Martha smiled sadly and took another small sip of her champagne.
“Well, I didn’t go. I liked to think I had too much dignity. I suppose it was nothing but stupid pride. Either
way, it turned out the same. I stayed. Then I got pregnant again – only I didn’t know I was pregnant. I wasn’t
even sicking up in the morning but then, I never did with the first one, either.”
“You didn’t go to this Mama Delorme because you were pregnant?” Delores asked. She’d made the
assumption that Martha must have gone to the bruja woman and asked her to get rid of the bun in her oven.
“No,” Martha said. “I went to her because ‘Tavia Kinsolving told me Mama Delorme could tell me what the
stuff was I found in johnny’s coat pocket. White powder in a little glass bottle.”
“Oh-oh,” Delores said.
Martha smiled again. “You want to know how bad things can get?” she asked. “Probably you don’t, but I’ll
tell you anyway. Bad is when your man drinks and don’t have no steady job. Really bad is when he drinks,
don’t have no job, and beats on you. But real deep-dish bad is when you find a little glass bottle with a spoon
on it in your husband’s coat pocket – where your hand was so you could maybe find a dollar to buy toilet paper
down at the corner market – and you just hope like hell it’s coke and not skag.”
“You took it to Mama Delorme?”
Martha laughed pityingly.
“The whole bottle? No sir, no ma’am, no way, I wasn’t getting much fun out of life, but I didn’t want to die. If
he’d come home from wherever he was at and found that two-gram bottle gone out of his pocket, he would
have plowed me like a pea-field. What I did was take a little of it in a handkerchief. Then I went to ‘Tavia and
‘Tavia told me to go to Mama Delorme and I went.”
“What was she like?”
Martha shook her head, unable to tell her friend exactly what Mama Delorme had been like, or how strange
that half-hour in the woman’s third floor apartment had been, and how she had nearly run down the crazily
leaning stairs to the street, afraid that the woman was following her. The apartment had been dark and smelly,
full of the smell of candies and old wallpaper and cinnamon and soured sachet. There had been a picture of Jesus on one wall, Nicodemus on another.
“Very strange,” Martha said finally. “She might have been seventy, or ninety, or a hundred and ten. There was a pink-white scar that went up the side of her nose and her forehead and right into her hair. Looked a little
like a lightning bolt. It had pulled down her right eye in a kind of droop that looked like a wink. She was
sitting in a rocking chair and she had knitting in her lap. I came in and she said, ‘I have three things to tell you,
little lady. The first is that you don’t believe in me. The second is the bottle you found in your husband’s coat
is full of White Angel heroin. The third is you’re three weeks with a boy child you’ll name after his natural
father.
6
“Later on, when I could think straight again, I told myself that as far as those first two things went, she hadn’t
done anything that a good stage magician couldn’t do – one of those mentalist fellows that wear the white
turbans. She had maybe gotten a call from ‘Tavia Kinsolving telling her I was coming. It could have been as
simple as that, but how it got done don’t matter. What matters is that a woman interested in being known as a
bruja woman finds ways to look like a bruja woman. You see what I mean?”
“Ye-ess-” Delores said doubtfully.
“And as far as her telling me that I was pregnantwell, I’d maybe had a little feeling that I was, sort of a shine
on the idea, but even if I was, that didn’t make it any more than a lucky guess on her part, or … my mother