Anyway, Madeline thought her husband was so sexy that other women must be lusting after his flesh, and she'd be the one to know. They were lucky they had each other. "A woman's got to have self-control if she expects to get to heaven, Madeline," said Ura Lee.

"Meanwhile your boy Ceese is going to have his first experience with recreational herbology."

"If heredity is any guide, he'll puke once and give it up for good."

"Why, is that what happened to Winston when he tried it?"

"I'm talking about me," said Madeline testily. "Cecil takes after me."

"Except for the Y chromosome and the testosterone," said Ura Lee.

"Trust a nurse to get all medical on me."

"Well, Madeline, I say it's nice to have some trust in your children."

"Trust, hell," said Madeline. "I going to tell his daddy when he gets home, and Cecil's going to be sitting on one butt cheek at a time for a month."

She got up from the couch and started for the kitchen with her coffee cup. Ura Lee knew from experience that the kitchen was worth another twenty minutes of conversation, and she didn't like standing around on linoleum, not after a whole shift on linoleum in the hospital. So she snared the cup and saucer from Madeline's hand and said, "Oh, don't you bother, I want to sit here and see more visions of the future out of my window anyway." In a few minutes the goodbyes were done and Ura Lee was alone.

Alone and thinking, as she washed the cups and saucers and put them in the drying rack to drip—she hardly ever bothered with the dishwasher because it seemed foolish to fire up that whole machine just for the few dishes she dirtied, living alone. Half the time she nuked frozen dinners and ate them right off the tray, so there was nothing but a knife and fork to wash up anyway.

What she was thinking was: Madeline and Winston have about the best marriage I've seen in Baldwin Hills, and they're happy, and their boys are still nothing but a worry even after they get out of the house. Antwon, who is doing fine, still had somebody shoot at him the other day when he was collecting rent, and twice had his tires slashed. And the other boys had no ambition at all. Just lazy—completely unlike their father, who, you had to give him credit, worked hard. And Cecil—he used to be the best of the lot, but now he was hanging with Raymo, who was studying up to be completely worthless and had just about earned his Dumb Ass degree, summa cum scumbag.

Last thing I want in my life is a child. Even if I was good at it—no saying I would be, either, because as far as I can tell nobody's actually good at parenting, just lucky or not—even if I was good at mothering, I'd probably get nothing but kids who thought I was the worst mother in the world until I dropped dead, and then they'd cry about what a good mama I was at my funeral but a fat lot of good that would do me because I'd be dead.

Of course, maybe I'd have a daughter like me, I was good to my mama till she got herself smashed up on the 405 the very day I had finally decided to take the car keys away from her because her reaction time was so slow I was afraid she was going to kill somebody running a stop sign. If I had taken the keys away from her, then she'd be alive but she'd hate me for keeping her from having the freedom of driving a car. What good is a good daughter if the only way she can be good to you is make your life miserable?

It only means that I'll never have a son like him, or a daughter foolish enough to marry a man like him, and that makes me about as happy a woman as lives on Burnside, and that's saying something, because by and large this is a pretty happy street. People here got some money, but not serious money, not Brentwood or Beverly Hills money, and sure as hell not Malibu beachfront money. Just comfortable money, a little bit of means. And only a block away from Cloverdale, and that street have real money, on up the hill, anyway.

She only got into Baldwin Hills herself because the earthquake knocked this house a little bit off its foundation and her mama left her just enough money to get over the top for a down payment—a fluke. But she was happy here. These were good people. She'd watch them raise their children, and suffer all that anxiety all the time, and thank God she didn't have such a burden in her own life.

WEED

Ceese saw Miz Smitcher looking out her window at him and saw how she was talking to somebody, and he knew without even thinking about it that the person she was talking to was his mother. "Maybe this ain' such a good idea, Raymo."

"What you saying, Ceese, you just getting scared."

"You never seen my daddy when Mama gets mad at me."

"Your daddy don't care if you smoke a little weed."

"He care a lot my mama gets upset. Whole house jumpy when mama get mad."

"So go on home to mama."

"Knows what? That you and me walking up the street with skateboards? Anybody want to look out they window, they know that. Ain't against no law."

"Miz Smitcher, she know."

"You tell her? That how she know?"

"You know Miz Smitcher! She just look at you, she know what you been doing for the last three days."

"Everybody know what you been doing, you been hiding under your bed, slapping the monkey."

"That's just dumb."

"You haven't figured out how to do it yet?"

"Too much stuff under my bed, nobody can get under there."

They laughed about that for a moment.

"I think Miz Smitcher, she call the cops," said Ceese.

"She call the cops on us, I just have to pay her a visit later."

Raymo always talked that way. Like he was dangerous. And grownups took him at his word—treated him like he was a rattler ready to strike. But in the past few months since Raymo's mom moved into one of the rental houses owned by Ceese's brother Antwon, they'd been together enough that Ceese knew better. Truth was, it surprised him that after all his brag, Raymo actually did score a bag of weed.

That was Ceese's problem now. It was easy to tell Raymo that if he scored some weed, Ceese would smoke it with him, because he thought it was like the girls Raymo was always bragging about how they liked him to slip it to them in the girls' bathroom at school or behind the 7-Eleven. All talk, but nothing real. Then he shows up with a Ziploc bag full of dry green leaves and stems, along with some roll-your-own papers, and what was Ceese supposed to do? Admit it was all fronting?

So now he had to think, was Raymo putting on when he threatened to do something bad to Miz Smitcher?

"Look, Raymo, Miz Smitcher, she okay."

"Nobody okay, they call the cops on me."

"Let's just ride down Cloverdale before the cops come and do the weed another time."

"You got it in your pocket, Ceese. You decide," said Raymo. But his smirk was saying, You chicken out this time, you ain't with me next time.

"I heard that," said Raymo.

"You spose to," said Ceese.

"You telling me I can't tell weed from... weeds?"

That's what I'm telling you all right. "No," said Ceese. "How would I know?"

"So you don't get high, you going to start telling everybody I couldn't tell weed from daffodils?"

"You can't help it, you buy fake weed."

"Just give me the bag and fly on home to Mama," said Raymo. "Dumb little—"

"No, I'm okay with it, I'll smoke it with you."

"I don't want you to," said Raymo. "You a virgin, I don't want to be your first time."

Ceese hated it when he twisted everything to be about sex. "Let's just smoke it," said Ceese, and he started walking through the wildflowers growing profusely between the road and the lawn.

"Not here," said Raymo. "Somebody pack your head with stupid?"

"You said we going to smoke the weed up by the pipe."