I raised one eyebrow. “I ain’t said nothin’.”
“What car? That one? That town car there?” he asked.
“That one,” said Lala, pointing.
“I’m not driving no kids nowhere without an adult!” yelled our driver as he screeched into traffic and got on Dad’s tail.
Have you ever seen an action movie with a thrilling high-speed car chase through the streets of New York City?
Lies. All lies. There is way too much traffic for that.
The Brooklyn Bridge was a parking lot. Through the windows I observed the gigantic sky curving around us like an upside-down bowl. It was that perfect light blue you see in picture books, with skinny clouds scribbled in white chalk.
Our town car was one of a few hundred vehicles hanging over the East River, facing off with the Manhattan skyline, waiting impatiently to step on the gas and shoot like rockets into the scene, watching the skyscrapers get bigger and bigger until we all disappeared in the maze.
Meanwhile we were more like a few hundred great-grandmothers making our way, inch by inch, from the bathroom sink—slowly, easy now—toward a painting of what? Of a skyline! Hanging way, over, there, clear, across, the room, stopping every, two seconds, to point out, how beautiful, it is. Before we get there, we’re all droppin’ dead.
These are the kind of thoughts a kid comes up with when she’s stuck in traffic.
“Why did your Dad’s car go this way?” said Lala. “He shoulda took the other bridge.”
Our driver shook his head. “I bet you anything there’s a young guy behind the wheel of that car. Young guys don’t know nothing about New York City traffic patterns. What is GPS? Robots in space! For years I study human behavior—human behavior, for years—before I take even one fare. Whaddayagonnadoaboudit?”
Our driver’s accent and appearance jumbled together made me curious where he grew up. I was considering whether there was a non-none-of-your-business way to ask about somebody’s family tree when, out of nowhere, the dam broke, the traffic flowed, and we were off.
Lala and I slammed against the backs of our seats, then sideways against the door as the driver shifted lanes to stay on Dad’s tail.
I wondered when would be the best moment to break it to him that we were somewhat short on cash.
The windows were down. The breeze was hot. The city was alive. Not too loud, not too dull. Alive. Our town car’s idling engine rumbled like a purring lion. We were parked outside some beauty salon, waiting for Dad. What was he doing inside a beauty salon? Wouldn’t we like to know. But there was no way Lala and me could get out of the town car to spy without getting caught. We’d just have to hope he came out with somebody, or something, that would give us another clue. Whatever Dad was up to in there, it was taking an awful long time.
While we waited, I imagined we were the cement lions outside the New York Public Library, ready to pounce. The picture was clear: Lala was Lala, only with a cement mane and sunglasses and a long tail, and I had paws as big as my head. Agim was there, too—Agim, you know, our driver? Only he was a jaguar, prowling back and forth in front of a window display of severed hands decorated with nails in every color in the galaxy, plus a few colors that only exist inside beauty salons. Looking back, I guess I was half-asleep and dreaming.
“I add turmeric. That’s key,” said Agim—the human version, who was still sitting behind the wheel and shaking his pointer finger at Lala.
“No doubt?” said Lala.
“Think I’m joking? Try my chicken,” said Agim.
“Chicken with biscuits is great,” I said.
“Biscuits, blech. Rice!” said Agim. “You don’t know nothing from my chicken.”
“Oh, Agim, I wish we had some now,” said Lala. “I’m dyin’ here.”
“Be our guests any Sunday, girls,” said Agim. “Lala, bring your mother and the boys. She needs rest, your mother, all she’s been through.” Agim leaned forward and pointed out the window. “Hey! This guy of Si’s, he takes care of himself.”
Dad and his new hairstyle got into his town car.
“He got layers framing his face!” said Lala.
“Dad was getting his hair done?” I said.
We knocked around the backseat like two Ping-Pong balls in a Lotto machine until we hit the next light. This thing with the lights happened approximately twenty-five more times before we arrived at what turned out to be Dad’s real destination. By that time, our car chase had taken almost two hours.
In the end, we learned what we needed to know.
We were parked outside a humongous building downtown. Agim was leaning his whole body out the car window, talking with an enormous security guard. They were speaking a language I had never heard before and have never heard since and shaking each other’s shoulders and tipping their hats and it seemed like they had known each other since the day they were born.
Agim pulled himself back inside the town car. “You ask any Albanian in New York City and he’s not gonna lie. He’s gonna tell you. And it all equals out in the end.”
I’d completely lost track of this conversation, and I had no idea where we were, or where Dad was. Albania? Was Dad in Albania? I felt like I’d been awake for three days.
Lala leaned forward. “What’s the scoop, Agim?”
“Your father—Claudeline? Is she awake, our sleeping one?” said Agim.
“I’m up,” I said.
“Claudeline, this place is the FBI. Your father is a rat. He’s giving up Si Song Senior.”
Whoa. A rat?
“A rat?” said Lala.
“An informant,” said Agim. “Si Junior works for the government now. Full-time. My lips are sealed and you didn’t hear it from me.”
“I think your pops might be too busy to be writing poetry,” said Lala.
Dad was telling the FBI about Grandpa?
What was he telling them?
I put my hands over my face. This was not good.
Was it?
“So Claudeline, where to?” asked Agim.
I frowned. “Albania.”
“Back to Brooklyn,” said Lala. “Thanks, Agim.”
“This one’s on me,” said Agim. “No money, I don’t take it. Every Sunday, girls, my wife makes a feast. Lala, you tell your mother she brings nothing. Nothing but her family. We’ll have a wonderful time. And hey, Claude, I wish you the best of luck with whatever this situation is that you got going on here.”
“Thanks, Agim,” I said.
“And the bad guys? May they choke on their meatballs. Tell ’em that’s from Agim.”
Our heads slammed forward, then backward, as we spun around and made our way across the bridge back home.
RATS
Buffalo wings = chicken wings in spicy sauce. World = full of lies.
—Steve Martin, comedian
At Guillaume’s, Phil and Rita made background noise while I kicked the bar and thought about rats. Liars and fishy schemers and rats. Rats carry diseases. Rats infest kitchens. Sure, some people keep rats as pets, but is that normal?
Lala was right. If Dad was ratting to the FBI, he probably wasn’t pretending to be a sick girl to raise money. That’d mean he was breaking the law right under some FBI agent’s nose. But if my parents weren’t Alma, who was? And what were they doing with the flyers?
I was dying to see what Phil made of this situation, but I’d watched enough movies to know that a gangster getting cozy with the FBI ain’t the type of thing you wanna spread around. I felt lost.
Somebody tickled my ear.
“I must run,” said Rita. “Tell me I’ll see you at the Sunset Park carnival this weekend?”
Rita was as swanky as ever in a white pantsuit and a necklace made of lavender rocks. Her mouth was open waiting for my RSVP. Her silver tooth looked overly enthusiastic to me.
“Isn’t Sunset Park sorta unfancy for you, Rita?” I asked.
“It’s research for my screenplay!” said Rita.
A movie. T
hat’s what I needed. A break from kid-detective land and its forests full of giant magnifying glasses. “How’s that going, anyway?” I asked.
Rita unbuckled her white leather bag, pulled out a stack of paper, and handed it over with a smile. “I’ve got fifty pages!”
I flipped through them. “‘GRANDPA RICARDO: You dirty rat-a-tat-tat! You want a belly fulla lead?’” I nodded. “Not bad.”
Rita’s smile fell. “But I want it to be bad. Good-bad, like you said.”
“The carnival should give you some ideas,” I said. “We got lotsa characters in my neighborhood.”
“You kids have a ball without me,” said Phil.
“You won’t be there?” asked Rita.
“Nah,” said Phil. “Gotta visit my no-good brother-in-law and my angel niece over in Jersey. A day trip outta the neighborhood keeps a guy alert.”
“Where do you live, anyway?” I asked. I thought of Phil as living in taverns and restaurants. I knew he lived in Sunset Park—behind a bar was just the only place I’d ever seen him.
“Over there by Green-Wood Cemetery,” said Phil. “They call it ‘South Park Slope’ now, trying to get the fancy-pantses we serve in here to buy buildings out there. Ain’t gonna stick, though. We got ghouls scarin’ ’em off.”
“Bring your brother-in-law and his daughter to the carnival!” said Rita.
“I’ll think about it,” said Phil. As we waved good-bye to Rita, Phil raised a tangled eyebrow at me, and I smiled. He was done thinking about it.
As soon as Rita sashayed away, a man decked out in a peach suit edged onto her empty stool. Meanwhile, Mom was speeding around the dining room in her red dress and red heels like a fire truck. I’d been so lost in rat city, I hadn’t noticed that the restaurant was getting slammed.
“Mom’s getting a workout tonight,” I said.
“Sara hates this job,” said Phil. He kept a tray of glasses filled to the brim amazingly steady as he passed it to a waiter. “But what’s she gonna do? She’s got no experience. Guillaume only hired her ’cause I begged him. Between you, me, and the fence post, it helps that your mother looks like a cross between Ava Gardner, Angelina Jolie, and what God dreams up when he’s makin’ his coffee. But I tell you what, we get a hundred fashion models in here every week carryin’ their résumés like they’re tickets to the prom.”
“I’m surprised you wanted to work with her,” I said. “She’s even meaner to you than she is to me.”
“Your mother and me are like family, Claude—we’ve known each other too long. Okay, I confess. Getting her hired wasn’t that hard. Guillaume thinks he oughtta be rubbin’ elbows with—how do you wanna call it?—underworld celebrities.” Ice cubes clinked as Phil dropped them in glasses. He lowered his voice. “That’s why he hired me. For my authenticity. You believe that? He wanted dirt from the streets. Loves bragging to his rich customers that his barkeep here was pretty well connected to the big guys, back in the day. He thinks that’s impressive or somethin’, and for this kind of money I’ll put on a show. Humor him with his whaddayacallit, authentic Brooklyn thing, right to the bank.”
“I been thinkin’ a lot about who’s authentic in Brooklyn myself, lately,” I said.
“Yeah, Brooklyn is stylish these days. Brooklyn! Who knows why? And as long as I’m makin’ this kind of money, who cares?” Phil cackled. “Guillaume’s a sweetheart. Got the backbone of a bowl of Malt-O-Meal.”
The way Phil’s bony fingers sped through his usual motions—mixing drinks, handing them out, grabbing napkins, reaching for limes—it looked almost automatic. Like his fingers could do the job without him.
“Do you need me to leave?” I asked.
“Stay!” said Phil, as he handed two cocktails to a lady with droopy shirtsleeves. “Don’t leave me alone with these people. Talk to me.”
Mom had said she didn’t want me to become a barfly, but it was such a pleasant way of avoiding reality. I took a sip of my pineapple juice. “So you’re gonna visit your niece this weekend? How come I never heard about her?”
“My niece? My niece, the niece I talk about all the time?” said Phil.
I definitely needed to become a better listener.
Phil handed a cocktail to a lady wearing an expensive-looking watch and pulled his wallet out of his pocket. He flipped open the wallet to a blurry photo of a girl younger than me who sorta resembled him. Which wasn’t as scary as it sounds, but it wasn’t nature giving her the greatest birthday present either. “Her ninth birthday party, over in Jersey, a couple years back. I rented a horse.”
“She’s my age? How come I’ve never met her? I know I’d remember that.”
“You kiddin’ me? My no-good brother-in-law doesn’t let the kid out of the backyard. Real life’s gonna be a shock for her. Gonna have to toughen up my little angel someday, but let it wait. We ain’t all born into greatness like you.”
“Greatness,” I said. I put my toothpick in my mouth and chewed it. I felt like having a Pepe Renaud moment, pounding the bar and barking in my perfect French, “My grandfather was a thief! My father is a rat! You call that born into greatness? I call that born into a pack of snivelin’ snails!” But since I speak even less French than I do Chinese, I probably would’ve just yelled, “Escargot!” Which is French for snails, which in a joint like this would’ve ordered me a side dish.
Phil flipped his wallet shut and held up a finger to a customer who was trying to get his attention.
“Sir,” called another customer in a fake-polite voice. “Can I get some help here?”
“Maybe you better run after all, Claude,” muttered Phil. “The liberal elite want Bellinis and mochatinis and all the other silly cocktails that keep this place in business by the markup alone. Have fun at the carnival. Kick a clown for me.”
I watched Phil lean over the bar to take an order and hopped off my stool. A carnival wasn’t at the top of my list of things to do this weekend either, but I had no choice. I was helping Mother Fingerless at her stuffed-mutant table.
Which was insane!
I headed home to rustle up the rat and get some answers. I may not have known who Alma Lingonberry was, but at least I knew why I was helping Mother Fingerless help her get well soon. Which was because I’d promised the old lady I would.
What was Dad’s excuse?
The rat, the rat. Rat-a-tat-tat.
A LIVE APPEARANCE
Faced with what is right, to leave it undone shows a lack of courage.
—Confucius, philosopher
The rat was not in the nest. So I checked my e-mail, out of habit.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Come and play a ton of games
Let’s have fun and be together
We’re people, all the same
Even during dark & stormy weather.
—Alma Lingonberry
THE SUNSET PARK CARNIVAL IS ALMOST HERE. Are you coming? It’s Saturday at the basilica!
Why am **I** such an eager beaver? Beca-a-ause:
My doctors are letting me drop by for half an hour
***not even kidding***
Cool, right? 1 of my friends will be selling handmade collectibles and I want 2 give her a big hug, and so should u.
Meet me:
At the craft table with the big pink flag
At 6PM
I am probably (warning) going 2 look like a ferret, all scrawny. Who cares? See u there!
And there was another e-mail, just for me.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
dear claude,
what’s up, girl? sorry i’ve been gone so long. how are u? me, i’m feelin better! i even talked to my doctor about the soup smell, like u said. she couldn’t fix it, but i made her laugh. maybe i’m learning something from u! also just wanted 2 add becuz i forgot. i am ***so super sorry*** yr grandpa died. altho i’ve never met yr grandpa, he sounds like
a superstar. maybe he can live on thru u? anyways wish u were online right now. will u tell me more stories? sounds like u will b there saturday? THANK u. embarrassing having people give me money, 2 be honest. k gotta go. can’t wait 2 finally meet! can we talk in private??
xo almz
I shut my laptop, feeling seasick. I wasn’t heartless. I wasn’t heartless at all.
If she wasn’t my parents, then couldn’t Alma Lingonberry still just be some corny kid?
At least one other person needed the answer to that question as much as I did. I made a call.
“What’s up with those e-mails?” asked second-grade-voice Lala. “Do you think she’s really coming?”
Honestly?
I hoped so.
I’m not saying I thought so. Or that I didn’t think so.
I’m just telling you what I hoped.
We stuck with our plan to meet at our bench in the park on Saturday and head to the basilica together. After we hung up, I looked out my window. Since our fight, Brett’s voice had been stuck on repeat in my head. For sure some of what he’d said was wrong. Like that I thought everything was funny because my family was so important. Like that I thought he was boring.
But not all of it. Since the day we met, Brett was the one person on earth I had never had to explain my family to. I was supposed to be the same thing for him.
All summer, I’d only been thinking about myself. Not that I didn’t have important things to think about. I did. But the whole time I was carrying around my photograph of the dog pile of gangsters, wishing I could find a way to talk to Brett about the Thing—the fact that my grandfather hurt people, and what to make of it—Brett had been trying to talk to me about his own life. His father, who was gone, even though he was still alive.
I’d have given anything to turn back time and listen to him.
Grandpa Si’s funeral was what had gotten Brett into Chinese philosophy in the first place. The funeral program was in my desk drawer. I’d never read it. Maybe that seems strange. But this was a funeral program. Having Grandpa’s whole life wrapped up like that, it felt too final. Like nothing new would ever happen to him. It was already all written up.
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