by Laila Lalami
I gave a quick nod and went to the sink to wash my plate, looking out of the window at the backyard as I dried it. It was the third week of May; the days had grown long. In the yucca shrub beneath the window, bumblebees drunk on nectar flung themselves into new blooms. “Want to take a walk?” I asked.
“Sure. Let me change out of this, though.”
When she came back, she was in a blue sundress, flat-heeled sandals, and all her jewelry was gone, save the necklace her father had given her. This was more like her, I thought, taking her hand. We walked the mile from the cabin to the main road. At the corner market, we bought fresh grapes and ate them on the way back. An old man walked by with his dog, touching the brim of his hat with a finger when he passed us. Two joggers ran on the other side of the road, kicking up dust in their wake.
It was dark by the time we returned to the cabin. The crickets had begun to sing. Under the pale halo of the porch light, one of the turtledoves was feeding its chicks. We watched it drop seeds into one hungry mouth, while the other called out for its share. The moonlight glinted off the wind chime that hung from the eaves. I kissed the back of her neck and took out the pins one by one from her hair, letting it fall about her shoulders.
I woke late the next morning, so late that for a minute I didn’t know where I was. Then I saw her curled up beside me and closed my eyes again. It was a Friday; I had the day off. Ordinarily, I would have gone to the gym, done my laundry, run some errands, but now I lay next to her, in rumpled sheets that still smelled of sex, and waited until she stirred and seemed about to wake. In the kitchen I started the coffee and picked out a mug—YUCCA VALLEY LIBRARY, it said in yellow lettering. My family had once owned a set of these; my mom had bought them at a fundraiser.
“Morning,” Nora said. She went to the swamp cooler and turned the dial up. “I can’t believe how stuffy it feels already.”
I added a drop of milk to the coffee I’d just poured myself and gave it to her, then pulled another mug from the cupboard. “It’s not that hot,” I said. “You just need new filter pads on that cooler.” I sipped from my coffee and watched her. She was in a yellow tank top and black shorts, stretching and muffling a yawn. It still didn’t seem real, us together like this. Like something I might have dreamed up when I was a kid. Even the order of things was different. “I can change them for you,” I said after a minute.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“It’s easy. It takes, like, thirty minutes.”
“I’m sure you have better things to do.”
“I really don’t mind.”
While she showered, I drove to the store to pick up new filter pads. It was a simple chore, I’d done it many times before. But this swamp cooler was a little more difficult because I had to work around the turtledove’s nest, all while she—or was it he?—hovered worriedly around me. I unscrewed the panels and pulled out the pads; they were filled with dust, sand, and pollen. The metal braces that held them in place were old and rusty, but I managed to ease out the pads. By then the sun was fully out; I could feel beads of sweat traveling down my spine. With a brush I cleaned the trays, leaving a trail of dirt on the ground. Then I slid the new pads into place, the braces closing around them with a satisfying click.
I called to her to turn the cooler on and was glad to hear the motor starting with a roar. After tossing the old pads in the trash bins, I went back inside. I found her standing across from the vent, eyes closed and arms wide open, enjoying the cool air. “I might not move from this spot,” she said. Her hair was down on her shoulders, the way I liked it, and under her white shirt her nipples looked brown and hard. In three quick steps I reached her and, with my hands still dark with dirt, drew her to me.
A.J.
Running a bowling alley means having to worry about two things. There’s the mechanical part—the pinsetter machines, the sweeping bars, the ball returns—and then there’s the people part. By far the hardest part of the job is dealing with people. I don’t mean the staff. We had some good employees at Desert Arcade, including one guy who’d been with us since my dad opened for business in the 1970s. I mean the customers: parents who allowed their kids to wander down the lanes, idiots who pitched a second ball when the first one didn’t come back, league bowlers who threw a fit when they didn’t score a perfect game. The challenge was dealing with all of them without losing my temper or my smile. It was a struggle sometimes. But I had to help out my dad, who was seventy-eight years old and had trouble keeping up with his business.
Both of my parents were old. In fact, they’d given up trying to have a baby by the time I was born. My mom was forty-four when she had me, my dad forty-nine. It was a miracle, they said, having their prayers answered after so many years. Every miracle has a cost, though, that’s what I’ve come to learn, and it’s not always paid by those who owe it. When I was a little boy, people would stop my dad and me at the community park or the grocery store just to tell him how cute his grandson looked. “Look at those blond curls,” they’d marvel. He would always correct them. “That’s my son,” he would say. At some point, he got tired of it. He stopped holding my hand when we went out, so it wouldn’t invite questions or comments from total strangers. It was easier for him, I guess. Not for me.
My mom, on the other hand, she never cared what other people thought. Even though her age kept her out of the PTA’s social circles, she volunteered in the school cafeteria at lunch and helped organize the Halloween carnival every year. We spent a lot of time together, especially on weekends when my dad was at the bowling alley for fourteen hours straight. I get my love of dogs from her. She’s always had dogs, sometimes four or five at a time, all of them sable-and-white rough collies. They’re a fantastic breed—smart, trainable, extremely devoted. When I was in middle school, my mom started breeding them and entering them in dog shows all over California. She and I would drive hundreds of miles to compete with one of them, and I got to see a lot of the state that way.
You’d think that spending so much time with my mom would have made it easier for me to talk to girls, but it didn’t. My mom was old and plain and agreeable, and the girls at my school were young and pretty and looking for trouble. Whenever I tried to impress them, it backfired. They’d roll their eyes or laugh. Do you know what it does to a boy when a girl laughs at him? Every time it happened, I tried to think of something clever to say, but that only made it worse. And I really hated that everyone called me A.J., which wasn’t my name, it was just a nickname that a teacher had given me in kindergarten, and somehow it stuck, even with my family. I spent most of my time with my dogs. They were less complicated than people.
Everything changed in freshman year. I’d always been a skinny kid, but I was pretty strong and flexible, and during tryouts Coach Johnson saw something in me. Natural ability, you could say. He put me on the wrestling team. There were fifteen of us across five weight classes, and already ranked second in the county even before I joined. What appealed to me about wrestling was the simplicity of it—you didn’t kick a ball or use a racket or wear elaborate gear, and you didn’t depend on someone else to help you score a point. You relied only on yourself, on your own ability. I fell in love with wrestling. Unless I was sitting in class or taking care of my dogs, I was training at the gym.
Coach Johnson taught me a lot, maybe more than anyone has ever taught me before or since. “Remember,” he would say, “what you practice on the mat has to be practiced off the mat. Focus. Speed. Opportunity. FSO. You’ve got to be watchful, quick, and seize any chance you get, because life will rarely give you a second shot.” We won all our matches that season, and got a statewide ranking for the first time in our school’s history. Between my training, my diet, and the fact that I grew a foot during that year, I looked amazing. It sounds conceited to say it, but I don’t know how else to put it: I looked amazing.
By the time I started sophomore year, it was the girls who tri
ed to impress me, by decorating my locker or making playlists for my training runs. One day in biology, Mrs. Barron asked us to split into small groups for a new project she had for us, an illustrated booklet on cellular respiration. I hated group projects because of that awkward moment when everyone chose their friends and I was left scrambling for a partner. But right away someone tapped my shoulder. It was Neil Gilbert, a lame kid with oozing acne on his face. My secret nickname for him was Crater Face. “Wanna do the booklet together, A.J.?” he asked.
“I’m already doing it with Stacey,” I said, and turned back and winked at Stacey Briggs. That was another thing about being on the wrestling team: it had given me some confidence.
“Yeah, we’re working together,” Stacey said, flashing me a smile. She wasn’t quite as pretty as Maddie Clarke, the girl everyone had a crush on, but she had a great personality and was always up for anything. I used to call her Energizer Stacey. She lived up to it, too, because she did all the writing for the project. She made up a cast of characters for the story, like Hermione the Human, Petunia the Plant, Ginny the Glucose, Moaning Myrtle the Mitochondria, and I penciled all the illustrations and inked them in full color. It took me a week, but our project booklet looked like a graphic novel.
I spent a lot of time at Stacey’s apartment because her parents were out of the picture and her brother Lee didn’t mind that she brought me home. He liked that I was on the wrestling team, said that wrestling was part of Greek and Roman culture. “It’s a civilized sport,” he said as he stretched his legs on the coffee table, “not like some of that savage stuff you see nowadays.” He was watching Falling Down on television. It was an early scene, when Michael Douglas walks into a convenience store to ask for change so he can make a phone call to his daughter, but the Korean clerk wants him to buy something first.
“Why doesn’t that guy just give him the change?” Stacey asked as she sat down on the couch next to her brother.
“Because all they care about is money,” Lee told her. “You kids want some popcorn?”
“Not me,” I said.
“Oh, right. You can’t eat junk food.” And he went to the fridge and found me some carrots to munch on while we watched the movie.
It was nice to be around an adult who wasn’t in AARP for a change, someone who didn’t mind doing fun things with me. Sometimes, Lee would take us to concerts in Palm Springs or Riverside or even farther than that, in Orange County. Stacey and I broke up during senior year, but Lee Briggs and I remained friendly. He’d teach me things about Western culture, things I didn’t learn in school, which was pretty neat. When I got to college in Fullerton, I even considered majoring in Classics, but the school closed down the department because of the state’s budget cuts. It was a bullshit excuse, of course, because they didn’t cut Asian-American studies or African-American studies or even Chicano studies. So I ended up majoring in business administration.
It worked out well, in the end, because I started my own business in Irvine. I would have stayed there for good if things had been different, but my mom had Parkinson’s disease and, even though I tried to visit every Sunday, I knew the time would come when I would have to move back home. Her tremors were getting worse; she needed someone to help her with basic things like cooking and cleaning. And my dad, too, he needed help with his business, because he didn’t have as many people working for him anymore. I was married by then and it wasn’t easy convincing Annette to live in the middle of the desert. But that’s what we do for family.
Moving back was a big adjustment. If you liked hiking and rock climbing, or if you were into weird art installations that popped up in the middle of nowhere, then this place was fine. But for someone like me, there were no driving ranges or department stores or even a decent multiplex. After a long day of work at the bowling alley, I still had energy I wanted to burn, and there were no wrestling gyms in town. There was so little to do, really. Which was why I was so surprised to see Nora Guerraoui here. Growing up in this place, all any of us ever wanted was to leave, and yet we both ended up coming back. I would never have guessed it.
Nora
It fell to me, then, to show that what happened on April 28 was not an accident. In order to trace a motive, I had to go back in time, not only to events that preceded that night, but to the very beginning, when my father bought the Pantry. The restaurant had been built in 1951, on land that belonged to Chemehuevi Indians, by Bill and Prudence Swenson, a pair of homesteaders from Corona. At the time, it was little more than a hamburger stand, serving travelers on their way to or from the Marine base that had recently opened in Twentynine Palms. But as the town grew, so did demand for places to eat. The Swensons added a few more items to the menu, built a full kitchen and dining area, and cleared the Joshua trees on the northern side of the building for a parking lot. Over the years, new businesses opened up all around them: Baker’s bowling alley and Oglesby’s dry cleaner next door, Kinney’s tire shop and Linden’s beauty salon across the highway. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that when my father bought the restaurant from the retiring Swensons, he stood out like a tall weed in a clipped hedge. And perhaps he knew it, because he made himself small, and tried his best to keep the place exactly as it had been for decades.
But there came a time when he had to expand the dining room and update the kitchen appliances, and although this had been good for his business, it had led to tensions with Anderson Baker. When I pulled up to the restaurant’s parking lot that morning, I noticed another change my father had made just before he died. He’d put up a huge new sign on the roof. You could see it from down the block. Was this what had triggered Baker’s bout of anger? The sudden prominence? Yet my mother hadn’t mentioned the sign when I’d asked her about recent disagreements. The only incident she’d pointed to was the fight about parking spaces a few weeks earlier, during Presidents’ Day weekend.
Walking into the Pantry, I found Marty at the cash register, feeding a new roll of paper into the printer. At the sound of the door jingle, he looked up. “Morning, miss,” he said. Even though I’d often told him to just call me by my first name, he always insisted on calling me Miss. He was attached to formalities like that.
“Morning. Everything okay today?” I asked, trying to sound assertive, yet cruelly aware of the inexperience in my voice.
“Everything’s fine, miss.”
“Great.” I walked past him and took a seat at the counter. On the stool next to me, someone had left behind a copy of the Los Angeles Times, and I picked it up. The top stories were a fire in Angeles National Forest and the death at fifty-seven of a baseball star whose name I didn’t recognize. Below the fold was news of a failed attempt at land preservation in the Mojave, and of a bomb attack in Syria that had left twenty-three people dead. I made a mental note to buy a copy of the Hi-Desert Star later that day, to see if Baker’s arraignment had been covered.
“What can I get you today?” Veronica asked as she came to the other side of the counter. She was tall and thin, with hazel eyes and a small overbite that on her was not unattractive. She’d been working at the diner almost as long as Marty. The kind of waitress who could handle a party of ten with three screaming children without ever losing her patience, and was always chatty and cheerful, without making it seem like a job requirement.
“Could I have the cheese omelette?” I asked, folding the newspaper and putting it back where it had been. “And some iced tea, please.”
She turned to the kitchen window to place the order. Then she brought me a glass of iced tea and set it on a napkin.
“Were you working on Presidents’ Day, Veronica?” I asked.
“We don’t get time off on holiday weekends.” She tucked her hands into her apron. “I always have to figure out what to do with the kids, especially during spring break or in the summer. And it’s worse now that I’m getting divorced. They have day camps over there at the community cen
ter, you know, but it’s expensive. I have to leave them with my sister. She’s on disability, so it’s not easy for her to watch three kids, but at least they’re with family.”
“Right,” I said and waited a moment to bring the conversation back to my line of thought. “I asked because a detective from the sheriff’s department might come talk to you. Coleman is her name.”
“Talk to me about what?”
“About what Anderson Baker did that day,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “How he burst in here and started yelling at my dad about parking spaces. The ugly scene he made about that Land Rover. You remember that, don’t you?”
In the kitchen, the cook dropped a batch of fries in hot oil. A few feet away, Marty rang up a customer at the cash register. “Yeah, I remember,” Veronica said after a moment. “Baker came in just as I was about to go on my cigarette break.” She brought the pitcher of iced tea again and topped off my glass, even though I had barely touched it. “When is that detective gonna come talk to me?”
“Soon, I hope. Any moment, really.”
“That whore works for the sheriff’s department.”
“Wait. I’m sorry, who are you talking about?”
“The woman my husband left me for. She works for the sheriff’s department. Answers the phone for them. I don’t even know how he met her, he never said.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Fifteen years we were married. Can you believe it? Fifteen years. Three kids. One of them a cesarean. He cheated on me twice before and I took him back both times because he said it didn’t mean nothing. And I thought, well, I’m the one he married, not them, so maybe he’s right. But then he met that whore and he damn near lost his mind. Says she’s his soulmate. I thought I was.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Not your fault,” Veronica said with a shrug.