Category:

"Oh." The woman pulled her hand away, quickly inserting it into her stiff red jacket pocket. "I'm sorry, but I was just on the train and was too slow with my bag to give you some money, so here." She held one of those green-and-peach-colored twenty-dollar bills between her fingers. A big spender.

A smile bloomed on Makeda's face, and the woman's gaze immediately fell, like a loose telescope, focusing on her teeth. Makeda smiled even wider. She knew the woman was looking at her two front teeth, which pointed away from each other dramatically, as if they contained magnetic poles of the same charge. She was also missing the two sharp ones in her bottom row, a dentist at a free clinic called them canines, but she didn't care. She wasn't embarrassed by her teeth because they were her teeth, and that made them perfect; something he had helped her realize.

"Thank you so much. You didn't need to go to all this trouble, though."

"It's my pleasure. I'm Kathy," the woman said, and extended the same cold hand she'd just placed on Makeda's stomach. Makeda shook it and felt Baby kick.

"Ouch." She doubled over and took an extra second before getting up. After almost eight months, she knew what Baby's kicks meant—"I'm hungry," "Roll to your other side," "Play me some Alicia Keys"—but this one said: "Leave, Mommy. Now."

 

The woman smoothed the loose hairs popping out of Makeda's fraying braids. "You should relax. Babies don't like to be stressed. Also," she said, continuing to treat Makeda like the latest token Black American Girl doll. "I never got your name."

"Makeda," she responded, beginning to count down from thirty. Twenty-seven. Twenty-six. At zero, she'd leave.

Kathy stared into Makeda's eyes and cracked another tight smile. "I just love your names. There's always a rhythm to them, not like boring old Kathy," she said, laughing to herself.

A smooth breeze tickled Makeda's cheeks. It shook the newly grown leaves of the park's oak trees, ruffled the canopies of designer strollers that Black and brown women pushed white babies around in, and sent plastic bags of all colors and sizes soaring into the street like jellyfish. Men in tailor-made blazers and women in monochrome pantsuits laughed, bleached white teeth beaming for all to see, like they were in a Gap commercial. The Truman Show-esque scene reminded Makeda that her perfect day could still be perfect.

Makeda smiled. "Nice meeting you, Kathy. It's time for me to go."

"You know, there's a homeless shelter not too far from here."

This old bitch. "What makes you think I'm homeless?"

"Oh, I apologize. It's just that, I—"

She held up a hand. "No, I'm sorry. You're just trying to be kind. The truth is, I am homeless. But I'd rather be outside than in a stuffy shelter with unpredictable strangers. Especially when the weather is as beautiful as this," she said, making sure to punctuate her sentence with a laugh. Nothing made white people feel better than a Black person laughing. Besides, she didn't think she needed to mention the rest: that she met him at the Rescue Mission a year ago and fell in love, only for him to abandon her and Baby last month; that he even had the audacity to leave a coffee-stained Starbucks napkin in place of the money she'd been saving with the words If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, baby.

 

Kathy wrinkled her nose as if a garbage truck had just passed by. "Well, I don't think that's the best decision for your baby, Mah-kah-dah. Being a mother is the most important job a woman can have, and I'm sorry, but I'm just tired of all of you having so many babies without a care in the world."

Makeda forced herself to take a breath—in through her nose, out through her mouth—then again, just as she'd watched him do whenever things didn't go his way, which was often.

"Have a good day." She took a moment to push herself from the bench, ignoring Kathy as she reached out to help her up, and walked away.

Passing the men hustling naive tourists and college students through lightning rounds of speed chess and artists hawking overpriced versions of paint by numbers, Makeda allowed the swarm of foot traffic to carry her across the street, all to a djembe drum's beat. Finally, she was spat out in front of her destination. The holiest of food stores: Whole Foods.