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life. While I personally would have chosen his broad chest to exaggerate, or the crinkles of sixty-two years around his be-still-my-heart eyes, Desmond had selected the high cheekbones and the ponytail. The difference in our views of Chief was startling. To Desmond he was the bad Harley-ridin’ daddy who didn’t take nothin’ offa nobody. To me, he was the most provocative human being who ever climbed on a motorcycle—
    Okay. Don’t go there.
    I put both hands to my cheeks and commenced convincing myself I was just having a hot flash. It was time to locate Desmond, and I was about to turn away from the wall of drawings when one more caught my eye. The contrast between it and the rest of them was so jarring, I actually caught my breath.
    It was a more distorted figure than the others and was drawn from the shoulders up. Desmond had hyperbolized a black patch over one of his subject’s eyes; the other seethed. A shudder ran through me, and I wanted to turn away, but the longer I looked at it, the more it forced me to stay. Was that half of the man’s head missing, or just the shadows Desmond had uncharacteristically shaded in behind him? He didn’t appear to be of any race at all. He was at once wild beast and cunning human, and the only thing I was certain of was that this person wasn’t anyone I knew.
    But Desmond must know him, and that was more disturbing than the drawing itself.
    “Owen,” I said, eyes still locked on the piece. “Did Desmond tell you who this is?”
    Owen turned to me, and the father he’d been holding hostage bolted for the next aisle. Owen shook his head as he scrutinized the drawing. “That’s not one of his.”
    I stuck a finger toward the signature at the bottom—Desmond Sanborn—curled around an unmistakable Harley-Davidson logo. “He signed it,” I said.
    But Owen was still wagging his head. “I helped him with his whole portfolio, and this wasn’t in it, unless all the icing has slipped off my cupcakes, but last time I checked, I still had all my marbles.”
    “Mr. Schat- zee .”
    We both turned to Desmond, who’d managed to slip up behind us despite the gargantuan proportions of his motorcycle boots. His feet were growing so fast, he was already on his second pair since Christmas.
    He and Owen did their private hand-slapping combination before Desmond turned to me, grinning lobe to lobe. I did not, of course, try to hug him. We had an understanding that I didn’t act like a mother in front of “other women.”
    “You ain’t seen the one I done of you yet, Big Al,” he said. He squinted at my forehead, but he didn’t ask. I’d explained it to him beforehand, which apparently I should have done to the entire community.
    Owen was pointing at the dark drawing, but I shook my head at him.
    “Where is mine?” I said to Desmond.
    He reached inside his sweatshirt and wafted out a page that flapped the blue ribbon attached to it.
    “This what won me the prize,” he said. “I call it ‘Classic Mama.’”
    I choked down a sudden lump and studied the drawing he presented to me. I had to admit he’d drawn me to a T. Light hair to my shoulders, about six weeks past the due date for a trim. Long face, eyebrows raised halfway up my skull, mouth in midword. He was right there: I was pretty much always telling him something, whether it was, “Keep your pickin’ fingers off my Oreos,” or “This is not West King Street, Clarence. We don’t pee off the back stoop.” He usually straightened himself out when I called him Clarence.
    But what kept me staring at Desmond’s caricature of me was the look in my eyes. The gaze he’d penned stared back more through me than at me, and for a very strange moment I hoped this two-dimensional figure could tell me what I was thinking.
    “Looks like I got you right here,” Desmond said. He tapped his palm with the index finger of his other hand.
    “Dream on, kid,” I said. “I am not one of your women.”
    His eyebrows drew in over