The rewards and dangers of opening your heart

I did not laugh or have fun.

I guess I felt some bad for it later, but at the time I don't know what I felt. Not the half of what I should've, that I can say for a fact. I was not a cold person. Just alive, like everybody else, and trying to stay that way awhile longer.

I guess I felt bad later because I could've let go of the gun. Not pulled on it. I think if I'd just let him take it back he might not've hurt me or anything. But then you don't know for a fact and you just do something and then it's the wrong something. I worry sometimes, did I shoot him because he didn't love me and never would? But I really think it wasn't on purpose. Only, sometimes I see people fool themselves, so I ask myself all the same. But I don't think I meant for it to happen. Besides, if I was to kill everybody who didn't love me and never would, wouldn't be nobody left on the planet but maybe Rosalita and Leonard, my little boy. Who, of course, was not even borned at the time.

This is how it was.

On account of it was my birthday, I had been almost all day looking for Mama. What one of these things has to do with the other I can't say that I know. What I thought she would do about it being my birthday, well, she wouldn't do nothing. That much is real clear now. But it made me look for her all the same.

To make things worse, Rosalita had got arrested, only this time she did not come back. And I had to wonder why. Usually it wouldn't take her no more than two, three hours to make it home. Cop would pick her up, take her on a ride supposed to be to the station. Only they'd go someplace else, she doing for him for free what he was supposed to be taking her in for. Then he'd drop her back on the corner.

This time she did not come home all day. Maybe some cop really put her in jail. Maybe he didn't want nothing from her, or had kids and a wife he wanted to stay true to for real. Or a bag of other maybes I could not understand. What had happened to things? I didn't know.

I went by to where Little Julius was sitting out on his stoop and I asked him did he see my mama.

"Maybe I seen her," he said. "Maybe I ain't. Why'nt you come over a little closer here and we talk about it?"

I didn't get no closer to Little Julius. He was a big fat man with his hair shaved all off and little designs shaved in, and when he smiled, his front teeth were all gold. You would think it would look nice — all that gold. But no. It was ugly in a way I could never explain. He liked the color of my skin because of me being part black and part Korean. He said I am fine. Not that day, but he had said it. In the past. And even that day, even with him not saying it, you could feel that hanging around.

I said, "Maybe did you sell her something?"

Little Julius said, "Ain't got nothin' to sell. Ain't got no product. If you would listen to reason maybe I would have. You and me, we could do okay. Little girl like you, just don't have no idea what you got. You and your mama, live in a real house. You'd be doin' okay."

I knew we were talking two very different kinds of things and so did he. I cared and Little Julius, he did not.

"Who she buy from when she don't buy from you?"

Excerpted from “Love in the Present Tense” by Catherine Ryan Hyde. Copyright © 2006, Catherine Ryan Hyde. All rights reserved. Published by Flying Dolphin Press, a division of Random House, Inc. No part of this excerpt can be used without permission of the publisher.

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