys’ Club director to make sure the signed slip was on hand. Sonny lost things, like keys, like report cards. She always called too, to get the exact location of the outing and to find out the exact time of return. She made it a point to be among the early arrivals, leaving work early sometimes in order to do it. No one was going to say she was a single parent who couldn’t cut it.
    Wandering out of the bathroom, she added forgery to Sonny’scrimes. And though she knew he was too proud to use the back way, she’d take a look from the children’s room just in case.
    “Ain’t you sleepy?”
    Kenti spoke the moment she entered the room. On each eyelid, Zala saw now, were daubs of blue eyeshadow. Kenti’s lips were red on top of Popsicle orange. Zala hadn’t noticed that before. Tiptoeing in the dark and cupping the girl’s chin to close her mouth, she’d been aware only of the perfume, the reek of it sickening, the fact that it had been a present from Dave, annoying. She had almost shaken her daughter awake to fuss. But she hadn’t, didn’t trust herself, hot with rage couldn’t risk it.
    “Sonny’s gonna git it, hunh?” Kenti leaned up on her elbow.
    Zala turned away from the scrape of skin against canvas, the girl’s bottom sheet half on the floor. She went to the window with only a glance toward the top bunk. The cash-register bank was nested in a pile of dirty socks in Sonny’s bed. The fork, bent from jimmying the bank’s payoff lid, was missing a tine.
    The yard on the Griers’ side of the house was as quiet as her side.
    “Is it the next day?”
    “I’ll get you up in time, don’t worry.”
    Her seven-year-old fussed with her sheets, and Zala made a mental note to get cocoa butter for the girl’s elbows … until she could see her way clear to get her a proper bed … to get them all better housing. Kofi grumbled and rolled away from the wall. He looked at her upside down, and she almost reached out to shake him by his hair. But he didn’t like that, and this was no time to talk about haircuts.
    She lost herself for a moment. One minute she was looking at the gray rings the fishbowl had left on their study desk, the next she was sinking into the blistered paint on the windowsill. She was falling asleep on her feet again. She tried stretching her arms up, but she couldn’t sustain it long enough to work the crick out of her neck. Her arms flopped and she folded them on top of her head and tried to work out the knots in her back.
    “It don’t go like that, Mama. You suppose to stretch up on tippy-toe. That’s how we do in the morning before the Pledge Allegiance. And Miss Chambers say, ‘Reach me down a piece of sky, children.’ She so silly.”
    “You better tell her something, Ma.” Kofi’s gruff-grumpy voice came up from under the covers.
    “Beg pardon?”
    Kofi kicked the covers off and drew his knees up.