by Matt Burgess
“Oh, that’s okay,” she said, unsure if he was messing with her. “I really don’t think I should take credit for any of that.”
“Itwaru?” he said. “I’d be upset if you didn’t.”
The main takeaway from Richie’s story: there weren’t any dark-suited Internal Affairs investigators waiting for her in the rumpus; otherwise he probably would’ve led with that. Actually, there weren’t many people in the rumpus at all. She’d never seen it so empty. Half the uncles were out making buys; the other half, like her, still had hours to waste before they’d have to show up for work. Desks were occupied only by investigators. She was alone in the forest to see the tree fall. Without any uncles around, the investigators didn’t mix martinis or parade cigarette girls, as she might have imagined, but instead filled out forms responding to the endless call-ins—my building’s superintendent smokes weed, my rival drug dealer sells drugs—that clogged the department’s already sluggish arteries. Janice meanwhile had nothing to do. To please Tevis, she could’ve asked Prondzinski for that partner change, but she didn’t want to bother the lieutenant now in case IA showed up later, plus she worried Prondzinski might have unfairly held her responsible for the Puffy/Gonz fiasco, plus of course she was still hoping to get Tevis to forgive her. Nothing’s easy. Because insurance concerns forbade her from even pretending to do work before her shift started—what if she got a paper cut?—she signed into her new Facebook account, not on a rumpus computer like a cavewoman but with her twenty-first-century smartphone. Jimmy Gellar’s name was waiting for her in the message box.
03/20, 3:34 PM
Dear Miss (Mrs?) Guyana,
Wow! So nice to hear from you! How long has this been your FB name?
More important-how did you manage to escape from Ned Shu’s diabolical death trap? What was it again? A cage of starving tigers? A vat of hot oil? Or can you not talk about it? Is this line secure?
Should we meet up in person?
Today, 2:28 PM
hahahaha. nice to hear from you too. especially after the craziness from last time … hey did you happen to talk to my mother the other day?
3:03 PM
I did! I went by your house to see if your parents still lived there which sounds way creepier than it really was but I just wanted to drop my number off and apologize for my boneheaded move outside the clinic. I’m seriously incredibly sorry about that (the boneheadedness) and felt awful for forever but if it makes you feel any better I’m being punished for it RIGHT NOW because the guy on the computer next to mine is literally watching porn. In the library!
Speaking of rude you’ve ignored my let’s meet up suggestion. You also ignored my super clever miss/mrs question. Is that because I should be calling you Detective Guyana? My bad!
3:08 PM
no not Detective yet but i should be finding out about that any day now. (i literally just knocked my knuckles against my desk.) and no r in my Ms. either. how about you? whatve you been up to these last hundred years?
3:16 PM
hello?
3:16 PM
you still there?
3:21 PM
Sorry, sorry. Had to switch computers before my computer got ejaculated on.
3:22 PM
yuck
3:23 PM
Tell me about it.
3:27 PM
What I’ve been up to these last hundred years: no r in my ms. either (wait, that makes no sense) but I am currently getting my associate’s degree from LaGuardia Community College. The dream is to go on and get licensed in alcohol and drug counseling, maybe get a master’s in art therapy or something … I figure it’ll be like when Mike Seaver on Growing Pains becomes a substitute teacher and he knows whenever someone’s about to throw a spitball because he’s done it all before. Anyway that’s the plan. We’ll see how it goes. I’d love to hear your thoughts on those final Growing Pains seasons (the Dicaprio years) but I’m running out of computer time here. We could try meeting up in person but that would be (ahem) the third time I suggested it and I don’t want to come across as somebody who can’t take a hint.
3:29 PM
no hints at all. i’ve just got a ton of stuff going on at work right now and it’s hard for me to find the time to do anything
3:30 PM
Well, I don’t mean we have to meet up this very second! I’m not crazy! How about tonight? Or Saturday?
3:32 PM
you think i get weekends off like a normal human being? fri and sat = work nights = the nonlife of a cop
3:33 PM
Well I can’t do Sunday (sad for you) because my niece is getting Christened and I’m an awesome uncle but I do have Monday free. What do you say? Hurry up and let me know because the librarian is upset I’ve exceeded my time limit. And I find her very scary.
3:35 PM
i do have mondays off actually
3:35 PM
Great!
3:36 PM
maybe we can meet up for a cup of coffee
3:39 PM
hello?
4:03 PM
New computer! Scary librarian off my back!
4:06 PM
Coffee is super boring, but you know what isn’t boring? Coney Island! When’s the last time you been? The rides won’t be running this early but it’s actually nicer that way and the weather’s supposed to be really great on Monday. (I just checked.) What do you think? We could do the boardwalk and eat hot dogs. And shoot the freak if it’s open.
4:07 PM
what the hell is shoot the freak? is it even legal?
4:09 PM
Shoot the freak is exactly what it sounds like and totally legal but probably shouldn’t be. If you don’t like hot dogs there’s a really great pizza place near there. Or we could do hot dogs AND pizza. Are you in? Memory lane? Pick you up at 2 for a super fun day?
4:17 PM
it would be really nice to catch up but i can’t be out too late, is that alright? i gotta work the next morning
4:18 PM
Awesome! No problem! Where should I pick you up?
4:21 PM
i’ll be over at my mom’s all day monday so just come thru over there i guess
4:24 PM
Great, great, great! Really looking forward to it … Coney Island can get a little dicey though so make sure you bring your domino mask, Gabby Guyana. Just sayin.
4:29 PM
domino masks sounds like a superhero thing. you must have me mixed up with somebody else … just sayin.
She thought she must’ve had herself mixed up with somebody else: a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl with elaborately layered pushdown socks and multicolored jelly bracelets. That embarrassed, embarrassing eighth-grader shared Janice’s rumpus desk with many other Janices, all of them fighting for armrest space. She hadn’t felt this crowded with selves since the LeFrak disaster. There was, for example, the rabbinical Janice who scrutinized Jimmy Gellar’s Facebook responses with a Talmudic attention to detail. Why didn’t he have any classes on a Monday afternoon? Did his less than subtle probing into her marital status indicate less than platonic motivations, and if so should she have clarified that she intended to pay for her own pizza and hot dog(s)? A more present, embodied self—reluctantly engaged in actual, more serious problems—mistook every rumpus shadow for an IA investigator. When Tevis showed up for work, a groveling Janice asked him to extend the deadline on their partnership dissolution. Because she’d be the uncle tomorrow and he’d only be the ghost, he acquiesced to a couple of more days, so long as she promised not to enter any apartment buildings. Done. Still groveling, she thanked him with chicken parm subs from Benateri’s. Suddenly suffering—cheap dim sum and chicken parms?—she peed diarrhea up in her secret third-floor handicapped bathroom. Add to those Janices the nail-biter, the hair-tie-snapper, the crackhead Janice Singh and the superhero Captain Richmond Hill and her alias Gabby Guyana and finally the latest Janice, the newly forgetful Janice, her mother’s daughter, whose shift had ended b
efore she remembered to call for a cab.
Tevis spotted her on his way out of the parking lot. She stood shivering with her hands retracted up her coat sleeves, her back to a pretty yellow house abutting the Narco building, a house where if the inhabitants ever smoked weed they had better first cram towels under the doors. Tevis drove a couple of car lengths past her before backing up. He was either curious or concerned or both. His window rolled down. He asked her what the heck she was doing.
“Waiting for a cab.”
“Where’s your car?”
She heard R&B out of his speakers but couldn’t really see him sitting in the dark of his Buick. She went over to him. She leaned her face through the open window, as she’d done to Sergeant Hart two days earlier, another accidental echo she hadn’t asked for or known how to interpret. The little care tag stuck up out of the back of Tevis’s T-shirt. To her surprise he’d apparently joined her mother on the short list of people Janice was unwilling to lie to.
“I hit a parked car and telephone pole last night,” she said. “Then fled the scene because I was drunk.”
The passenger’s-side door unlocked for her. Because Tevis was the most conscientious human being she’d ever met, he made her call the cab company back and cancel her order. After she got off the phone, she expected him to immediately launch his interrogation, or at least tell her an instructive anecdote, but he seemed content to just stare at the road. She would’ve had more questions to answer in a taxi. Where we going? What do you want to take, College Point Boulevard or the Grand Central Parkway? Tevis, without asking, without a fare to pad, headed straight toward the Van Wyck. They drove in silence almost all the way home, through a post-mortgage-crisis Queens stuck in developmental limbo with unmanned cranes on either side of the expressway. Public-housing skeletons waited for stimulus money to finish their windows and doors. Up in the sky, planes beat a path out of JFK.
“Shit,” she said, by far her most commonly expressed sentiment of the month.
She put the probability of her mother remembering at roughly 33 percent. And even if she did remember, there was only like a 51 percent chance her feelings would be hurt, for an overall potential disappointment score of … something or other. She could’ve figured out the exact number on her fancy new cell phone, but it didn’t matter. She said she’d do it, so she had to do it. Plus, Sway: The Art of Gentle Persuasion suggested that you can get people to trust you—and she of course wanted Tevis to trust her again—by asking for a super-small favor, one that can’t be politely turned down, and afterward the antagonist will convince himself that he can’t dislike you that much, otherwise he never would’ve done the favor in the first place.… Never mind that Tevis was already doing her a favor by driving her home two out of the last three nights.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“I’m sorry, but can we make a stop real quick? I promised my mother I’d get her some flowers.”
“Are you kidding?” he said. “There’s nothing I’d rather do.”
They pulled into the alleyway with a gas-station bouquet of droopy carnations that cost more than they should have. Because it was dark out, after midnight, he insisted on waiting in the car until she could get herself into the house. Even though she was a grown-up. Even though she had a gun in her purse. But, of course, no keys. She rang the bell, thankful to have these carnations to hand over—sorry to pull you out of bed, swarm your chest with panic, make you scamper down the stairs fully convinced that I’ve been killed—but Vita opened the door right away, completely awake, in a lovely black-and-white dress with jade earrings brushing the tops of her naked shoulders.
“My baby girl,” she said.
Tevis stepped out of the car with what appeared to be an automatic reflex. He fiddled with his belt, his pinkie finger discreetly checking to make sure his fly was all the way up. Forget small favors. Forget chicken parm subs. Janice had her irresistible mother. As he climbed the back steps, Vita turned to him, perhaps to position herself more flatteringly under the porch’s golden light, and when she did she gave Janice a clear view into the kitchen, where her father sipped tea at the cluttered table. A white moth flew into the house through the open door. Her father raised his mug in Janice’s direction, as if to toast her good health and fortunes.
“You look stunning,” she heard Tevis say. Brother leaned forward, suddenly interested, but from where he was sitting he could see only Tevis’s hands, Tevis’s black hands, stealing the flowers from Janice so he could give them to Vita himself.
“So what’s the big occasion?” Tevis asked her.
Brother had already left his chair. He came over to lean against the doorjamb, one foot on the porch, one foot still in the kitchen, as if reluctant to step entirely out of the house, as if worried he might not make it back in again. His shoes and socks were off. He’d missed a loop on his Movado wristwatch and she wished she could remember if it was like that earlier. “I think you’re the occasion,” he told Tevis. “She got all dressed up because she knew you was coming. And with flowers! The big charmer!”
“I’m sorry,” Tevis told Vita. “I didn’t realize you had company.”
“Oh, that’s not company,” she said. “That’s the degenerate ex-husband. Degenerate ex-husband, I’d like you to meet Detective Chester Tevis.”
“A cop!” Brother said. “How perfect! Brother Itwaru, Detective Chester Tevis. So very nice to finally meet you.”
Their hands met in the middle for a quick shake. Not at all the tarsal-crunching macho pump-athon that Janice had expected. But why should she have? They were all adults here, right? Even her. Even though—sleep deprived, half delirious—when she’d first seen her father inexplicably sitting at the kitchen table, part of her had wondered if she’d somehow stumbled up to the threshold of 1999, if the refrigerator was back to being covered in photographs instead of magnets and the microwave had a turn dial, the telephone a curly cord, if Judith was up in the attic bedroom IM-ing her boyfriends on a Y2K-prone computer.
“Brother?” Tevis said. “Is that your real name?”
“One of them,” he said. “How long it take you to grow a beard like that?”
She didn’t hear Tevis’s response. She was watching the moth flutter back out of the house. It flew toward the porch light, a typical moth, singeing a wing on the bulb before careening down the alleyway. The men, typical men, hadn’t seemed to notice it, but Vita did, or at least appeared to. She hugged the bouquet to her chest, aware that ghosts took many forms.
“I’m cold,” she announced. “Chester, would you like to come in? I got some leftover pepper pot I can reheat.”
“You do?” Brother said.
“I really shouldn’t impose,” Tevis said.
“You should do what you want,” she told him. “Or? You know what? You should do what I want. And I want you to come inside and eat some of this pepper pot.”
She brushed past Brother into the kitchen. She went in forward, not backward, a mistake inviting all the neighborhood’s malevolence to go streaming in after her. Like, for instance, her degenerate ex-husband. He hung a conspiratorial arm across Tevis’s shoulders, pushed his wicked mouth close to Tevis’s ear. “Next time?” he said. “If you really want to get her going? Splurge a little and buy lilies.”
Janice slumped down at the kitchen table. There were four chairs, room for everybody in theory, but two were already occupied by the pagoda stacks of voided checks, credit-card offers, and presidential campaign letters. Vita stood over at the counter, chopping half inches off her flowers’ stems, while the boys simultaneously, to their apparent embarrassment, reached for the only other available chair.
“Oh, sorry,” Tevis said. “Were you sitting here?”
“Not at all,” Brother said.
“You weren’t sitting here?” Tevis asked, pointing to the empty tea mug on the table.
“No, I was, but please go ahead.”
“No, no, no,” Tevis said. He pulled out the chair
for him. “Here. Take it.”