"And then I can… uh… pick you up later, maybe, after work, and… uh… maybe we can have supper together, all right?"
She stopped dead on the boardwalk with the wind tearing at the blue kerchief wrapped around her head and tied tightly under her chin. Her eyes were serious and defiant. She kept both hands gripped over the brass clasp at the top of her handbag. Her hands were motionless. She stared up at him with her brown eyes flashing and the blue kerchief flapping in the wind, her body rigid and motionless.
"What are you talking about?" she said. "I told my boss I had a headache. I can't just walk back in now and tell him-"
"We could meet later," Roger said. "For supper."
"Are you-" She stopped the words and let out her breath in exasperation, and then stared at him solemnly and angrily for several moments, and then said, "What the hell is it?"
"Nothing."
"Two minutes ago, you were kissing me as if-"
"It's just that I promised somebody-"
"Well, what scared you off, that's all I want to know. Don't you like the way I kiss?"
"I like the way you kiss."
"Well, then what? I mean, if you're afraid of being seen with a colored girl, I mean taking a colored girl up to your room-"
"It's not that."
"I mean, we can always go back to my house, where we'll be surrounded by colored people and also by rats running out of the walls, and leaky pipes, and exposed wiring, and-"
"There are rats where I'm staying, too."
"Of course, my mother might not like the idea of my bringing home a white man. She might actually begin singing the same old tune she's been singing ever since I was a darling little pickaninny, 'Honeychile stay away from de white man, he is only out to get in yo sweet little pants and rob you of yo maiden.'"
"Look, Amelia-"
"The only thing my mother doesn't know, made of iron though she is, is that her darling little Amelia was robbed of her 'maiden' on a rooftop the summer she was twelve years old, and it wasn't a white man who did it, or even a white boy. It was six members of a street gang called the Persian Lords, the biggest blackest niggers you ever saw in your life." Amelia paused. Bitterly, she said, "My duena was away on vacation that summer, I guess. At the beach, don't you know? Sand Harbor, where all the society ladies spend their time, naturally. What the hell is it, Roger?"
"Nothing."
"You're not a faggot, are you?"
"A what?"
"A fairy, a pansy."
"No."
"Then why-"
"I'll meet you later, that's all," Roger said. "It's just that my friend - the one I told you about?"
"Yes?"
"I have to see him, that's all."
"He's a very convenient friend."
"I have to see him," Roger said.
Amelia sighed.
"I have to."
Amelia sighed again.
"Come on, let's go back," he said.
"I'll give you my home number," she said. "I won't go back to the drugstore, not after I told him I had a headache."
"All right."
"Will you call me?"
"Yes. Yes, I think so."
"Why do you only think so?"
"Because I… Amelia, please don't… don't push me, huh? Just don't push me."
"I'm sorry."
"I'll try to call you. We'll have supper together."
"Sure."
They barely spoke on the subway ride back. They sat side by side, and occasionally Amelia would turn to look at him, but he was busy thinking about Molly and about what he had to do. It was foolish to even imagine any other way.
He had to go to the police, that was all there was to it.
He left her off on the corner of her block. It was almost twelve noon. The wind swept through the narrow street, and she clutched her collar to her throat and ducked her head.
"Call me," she said.
"I'll try."
"I'll be waiting." She paused. In a whisper, she said, "I like the way you kiss, white man," and then she turned and went up the street and into one of the tenements.
He watched her until she was out of sight, and then began walking toward Grover Avenue and the police station.
It was beginning to snow.
The flakes were large and wet and they melted the moment they touched the asphalt streets, melted on the tops of parked automobiles, and on the lids of garbage cans standing alongside shining wet tenement stoops. In the park, on the stone wall bordering the edge of the park, and on the rolling ground and jutting boulders of the park itself, the snow was beginning to stick, covering only lightly and in patches, but sticking nonetheless. He walked alongside the stone wall with its pale-white, almost transparent covering of snow, and looked across at the police station and then took a deep breath and sucked in his belly and crossed the street.
He went up the steps. There were seven of them.
