Free The Warmest December by Bernice L. McFadden Page A

into Orange Cap’s face. He was cute, long lashes and nice thick lips. It made it easier for me. I smiled and said, “It don’t work if you keep the door open,” with just a sprinkle of street.
    “Yeah, yeah,” he said and laughed before letting the door close. The elevator jerked upward and I leaned into the graffiti-scarred walls and thanked God for getting me through … again.
    The elevator came to a stop and I stepped into the corridor. My heart was beating so loudly I couldn’t hear the sound of my footsteps as I hurried down the hallway toward my apartment. I moved quickly, careful not to kick over the empty beer bottles and crack vials that littered the black and white checked floor.
    The lightbulbs had been shattered again; the soft white glass crunched lightly beneath my feet. I thanked God for the moonlight as I moved on.
    I smelled pork chops and I could hear the crackle and pop of the grease as it raged against the flame. When I pushed the door open I was greeted by the blaring noise of the television; Delia kept it loud to drown out the sound of gunshots that rang in from the courtyard every night.
    She was seated on the secondhand tweed couch, bent over as far as her round belly would allow as she tried desperately to paint her toenails.
    “Hello,” I said and let the tension of the hall slip from my shoulders.
    Delia looked up, grunted a greeting at me, and went back to her toenails.
    She was barely fifty-five, but the weight she’d gained over the past few years made her look ten years older. Her hair was a mass of gray and had only recently started to grow back in around the edges. “Nerves,” the doctor had told her when it started dropping out in clumps. Delia’s eyes were vacant and they made you feel sad just to look into them. Her skin was blotchy and dark in places where Hy-Lo’s fists had visited often enough to leave behind marks that she would die with.
    The heat of the apartment gathered me into its clutches, forcing beads of sweat to form on my forehead and above my lip. “It’s hot in here,” I exclaimed as I began to remove my coat.
    “Uh-huh,” Delia said absently and attacked her pinky toe with the tiny brush.
    The couch tilted a bit with her weight. It had probably seen twenty different apartments by the time it got to ours. The left back leg was missing and so we substituted it with two encyclopedias. The cushions were thin and growing thinner by the day. That was how Salvation Army furniture was. Overused, broken down, and shabby, just like the people who purchased it.
    Shabby. That was the word that always came to mind when I walked into the apartment, greeted by the dull beige walls and peeling paint that hung from the ceiling like cobwebs. I had to bite my lip just to keep the word from spilling out of my mouth in a loud angry scream.
    Shabby. That’s what would be on my tongue when I slipped the key in the lock and jiggled until the bolt slipped free. Shabby is what I saw when I saw my mother, her hair gray from worry and arms fat from Fritos and Pepsi-Cola. Shabby is what rested on the tip of my tongue, but “hello” is what I would say when I stepped in.
    I sighed and came to sit beside Delia on the couch.
    “I was thinking maybe next summer we could go down to Florida, maybe, um, visit with my cousin Anna and her family,” Delia said, leaning back to admire her toenails.
    “Uh-huh,” I responded, not sure where she was going with this. We had not seen or spoken to Anna in about five years.
    Delia lit a cigarette and took a puff between every three or four words. I looked on and listened intently. She did this when she was trying to avoid what she really wanted to say.
    “Or maybe we could go on down to Sandersville and see Tessie and her husband Michael. They’re always asking us to come down. Maybe next summer …” She trailed off as she lit another cigarette.
    “Uh-huh,” I responded again and went to the kitchen to turn the chops.
    “Yeah, that’ll