Bebe Moore Campbell by 72 Hour Hold Page B

Melody?”
    “In Compton.”
    “Compton! You come all the way from Compton to Beverly Hills?”
    “The program out my way was full.”
    I looked at my watch. It was three-twenty. The trip to Compton and back to the store would take at least an hour and a half, maybe more if I ran into traffic. My first client was due at four-thirty and the next at six o’clock.
    My daughter’s smile was bright and expectant, manipulative. Regardless of what it had taken away, mental illness had conveyed to her a kind of protracted childhood, a long pause filled with delusions of grandeur, no responsibility, very few apologies, and endless adventure. And to me it should have bequeathed an elastic sense of gratitude for life’s most minuscule concessions: My daughter was standing right in front of me; I didn’t have to go looking for her. Instead, I felt anxious.
When is she going to get back to normal?
    “BE GRATEFUL,” MA MISSY TOLD ME ONE MORNING, WHEN my mother’s semiconscious body was lying across the living room floor. She was breathing, but we couldn’t rouse her. It was important for her to wake up, wash up, get dressed, and accompany me to school, as she had promised that she would. She was supposed to meet my teachers, sit in the back of the room, and smile when she saw my papers with stars hanging up on the bulletin board, smile again when she heard all the good things the teachers had to say about me. But she wasn’t moving, only moaning as I shook her. Ma Missy called her name, softly at first and then loudly. I began to cry. Ma Missy stopped calling my mother and put her arms around me.
    “Be grateful, baby. One of these days she’ll be all right, and you won’t even remember the bad times. Plenty things worse than a drunk mama. Be strong, girl.”
    But I had never learned to be grateful for having less than I really wanted.
    “WE’RE GOING TO HAVE TO HURRY,” I SAID, PICKING UP MY cell phone.
    Once we reached the car, Trina and Melody sat in the back together, their loud conversation a kind of voluble stage for me to pitch my thoughts against. From time to time they would lower their voices and whisper, reminding me of two conspiratorial teenagers, plotting against the adult.
    Compton always surprised me. The neighborhood seemed less the subject of the bicoastal gang warfare of rap lyrics than a blue-collar version of the American dream. Away from its hardscrabble commercial strip, with its row of fast-food restaurants—that high-fat staple of urban America—Korean mom-and-pops, overpriced gas stations, and more beauty salons than beauty, the LA version of “da ’hood” looked like a PG-rated movie. I let Melody out in the middle of a block of neat bungalows, in front of a gray house with a postage-stamp lawn bordered by roses and the ubiquitous impatiens that claimed every garden in LA as home.
    “I sure do appreciate the ride,” Melody said, as Trina exchanged her seat for the one beside me. “Drive safe.” She smiled, then waved green dragon-lady fingernails in my direction.
    “TRINA,” I SAID, WHEN WE WERE HALFWAY DOWN THE street, “you’ve had perfect attendance at the partial program. You should be very proud of that. Now”—I hesitated, searching for the right words; Trina’s therapist had told me that she needed my approval—“you must stick to the program schedule and stay until the end of every session.”
    “All right,” she said, her voice soft and petulant.
    I looked at Trina. Such a pretty face.
    “We had lunch with Daddy,” she said. “Aurelia came too. When he called at the shop the other day, we arranged it.”
    “Oh.”
    “He didn’t know I was ditching group. I thought we’d get back in time, but we were having fun. It was kind of a delayed birthday celebration.”
    “Was Melody with you the entire time?”
    Our eyes met; our lips twitched: We were still in tune. Trina and I snickered. Clyde was from the Booker T school of black upward mobility. According to him, if