Yearn.

Kiki didn't have anything smaller than a twenty on him at lunch time. He'd pulled out a role of twenties and fifties and told Stephen to meet him at the park when school let out. Stephen had never seen so much money on someone his own age. And even though he knew he was supposed to head straight home, he agreed to meet at the park.

When he got there, he went straight to their spot, a stone house at the edge of the playground that all the kids called the White House. Stone turtles, dolphins, horses in mid-gallop were scattered all around the park, but the White House was where the boys played Spider, where the couples did it, where the teenagers played handball and where he and Kiki met.

That afternoon, they had it all to themselves.

"Look what I got." Kiki had a bag full of fireworks--Jumping Jacks, Cherry Bombs, Butterflies, Ashcans. It wasn't even the Fourth of July.

"Oh snap, where'd you get those? Did you go to Chinatown?"

Kiki was smug, "I got my ways, Steve. I even saw Spearman of Death."

"For real? The one with the Five Deadly Venoms?"

"No, for fake, Mama's boy," Kiki pushed him and laughed.

"I'm not." But even to himself, it sounded whiny.

Stephen imagined Kiki--short, pudgy and Puerto Rican-riding the subway up to Chinatown, buying fireworks and rice candy, and maybe even taking in a kung fu flick, a real one with the English badly dubbed over. He wished he could have gone. Just thinking about all the things that his mother kept him from doing got him upset. He was almost twelve and still being treated like a baby. If it weren't for Kiki, he'd never get to light any fireworks.

His mother was too worried he'd blow his fingers off. His mother worried about too many things. She was worried about where they lived. She didn't like Bed-Stuy. They lived on a block with nothing but brownstones. Even though they didn't live in the projects, she said it was still the ghetto. The boys that lived on the block and in the surrounding area worried her. The way they grew up and began to dot the street corners. The way they took up residence on the corners and glued themselves to the pay phones, rigging them so no one else could use them. The way they wore their jeans so low they seemed to hang off their narrow behinds. And they carried pagers and cell phones as if they were doctors and lawyers even though they had no jobs and nowhere to go. She worried that those boys or boys just like them would kill him. One day, she said, they would turn around and shoot him straight through the head if he said the wrong thing.

But he knew that she was wrong. The older boys were his friends. They looked out for him. She worried over nothing and made him look like a punk in the process.

"I'm not a mama's boy," Stephen said, this time without whining. "I'm not."

"Be cool, Steve," Kiki said.

They started out behind the kiddy swings. Kiki pulled the Jumping Jacks out of their thin red paper and left the dozen twisted together. He lit the whole pack at once and they watched as the pack leapt into the air as one, each firecracker straining against the other, ready to dance, each side fizzing and glowing orange, yellow, and green.

"Yo, that was fresh," Kiki said.

"You gonna waste them, doing them like that."

"It's plenty more where that came from. Chill out. Scaredy."

"I'm not!"

"Then follow me," Kiki said as they began to walk away, kicking paper bags and crack vials out of their path. Kiki to watch a group of girls playing rope from a distance. "Isn't that that puta Maribel you tried to talk to?"

"Yeah, that's her," Stephen said, not sure what a puta was. She was playing Double Dutch with two girls he didn't recognize. Her back was to him and he lost his train of thought for a moment as he watched her denim cutoffs sway back and forth to the rhythm of the rope she was turning.

"--a lot of nerve turning my boy down. I'll show her she can't play with my homey like that," Kiki was muttering. He reached around in his bag until he pulled out a stink bomb.

"Get behind that tree!" Kiki shouted as he lit and tossed the stink bomb at the girls and scampered out of sight.

"Yo, why'd you--"

Kiki was doubled over with laughter, "Stop frontin'. You know you thought that was funny."

He tried to deny it, but as soon as he opened his mouth, he started to laugh hard. It had been funny to watch the girls. They had started sniffing the air, and before they realized it was a stink bomb, the girls had all stared at Maribel with disgust, as if the smell came from her. Red-faced, Maribel dropped her end of the rope and ran.

"Bet you wish you coulda did it yourself," Kiki said.

He wondered how Kiki knew. Stephen had tried to dance with Maribel at her birthday party twice and she'd turned him down. He'd written her a note, asking her to go steady with him and she'd shown it to all the girls in their class at lunch time. When he'd seen the note wafting through the cafeteria, covered in chocolate milk stains, he had wished for some sort of divine hand to come down and smack her silly. But he hadn't done anything himself. It felt good to see her get humiliated for a change.

Kiki pulled himself together, "Damn, I almost pissed myself from that. Serves her stank ass right."

"Stank ass!" they both screamed with laughter.

They heard the Mr. Softee ice cream truck a block away and Stephen realized he was late. The ice cream man always came down their block between five-thirty and six, when he judged the parents would be home to give their kids money. "Oh dip, I gotta go," he said.

Kiki gave him a pound, "I got a little more work to do first. I see that pendeja Rosario over by the swings. I got something for her."

"I thought that was your girl?"

"I dumped her. I started going with Tiffany yesterday. Come by my house tomorrow after school."

"I don't know. I'll try."

"She's bringing her girlfriend Wanda over. She'll heal your broken heart."

"Man, forget you," Stephen said. But as he walked away, he was trying to remember what he knew about Wanda. Wanda had started to grow real breasts in the fifth grade. He'd find a way to be there all right.

By the time he got his street Mac Donough, everyone was already outside. He walked through the maze of bodies, sidestepping Double Dutch ropes that whipped by fast enough to sting and stepping over the boys using yellow chalk to etch their lines and numbers on the sidewalk so they could play skelly, without really seeing any of them. He could count on his neighbors to be the same. Each day the heat brought them downstairs with the promise of a breeze or two before dinner. The stoops were littered with adults playing cards, fixing hair, smoking and talking. Each day the old men on the street congregated in front of 32, his building, and sat on milk crates at the top of the stoop, dressed for church and talking quietly to each other. And each day Miss Earlene drank herself into a stupor and tried to pick fights.

"Yes, that's what I said! These kids here today ain't amountin' to nothing." She looked up at the old men on the stoop for support, but they ignored her. She sat at the bottom of the stoop, with her knees spread and her skirt tented over them, a forty-ounce bottle of beer in her lap. Stephen knew the moment she laid eyes on him.

"Not even close to nothing! Look at you. Yes, you Townsend boy. You, Stephen you! You special, huh? That's what your mama make you out to be? What's your father say, huh? Mama's baby and Papa's maybe. Your daddy wasn't nothing and you ain't never gonna be nothing neither."

Miss Earlene was a conversational drunk. After a few beers she talked to anyone who would listen. His mother said she had been beautiful once, when she was much younger. And what his mother hadn't told him, but others had, was that Miss Earlene had loved his father and tried to steal him away. She and his mother had gotten into fights over his father, and his grandmother always had to pull them apart.

He'd learned to ignore Miss Earlene's tirades over the years. Especially when they were about his father. All his mother had ever said was that his father had left them, and since he'd been too young to remember him, he'd left it at that. He had no feelings where his father was concerned. No hatred, bitterness, no nothing. He was the only remainder of his father's presence. There were no pictures or souvenirs. Only absence. Drunk as she was, Miss Earlene was careful. She could say what she wanted about his father, but she knew better than to say anything about his mother.

The kitchen was hot because the windows were closed and the shades drawn; the smells that would have wafted out now turned back and circled around the apartment. Stephen's mother stood in front of the stove, her brown arms and elbows smattered with flour. Her short pixie haircut was wilting. Damp black tendrils framed her face. She was frying chicken when she heard him come up behind her.

"Hey Ma."

"Hey yourself. Where you been?"

"Out. Chillin'. You know."

"No, I don't know. That's why I asked you. Mind telling me why you didn't take out the garbage today? Too busy doing all your 'chillin' '?" "Ah, c'mon, man--"

"Boy, who are you talking to?"

"Ma, I forgot, all right?"

"Well, why don't you just go on and remember, then?"

"All right. Dag."

"Stephen, how many times I got to tell you to quit saying that? Sounds too much like damn." "Sorry."

"Thank you." She kissed his cheek and wiped off the counter, motioning for him to help his grandmother set the table.

They sat down to eat and his mother opened up the conversation after saying grace, "You sure were late getting home today. I got here before you. What were you doing?"

"Nothin' really. Chillin'."

"Well who were you doing 'nothing really' with?" she asked.

"Nobody."

"I may not be hip, Stephen, but even I know you can't 'chill' alone. I don't mind if you stay after to be with your friends as long as it wasn't that Kiki. But I know it wasn't Kiki because I told you I didn't want you around that rough little boy any more. He's got too much time on his hands and too much money in his pockets for a boy that age."

"Does he have a rich grandfather, do you think? Maybe he could give me some of that money," his grandmother quipped.

Stephen bit back his laughter, "No, Gram, he don't have no rich grandfather."

His mother raised her eyebrows and sent his grandmother a knowing look, as if he couldn't understand their communication. "Mama, that money is dirty money. He gets money from that brother of his," she said.

"Wilfredo has a job, Ma."

"Mmmhhm. A job. Washing cars down on Atlantic Avenue. They don't pay that kind of money down there. He got a job, but he's got a something else, too," she said.

She wouldn't say the words drug dealer, but he heard them just the same.

"Ma, Kiki's brother is not what you think. It's nothing wrong with his money."

"First off, don't tell me what I think. You don't know where Wilfredo's money comes from and neither do I. I swear, one of these days, somebody gonna come looking for that boy to make him pay up, and whoever is around him is gonna get caught up in it. Even if they're just minding their own business. And they gonna be real sorry, too. When they come looking for him, they're not gonna care who all is with him or if they're kin or if they're too young or what. Just don't let it be my child, please," his mother said, speaking to no one in particular but making it clear that she was talking to him. She wiped her mouth with a paper towel that had been folded to look like a napkin. When she put it down, he could see the faint traces of the raisin-colored lipstick she wore to work. "But none of that even matters since you don't play with Kiki anymore. Isn't that right, Stephen?"

He didn't answer.

"I said, isn't that right, Stephen?"

His grandmother jumped in. "Stephen, you hear your mama talking to you?"

He still didn't answer.

His mother pushed her plate away from her and started to stand, but thought better of it. "Stephen, I have had enough of this. Now I am going to ask you this question one last time, and this time you are going to give me an answer. Were you outside again with Kiki?" She watched him closely, skewering him under her glare.

He shifted in his seat, "Yeah, Ma."

"I told you I don't want you hanging around with that boy!"

"But Ma, he's my boy. You can't--"

She slapped him across the face, "I don't want to hear another word! He's not my boy, you are, and I don't care what you say about him! You got another think coming if you expect me to put up with you disobeying me! And don't even think of stepping one foot outside this house tonight or any other night until I say so. Take yourself to your room this very minute or else I'm not gonna be responsible for what might happen if you stay in my sight. Lord give me strength. And I better not hear no TV on in there and no video games! You hear me?"

He rose sullenly and left the table, kicking his feet out behind him, his face stinging.

All of their bedroom doors were closed to each other. Stephen was lying on his bed, listening to the sounds in the other two bedrooms. The music that his grandmother called the blues was playing in her room as it always was whenever she was alone in there. His mother was behind the door in her own room, crying.

He often made his mother cry. But he was always sorry. And he had never made her cry like this. This time her crying was louder than the music in his grandmother's room. This time it sounded as if it would never stop. He opened her door and let a little bit of light slip through so that he could look at her. Lying across the bed on her stomach, she looked a C of sorrow with her back curved up and her face buried in her arms. He felt a little sick inside when he realized what he was doing to her. He felt as if he had eaten something bad and couldn't get the taste of it out of his mouth.

Hurting her wasn't something he did on purpose, but it always seemed to happen whenever he did the things he yearned to do. The two of them didn't see eye to eye on anything. She saw the danger, the trouble, before she saw anything else. Sometimes he wondered what kind of man his father had been, if he was the kind of man who took chances and saw the possibilities instead of the problems. He wondered if his father had seen his mother with her short pixie hair and lips dark as grapes and seen all the possibilities with her only to find out that she saw only pitfalls to be avoided, that she kept her feet rooted firmly to the ground and would not pick up and follow him wherever, that she would rather hear him tell her the bills were paid on time than say she was beautiful. Stephen wondered if there was any of his father in him, if that was the difference that made everything so hard, if it was his father in him that his mother saw and worried over.

He didn't go to her. He let her cry. He had done this enough to know all the things that she would say:

These boys, they'll kill you.

They'll take everything you have.

They don't want you to have nothing.

They see that you're smart. That you've got a little something going for you and they hate it. It makes them mad.

They'll smile at you now, but when you try to do something for yourself, when they see you trying to have a little something to your credit and name, they'll try and stop you.

Stephen, why you make it so hard?

If you could just listen sometimes. You "re my baby, and I'm just trying to keep you alive.

He closed her door, standing there with his hand on the doorknob. He gripped the knob tightly until he could see his brown knuckles lighten with the strain of it. He wouldn't go in, but he listened long to the tears she was crying for him.

He went to his grandmother's room and knocked lightly on her door.

"Can I come in, Gram?"

"Yes, baby. Come on in." She was lost in thought, leaning out of her chair, bending over her record player. "Have a seat," she said.

He sat down on the floor by her feet and rested his head on her lap, comforted by the scent of peppermint balls in the pockets of her house dress. Her lap was warm. Her hand came down to rest on top of his head. She stroked his hair lightly.

"How you feelin', baby?"

"Okay, I guess." He didn't want to explain. He just wanted to sit there and feel the comfort of her old fingers slowly weaving in and out of his hair.

"You want me to rub your feet, Gram?" His grandmother was always complaining about having poor circulation in her legs and feet. Sometimes he had to help her put her knee socks and shoes on before her doctor's visits. Sometimes he had to rub the life back into the soles of her feet.

He knelt before her and braced her feet up on his thighs. He began to rub lotion on the cracks and hard, dead skin off her heels. The music came to him softly as he rubbed.

There ain't nothin I can do

Nothin I can say

That folks don't criticize me

After a few minutes, she sighed. "Thank you, baby, but you don't need to be in here rubbing an old woman's feet. These feet done more walking than you can ever imagine."

He shrugged. "I don't mind, Gram. I know you're tired."

"Oh? Who told you?"

"I have my ways," he said, thinking of Kiki and his cryptic answers. "Like right now I know you're think-in' about somethin'." When she looked at him curiously, he jerked his head to the record player in response. The music had stopped but the needle continued to play and move, making shushing sounds on the record's edge.

"'Cause you lettin' your record getting scratched up. The song's over." He got up and took the needle off the record. "Want me to play it again?"

"No baby, take the one off the top of the stack."

"But that one's scratched worse than this one."

"It'll play," she assured him.

He pulled the forty-five out of its paper sleeve and put it on. The needle scratched several times. Then it caught.

"Ah, now this is it." She leaned back. He recognized Billie Holiday's voice. His grandmother's favorite singer. His mother liked her, too. He could never forget Lady Day's voice. His mother said she and his father used to play Billie Holiday records to soothe him when he was teething and crying loud enough to wake the neighbors. He didn't remember any of that, but sometimes it did seem that her voice called to him when he was listening, that sometimes it was reaching just for him. She always sounded to him as if she were aching. He thought she sang as if her heart were torn at the seams.

That voice surrounded the two of them in the room.

   Them that's got shall get
   Them that's not shall lose

He saw that when his grandmother closed her eyes, the fine lines around her eyes disappeared. He pressed both thumbs hard against her heel and rubbed. "Can't for the life of me figure out why they wanna call this stuff jazz," she said. "Ain't nothing about this jazzy. Don't nothing in this music make you wanna get up, snap your fingers, put on a pretty dress and some red lipstick. Make you wanna be at home with your thoughts, know what I mean?"

   So the bible says
   And it still is news

"You know, your problem is you listen to the wrong people. You wanna be out there so bad, but it ain't nothin' out there. Why you gonna listen to your friends over your family? That boy ain't done nothing to make you stay." She spoke as if her feelings were hurt. Her voice, coming after a long period of silence, startled him and her words and tone sparked the need in him to defend himself, but he couldn't say anything without sounding fresh.

He wanted to pull down their way of life. To say that he didn't want to live quietly like they did, without a sound. To say that he needed someone like Kiki to keep him sane enough to live with them. But he knew better than to open his mouth and talk back. He held her leathery feet in the flesh of his hands and rubbed them back and forth, her toes cracking under the heels of his hands.

"Now that boy Kikuyu--"

"Kiki."

"Whoever. Does he work to feed you?"

"No, Gram. You know that."

"He save his dollars to buy you things, sneakers for your feet and food for your stomach? Money for all these fancy haircuts you always need, or these video games that's like life and death to you?"

"No, Gram."

"Then what is it? That boy don't never come over here or call on the phone like decent folks. He's always got to be sneaking around, hanging on street corners. What he do that you got to be out there all the time chasin' after somebody that don't do nothin' for you? Must be somethin'."

   Mama may have
   Papa may have

He couldn't tell her what Kiki did for him, he wasn't sure he understood it himself. Like today, Kiki did the things that he only thought of doing. Kiki made his thoughts real and put them into action. Kiki dared. And when he was with him, he dared, too.

"Well?" she prodded, but he knew better than to answer. She huffed in some air and told him to change the record.

"You just like your granddaddy," she said. This made him look up. His grandfather was a subject wrapped in tissue paper. No matter how lightly you touched it, it would rustle.

"How come?" But she wasn't listening. She was shaking her head in time to the music.

"He thought he knew everything there was to know 'bout life. Made me believe it, too. He got me to move up here to New York--did you know that?--just knowin' it was gon' be different. But one place ain't no different from no place else. People try and make it like everything's new only to find that the devil done followed you wherever you move and all you can do is hold him off a little while whiles you catch your breath.

"People'll tell you this used to be a nice block. Way back when. When we settled up here, there wasn't as many of us as it is now, but ain't nothing different. What we doin' now, the Jews and Italians who moved off done already been through. It might've been different folk, but things don't change. And he couldn't realize that. Thought a place was gon' change something. But if somethin' in you ain't reconciled and you go somewhere else or be with somebody new, is it gonna be healed?"

This time she seemed really to want an answer. Her dark eyes held him in place, waiting. "No, ma'am," he mumbled, "I guess not."

He waited for her to pull out the lesson from her story, to tell him to heed his mother, expecting her to bring it all back somehow and make him feel guilty. But she just rocked to the record, and when it ended he put the needle back to the beginning again. Skipping over the scratchy part, she began to sing with the record, her voice throaty, a low rasp.

   But god bless the child
   that's got his own
   That's got his own

He set her feet down and shook his hands out. He got up from his chair and walked over to her small window. The shade was pulled all the way down. He knew he didn't need to lift it to see what waited for him outside.

The old men lined the stoops, their long legs hanging over the blue, red, and orange crates and down a step or two. They wore their best slacks, with the creases ironed in, as if they were going to work. Their backs stooped and bent, their hands hung down in the space between their legs, thin brown fingers laced loosely together. Beneath their Sunday hats, their eyes were sad, and when they spoke quietly amongst themselves, their voices came out rusty.

His grandfather could have been any one of them if he had lived.

His father could have been any of them--one day--if he had stayed.

Stephen never wanted to be like those men. Just once, he wanted to pull that shade up and not see them sitting there like always. He wanted his mother not to have to worry about him, not to have to cry.

The record ended and his grandmother was still singing, her body bent and nodding toward the record player.

Part of him wanted to stay right there at his grandmother's feet, to keep that window shade pulled all the way down so that not even a crack of light from the outside could show through. But another part wanted to tug the threaded cord quickly, sending the shade snapping up to the top, where it would roll on itself, flap, and break the silence. Because beyond his stoop, over the heads of the old men and past the edge of his block, the park was not empty. Kiki was still out there even though it had grown dark, shooting skyrockets that zipped and exploded into myriad colors in the night dark sky. He was setting off Moonwhistlers that flared and pierced the heavy stagnant air, lighting and tossing Ashcans that resounded like claps of thunder. Stephen moved to replace the needle and replay the record. He passed the window and lingered, straining to hear.

Amina Gautier is a native of Brooklyn, New York, and a graduate of Stanford University. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Cicada, Notre Dame Review, New Century Voices, Shenandoah, Storyquarterly, and Yemansee. A 2003 Breadloaf Writer, she is a fiction editor for Storyquarterly.