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“Me too,” I concurred. “But maybe not for the same reason.”

“Baby,” my grandmother said. I had knocked on the open door and then entered her room.

She stood up from a chair that was set at a height halfway between a regular seat and a barstool. Her dress was bright yellow and her skin the blackness of a night sky.

I kissed her lips because that’s what we’d always done.

“Sit on the bed, darlin’,” she said, waving toward the single-mattress cot that was the main purpose for her room.

She fell back into her carpeted wood chair, then momentarily raised her shoulders to prove how happy she was to see me.

“How’ve you been, Grandma?”

“Fine,” she said with a sneer. “That white man Roger Ferris keep askin’ me to go hear some music at Lincoln Center. I tell him every time that I will not go out on a date with a white man. I mean, if it was a double date and he had a white girlfriend and I had a black boy, then that would be okay.”

“What did he say to that?”

“That we didn’t have to kiss good night.” There was the hint of a smile in her scowl.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“He says that if there’s no kiss, then it wasn’t a real date. And that if I knew before we went that there wasn’t gonna be no lip action, then I wouldn’t have to think we were on a date.”

“That’s a pretty good argument, if you ask my opinion,” I said.

“No one askin’ you.”

“Roger Ferris. Isn’t he that guy who owns most of the silver in the ground in the world?”

“I wouldn’t know. The only ground people up in here have is in the cemetery, waitin’ for the little we got left on our bones.”

“How’s our other friends?” I asked.

“Stop it, King. You and I both know that you not here at no eight thirty in the mornin’ to make small talk.”

I do love my grandmother. The milestone of ninety years was well behind her, but she read the Daily News every morning and did all my sewing. She was a shade under five feet tall and hadn’t brought the scale up past a hundred pounds in years, but she was a power to reckon with.

Stonemason’s was one of the most exclusive retirement/nursing homes in the world, but something about my grandfather’s career as a fireman got him and her put in a benefits clause that I had never seen.

Brenda Naples still walked, smoked, and talked back. It’s an even bet that she’ll outlive me.

“What is it, King?” she asked.

I told her about the letter from Beatrice Summers and the danger of me following down that evidence.

She concentrated with her eyes and ears, and maybe even by scent.

“You got to do it, baby,” she said when I was through. “All a man got is his sense of what’s right and what’s not. If you know you been done wrong and you know how to make it right, then you don’t have no other choice.” Her dialect veered back toward its Mississippi roots when she was being serious.

“I’ve always known,” I argued.

“But no one else ever gave you hope or a name,” Grandma countered. “And before you had more important work to do.”

“Detective work?”

“No, fool.” She snorted. “Aja-Denise. You had to see her become a young woman before you could take care of yourself. That’s just mother wit.”

I didn’t say anything because she had said it all.