by Cheryl Reid
“Hey, gal,” the deputy hollered. He scowled as he walked toward my window. “You going to kill somebody the way you’re driving.”
People on the sidewalk stared in my direction. Blood rushed to my cheeks. I tried to smooth my hair. I was not where I should be, at home mourning, waiting on my family. Even if they didn’t know my husband was dead, they would soon know, and they would wonder why I was out when I should have been home. I peeked to see if the money was hidden or littering the floor. The canvas bag stuck out from the seat.
Up close, I knew the deputy from my lunch counter. His face softened when he recognized me. “Mrs. Nassad,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said. My father had taught me to be cautious of the law. He’d been bullied in his days of peddling, and he’d lived in Mounds long enough to know that when the sheriff came, it was not a good sign.
“You need to be more careful.” He placed his golden forearm on top of the car and his face hung in the window.
“I’m sorry,” I said. My eye caught a young man who looked like Marina’s Michael, with blond hair and dressed in a suit, going into the courthouse.
The deputy leaned closer into the window. “I thought it was a drunk colored gal in front of me.” He whispered as if he were letting me in on a joke.
“No, sir.” I looked at him squarely.
“Because you’re coming from Blacktown.” The deputy cleared his throat. His face blushed. “That’s why.”
“I was checking on my father.”
“Everything okay over there?” He tried to show concern.
“Yes,” I said and wondered if he knew about Elias’s visit to Mr. Washington.
“Let me call in.” He tapped the roof of my car and sauntered back to his. He opened the door, sat, and talked on his radio.
I looked for Michael. He went to the courthouse every day, but I saw no sign of him. People gawked at me pulled over with the blue lights flashing behind my car. Surely some of them knew by now that Elias was dead.
The officer stood over me again. “Heard you been having some troubles.” He would know I allowed Mr. Washington to deliver our mail. Everyone knew.
I started to refute him, but then I remembered my precarious position. Elias was dead. “This morning.” I paused. “My husband passed away.”
He stood tall and placed his hand on his belt. “But I just saw him last night.”
My chest tightened. He had been party to the group at Mr. Washington’s.
“No wonder you’re driving crazy,” he said.
“I need to get home,” I said. “Now that I checked on my father.”
“At least that ape won’t bother you no more.” He grunted and leaned on the roof of the car. His face came close to mine. “We took care of that for you.”
I covered my eyes. The air felt trapped in my chest. I wanted to ask if Mr. Washington had been harmed, but I did not know how to ask without more trouble.
I wondered what Elias had said about Orlando Washington to this man and the others. Had he merely gone along with the town’s anger or had he added his own, about me allowing Mr. Washington to deliver and inviting him inside for water? Surely he had not told them Mr. Washington was inside the house with me. If he had, Elias would have lost face and Mr. Washington would be in jail or worse.
“Next thing, they’ll want to be sheriff,” the officer said. “Or mayor.”
I looked up at him. “Is that man all right?” As soon as the words were out, I feared they might put Orlando Washington into further harm. But I needed to know.
He looked at me sideways. “I guess that depends. He got fair warning.”
“Fair warning?”
He smirked. “Didn’t Elias tell you?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. He had told me nothing of what he’d done. “I was asleep when he came home.” But that was a lie.
Wind from the south blew thick and hot. The storm was getting close.
“I guess he didn’t want to worry you. He was a good man.” He tapped the top of my car again. “Storm’s coming,” he said. “You get on home, where you belong, and settle down. My condolences to you.”
I did not know what he thought of me or what Elias told him. I pulled away, left him standing in the middle of Water Street. I crossed over Main. I was not paying attention, and I had to slam the brakes to keep from hitting a woman and her child crossing in front of me.
The woman’s white-gloved hand jerked her little girl’s arm. The mother looked back, her face enraged and at odds with her perfectly coiffed hair and pink lipstick. “Slow down,” she yelled.
I felt sick at my carelessness.
The little girl stared at me as if she could see through me. She reminded me of Marina, how watchful she was, waiting for something to happen, waiting to intervene. Marina was always so wise and could give me a look and break my heart. My chest tightened, because Papa wanted me gone, away from my home and my children, but I had worked as hard as Elias. All of it was as much mine as his.
I looked down into the floorboard. The money had spilled again. I pulled over on the side of the road and reached down to clean it up. I did a quick count, as I had all my years in the grocery business. It was more than twenty thousand. That was a lot of money. Enough to start over. All that money, but it was not all that was mine. My father and Elias were both rich men. A daughter and wife’s inheritance should be more. I was owed more. I tucked the bills back in the canvas and then into my purse.
I knew where Elias kept money in the store. If I did not get it now, Ivie would have it. I would be damned if Ivie got it. I wanted to get what I was after and find my children. I needed to move on, like the people on the sidewalk—the lawyers heading to the courthouse, the mothers with strollers, the secretaries going home. That money was for Marina, for Eli, for my grandchild. It was for me too, so I could stay near them where I belonged.
The Store
I turned left onto Main Street and the old courthouse loomed in my rearview mirror. I crossed Maple and then Sycamore Street. One block away, the sign—a large porcelain disc, Nassad’s Lion Grocery with the image of the lion in the center—hung over the sidewalk. The familiar sight of it aroused a feeling of dread, as if Elias himself stood in the middle of the road. I turned left on Oak and into our lot. I passed the painted brick wall promising Coca-Cola, Ice Cold and Refreshing.
I pulled around back to the alley, past the bars of the metal cage where Elias had kept the lion, years before we married. Leona the lion. Ivie had traded with the Gypsy circus, food for the cub. When Elias saw it, he threatened to drown it in the river, but Ivie guarded the cub, and in a short time Elias began to value the curiosity she stirred in his customers. She was to become his best draw ever. He had posters made: Come to Nassad’s Lion Grocery and see Leona the Lion. He plastered them all over town. Gus and I, ages three and eight, hand in hand, watched Elias weld the cage. We had witnessed the cub ride in the cab of his delivery truck. “Crazy,” my father had said under his breath as they drove by. Then she got too big and Elias locked her inside that cage. She moaned and roared from that day forward, and her groaning and grumbling carried for five miles. The noise became as familiar as the train horn blaring.
I turned the engine off. My mouth was dry, and I smelled musty and damp. I hoped no one noticed me. If someone saw me here, asked me why I was at the store, I’d tell them I was gathering food for the wake. I locked the money and my purse in the trunk of the car.
A chill ran over me as the hot wind hit my sweat-soaked dress. The storm was close. Over half my life had been spent in this store. It was where I belonged, bringing the bread, cleaning the shelves, working behind the counter. Here, I smiled at customers and accepted their compliments, and Elias would touch my shoulder or nod in a proud way. It was an act, but I played along because I liked the feeling that people wanted something I had made, and the feeling made me smile. In her teenage years, Marina held it against me, called me two-faced. She said I was never so frie
ndly at home, that I had one face for the store and a sour face for home. She said, “Maybe if you smiled at Daddy like you do at the store, he’d be happy to see you.”
Notes were lodged in the crevice of the storeroom door. Four crates of milk, spoiled from heat by then, blocked my way. I pushed them out of my path. I unlocked the bolt and the notes cascaded to the ground. One from the clerk, one from the bread man, one from the milkman . . . Nobody here, they wrote. I waited. Where are you?
“He’s dead, of course,” I answered aloud. “That’s the only reason he would not be here.” I pushed open the large wooden door on its metal track. It rumbled and the sky thundered.
The dark stockroom smelled of concrete and earth, of potatoes and onions, of overly ripe cantaloupe in damp cardboard. There was money hidden in that back room. I closed the track door and locked it from inside.
A shot of sunlight beamed through a high window on the far wall and streaked across the concrete floor. Then, dark clouds covered the sun and the sky opened up. The rain rushed down in sheets and pounded the flat roof. The storm had arrived.
Up high, on the tallest shelf and in the farthest corner, Elias kept money in oatmeal tins. He hoarded cash, the same as my father. I rolled the ladder along the wall of shelves and climbed up. I dug past the boxes and brought down two at a time. I found six tins.
Behind two loose concrete blocks in his office were cigar boxes with cash. I pulled out nine. There was the safe. I turned the code, the children’s birth months and days, but it would not open. I tried again. My hands shook. In my absence the last two days, he had changed the combination.
There was also the register. I pushed through the swinging door into the store proper. The gray rain pounded the street outside and the roof above. The humming noise of the drink coolers greeted me. My hand reached to switch on the dozen milk-glass pendants hanging from the tin ceiling. I fingered the switch, but decided no, turning on the lights would draw attention to my presence.
The heels of my shoes echoed in the empty room as I crossed the floor to pull the shades down over the door and windows. The heavy rain cast a gloom through the plate-glass windows. Smudges covered the glass where the morning and lunch customers pressed their faces to see in. Elias would have cleaned the marks right away. Appearances meant everything, and he’d go behind people, straightening products on shelves and cleaning smudges. I pulled the shades and the place went dark like it was twilight.
The large room smelled of him, or as he had always smelled—a mixture of cigarettes, cloves, and coffee, of blood from the meat counter, the excess juices wiped on a rag looped to his apron, the sour odors of olives and pickles kept in glass jars on the back counter. We used vinegar to clean the glass cases and to mop the floors at the end of each day. The musty smell of money was there too.
I had worked here beside him. An entire section of counter devoted to my pies, baked goods, and breads, a baker’s case full of my labor. The case was empty—he would have sold the day-olds and then thrown the rest out. I wondered how, yesterday, he had explained my absence, how he had answered the customers asking for me and why there was no fresh bread. People must have suspected a rift between us—they’d heard Elias say we wouldn’t help the colored postman, but I had allowed him to deliver our mail.
Behind my counter on the brick wall, like a banner, the words regarding me were painted: Mrs. Anna’s Delicious Fruit Pies, Breads, and Savory Treats. A surprise when we returned from our trip to the beach. An idea that Nelly had conjured, something to keep me busy until the children arrived, and it had. She liked my baking because she saw profit in it. The one sweet thing—my cooking, my baking, the attention I got. I could get lost in the rhythms, the silky mess of the flour, the feel of the dough on my hands in my kitchen, and I answered to no one while I baked.
Marina did not like baking, but she would watch me work. She salivated and begged as the bread cooled, but I held out to keep her attention. I told her I wanted to be sure I had enough to fill the counter, even though I knew there was plenty. She helped me carry the boxes of bread to the car and rode with me as the car filled with the smell of yeast and warm bread. We carried it in—the mountain bread, the loaves, and often pies or savories—and the end reward would be mine, watching her eagerly choose a treat and thank me for what I had made. Having her close gave me a pleasure I felt no other time. I thought, I had done that, had made that with my hands and made my daughter proud.
Those first years, the town women came in and asked, “Aren’t you Mr. Khoury’s daughter?” Puzzled that I was out of place, as if I were a prop in their world, not an actual, unfixed human, who lived and felt and dreamed as they did. They would whisper to each other and their eyes would fall on me.
“Yes, ma’am,” I would say. Still surprised to be in Elias’s store, so bright and ordered, so full of white faces, unlike my father’s place. I knew them all, and learned quickly their preferences, if they had bought carpets from Papa or if their husbands were important or if their children had attended school with me. I knew the gossip that surrounded them and where they lived, the names of their maids. They knew nothing about me except I had come from one side of town to the other. That kind of crossing was unheard of and made me a lesser person in their eyes. Not black, but not wholly white—an Arab, a Catholic, like a coffee stain on a white tablecloth. “Elias and I married,” I answered.
“Of course you did.” They smiled as they put it all together. “Bless your heart,” they said, unsure, because I was Khoury’s daughter, the girl whose mother had died, the one who lived with her father and brother above the colored store across the tracks, the dark girl who had gone to school with their daughters or sisters. “Welcome,” they said, as if I were standing on the thresholds of their homes and not in my husband’s store. And sometimes they said, as an afterthought, “I bought rugs from your daddy.”
“Thank you,” I would say. Gratitude, so important to my father, to Elias, to our business. Be deferential to the customer, Elias would say, but I knew he wanted me to be deferential in all matters. Their maids in white uniforms moved in and out of aisles. White shadows of the women they were—not as I had known them in my father’s store in their own clothes, moving and talking with ease, their children, or a man, or both, buzzing around them, doing as they said.
“Now, did you bake all this yourself?” the white ladies would ask.
“Yes.” I could read their faces, uncertain that I was clean enough to cook for them.
“My goodness,” they would say. “That’s a lot of work. I’ll have to try something.” Their lips puckered as they studied the mountain bread, the tabbouleh or hummus. They’d choose a pie or half a dozen rolls, something familiar, because they were not sure of me. But they came back for more or sent their maids. Their husbands, less restrained, asked for the stuffed grape leaves or the mountain bread rolled round Elias’s deli meats.
The women smiled to my face, but I heard what they said to each other behind my back. “He works her like a nigra. She doesn’t know any better, growing up over there.” They scared their children with warnings: “If you don’t mind me, Mrs. Anna will get you.” My looks frightened them. My olive skin, my thick eyebrows, and my large, curved nose. To those children and their parents, I resembled a Halloween witch. The warnings heeled them to their mothers like obedient dogs, and they dared only to peek round their mothers’ skirts. Those frightened looks would send me to the bathroom to powder my nose and escape their gaze. Sometimes, instead of seeing what they saw, by some trick of light, I saw my mother, and I felt whole again.
“It’s good for business if you look like something,” Elias said. “Impressions go a long way.” So I wore nice dresses from the best dress shop. The same dress shop the ladies frequented. I wore gifts of pearls and gold brooches he gave me. His gifts flattered me for a few years until I understood the nature of our marriage and the reasons for the gifts. They were not gifts to show his love. They were investments in my appearance and
a show of our status. The gifts were an attempt to distract me from the fact that he did not love me and he never would.
We had money and things, when most people had nothing. With our store on Main Street, we had a good position in Riverton, and Elias walked into places like he belonged, like no questions could be asked. He was the secretary in the Knights of Columbus and was a member in the Rotary Club. The way he carried himself, no one would have known he felt inferior. He knew we’d never be invited to the country club, but if we worked hard enough, if people saw us in a good light, maybe Eli and Marina would.
The words on the wall lurked over me—Mrs. Anna’s Delicious Fruit Pies, Breads, and Savory Treats—and I could hear Elias’s voice in my head. You’re late, or You’re short on goods today, or The spinach pie didn’t go over, or Where’s mine? Always, his voice filled this place. He yelled orders to one of the boys working in the back or he crooned sweetly to a customer.
I remembered the times he was not here—when he’d gone to Mobile to see Zada, the woman that my father had arranged for Gus to marry. When Gus did not marry her, Elias gave her his sympathies. A few months passed, my belly grew, and unbeknownst to me, Elias and Zada were making their own arrangement through an exchange of letters. They planned a rendezvous and the first time he went to her, I was six months along with Marina. He told me he was going on a fishing trip to Mobile, but I suspected that he was going to see her. He denied it. I asked to go along, but he said I needed to stay put for the baby’s sake and he needed me to watch over the store. Hours after he left, I found the letters tucked in a box in his closet. I sat on the floor, the baby kicked inside me, and I cried reading her words to him. I hoped he would not submit, that he would return and our marriage would be intact, that he was only fighting a natural curiosity, but when he returned so happy and jubilant, I knew the truth.