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Mitch?”
    “Ain’t that much money in the world,” I said, and I meant it. Mitch was one of a kind.
    “You got that right. So I put it away and didn’t touch any of it for a long time. Then I realized how much I really wanted to find a way to fix the things we’d been busy half repairing with all the tired programs that don’t work and the exhausted people who don’t care. Mitch’s insurance let me buy myself enough time to try.”
    It was almost funny. In the middle of all the bad things that have come our way, we both emerged as sisters of independent means.
    Joyce frowned and shook her head. “That’s why this stuff with Eartha really makes me mad. She’s been coming every week for the last four months, lying the whole time, and for what? Because she’d rather smoke crack than have a healthy baby?”
    “What the hell is the Sewing Circus?” I said, but Joyce just yawned, which made me yawn, too. We were both pretty exhausted.
    “That’s too long a story to start on this late at night,” she said, “but I’ll tell you everything tomorrow. I promise.”
    Joyce’s room was quiet and I had settled into my blue heaven before realizing I hadn’t told her about Eddie punching out the guy in the parking lot. We both had some stories to tell in the morning.
     
     
• 9
     
    the hospital called to say the baby tested negative for HIV, positive for cocaine, and that they were going to do some more tests, so Joyce couldn’t see the baby until tomorrow. The other big news was that the mother had disappeared. Not disappeared as in,
now you see her, now you don’t.
Disappeared as in, got up, got dressed, put on her shoes, picked up her purse, and walked out.
    Joyce can’t understand it, but I can. Homegirl’s trying to walk away from that HIV. She’s trying to decide if she’s going to tell anybody or just keep living her life and see what happens. I used to wish I hadn’t taken the test so I still wouldn’t know.
    Before I tested, I had been celibate for almost a year. I had had enough of those Atlanta Negroes for a while. They talk so much shit when they’re looking for some sweetness, but they got no heart for the long haul. I figured ten years of rolling around with them was plenty.
    Besides, in spite of what people will try to tell you, Atlanta is still a very small town, and the way I’d been living, it was getting downright ridiculous. I’d walk into a reception and there’d be a room full of brothers, power-brokering their asses off, and I’d realize I’d seen them all naked. I’d watch them striding around, talking to each other in those phony-ass voices men use when they want to make it clear they got
juice,
and it was so depressing, all I’d want to do was go home and get drunk.
    Then I started keeping company with a bearded saxophone player who wore two gold hoops in each ear and played regularly at a club downtown. We hadn’t formalized anything yet, but we’d been hanging pretty tough for about three months and he was making me rethink this whole celibacy thing in a serious way. He wasn’t much taller than me, and built kind of round, but he had a lot of style and he could make a sax sound so sweet you couldn’t decide if you wanted to take him or the horn home to bed with you. He’d already been tested, so it was on me.
    When I got the results and told him, he sat there and listened to me tell it all and then he picked up his coat and his horn case and walked out the door. No
good-bye.
No
damn, baby, what we gonna do?
Nothing. One minute he was there, then he was gone. That was it.
    I went with Joyce to see Eartha’s sister. I had told her about what happened at the liquor store yesterday and I figured, why not meet the rest of what seemed to be a supremely fucked-up family. The woman who came to the door let out a blast of that peppermint-smelling vapor that means
crack smoked here,
but Joyce didn’t blink. Joyce was a state caseworker for fifteen years and she’d been in