by Laila Lalami
I couldn’t get away from stories of infidelity, it seemed. But I saw it differently now, my mistake. I remembered how it had felt to sit in the main house at the artist colony in upstate New York, surrounded by painters and writers and visual artists who were far more accomplished than I, wondering how on earth I had managed to get admitted into this place. I felt like an impostor; I was certain I would be discovered and thrown out. Then one night, the famous Max Bloemhof arrived and, seeing me curled up in an armchair with a copy of Memory of Fire, came right up to me and introduced himself. I remembered how it all began. How he asked about my music. How I’d sat at the grand piano and played a piece I’d just finished. How he’d looked at me. “Do you know,” he said, “I once watched Brad Mehldau play this piano. He was sitting right where you are.” He asked me to stop by his cottage sometime so he could give me a copy of his new book. The colony was on forty-two acres of land where horses and deer grazed, and for days I had stayed on the paved pathways, avoiding the fields for fear of ticks that carried Lyme disease. Yet that night, I took the shortcut to Max’s studio, walking, almost running, through the green fields. I remembered how he opened the door, how I stepped across the threshold, knowing what would happen next. For months, I didn’t allow myself to talk about the affair or think about his wife. Instead I waited, believing that our story would truly begin only after he left her and the messy details could be forgotten.
They weren’t. In March, he came to my apartment with a bottle of champagne and a duffel bag. It was past ten o’clock and I was already in my pajamas, a pencil and a page of musical notations in my hand. “What happened?” I asked, alarmed to see him on my doorstep so late, and yet also excited—perhaps he’d finally made the leap he’d been promising me he would make. “I just got a Lannan,” he said. It was his first big fellowship after years of scant attention from grant foundations. He’d once bitterly denounced the critics who served on judging committees as “a bunch of sheep” and “tasteless hacks,” but now his eyes shone with happiness and the deep lines around his mouth faded. “Let’s celebrate,” he said as he walked into my apartment. Margo, who’d been reading a magazine on the sofa, shuffled past us to her bedroom. I took out the champagne flutes and watched Max wrestle with the bottle. The hair on his arms was very dark, and on his right wrist he wore an old wind-up watch that had a cracked glass front but kept the time unfailingly. “Evelyn is taking Isabella for a field trip overnight,” he said, “and Ian is at a sleepover.”
“So you can spend the night?”
“I can spend the night.”
The champagne bottle popped, and Margo slammed her door shut. I put my work aside, drank the champagne, and listened to Max tell me about his fellowship plans. He would travel across the U.S. to conduct interviews with surviving Freedom Riders, in the hope that he could use selected quotes to weave together an oral history of their fight. “Kind of like Svetlana Alexievich, but more rigorous,” he said, which irritated me no end. He did this a lot, I thought, sneered at other writers, particularly women. He didn’t ask what piece I’d been working on when he arrived. In fact, except for the night we met, he’d rarely shown any genuine interest in my music. The next morning, while I was still in bed, my head pulsing with an incipient hangover, he got up and packed his bag. He was getting ready to return to his wife and kids and responsibilities, and I would be left behind. What was my place in all this? And the answer was as clear to me as if he’d spoken it himself: I was the bottle of champagne, the personal celebration. I raised myself on one elbow and told him he had to choose.
For weeks, I waited to hear from him, and would have waited even longer. So I hadn’t expected what happened with Jeremy that night in Joshua Tree or the few nights since. I was unprepared for the eagerness with which he took me in his arms, the tenderness that was in his voice when he spoke to me. It stunned me that my body had moved on like this, that it had grasped on to life, insisted on whatever comfort it could find, even as my heart pined for the old world, the world as it was when my father was still in it. The time I spent with Jeremy was a private solace, a few hours when there was no fighting with my sister, no criticism from my mother, no disappointment in myself. I could just be, even if it was for only a short while. He was the grown-up version of the boy I had always known, kind and funny and warm, and yet I feared that beneath this easy familiarity lay disturbing secrets.
Whenever he came to see me, he tried to fix up little things around the cabin. One time he changed the air filter on the swamp cooler, another time he found a replacement bulb for the missing light above the stove. That morning, I caught him eyeing the unsteady chairs around the dining table. “You don’t need to bother with that,” I said. “It’s not like I’m staying for good.” But he insisted. “It’ll only take a minute,” he said. I was beginning to think he was trying to make up for something, though I had no idea what it was he’d done. And I didn’t want to find out. I couldn’t allow myself to be drawn into a relationship at such a fragile moment. All my attention was on the hit-and-run case.
“Want some toast on the side?” Veronica asked. She placed the cheese omelette in front of me on the counter and once again topped off my iced tea.
“No, thanks.”
“Or maybe fresh biscuits?”
“This is just fine, thanks,” I said. Then, remembering something else, I asked her, “So that big new sign outside, it went up the morning my dad died, right?”
“Right.”
“I imagine there must’ve been a lot of noise? Or some kind of disruption?”
“I guess so, yeah.”
“Was Baker upset about that?”
Veronica tilted her head, but didn’t answer one way or another, and I thought it best not to push too much. She walked away to the other end of the counter, where the sugar dispensers sat, waiting to be refilled. I picked at my food as I watched the other diners through the mirror above the counter window. There was a time when I would have known some of the Pantry’s customers or at least recognized them, but all I could see now was a roomful of strangers. Two construction workers in orange vests had finished their meals and sat with their arms hanging over the headrests, their faces turned toward the windows. A young couple pulled miniature containers of jam from the dispenser and made a pyramid out of them to amuse their toddler. A middle-aged man in a baseball cap, a toothpick hanging from his lip, was reading the newspaper. His glass was empty, but Marty hadn’t noticed. I picked up the water pitcher and went to refill it.
Afterward, the pitcher still in my hand, I cast an appraising eye on the restaurant. The counter, which had been shiny new a few years ago, bore the unmistakable dullness of too many wipe-downs. There was a crater in the vinyl flooring at the entrance. Cracks ran through the grouting on the baseboard. The paint on the far wall, once an appealing pistachio color, had yellowed over the years and was peeling in places. The descriptions on the menu—calling the eggs “farm-fresh,” the bacon “applewood smoked,” the tomatoes “vine-ripe,” the bread “Grandma’s own”—were no longer au courant. A gash cut through the backrest of the last booth by the window. The plates were gray. The water glasses were scratched. The gumball machine was empty.
But the place was busy.
Perhaps this was what Baker had begrudged my father.
I put the pitcher of water back on the counter and walked around the corner to the back office, a tiny room with a high window and barely enough space for a desk, a chair, a filing cabinet. The air smelled of forbidden cigarettes and used books, a mix that immediately brought me memories of long afternoons spent reading on the deck, my father sitting beside me, smoking, despite the advice of his doctor. My mother was at the desk now, still in widow’s white, hunched over a ledger of some sort. “Morning, Mom,” I said. “Did you find that note?”
“Not yet,” she said, taking off her reading glasses. “Look at this place, benti.”
&
nbsp; On the desk around her were mountains of papers. Files jutted against stapled records and paper-clipped receipts, rising in peaks and hollowing in valleys, the glass top of the desk buried beneath it all.
“What’s going on here?”
“I don’t know what your father was doing. Nothing is in order.”
“That’s not like him.”
She shook her head and was quiet for a moment. Did she know why he had been so distracted lately? But nothing in her expression suggested it, and my heart ached for her. “I’m sure you’ll have this in shape in no time, Mom.”
“Maybe he threw it out.”
“I hope not.” The note in question was a handwritten piece of paper that had been taped to the door of the restaurant the day after the Land Rover incident. As soon as my mother had told me about it, I said we needed to find it and turn it over to Detective Coleman. It could serve as evidence. “Let me look for it,” I said.
“All right.”
My mother went back to her ledger, and I started sifting through the papers on the desk. There were payments for paper napkins and drinking straws, orders of Styrofoam to-go containers, two prescriptions for an antihistamine, a copy of the AARP magazine, but no note. I rummaged through the desk drawers, leafed through books of crossword puzzles, and checked the pockets of the suit jacket that was hanging over the back of the desk chair. Finally, on the windowsill, beneath a half-empty box of matches, I found the folded note. It was a piece of lined paper on which Baker had written, in an arthritic penmanship, PARK IN YOUR SPACES ONLY! A strip of clear tape lined the top of the page, and the word only was underlined twice. The note wasn’t signed, but to my eyes, it seemed incriminating. This was progress. “Here it is,” I said, my voice rising with excitement.
My mother came to look over my shoulder. “That’s good. Really good.”
“Can you think of anything else we could show the detective?”
“No,” she said after a minute. Then she went back to sit behind the desk. “But there’s something I need to tell you.”
“What is it?”
“Close the door.”
I closed the door and stood against it, puzzled by the secrecy. “What is it?”
“We want to sell the restaurant.”
“What are you talking about? Who is we?”
“Your sister and me. We want to sell.”
My mother said this with a finality that stunned me. I came closer to the desk, facing the piles of paper I had been sorting through just a moment earlier. “How long have you two been talking about this? It’s crazy you’re having these conversations and then informing me of your decisions after the fact. Shouldn’t we discuss this first?”
“The market is a little slow now,” my mother said, folding her reading glasses and sitting back in her chair. “But I think we can find a buyer.”
“Did you not hear what I said? We can’t sell the restaurant.”
“Why?”
“Because Dad wouldn’t have wanted us to. You know this. Salma knows this.”
“But I never wanted a restaurant. It was your father’s idea. What I wanted was a coin laundry. No employees, no big expense, no waking up at five in the morning.” She ticked off these items on the fingers of her left hand. It seemed to me she was falling back, almost with relief, into an old argument, and this time she would see it through. “But your father never listened to me. I don’t want the restaurant and I don’t want to see Baker going and coming. Every day, he’s going and coming like nothing happened. I want to sell. And your sister, too. She said she needs the money.”
“For heaven’s sake, we can’t sell. That would give Baker exactly what he’s been after all this time. He wanted Dad out of here and you’re letting him have his way. And what does Salma need the money for? Her practice is doing well.”
I saw that I had finally scored a point, because my mother was speechless for a minute. She put her reading glasses into a tortoiseshell case and slipped it into her purse. “So you want to keep the restaurant?”
“Yes.”
“Who’s going to run it?”
“Marty can. He pretty much does, already.”
“He’s not family.”
“So? It’s a job, and he’s good at it. This would only make it official.”
“No. He can’t do it alone. You want to do it?”
“But I have my own work, Mom.”
“So why do you want to keep the restaurant? Go make your music. Salma and I talked to the realtor on Wednesday and he—”
“You already talked to a realtor? Mom, will you please just wait? Let me think about it. I have just as much say in this decision as the two of you. And we have to wait for the probate to be closed, anyway. That’s going to take months.”
“We can shut down the restaurant until probate is closed.” And then, seeing my eyes widen with revolt, she said, “Okay. Fine. Think about it. Then we’ll talk to the realtor.”
It took all I had not to slam the door behind me as I left the office. The move to sell the restaurant had taken me by surprise, but it was the fact that my mother and sister had formed some kind of alliance behind my back that made it so devastating. Walking back through the restaurant toward the exit, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would look like under new owners. Would they keep the dappled mirror over the counter? Or the metal sign by the back door that said COCA-COLA: GOOD WITH FOOD? Would Rafi and Marty and Veronica still have jobs? Would Baker still start arguments over parking spaces? I didn’t like where any of this was leading. What I wanted more than anything, and this desire surprised me with its clarity, was for this place to stay exactly the same as it was when my father was alive.
Coleman
I was in the break room pouring myself a cup of coffee when Gorecki came in. It was a little after six in the morning, and I don’t think either of us was ready for the sergeant’s briefing, or even fully awake yet. He picked up a Dixie cup from the tall stack next to the sink and held it out to me like a beggar, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He was working on a college degree, in American history if I remember correctly, and this fact set him apart from the career deputies, and at times it even created some conflict, but I liked that he was kind of an outsider, like me. “How are you?” I asked as I filled his cup.
“Pretty good, actually. How about you?”
“Hanging in there,” I said, and took a sip of my coffee. It tasted bitter and did nothing for my mood. The night before, while Miles was in the shower, I had gone through his Instagram account and found, mixed in with the selfies, desert landscapes, and artsy compositions, a shirtless picture of Brandon. It had been taken after a basketball game at school, with Brandon looking straight at the camera, smiling, his arm reaching as if to touch the person taking the photo: Miles. I had a sense of what was happening, but not how to talk about it with my son, much less with his father. “A little worried about Miles.”
“His schoolwork, you mean? I thought you were helping him with that.”
“I am,” I said, catching myself. Gorecki waited for me to say more, but instead I asked about the sergeant. “How are things with Vasco?”
“He caught me reading a book during my shift the other day. Chewed me out.” He shook his head slowly. “You’d think reading was illegal, the way he was acting.”
“He’s worried about appearances. There’s a new article on Bowden.” I tilted my head to indicate the newspaper that lay at the other end of the counter. Bowden was an unemployed plumber with a long rap sheet that included petty theft, possession, and assault. He was being served with an arrest warrant for another drug charge when he fled through the back door of his house, leading deputies on a car chase across unpaved streets in Twentynine Palms, down Highway 62, on to a tire shop in Yucca Valley, where they finally caught up with him. The Los Angeles Times had dug up cell phone footage show
ing Bowden lying on his stomach, his face against the asphalt, and a deputy repeatedly punching him in the head.
“Well, you made an arrest in that hit-and-run. Vasco’s happy about that.”
“Stroke of luck,” I said, and immediately regretted the modesty in my voice. Humility had been drilled in me, as it was in most of the women I knew, and I found it hard to get rid of it, even though it was frequently mistaken for inability.
“That’s not how Vasco made it sound,” Gorecki said. “He called it good old-fashioned police work. Held you up as an example and said that’s how you get shit done.”
“It was the old man who owns the bowling alley. Not some hard-ass guy or anything.”
“And you think it was just an accident?”
“Accidents are common on that highway,” I said. The victim’s daughter kept insisting that it was more than that, and it was true that the three-foot dent on the Crown Vic made Baker’s coyote story less believable, but it was a huge leap from hit-and-run to murder. Vasco wasn’t thrilled about the daughter’s allegations—it meant he couldn’t close the case—but I had a professional duty to investigate her claims, and I tried to look into them whenever I had some time.
My first stop had been to the Pantry, where the workers essentially confirmed the story that the Guerraoui family had told me: frictions that started out over dust and dirt from remodeling a few years ago had recently boiled over into arguments. But neither the restaurant manager nor the waitresses could recall specific criminal threats that Anderson Baker might have made against the victim. There was no I’m gonna kill you or You better watch your back or even a measly I’ll make you regret it, any of which could have been used to establish intent. “They just griped a lot,” Marty Holtz, the manager, told me as he stood at the front desk, spraying Windex on plastic-covered menus and wiping them down with a paper towel. “They griped constantly, and about everything.”
Meanwhile, at the bowling alley, the cashier, Betty Sanders, claimed that the problem hadn’t started with the mess from remodeling, but a few months before that. “Thing is,” she said, rubbing out excess lipstick with a tissue, “Mr. Baker had already talked to the dry cleaner next door about buying his shop when he retired. Then the Muslim guy comes in last minute and offers him a little more. Bought it from right under him. So.”