Free Odyssey by Walter Mosley

if I was tied by a long rope and then all of a sudden the rope is cut and I’m free, but I don’t know where I am, much less where to go.”
    “But what do I have to do with that?”
    “When I could see, people touched my life all the time and I took it for granted. I thought I knew everything. All I had to do was look at somebody or hear five words out of their mouth and I thought I knew everything about them. I wasn’t grateful for a damn thing. My own father fed me and protected me from the world. He built a house for his family and one day I just took off. I didn’t even go to his funeral. Now it’s too late. But … but you came up and saved me, and if I don’t give you something, I mean something more than a reward, then I’m stillthe same man I was—not worth saving.”
    As Sovereign spoke a world opened up to him. He realized how much he missed his father’s father and how he had been a bad son. Maybe, he mused briefly, this was why he had never married and sired children; maybe he didn’t feel worthy to be a parent.
    “I think I know what you mean,” Toni said. “It’s like my auntie G.”
    “Who’s that?”
    “She lived upstairs from us. My mama said that she was our auntie, but really she was Mama’s mother, only they got raised by Auntie G’s mama. Auntie G had had my mama when she was just twelve, so her mother raised them both like they was hers. Nobody said until my mama was grown, and so she treated Auntie G like they was sisters. And Auntie G lived in her rooms upstairs and was always makin’ brownies and lettin’ the little kids come up an’ watch her TV. One time when I was still little my mama got arrested and Auntie G let me live with her for seven weeks.”
    “She was your grandmother.”
    “She was my auntie G. And when she died, when I was twenty, nobody did nuthin’, not even Mama. The city buried her in what they call Potter’s Field and there wasn’t even no service or nuthin’.
    “I was away then and when I got back I spent three weeks tryin’ to find the number of the grave site so I could at least bring some flowers for her.”
    “What was her real name?”
    “Giselle Breakwater. I told the people that but they didn’t care. And now I feel like I let her down.”
    “No,” Sovereign James said.
    “What you mean, no?” Toni said, anger threatening to come out in her voice.
    “The fact that you tried to find her makes the memorial for her. You sitting here right now talking about her is better than any bouquet or eulogy. You are a living testament to that woman. No one could do more.”
    Toni and Sovereign sat in the silence that followed his words. If he could have he would have seen that her brow was furrowed and her eyes were steady on him.
    “There’s an envelope on the glass table between us,” Sovereign said. “It’s for you.”
    He waited long enough for her to take the letter and open it. Inside she would find twenty-five twenty-dollar bills and a folded piece of notepaper saying
Thank you
.
    “They wanted to give me hundred-dollar bills at the bank, but I thought twenties would be easier to deal with,” he said.
    “This nice,” she said. “Thank you.”
    “You’re welcome. Um … what do you do, Toni?”
    “You mean like a job?”
    “Yes.”
    “I work at a beauty shop part-time sometimes. I do braids mainly, but Iris teaching me about stylin’.”
    “Only sometimes?”
    “They got a whole lotta full-time girls. I just take their place when they out sick or sumpin’.”
    “Do you like the work?”
    “I like bein’ around the people there. It’s almost all women except for Albert. He’s gay and Iris say he’s the second-best stylist in the whole shop.”
    “Next to her?”
    “No, next to Lisa Banning. Lisa used to do them wild hairstyles for Motown singers in the eighties. Iris say that Lisa could make wine into water.”
    “You mean water into wine.”
    “No,” Toni said with a sneer in her voice. “Lisa say that