Gina Crow played Hoagy Carmichael records every Saturday morning. Certain records she played more than once. One day Roy heard “Hong Kong Blues” and “Old Man Harlem” twice, and “Memphis in June” three times. Usually, the last song Mrs. Crow played was “Stardust”. All of these versions featured Hoagy Carmichael with solo piano, except for “New Orleans”, on which he sang a duet with a woman. Roy liked to sit on his back porch from about eight to nine o’clock listening to the records during the year Gina Crow and her daughter, Polly, lived next door. Polly was twelve, a year older than Roy. She had cat’s eyes, billiard ball black with yellow flames in the center. Polly looked and acted older than she was, and she had a sharp-edged manner of speaking that made her sound mean or angry. She made Roy feel uncomfortable but excited at the same time.
“Martha Poole told me that Gina Crow’s husband is getting out of prison.”
“I didn’t know she had a husband.”
“Martha said he was busted in Toledo, where they used to live.”
“What for?”
“Embezzlement. She thinks he worked in a bank.”
Roy’s mother and her husband were washing and drying dishes while Roy was sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of cereal.
“What’s embezzlement?” he asked.
“It means he stole money,” said his mother.
“Is he coming to live with them?” her husband asked.
“Martha doesn’t know.”
“If he’s on probation, he’ll have to stay in Ohio. For a while, anyway.”
“I’m just glad he didn’t rape or murder anyone. I wouldn’t feel comfortable having a murderer living next door to us.”
Walking home from school the next day, Roy was following behind Polly Crow and her friend Vida when he heard Polly say that her father was coming home soon, and that she had not seen him for a long time.
“Where’s he been?” asked Vida.
“Far away, in the Colony of the Sun.”
“I’ve never heard of that place. Is it in the United States?”
“I think it might be in Canada, or Antarctica.”
“What was he doing there?”
“Working on a big project. My mother told me he was exploring for something that could save the planet.”
“You mean Earth?”
“Yeah. My mother says pretty soon there won’t be enough coal to heat all of our houses.”
“Maybe he was digging oil wells. They use oil to heat houses, too.”
“Could be. She says the men there have to shoot polar bears and seals to have meat.”
After Vida turned off at her street and Polly was by herself, Roy caught up to her and said hello.
“Oh, hi, Roy. Were you walking behind me and Vida?”
“Yes. I heard what you said about your father being in Antarctica.”
“It gets even colder there than here in Chicago. We might move to New Orleans, where it’s a lot warmer. My mother lived there when she was a little girl.”
Polly was taller than Roy. She had long brown hair and very white skin. The wind blew her hair across her face and she kept pushing it back into place.
“How long has it been since you’ve seen him?”
“I was eight. We were in Toledo then.”
“I like the records your mother plays. Sometimes I sit on our porch and listen to them.”
Polly stopped walking and turned and faced Roy. Her lips were purple and she brushed her hair out of her eyes.
“Two nights ago my mother got drunk on vodka and told me my father isn’t my real father, and that my real father was a boy named Bobby Boles and that he was killed in a bar fight in Houston, Texas. At least that’s what she heard because he abandoned her when she told him she was pregnant. She married my father when I was a year old. She told me she still loved Bobby Boles, even though he was dead, and that every time she looks at me she sees him in my face and it makes her want to cry.”
Roy stared at the jumpy yellow flames in Polly Crow’s eyes. They got bigger, then smaller, then big again.
“She never told you this before?”
Polly shook her head. The wind whipped her hair around.
“Why do you think she wanted you to know now?”
“She made me promise not to tell my father that she told me. She said Bobby Boles had been her sister’s boyfriend, my Aunt Earlene, who’s older and lives in Little Rock, Arkansas. I’ve never met her. My mother says when Earlene found out Bobby Boles fucked my mother she called her a whore and swore she’d never speak to her again, and she hasn’t.”
Roy had never heard a girl say fuck before. Polly started to walk, so he did, too. She didn’t say anything else and when they got to her house Polly went in without saying goodbye.
As far as Roy knew, Gina Crow’s husband never showed up, and a few months after Polly had told Roy about her real father she and her mother moved away without telling Roy or his mother and her husband or Martha Poole to where.
“Gina’s an odd woman,” Roy’s mother said one night at the dinner table. “Her daughter, too. She’ll be trouble when she grows up, if she’s not already. Where do you suppose they went?”
“The Colony of the Sun,” said Roy.
“There’s no such place,” said his mother’s husband.