by Naima Coster
Ray watched them walk to the corner. He felt distinctly that he was watching his whole life move away from him: the slender shape of Jade and her mussed hair, Gee’s backpack immense on his little body. He wanted to run after them and draw them back, keep them in the shop, where he could protect them. From what? From Wilson? Ray knew it didn’t make sense, these urges he got sometimes to hold everything he loved close, the occasional shock of how much he had to lose. Maybe he was nervous the reporter wouldn’t like his doughnuts. Maybe he’d poured himself too many cups of coffee. He moved to follow them, to give Jade another kiss, his boy another squeeze, but he knew it was just nerves. He stayed put. By sundown, they’d all be back at home.
At noon, the reporter still hadn’t arrived, and Michaela and Michelle gave up their waiting and left for lunch. Linette sat in her office, a supply closet where she’d installed a fan, a hanging bulb. Ray was alone at the register, watching Beard Street out the windows. The passing traffic was sparse: a truck headed for the highway, the sleek cars pulling up to the lunch window. They wore suits, the people who came from downtown, and Ray had no idea what kinds of jobs they had. A pair of police officers came into the bakery for sandwiches, and a crew of construction workers, Latin American, for coffees. They were tearing down one of the old tobacco factories nearby. Eventually, the mechanic from the garage came in for his weekly sandwich, on the house.
He was close to Ray in age, but he looked much older, a lean man with the beginnings of a paunch at his hips. He had a sunburned brow, a dark mustache, and no beard, and he wore his wavy hair hardened to his head with gel. He came into the shop, wearing aviators and a white polo shirt that somehow wasn’t stained with grease.
“White, man? How you going to wear white to work on cars?”
The mechanic laughed. Ray could hardly ever remember his first name, but he usually wore his last name embroidered on the pocket of his uniform: Ventura.
“You just got to be careful, man. You need to do it like I do.”
He was cocky, which was one of the things Ray liked about him. At first, he’d wondered if Ventura was gay, if he was flirting at him when he winked and bragged and pooched out his lips at him. But he’d learned it was just the way he talked, although Ray wasn’t sure how much of it was because he was Latin and how much of it was because he was from New York.
Once, after work, Ray’s car wouldn’t start, and he’d walked up the street to the garage to ask if someone could take a look. They told him it would cost fifty bucks to tow the car, even if it was going just to the end of the block. One of the mechanics had agreed to help him push, off the clock, since his shift was over. “It’s all right,” the mechanic had said, “he’s my neighbor,” although they’d never seen each other before. He helped Ray get the car in, and the next day, Ray brought him a coffee and a sandwich. After that, the mechanic came by once a week for his lunch.
He handed Ventura his sandwich, a cup of coffee. “The secret is I wear my work shirt over the white,” he said. “That way, when I leave the garage, I’m looking nice.”
Ray shook his head. “Out here? For what? There ain’t nobody out here.”
Ventura laughed and gestured at the two of them, as if they were enough of a reason. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his jeans and waved them in the air.
Linette surfaced from the back, as if she had read their minds. “You’re due for a break, Ray. Go on and take your lunch, just don’t go too far.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ray said, and he and Ventura hurried out like boys given leave to go and play.
They went around to the back of Superfine and lit up.
“I’m buying a house. I told you?” Ventura said. “Out by the forest. We’re going to be living in the trees.” He smiled, all his good teeth gleaming, a gold chain visible underneath the collar of his shirt. Ventura always looked sharp. “My wife is packing us up right now.”
“You’ve got two girls, right?”
“Three. My youngest had her first birthday a few months ago. You only got the one, right?”
Ray hadn’t bothered to explain about Gee, so he nodded.
“It’s crazy, man. I thought I loved my wife—I do. But you’d do anything for your kids. It’s like something changes in your brain. They climb in there and take over. They’re the ones in charge. They don’t know it, but they are.”
Ray figured there was no point in saying it wasn’t automatic. Something in him had been reordered when he met Gee because he’d let the boy come in and rearrange everything. But it hadn’t happened with his own parents: his father, who’d left him with his mother, or his mother, who left him to watch the kids she babysat, returning once in a while to drop off juice and chips and hot cereal, until she didn’t return at all, and Ray went to live with his grandmother until she died. He was twenty by then, and he met Jade waiting in line at the DMV. She was getting her first driver’s license, Gee nodding off on her chest, and she looked too skinny to be someone’s mother, her teeth pretty and wide and set apart, and Ray was there to change his last name. He figured he didn’t want anything in common with his mother, his father, so he took on his grandmother’s first name as his last, Gilbert, from Gilberta, and Jade thought it was funny. If he wanted to honor his grandmother, why change her name into a man’s name? “If you’re going to do it, you might as well do it all the way,” she’d said, and he’d known then that was how she lived her life, whether she was drinking or studying or screwing a college boy, or giving her opinion on a band or an election or how much sugar Ray put in her coffee. He’d seen quickly that he wanted to live just like that, all the way, with her.
Ventura went on about the house. “It’s on the north side of the county. Feels like the country. There’s too much crime around here. I thought New York was bad. But every time you read the paper, there’s some kid who moved down here from the Bronx because his moms thought it would be safer, and he winds up dead.” Ventura fired an imaginary gun with his hand.
Ray nodded. He had heard more than one story like that.
“You get a good deal on the house?”
“Almost nothing down, can you believe it? It’s not like I thought. They only care if you can make the payments on time.” Ventura squinted at the sun, running his tongue over his bottom lip. “You know, nobody in my family has ever owned anything. Not in Colombia, not here. But now I have something to leave for my kids.”
Ray laughed. “Everybody’s talking about dying today. You got a disease I don’t know about or something?”
“You think about it, man,” Ventura said. “You see the next generation, and you remember we’re on the way out. We got to leave them something to hold on to when we’re gone.”
“Yeah.” Ray nodded. “Memories. Good times.”
Ventura dragged on his cigarette, shook his head. “You can’t live in good times, man. You can’t live inside a memory. You need a deed with your name on it.”
They could see downtown from the back of the shop, the compact cluster of brick buildings, the water tanks, a few newer towers made of glass. Beyond the city, to the north, rose a bank of longleaf pines. Even farther, the state park surged with trees blushing rose and yellow.
Ray told Ventura about the reporter.
“Then you should be thinking about a house. Start saving. Don’t you live on the east side?”
“My whole life,” Ray said.
Ventura shook his head. “You got to be thinking about schools. If your boy stays on the east side, his future will be over before it starts.”
Ray shrugged. School was the least of his worries for Gee. The boy was quick. He’d be fine anywhere, as long as he got what both Ray and Jade had been missing: two parents, a peaceful home. That’s why Ray was always working on Jade. More than once, in a rage, she’d told him she was too smart for her life. What haunted Ray wasn’t the meanness of it, but the truth.
“I’m telling you,” Ventura said. “If there’s something I’ve learned in this country, it’s t
hat your address decides everything. You’ve got to get out.”
“Maybe,” Ray said. Ventura had made the long journey from the country where he was born to New York to North Carolina. Why shouldn’t he be able to get to the other side of town, if he set his mind to it?
Ventura drained his cup. “Life is funny. One day, you’re in the mountains picking coffee beans. Another day, you’re here, drinking coffee, with an American wife and a house.”
“I know what you mean,” Ray said. He didn’t own a home, but he knew how he felt. One day, you’re a boy, home alone, giving a stranger’s baby your finger to suck on, and the next, you’re a man, with a boy of your own, waiting for a reporter to come and put your picture in the paper.
“If we ever get a house, maybe we can have you all over,” Ray said. “For dinner or something.”
It surprised Ray to say it—he and Jade weren’t the entertaining type, but maybe they would be, if they lived in a house. Ventura picked up the idea quickly. He smiled and snuffed out his cigarette on the concrete, working his way up to whatever slick line he was planning to deliver to send Ray laughing and seal their fifteen minutes of smoking and standing together, before they both went back to work.
“All right, Ray,” he said. “But I want some real food. Don’t make us no sandwiches.”
By two thirty, the reporter hadn’t arrived, and Ray was getting listless. He had been working nearly ten hours, Michaela and Michelle had left to pick up their kids, and Linette called the paper but couldn’t get through.
“Maybe they got backed up,” she said.
The shop was empty, in the lull before the after-work crowd came by. Linette said one day this would be their busiest time: when people came in for afternoon coffee and lingered. Women who stayed home with their kids, people who got days off, the university students. They just didn’t know about Superfine yet, but they would. They’d be better than Starbucks, and there was no Starbucks opening in town anytime soon. If there was something Ray admired about Linette, it was that she wasn’t afraid to dream, once you showed her she wouldn’t be doing all the dreaming alone.
Ray called Jade from the phone in the back to ask about her test.
“I got a one hundred at least,” she said.
“That’s my girl. How’s that headache?”
“I helped Wilson put everything out in the yard—he’s selling all his furniture. I want to lie down, but I’m fixing to get Gee.”
“Let me get him. Nothing’s going on over here.”
“You sure?”
“I’ll bring you another doughnut. There’s a lot left over.”
Jade softened, as if she knew it hurt his feelings to say out loud that his doughnuts hadn’t sold like he hoped they would. “Bring me two,” she said, and hung up.
He was waiting for the engine to warm up when Linette came bounding out the back door.
“He’s coming!” she called. “A reporter and a photographer. They’ll be here in half an hour.”
“They starting with us?”
“I don’t know.”
Ray made to turn off the car, but then he thought of Jade and her headache. The truth was he didn’t need his picture in the paper, as long as the bakery made it in, some line about the goodness of everything he’d made. He told Linette that Jade and Gee were waiting on him.
“But I need you here.”
“I’ll be quick,” Ray said. Wilson’s house was no more than five minutes from Gee’s school, which was ten minutes from Superfine on the highway. Fewer, if he hustled. “I’ll be right back, Linette—you’ll see.”
Ray yanked out of the lot and sped toward the highway.
Gee was waiting in front of the school with his teacher. Ray signed the checkout clipboard and caught the boy up in his arms. He settled into the backseat, and Ray told him to buckle up, the reporter was coming, and they had to rush.
Wilson lived in a neighborhood of battered brick ranch houses with empty, overgrown lawns. At least where he and Jade lived had signs of life: bicycles underneath the porches, plastic slides in the yard. And, still, it was nothing like the west side, where the houses had deep porches, ivory-white pillars, flower gardens. The apartment Jade and Ray lived in was an old millhouse that had belonged to tobacco workers. He had been told the east side was once a nice place to live before the factories closed and the city hollowed out, only the west side left intact. Maybe Ventura had the right idea, buying a house along the edge of the county. Maybe a house would satisfy Jade more than a ruby ring, a trip to Florida.
Ray looked at Gee in the rearview mirror. “What do you think about living in a house one day? One that’s really ours?”
“Our house isn’t ours?”
Ray didn’t want to explain about rent and mortgages, and he wasn’t sure he knew how it all worked himself. But he wanted his boy to understand.
“When a house is yours, nobody can take it away. It’s mine, and then one day, it passes on to you. It has your name on it. You know what a legacy is?”
Ray turned onto Wilson’s street and put the car in park. He wanted to go on talking to Gee, but he knew he had no time. He turned to tell his boy to run up to the house, when he saw Jade and Wilson in the yard, talking to a man in a dark blue sweatshirt. His back was to the street, so Ray couldn’t see his face. He was hardly moving but Ray could tell something was wrong. Jade had her finger pointing at the man and she was yelling. Wilson had his hands stuffed in his pockets, and his face too nonchalant, like he was doing his best not to explode.
“You stay in the car,” Ray said and unlocked the door.
“Daddy?”
Ray turned to face his boy. “You pay me mind,” he said more sternly. Gee nodded. He sat up taller in his seat, strained to peer out the window.
Ray handed him the box of doughnuts. “I’ll be right back,” he said more softly, and scaled fast up the lawn.
Jade said his name as soon as she saw him, and the man in blue turned around. He had a pale face, a toothpick dangling out the side of his mouth. He slit his eyes at Ray and said, “Who the fuck is this? Did you call somebody?” He pointed his finger at Wilson, who was tapping his foot against the ground. He was either agitated or scared. Jade was both, Ray could see. He went and stood beside her.
“What’s going on?” he said. He was still wearing his apron, but he made himself look broad, his voice low.
“Your cousin owes me money. Selling all this furniture isn’t going to make you enough to pay me back. And I’m tired of waiting.”
“I already told you, I don’t have it on me,” Wilson said.
The man in blue shook his head. “Then I’m here to take you to the bank where you can get it. Or I’m taking her to the bank—” He nodded at Jade. “I don’t care who it is. Somebody is going to pay me my money today.”
He was shouting, and Ray wanted to take Jade, put her in the car, drive her and Gee back to Superfine, but he knew he couldn’t. This man wouldn’t let them off, he could see, and, if they weren’t careful, it would come to a fight. He didn’t want to fight him, not with Gee in the car. The little boy had his face to the window, his hand on the glass.
“How much does he owe you?” Ray asked. The man said the number, and Ray shook his head. “I can’t help you with that.”
“Then maybe she can,” the man in blue said, and he took a step toward Jade.
Ray put his arm around her, even if it didn’t make sense, even if he should keep his hands free. She was looking away from the three of them, toward the car, watching their son.
“That’s enough,” Wilson said finally. “Let’s go to the bank. Just leave my cousin out of this.” He inched his hand around his back.
“What are you doing?” the man in blue shouted at him. “Hey, man, what you doing?”
Before Wilson could answer, the man pulled out a gun, held it straight up to his face. Jade gasped, and Ray took her by the shoulders, pushed her hard behind him, but all the man in blue saw was Ray moving. He tur
ned the gun toward him and shot.
His daddy had told him not to move from the car, and Gee didn’t mean to disobey, but his body started going all on its own. He was running up the lawn. His mother was slumped over, like she’d been knocked down, too, and she was screaming. There were doors opening down the street, but Gee couldn’t turn to look—his eyes were set on his father, fallen down, like he had been playing a game where one moment he was up, and the next, he was splayed out. Gee wedged himself between the grown-up bodies to kneel next to his daddy. He felt his mother lifting him away. He fought and kicked to stay close. She lost her grip on him, and he sank nearer to him, the one he loved. He used his hands to pinch his father’s shoulders, his pretty ironed shirt, his favorite, red-and-pink plaid. Gee shook him, called out to him, but he stayed still. He stuck his hand underneath his daddy’s body, to prop him up, so he could hear. Daddy, he said. Daddy. When his hand came back to him, it was shining with blood.
2
November 1996
On the outskirts of a city in the Piedmont, North Carolina
It was a Wednesday, newly November, and Lacey May Ventura was raking the leaves in the yard. Her fingers were red and sore, and it occurred to her to check the gas tank behind the house. In the Piedmont, winter never announces itself; the days turn toward the cold and away from it, the first dusting of snow arriving gently, without warning.
Lacey May pulled up the metal lid and saw the needle on the gauge pointing down to 15 percent. She ran inside, still holding the rake, and dropped the heat down as low as she could stand.
She passed the rest of the day in her good coat, a kettle boiling on the stove. She drank cup after cup of coffee to keep her hands warm, and by noon, she was shaking from all the caffeine, her fingernails tinged with blue. She wanted Robbie to call so she could ask how long 15 percent would last, but he didn’t. She called the agency instead to ask if they’d found anything for her yet.