Apple Brown Betty by Phillip Thomas Duck Page A

stopped spinning over here where you grew up, but it hasn’t. Some bad shit goes down over here. Your wonderful stepfather couldn’t figure out how to change Mama any more than you could. You just ran away from it—he chose to give in to it. He died a coward’s death for it, too. Mama will be next, thanks to him.”
    â€œThis is too much,” Cydney cried.
    â€œYeah, well, I just wanted to let you know. I can come by later if you want.”
    â€œNo, no, no. Let me handle this by myself. I’ll call you if I need you.”
    â€œAiight,” Slay said, disappointed.
    â€œBye.”
    She sat there for a while, crying, hugging herself in grief. Then she wiped her face with the back of her hand, slipped her feet into her shoes and grabbed her car keys. She didn’t know where she planned on going, what she planned on doing, but she knew she had to get out of her apartment.
    Before she knew it, she was traveling around the Asbury Park circle, coming down Asbury Avenue headed into the broken city. How long had it been since she had come here? She came to Main Street, turned right instead of going left, toward where her mother stayed on First Avenue. She drove a few streets, then made the left on Cookman. Most of the businesses were boarded up. The sight of the decaying Steinbach Building jolted her. She noticed the lineup of cars just across the way. The glowing banner emblazoned with the name Cush outside the new restaurant. A line of white couples waited by the door to the restaurant, a half dozen or so other people making their way up the sidewalk toward the entrance. Cydney drove past.
    Farther up the road, by the bridge, the weeping willow tree bent to a lean that placed it almost perpendicular to the ground; still stood strong. The tree had been like that for a long time and she wondered what act of God it would take to make it finally fall. She continued on.
    A small posse of kids, none of them older than ten, darted by in front of her. She slammed on the brakes and laid into her horn. They didn’t even look in her direction. One of the kids threw his basketball high in the air, aiming it at the electrical wires above, trying to dislodge a pair of worn sneakers hanging by their laces over the wire. Cydney continued on.
    She came to the end of Cookman, with Heaven on Earth dance club in front of her. She turned left. Passed by that horrible go-go bar, Hot Tails. Passed an abandoned lot with weeds growing heavy from cracks in the pavement. Passed by what at one time was a parking garage. Now the entire facility was abandoned, the metal skeleton of the parking structure rusted brown, slabs of concrete angled up against the side of the ground-floor building. She continued on.
    A boarded-up building ahead had an elaborate NJ Lottery logo spray painted in graffiti on the one free window. There was raw talent in this jungle, but seldom was it used for any good; seldom did it garner any value. Cydney continued on.
    She passed another one of the endless paved lots. This lot had a rusted crane sitting along the edge, up on its haunches as if it had decided to sputter out halfway through its work. Farther up the road was the Berkeley Carteret—a lavish hotel—which somehow still thrived, still had business in the midst of all this poverty and neglect. It made her think of her brother. Slay—because that’s who he was when he spoke of the hotel—always referred to the Berkeley as his corporate offices. Cydney came to a stop at the lake that separated the squalor of Asbury Park from the richness of Deal. She started to drive around the lake on the circular road and ride through Deal back to her home in West Long Branch, but she didn’t. She stopped the car, cut the engine and sat looking at the ripples of water in the lake. She wasn’t sure where exactly, but she knew not too far from here Pop G had faced his end. As she considered all she had seen on her way to this