Tess’s birthday landed during the school week, which was, for those with keen appetites for attention and acquisition, a good thing. Teachers would schedule a little party at the end of the day (no child’s birthday was kept secret), and there’d be the usual arrangement of cupcakes and kool aid waiting after the last recess, and a bit of dime store crapola to boot. Sugar often appeared in the classroom, but (not coincidentally) only at the end of the day.

Tess had a pair of distinct and contrary relationships with money throughout life. As a child you could trust her with holding the rent, yet as an adult every cent that wasn’t nailed down (and many that were) went into her veins or up her nose. So it was no surprise that despite all the improvised birthday cards and junk she was carrying that she hadn’t lost the fiver Mom had given her to buy the cake with on our way home from school.

“Hold this,” Tess said, handing me her bag of crap. She then produced the bill she had carefully folded and placed inside one of her socks. Nora’s gift that morning was a Mickey Mouse watch that Tess instantly took great pride in. She consulted the rat and told me she would be back out of the bakery in precisely two and a half minutes. I was not allowed inside anymore due to my tendency to talk back to Mr. Gavin’s countergirl.

Gavin’s Bakery (“Home of the Pink Champagne Cake”) is still in business on North Callow, as it has been since 1957. Of all the businesses in that area of Charleston only Gavin’s and Elmo’s (est. 1948) remain. They are two blocks apart yet the divide was once much wider.

Callow Avenue ran south to north. A block and a half from our building, east to west running Sixth Street bisected Callow and continued up Torqwamni Hill and eventually terminated, as most American things must, at the freeway. Sixth also marked the end of the alley and briefly interrupted Wyckoff, which picked up again as North Wyckoff about a half mile away. There were such places as South Callow and WycKoff, once, but they were only a block long and ended at the shipyard’s south fence and the properties were bought out by the government sometime during the Reagan era in favor of Shipyard expansion.

Sixth also served as a boundary between the wholesome family oriented businesses you’d find on North Callow and the other kind of operations that stood on just plain Callow. On our side of Sixth there was old Elmo, the Graydons (and other food stamp laundering Mom and Pop’s), the state liquor store, various taverns (such as the White Pig), tattoo artists, drug houses, pawn shops and several massage parlors that were not exactly brothels but not exactly massage parlors, either. For years an illegal, yet long running Pan game was constantly on the move from one Callow back room to another; floating card games and craps-shoots were often objects of whack-a-mole police investigations that a few dollars tossed in the right direction affected in a desired manner.

Another thing about Tess was her rotten perception of time. It was just as screwy at any point in her life. If she told you she’d be somewhere at a given time or back in so many minutes it was a certainty that the time or interval mentioned would be the last to happen. Sometimes she’d be very early, but mostly she’d run late, never would she be on time; and sometimes not at all; especially if she smelled something like an intervention on the schedule.

I figured that two and a half minutes was a bold prediction destined for failure, so I went around the side and lit a cigarette. I was already five-ten, thus a casual glance didn’t betray my twelveness or create concern. The funny thing was that the people who did notice me and had something wrong to share usually had a butt going themselves. This blatant Do As I Say Not As I Do circumstance helped fuel my contempt and bad attitude. It was impossible to respect people who said stuff like “Watch your goddamn language.”

I rummaged through the sack and found myself thinking that it was a good thing that the world will always need criminals for the sake of police job security. The first grade spelling-level on the little cards devised by fourth graders (Charleston Elementary was not known as a cradle of tomorrow’s leadership) told me all I needed to know about the up and coming brainpower. And without consulting the name, you could always tell a girl’s handwriting from a boy’s; girls usually attempted cursive while the boys scrawled well enough for a ransom note. There were other things in it, including packs of gum, store bought cards and one of those cheap paddle ball toys I was good at but Tess could never get the hang of. Out of annoyance she’d tell me that I could play it because they were made for left-handers like me–a useless thing to make up some, in a special Ed sort of way, for the location of doorknobs and the way pencil sharpeners were set for righties. Unlike Mom, Tess’s lies had too many moving parts.

An old lady passed by. She was beating a cane on the sidewalk and did not look my way. I thought about how she was like me once, but instead of logically deducing what that said about my future, I got annoyed because I decided that she had let herself get that way by choice. She was heavily bundled even though it was nearly sixty out, yet the hem of her sensible old lady dress was visible below her long coat, and it got me thinking about Lydia the Jehovah’s Witness.

I’d been thinking a lot about Lydia over the past few months. Sometimes I found myself sneaking peeks at her during class. Sometimes I found myself wanting her to like me even though I’d never felt that way about anyone else. I guess this had been going on since the start of the school year and was invigorated by a weird little event that took place the day before the start of Christmas Vacation.

The only thing we knew about Jehovah’s Witnesses was their avoidance of celebrations. They did not observe birthdays or holidays. So whenever there was a little party at the end of the day, Lydia would be “Excused to the library to study quietly” after we’d come in from final recess. I’d seen it happen dozens of times over the years and never thought anything of it until that day.

“Yes, Sarah,” Mrs. Raker said, cautiously, upon noting my raised hand, after she had excused Lydia before the start of our sixth-grade Christmas party.

“How come you teachers always do that?”

“Excuse me, Miss Spahr?”

“How come you always wait till after recess to send Lydia to the library in front of everybody?”

Lydia was coming out of the cloak room with her stuff before heading down the hall to the library. I recall feeling like a cheat of some sort for making sure she heard me.

She was waiting in the hall, knowing that I’d just punched my ticket to the principal’s office, carrying yet another note. I knew the way.

“Thank you,” Lydia said. Then her light eyes darkened. “But I don’t need your help.” And she left me standing there.