by Matt Burgess
CHAPTER NINE
Fuck my life. She woke up the next morning needing water, coffee, huevos rancheros with lots of Sriracha, a teeth-scrubbing, a tongue-scrubbing, a hot shower, an alibi, a mechanic, and more sleep, but the first thing she did was go to the window. No squad cars sat parked outside her house. Not yet at least. The woman reflected back at her in the glass looked destroyed. Dark bruises mottled the bags beneath her eyes. Blood crusted her nostrils, but the nose itself felt merely stuffy, not broken. She went into the bathroom to cover up the bruising with bronze-colored concealer and must’ve done a pretty good job of it, too, because when she came into the kitchen her mother didn’t seem to notice anything unusual, other than that Janice was awake and sentient at seven-something in the morning.
“What’s going on?” Vita said. She sat at the kitchen table amid her never-shrinking stacks of unopened mail, her eyes peeking over an early-edition copy of the Post. “Escape!” said the back headline. “Duke Survives Scare.” Behind her, soap bubbles gushed out of the dishwasher. Like an oil stain, they rainbowed the light, oozed across the floor mat and tiles. “You hungry?” she said. “You want me to make you some breakfast?”
“Did you put the wrong kind of soap in the dishwasher?”
“Shit,” Vita said.
She knelt on the tiles to mop up the water with what was nearest at hand: her copy of the Post. A newsprint photo of Senator Obama disintegrated beneath soapsuds. The front and back covers fell apart. She seemed frantic, unable to pull out sections of the paper fast enough, too mind-muddled to stop the problem at its source. Janice turned off the dishwasher.
“Maybe we should go out for breakfast,” Vita said from the floor, looking up at her like a child.
“I wish I could, but I got some errands to run before work.”
“Errands?” she asked with a mother’s instinct for entirely justified suspicion. “What kind of errands?”
“Like buying you flowers. A huge bouquet to show you how much I love you.”
“Yeah right.”
“Yeah right, what’s your favorite flower?” Janice asked, hopeful she’d remember the answer was lilies.
Kneeling in a mess she’d have to clean up all on her own, with little bubbles clinging to her ankles and fingers, Vita offered only the standard good-bye: “Be good,” she said. “Don’t forget to call if you get overtime.”
Janice took side streets into the Cypress Hills neighborhood of Brooklyn, only ten minutes from home. With her headlamp busted, she wanted to get off the road as quickly as possible and so she turned into the first auto-body repair shop she saw. The little sign on the door redundantly said WELCOME! OPEN! The big sign in the parking lot said WOMEN FRIENDLY, which she didn’t know whether to find offensive. She expected a dark garage, manned by mechanics in overalls, but instead walked into a temperature-controlled waiting room with a coffee bar and leather couches and a young black guy, her age, with more grease in his hair than under his fingernails.
“I gotta get my car fixed.”
“Well, you have certainly come to the right place,” he said from behind his counter. He had a nervous tic of some sort that caused his eyes to blink rapidly. “Have you used us before? Are you already in the system?”
“The system?” she said, and was handed a paper questionnaire asking for her name and address and phone numbers, work and private. The make and model of her car. Her license plate and credit numbers. Her insurance info. An accident report (if applicable) made out by the New York City Police Department. She said, “Do I still have to fill all this out if I pay in cash?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do you mean, what do I mean? If I pay in cash, do I have to fill all this out?”
“Uh,” he said. “I guess … I don’t know? I guess it’d depend on the sort of repairs you were looking for?”
She told him she needed a new headlamp, a new fender, and a new airbag, but said nothing about the accident. She told him she was also thinking about different tires and maybe a color change. In response he blinked his eyes, as if snapping mental photographs.
“You can talk to my boss,” he said. “If you want. But I think once the airbag’s been deployed, we have to make an official report to the—”
“Thanks for all your help.”
“Hey, are you all right?” he called after her as she went through the door. “You want a cup of coffee or something? It’s free!”
She drove one-handed back to Queens, repeatedly punching the stupid roof of her stupid car. When her knuckles began to hurt, she banged the back of her stupid head against the stupid headrest. It was early still. The Subaru’s owner may not have left for work yet, but if he had, he hated her now without knowing her. Don’t worry, pal: she hated herself even more. To find somebody skilled and sleazy enough to fix her car without draining her bank account or requiring an accident report, she drove from the Jackie Robinson Parkway to the more congested Van Wyck, then went farther east on Roosevelt than she ever did on foot for work, past Shea Stadium, past orange construction cranes erecting the platinum-blond trophy wife of the Mets’ future stadium, Citi Field, a half-completed brick-and-steel husk of a ballpark with enormous gray scaffolding bags hanging off the rotunda walls like scabs on a wound. She turned onto Willets Point Boulevard, a valley of ashes and auto repair shops, the sky there grayer than anywhere else in the borough. Semitruck trailers, stripped of their wheels, sank into the mud along the sides of the road. Graffiti covered the shops’ security gates, which were raised only a few feet off the ground so mechanics could scuttle in and out beneath them while keeping the garages’ inner workings concealed. Exclusively male, each one of them in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, they peered under hoods and pulled gravid garbage bags out of trunks. She had never driven herself here before, but she knew from countless backseat trips where to go, where to turn, when to slow down for workers running out into the dirt road with paint buckets and sandblasters, when to roll up her window to avoid the errant seat-soaking spray of an industrial hose. Throw a dead cat and you’d hit a shady mechanic; throw a dead cat with money in its mouth and her father would catch it.
It had been double-digit years since her last visit—with Judith, knocking golf balls up and down the artificial putting surface in their father’s office—but the shop looked exactly the same, except on the roof two American flags snapped at attention instead of just the one, the second likely added to reinforce Brother’s patriotism after men who looked vaguely like him knocked down the Twin Towers. She parked out in front, beneath an awning that said BROTHER AUTO PARTS SALES. For reasons she never thought to question until now, the phone number listed on the sign had its area code in quotation marks. They were probably cheaper than full-on parentheses, she realized, and the realization—the power it gave her over her miserly father—made stepping out of the car just a little bit easier.
She found him at the back of the shop, surrounded by bulky tool chests and motor-oil smells, with a golf putter held behind his neck as if to stretch out his shoulder muscles. He annoyingly wore the blue-and-orange tracksuit Judith had given him for his birthday. A sweaty Latino, one of Brother’s many shifty employees, was trying to explain the housing magnet issue in a remanufactured windshield-wiper relay. Whatever that meant. Janice couldn’t really follow what he was saying, nor could her father, who didn’t even seem to be trying. He kept nodding along without actually listening. His obvious disinterest, his heavy wristwatch, the putter across his shoulders, and the bulging stomach beneath his tracksuit were all meant to indicate to anyone who passed through here that Brother Itwaru was a super-important Big Boss.
“My God,” he said when he saw her. A little flustered maybe, he blindly passed the putter over to his assistant. “What are you doing here? Is everything all right? Is Mom okay?”
Never your mother, never your mom, only ever Mom, as in where’s Mom, don’t tell Mom, let’s make Mom some breakfast, let’s put salt in Mom’s sugar dish, lookit wh
at I bought Mom, you think she’ll like it, you better because I bought you girls the same thing. To her face she was always Babe.
“I need a favor,” Janice said.
The Latino kept his head down as he walked away. A mechanic in the valley of ashes, where shop owners occasionally burned their garbage and favors were understood to be of a criminal nature, he knew enough to leave them alone. He crab-walked under the security gate, taking the putter with him, perhaps to practice his stroke in anticipation of himself one day becoming the Man.
“A favor,” Brother said. “From your dear old dad, huh? Well, isn’t that interesting.”
“Are you gonna rake me over the coals on this, or are you gonna help me out?”
“This is how you ask for favors?”
“This is how you help people?” she said, but her voice—bouncing back to her off the titanium rims along the wall—sounded childishly bitter. She took a three-second breath to help her start over. “I can pay you,” she told him. “Whatever’s fair, I’ll pay. I’m not trying to get anything off you for free.”
“You’re an exhausting human being,” he said. “You know what your sister told me? When you stormed out of the house on my birthday?”
“Is this your fifty-first birthday we’re talking about?”
“She told me that if I wanted you back in my life—and obviously I want you back in my life—then I needed to win you over with tough love. ‘Man up,’ she told me. ‘No more groveling.’ ”
“I don’t remember any groveling.”
Now it was his turn to take a deep breath. To impress upon her that he did not have all day to waste on a prodigal daughter—credit his new Judith-inspired toughness—he looked down at his watch, a faceless Movado like the one Korean Marty had worn, except her father’s was almost certainly real, almost certainly having fallen off some unlucky gambler’s wrist.
“I was in an accident,” she told him. “And I was hoping you could take a look at my car. Please.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
He must’ve been thinking especially hard about something because his tongue filled the pouch of his lower lip. “Was anyone hurt?” he asked. “No one.”
“Are you sure?”
It must have been her haircut. The haircut he hadn’t even commented on yet. It must’ve made her look like somebody else, a ruthless, toothless scumbag who hurts people then lies about it, so you have to ask her twice. Afraid of the mounting pressure behind her eyes, she addressed herself to all the doorless cars stacked behind him like books. Never mind, she said. She apologized for coming down here, and before he had a chance to respond she walked away, under the security gate and onto the dirt road, where two men walked past her carrying a pane of clear glass. The air felt charged for a rainstorm. Her father’s putter lay abandoned on the ground. She stepped over it and so did he, coming out after her, not to beg any sort of pardon but to inspect firsthand her car and its damage. In a kind, pacifying tone he told her this particular Ford Focus model had notoriously touchy air bags, too easily engaged. He slapped at the headlamp’s dangling eye with an expert’s bold gruffness. He asked if the engine had been making any funny noises since the accident, which out there in the road he called the incident.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“What do you mean, what do I mean? Has it been making any funny noises?”
“Like what?”
“Like whoopee cushions and joy buzzers,” he said, annoyed, or maybe just pretending to be annoyed. “Go get behind the wheel so I can take a look. And stop being such a poop stain.”
While he tinkered under the hood, she revved the engine in park, a gearshift away from running him over. On her sixteenth birthday, eager to better prepare for the police academy, she had begged him to teach her how to drive, not in this hunk-of-shit Ford, but in the Brown Beauty, his 1971 Pontiac LeMans, a hardtop four-door sedan with beautiful whitewall tires, the same car Popeye Doyle commandeers at the end of The French Connection. Brother lasted one instructional trip around the block. A little more patient, her mother took her out for two lessons—two!—before finally sending her to the Alamo Driving School’s Mohammed Ahmed, a chatty instructor whose foot continually hovered over the shotgun brake, a teacher not unlike Tevis in that regard.
“Switch,” her father said, and so they switched. He took her seat while she stood outside the car looking in. He kept his cowlicked head turned away from her, the better to hear the vroom of his foot on the gas. “I think you got lucky,” he told her. “I think you’re just gonna need a little bodywork.”
“How much would it cost for a new paint job? Maybe new tires?”
“How about a different license plate?”
“Just so we’re clear?” she said. “Nobody got hurt.”
“Then you’re doubly lucky. Were you drunk?” When she didn’t answer, he folded up the air bag and tried stuffing it back into the steering wheel, but it only spilled back out across his stomach. “You need to be careful,” he said. “You’re genetically … what’s the word? Predisposed. Maybe socialized, too. At a young age. I don’t know.”
“When should I pick up the car?”
“I’ll call the house.”
“Call my cell,” she said, a little too quickly. She needed to buy a new one, but she imagined she could retain her old number. Whatever it took to keep him from resuming contact with Vita. “It’ll just be easier to get ahold of me that way,” she said. “What with work and—”
“Sure, sure, I’ll get the number off Judith,” he said, as in: Oh, you thought this would be a secret? Oh, you didn’t know I talk to your sister every night? That she’s number two on my speed dial, after voice mail but before Barbara, before my AA sponsor, before all my great Great Neck neighbors, my alleged jogging buddies, this shop right here with its 718 area code? He smiled and said, “So how’s Mom?”
Mom? Mom was banned for life from the Starbucks on Queens Boulevard because she’d gone behind the counter to scream at a barista, although she says she went behind the counter only to look at the bulk tea prices, and started screaming at the barista only after the barista had screamed at her for crossing an apparently sacrosanct border that was poorly designated in the first place and open to debate. This morning she filled the dishwasher with soap instead of detergent. The green beans, the rubbing alcohol, the picture-stick, the mouth-painter, Jimmy Gellar’s name on the whiteboard: she’d forgotten them all. She said she didn’t send you that photo of me in uniform, but maybe she did and can’t remember, or maybe she’s started lying. A formerly anal bookkeeper, she can no longer be trusted to pay the monthly bills. She has dementia, that’s how Mom’s doing, but to answer your question the way she would want it to be answered?
“She met someone,” Janice improvised. “A little while ago. She just seems sorta … I don’t know. Just sorta smitten, I guess.”
“Really?”
“You sound surprised.”
He attempted what he probably considered was an innocent-looking shrug. Obviously uninterested in continuing this conversation, he picked her purse up off the passenger seat and passed it to her through the open window. “You need a ride wherever you’re going?” he asked.
“No thanks,” she said. Because she was an idiot, because she was hungover and had dementia stalking her DNA, she hadn’t entirely realized that when she left here, she would necessarily be leaving without her car. She looked up. Dormant raindrops grizzled the clouds. She said, “I was actually looking forward to the walk.”
You couldn’t call her ungrateful, she did thank him for the offer. Closer to work than to home, she walked to the Willets Point train station, where she caught a 7 local to the end of the line. She expected to step off the el and into a rainstorm, but here in Flushing, only one stop away, the sun was brightly shining. Chinese sidewalk merchants encouraged her to buy their ox bones and toy helicopters and miniature leather Bibles. If only drug dealers were as friendly.
Somehow, at the nearby Flushing Mall, she got bamboozled into an iPhone, which came with Internet access and downloadable apps and an extended memory voice-memo program in case she ever needed to dictate her autobiography. After taxes and the sucker warranty it cost almost seven hundred dollars, but at least she got to keep her old number. Jesus Christ, though. In penance she ate lunch at a frighteningly inexpensive dim sum restaurant, which didn’t provide English menus but did display Queens’s most depressed catfish floating in a tank of green water. Janice tapped an apologetic finger against the glass. She thought about calling her mother on the new phone but didn’t want to find out that the police had come by the house. Hours early for her shift, she took the Q65 to the rumpus, not realizing until she walked through Richie’s reception area—once again blame the hangover, the hungry dementia—that she’d left all her keys dangling in the car ignition, not to mention a burka in the backseat.
“Ah, shit.”
“Is it that obvious?” Richie responded. “You can see it in my face? I tell you, Itwaru, you called it. With the penne alla vodka? I get a big magnum bottle of the stuff. What I don’t put in the sauce, we’re using for shots, and this is in addition to the red wine. Then the roommate? She opens up another bottle of vodka. The sauce, it probably came out terrible, you could strip paint with it, but it don’t matter to us because at this point? We’re hammered. All three of us. Okay, so now what? I go, hey, who wants to lie down? Anyone feel like lying down? Next thing you know, the three of us are in my bed, the girlfriend from Payroll, the lesbian roommate, and me in the middle, jumping out of my skin. Now you got me this far, kid. You told me, ‘Alcohol.’ If I wanted to make it happen, ‘Alcohol.’ But what came next, how to truly seal the deal, that was always gonna be on me, right? So I go, ‘Hey, is anyone sort of hot? Should we maybe get a little more comfortable?’ The girls, they’re just giggling like they don’t really know what I’m talking about. Actually, though? I am sorta hot. I don’t know if it was all the steam from the pasta, and the alcohol, of course, that played a part. I always get flush from red wine. Especially if it’s South American. Anyway, long story short, the girls start making out with each other. Right there in the bed, with me lying in the middle. Fact. Then they start touching each other, like for real, heavy duty, but I’ll spare you all the details because I don’t know all the details. I’ve already passed out. The only reason I know any of this at all is because when I finally wake up in the morning, the roommate’s vamoosed, but the Payroll girlfriend’s still there. Sobbing. She says she is quote unquote sexually confused now. Is that incredible? So now I’m suddenly single, I’ve got a hangover feels like an elephant literally took a dump on my face, and don’t get me started on all the leftover pasta in my fridge that’s got me sick just thinking about it. Story of my life. But the whole reason I’m telling you all this? Other than that it’s nice to get off my chest and I’d figured you’d want to know, but the whole reason really is that I wanted to thank you for at least getting me halfway there with the drunk girls in the bed and all that. Things didn’t turn out the way we hoped, but that’s my fault, not yours. Seriously. And if you ever need a favor? Consider it done. Guaranteed. That’s an official IOU.”