Chapter One

 A thick-set black woman in a faded house dress hung up the pay phone and stepped out of the graffiti-scarred phone booth at the Public Market. With her head down and shoulders slumped, she trudged past the live chickens in their wooden crates and past the Vietnamese woman selling twisted shoots of lucky bamboo, limping slightly; her knee was bothering her more than usual in the damp weather. It was September; there was a crisp chill in the air and it smelled of decomposing leaves and wet earth, though it is unlikely that she noticed any of this. Her name was Dorothy Dunn.

Dorothy Dunn slowly made her way the ten blocks back to her home, her eyes fixed on the sidewalk, which was heaved in places by the cold winters. Her neighborhood was not high on the list for urban renewal. Arriving at the house, with its peeling green paint and porch spindles leaning like loose teeth, she hobbled up the front steps, unlocked the three locks on the door, and let herself in. The interior was shabby and dark and chairs were stacked up against the front windows like barricades.

She seemed not to notice the three young children huddled together on the threadbare couch in the front room, their eyes wide as owls’; she did not speak to them, nor they to her.  She went into the kitchen and slumped down onto a chair, chin on her chest.

A few minutes passed, then the stillness was broken by the wailing of a siren. A Rescue Squad pulled up in front of the house; paramedics spilled out and scrambled up the rickety porch steps. They pounded on the door and called out, but the woman didn’t move. One of the children, her ten-year-old daughter Alice, cracked the door open and peered out.

“Where’s the child?” they asked, pushing their way in. Spying the woman, they went to her, but she gave no answer. She had on a dime-store wig, perched awry so that it looked as if her head wasn’t on straight.

“I guess he must’ve fell,” Dorothy said, as if to herself. “He’ll be alright, won’t he?” She looked up at them for the first time. “You can fix him, can’t you?” she asked.

And then they saw him, her three-year-old grandson, Raymie, sprawled on his back in the pantry, his milky eyes wide open. He had a large, bloody, bruise on his forehead, his skin was cold to the touch, and he was clearly dead.