by Laila Lalami
“Fanning,” Mr. Mitchell called. “Gorecki. Guerraoui. Henderson. Lorenzo.”
I rummaged through my backpack for the permission slip with the counterfeit signature. I routinely signed all my school paperwork as well as Ashley’s, but it was only when I walked up to the desk that I realized I didn’t have the $15 fee. At breakfast that morning, I’d been too angry to even look at my father, let alone ask him for anything. “Mr. Mitchell,” I mumbled, “I’m sorry, I forgot.”
Mr. Mitchell shuffled some papers and said he needed a minute to sort it out. I walked back to my seat, trying to suppress my embarrassment, while Jonathan Atkins repeated, in a boo-hoo-hoo voice, Mr. Mitchell, I’m sorry, I forgot. I was delirious with sleeplessness; I couldn’t think of a retort. And Atkins was on the wrestling team, his shoulders as lean and strong as one of those action figures I still kept in a storage bin in the garage. Not someone I could start a fight with. I was staring at my Chuck Taylors when Nora leaned across the space between our seats and whispered, “Ignore that guy, he’s an idiot.” I looked up, but she was already zipping her backpack. We were about to leave.
At the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, while my bandmates admired the bronze sculpture of a peace dove or played in the dancing water fountain, I started to worry about lunch; I didn’t have money for that, either. With utter lack of solidarity, my stomach started growling. I was famished. When the others went to order food, I stayed behind, walking along the side of the building, where the names of donors were etched on granite slabs. At the end of the walkway was a giant magnolia tree, and just below it, across the street, was the new Disney Hall. I stood there awhile, wondering who could have designed such a monstrosity. Then I heard my name.
“Do you want some lunch?” Nora asked. There were two sandwiches, two drinks, and two chocolate cups on her tray. My stomach replied for me. I felt embarrassed, but she acted like she hadn’t noticed. We sat with our legs crossed Indian style, with the tray on the ground between us. I had known her since we were kids, and yet I had never really seen her. Now I found myself looking at her, really looking at her. Her eyes were dark and willful. Her nose was graceful, her smile generous. She glanced over my shoulder at Disney Hall. “You like Frank Gehry?” she asked.
“That’s the architect? This thing looks like he smashed a can with his shoe. I could’ve done that for Disney and saved them millions.”
She laughed. I liked the sound of her laughter.
“I love it, actually,” she said after a moment. “It’s different from all the buildings around here. Gehry designed the Bilbao, too. I want to see that someday. Have you ever been to Spain?”
“I’ve never been out of the country. We went to Mexico once, but I was, like, nine months old. It doesn’t count.” I reached for the second half of my sandwich. “You probably travel a lot.”
“Not really. We couldn’t go to Morocco when I was little because my dad was afraid he’d get arrested, and then later when we finally went, all we did was go from house to house, visiting relatives. We didn’t go to museums or monuments or anything.” After a moment she said, “But I saw acrobats at the market in Marrakesh.”
She asked what books I read, what shows I watched, and she really listened when I answered. We didn’t have the same taste. I loved The Simpsons; she never watched it. I devoured the Harry Potter books; she’d given up on them after the first two. She raved about Zora Neale Hurston; I hadn’t read her. We agreed on Mark Twain and The Princess Bride, but about nothing else in between. She had long hair in which her earrings got tangled every time she shook her head. I had an urge to reach across the tray and untangle them for her.
Then Sonya Mukherjee came to find us; the matinee was about to start. “Come on, you guys. Everybody’s already inside.” Nora stood up and held out a hand to help me off the ground. That morning she had been just another girl, but by the time I’d raised myself off my knees she was the only girl. For weeks afterward, I felt tethered to her. It was her face I looked for first when I got to school, her smile I tried to draw when I made a joke, her body I hoped to brush against when we were in line. I spent my time waiting for first-period English and fifth-period music, bookends to endless days of boredom, but I could never find another moment with her. She was always rushing from one place to another, as though she couldn’t wait to leave this town forever.
Then we graduated and faded out of each other’s lives. When I saw the name Guerraoui on the case board at the police station, I felt as if I’d received a notice that had been lost in the mail. It reminded me of Nora’s kindness that day on the field trip, which was why I had gone to her house to offer condolences. But tonight at McLean’s was something else. This time she had looked at me differently. Something might have started between us. But then the war came up and she’d turned fierce. Righteous, even. In a way, I found it touching. No one had argued with me like this ten years ago. When I’d told my old man that I’d dropped out of college for the Marines, he’d struggled to get out of his chair, already drunk at four in the afternoon, and when he was steady on his feet he clapped an arm on my shoulder, and told me he was proud of me.
Anderson
The lady detective came into the bowling alley around noon, when I was still hoovering the carpet on the concourse. I used to have a guy who did this, emptied the trash, too, and cleaned the bathrooms, but I had to let him go, so I did the hoovering myself, or sometimes A.J. did it for me. The little lady stood against the bright light from the entrance, and at first I couldn’t see her face, only her figure. I turned off the vacuum cleaner with a kick. “Can I help you?” I asked. I could tell she wasn’t here for a game, she was dressed all formal like, in a business suit, and she carried a notepad in her hand. As she stepped out of the light, she unclipped a police badge from her belt, and that’s when I realized she was here about the hit-and-run with the guy next door.
What happened was a terrible accident. We need a lot more lighting and signals along the highway. You could drive for miles out here without coming across a single lamppost or a stoplight. Some people don’t remember this, but the intersection of the 62 and Old Woman Springs Road used to be called “Crash Corner” because of how often accidents happened there. Gruesome ones, too, with body parts mangled into car parts right there in the middle of the road. The state put in a special sign and a left-turn lane, but the crashes kept happening at that intersection until they installed a light signal. That was in 1973, the year I opened my bowling alley. A long time ago.
See, my wife had come into a bit of money from her grandmother in Sacramento, and we were trying to figure out how to use it. Back then, there wasn’t a whole lot to do in a town like ours—that’s what gave me the idea to open a bowling arcade. A lot of sweat went into it. I bought the land, found an architect, got the permits, hired a contractor, the whole thing. You should’ve seen how many people showed up for the grand opening. I remember it was the week before Christmas and Helen, that’s my wife, she put up a ten-foot Douglas fir on the concourse, all trimmed with lights and smelling like heaven. To this day, whenever I smell Christmas trees, I think about the grand opening. It made the front page of the Hi-Desert Star.
Helen was a little ball of energy, always looking for ways to grow our business. She came up with themes for our specials, got us a good deal on advertising with the local radio station, convinced some of our friends from church to start a bowling league. We did really well for a few years. But after A.J. was born, she lost interest in running the bowling alley and wanted to spend all her time with the baby. Even after he started school, she didn’t want to go back to work. She was always waiting on him hand and foot. I warned her, I said, “You’re spoiling that boy, Helen,” but she waved me off, said I was being too harsh on him. She didn’t get involved with the business again until after A.J. went off to college in Fullerton.
By then, though, there was another bowling place a few miles down the hi
ghway, and the movie theater, and the drive-in, and all of those bars and restaurants. People had more options for what to do on a Friday night. And Helen wasn’t the same, either. She started getting the shakes on the left side of her body. Resting tremors, the doctors called them. Still, we managed to make a decent living. We worked for ourselves, we had no complaints. The Muslim guy moved in next door in 2002, I think it was. He bought the place from old Mrs. Swenson, who used to run it as a greasy spoon, hot dogs and burgers and such, and later he turned it into a full-service diner. What happened to him was a terrible accident. And to be honest, it’s a matter of time before it’ll happen to somebody else because that crosswalk gets so dark at night. Like I said, we need to have some lighting on the road and maybe even a stoplight.
The lady detective walked down the concourse toward me, and introduced herself as Detective Coleman. A black woman, about forty years old, with hair cropped very short, like a man. I don’t know why women do that sort of thing, it’s not attractive at all. Anyway, she said she was investigating the hit-and-run that took place half a block down from the bowling alley. I could tell straightaway that she wasn’t from around here, but I couldn’t trace her accent. “Were you working on Sunday, Mr. Baker?” she asked me.
“Sure,” I said. “Same as any other Sunday.”
She wrote down my name in her little notebook, and started asking me all kinds of questions, like what time I open and close, if I’d seen anything unusual or suspicious, anything at all. I thought about it while I unplugged the vacuum-cleaner cord and wound it firmly around the hook in the back. “It was just a regular night,” I said.
“Do you have any security cameras?” she asked.
I almost laughed. “This isn’t Chicago,” I said. “We’re a quiet little town. We don’t really need that kind of thing here.”
“So, no cameras?”
“No.”
She was quiet for a minute, I could see she was disappointed by my answers. “What about your customers?” she asked. “Any chance I could talk to them? Someone might’ve seen something.”
The accident had happened on a Sunday night, which is usually a busy night for us, and we’re closed on Mondays, so by Tuesday morning, when she was asking me all these questions, I honestly couldn’t remember who had been there. “I don’t keep tabs on my customers, you know.”
“Maybe I could look through your receipts from that night?”
I stuffed my hands in my pockets, jiggled the change in them. “Is that legal?”
“It is, if you let me.”
I wasn’t convinced, but she had asked nicely and I’ve never minded helping the police. They have a tough job to do, sometimes, a thankless job. “All right,” I said. “Just give me a minute.” I rolled the vacuum cleaner into the utility closet and walked to my office in the back. She followed close behind. “What time were you looking for?” I asked her over my shoulder.
“No specific time. Anyone who came here that night.”
I sat at my desk and looked through the blue plastic organizer by the computer. I’m not a young man anymore, and even a small task like hoovering the carpet can get me winded, so I pulled out my handkerchief and wiped down the sweat from my forehead while I sifted through the papers. There were a lot of cash receipts from that Sunday night, but I found six or seven credit card slips and handed them to the lady detective. She took a picture of each one with her phone. “We really need to have a stoplight at that crosswalk,” I told her.
“Hmm-hmm.”
“You should tell your boss about it.”
“I’m afraid that’s not in the purview of his work.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“That’s something for the city council to decide.”
“Right. I was just saying, is all.”
She slipped her cell phone in her pocket. “What about your employees?”
“You mean Betty?” I said. She worked the cash register, but unless she was making a sale she was always on her phone, playing Solitaire. She wouldn’t have seen anything. “She doesn’t start until three. You’re welcome to try her then.”
“All right,” Coleman said, handing me her card. “If you recall anything else, Mr. Baker, please give me a call.”
We walked back through the concourse area together. The light above lane 3 flickered, which meant I had to check the wiring again, a nuisance I’d been dealing with for weeks. At the entrance, I opened the door for Coleman, then stood behind the glass, watching as she went back to her car. I’d only ever seen lady detectives on TV shows before.
Nora
From the nest above the swamp cooler came the cooing of the turtledove. It had woken me up earlier that morning and now I lay in bed, watching a spider climb the window screen, the sky behind it a brilliant blue. The spider moved with elegance and without hurry, unconcerned about the past or the future, one as immaterial as the other. Time was passing—nine days now—but I felt stuck, as if I’d only just heard that my father had died. In the Muslim tradition, the period of mourning lasts forty days. Why forty? Moses spent forty days without bread or water before receiving the covenant on Mount Sinai. Between his baptism and his return to Galilee, Jesus was forty days in the wilderness, resisting temptation. Muhammad was forty years old when he secluded himself in the cave at Hira, and Gabriel appeared to him. Forty was a potent number, a promise that ease would come after hardship, that good tidings would follow bad. But my grief would not end in forty days. Or forty weeks. Or ever, it seemed. All I had left of my father were memories, each as fragile as a wisp of smoke.
I thought about his last visit to me, the previous spring, when he’d come to watch me perform at the Botanical Gardens. He’d worn a pin-striped suit and a black tie and, looking at his reflection in the full-length mirror in the hallway of my apartment, he had said, “Nor-eini, wait.” I was already at the door, the folder with my music tucked under my arm, my hand halfway to the light switch. “Wait, Nor-eini.” My father took off his jacket and, sitting on my piano bench, brushed his shoes until they shone. He wanted to look his best for the performance. Come to think of it, he always wanted to look his best when he ventured out of his work clothes, as if any trip into the wider world—the whiter world—was a test he might not pass someday, if he wasn’t careful. At the Botanical Gardens, he’d asked a passerby for a photo of us standing by the marquee with my name on it. Where was that picture now? In the drawer under my bedroom window? Or somewhere on the desk I shared with Margo? I’d have to look for it when I got back. I needed to get back to my new piece, too; I wanted to finish it in time for fall fellowship deadlines.
Then the cabin phone rang, startling me. It was an old-fashioned landline phone and its sound was urgent and bothersome. I dragged myself out of bed to pick it up, holding the receiver close with one hand, and working with the other to untangle the cord. The line crackled. “Can I speak to Mr. Guerrari?” a man asked. His voice was high-pitched, almost feminine in tone, and he spoke with a European accent I couldn’t place.
“Guerraoui,” I corrected, my heart skipping a beat.
“Sorry, it’s hard to make out the handwriting on this order. I only have the carbon copy in front of me. Is Mr. Guerraoui home?”
“No, he’s not here. He passed away.”
There was a moment of shocked silence on the other end of the line. In that time, I relived my disbelief at the news of my father’s death, the sight of him in his burial shroud, how cold his skin had been when I’d touched it, the grief and anger that took turns inside my heart.
“I’m—I’m sorry,” the man said. “I didn’t know. I called the cell phone number he left me, but it went to voicemail, and no one ever answered this one until today.”
“He didn’t give you the house number?”
“No. Just this one.” After a moment, the man drew his breath again. “Who should I talk to about get
ting paid for the balance?”
“What balance? I’m sorry, who did you say you were?”
“The balance on the engagement ring he ordered in April. This is Maurice from Maurice and Dana’s Designs.”
I had trouble parsing the phrase engagement ring. It didn’t seem to belong to a language I could speak or understand, and that feeling persisted even after I wrote down the address for the jewelry shop, drove to Palm Springs to find it, and was buzzed inside by Maurice. I was clinging to the possibility that there was some kind of misunderstanding, that my father had meant “anniversary ring,” even though my mother had developed an allergy to detergent some years ago and couldn’t wear rings of any kind. “I’m here about the ring,” I said, nearly out of breath as I walked into the shop.
Maurice nodded thoughtfully and his eyes misted over, as if he were about to grieve with me. He was very short—his waist barely reached the top of the glass counter that separated us—and he wore gold rings on the last two fingers of each hand. From a file folder by the cash register he retrieved the receipt and showed it to me. The words engagement ring jumped out from the first line. “And he ordered this ring from you himself?”