by Brian Selfon
The wig reads as though words are just sounds. Then she pushes documents at Kerasha. “Sign by the Post-its. I put them there for you.” Her smile tells Kerasha to be grateful. Kerasha knows this smile from Sister Xenia, one of the senior nuns at the halfway house where Kerasha has been staying for the last month. The documents are a dull rainbow of carbon paper. They smell like gunpowder.
We wear the mask that grins.
“Those Post-its are so helpful,” Kerasha says. “Thank you.” She signs the papers. Pushes them back across the desk. The wig reshuffles them, clips some and staples others. Lines them up in three piles. She mumbles something about “conditional discharge” and “reincarceration,” and Kerasha wishes she could pay attention. Knows she ought to, but she’s distracted, squirming, anxious—and this amazes her—to get back to Sisters of Mercy. Dinner tonight will be gray vegetable soup and butter rolls—that’s not the draw. Waiting for her under the half-collapsed mattress she shares with a failed suicide is a gorgeous copy of Saint Augustine’s Confessions. She liberated it from Sister Xenia’s locked library just last night. Stayed up reading about how Augustine monkey-fucked some woman in his church, timed her groans to synchronize with the tolling of the bells. This is how to do it, she thinks. If you know you’re going to be saved, fall first, and fall all the way down.
Daydreams of her favorite saint break apart when she hears the words “your appointment.” Focus, Kerasha. There are rules to follow. First, don’t get caught. Second, when there’s an appointment, show up. Franklin was not hell, far from it. But she robbed the warden on her way out, and every warden is a genius when it comes to revenge. Going back is not an option.
She picks up the appointment slip on her way out. Dr. Andrew Xu, tomorrow at four o’clock. Apparently she needs a physical now, and with Andrew—of course it’s a guy. His hands will be moist, and they’ll be all over her. Then she’ll have to decide: report him and be transferred to another pair of moist hands, or snap off his chode and go back into the cage. Fuck you, Andrew Xu. Fuck your moist hands.
Already violated, she begins to plan her retribution.
Andrew Xu turns out to be a slim, balding man with a thin ponytail down to the small of his back.
Turns out, motherfucker, to be a psychiatrist.
He indicates the couch across from his armchair, his hands small, girlish. Dr. Andrew Xu will be the greatest trial of her life. It comes to her with perfect certainty. It is whispered by Saint Augustine himself.
She thinks of the wig and knows this is her vengeance. Unplanned, yes, but a kind of cosmic justice Kerasha usually doesn’t believe in. Payback for what Kerasha took from her. A half block from that beastly, mumbling bureaucrat, Kerasha felt something heavy in her pocket. Reached inside and discovered a stapler. Kerasha hadn’t meant to swipe it, hadn’t even noticed herself doing it. But sometimes your hands do the work for you.
No doubt Dr. Xu would have something to say about this. If she tells him.
If she lets him in.
chapter 3
Family. Shecky Keenan once thought he’d never have one. But on the day before Emil’s murder, he walks into his home, wiping sweat from his face, and here they are, seated in his dining room. The cousins are both orphans, and though everyone in this room is mixed race, Henry and Shecky look white, and Kerasha, black. For Shecky this proves a point. The three of them are the family he glued together, and Shecky wouldn’t want any other.
Tall, angular, and sinewy, Henry is the closest thing to a son Shecky will ever get. His mother, Molly, was Shecky’s first cousin. A part-time artist and full-time boozer, she drank herself into a car crash when Henry was seven. His father, Alessandro, went down three years later, dying with a brain tumor, but technically from an aneurysm. Poor bastard. Alessandro spent his last year in the psych ward, the tumor having made a monster of the gentle man.
And how Henry has changed. He was a chubby fifth-grader when he moved into Shecky’s house on Hart Street. Couldn’t sleep alone. A crier at home but a brawler at school—Shecky shivers now, remembering the stories. The pencil he stabbed into one kid’s hand, the combination lock he slammed into the face of another. To his credit, Henry never started fights, and he backed down from fights with smaller kids. Give him a worthy asshole, though, and Henry would get to work. Guidance counselors and teachers all said the same thing: Henry’s fights were red and dirty—eye pokes, crotch kicks, quick hits to the throat. Half the fights, though, Shecky never heard a word about. Henry would just come home battered and bandaged. Wouldn’t say nothing, had no peaceful way to let out his feelings. A little ball of fury. But look at him now, how he’s grown into his anger. A rugged man, broad shoulders, broad chest. Well over six feet tall, and his legs stretch under the table and rest on the opposite chair. You wouldn’t guess that Henry and Shecky share any DNA at all. But fuck appearances, the proof is here on the dining room table.
The sketch pad in front of Henry is bigger than a pizza box, and in his hand is a pencil. He picks this stuff up at the art-supply store over on Myrtle Avenue. Wasted beer money, other kids probably think. It’s almost a joke: a strong, physical kid like Henry, laboring—and that’s the word for it, laboring—over sketches. The paintings Henry keeps in the basement, but the sketches Shecky finds everywhere around the house. On the back porch he’s found sketches of that tabby that hunts and fucks in the alley. In the upstairs office, where Henry is working more and more these days, Shecky finds the desk covered with sketches of the faces and back rooms Henry has gotten to know through the family business. The kid has a red streak, but here he sits, trying to turn that into a kind of beauty. And maybe speaking back to his mom, too.
Shecky loves thinking about this, the artistic spirit in the family. He was a four-year member and two-term treasurer of the drama club at Bushwick High School. (Stole from it far less than he stole for it, when Jesus knows he could have cleaned the thing out.) Still a thespian as recently as last Christmas, when he played the Ghost of Christmas Future in the Watts Community Theater’s annual production. So he understands Henry’s need to express something true. Knows the power of the urge, the violence in it, and how when it comes up, you can’t fight it. You’re the vehicle, and something wicked does the steering.
Henry’s been in this house twelve years now—twelve—and each year has passed like a breath. Hard to believe. The downside to happy times, what life takes from you in kind, how time can just up and vanish. But Shecky will pay it, pay double if that’s the ask. He who grew up amid such squalor and violence, getting passed like a dirty joint among a trio of vicious uncles. Uncle Samuel, who beat him, wrecked his ankles with a pipe. Uncle Joseph, who used Shecky’s name and social security number, busted out Shecky’s credit for drinking money. Let’s not talk about Uncle Tomas.
Henry rotates his sketch pad ninety degrees. Goes at it from another angle. His face is lined with concentration, the palm of his right hand black from the pencil. The kid may brawl again, but at this moment, and Shecky’s lonely years taught him to appreciate moments, Henry is an artist.
Shecky’s eyes turn to Kerasha, his second charge. The miracle of her arrival last month is still so fresh that sometimes, when he’s walking distracted into his own kitchen, he can startle at the sight of her. Or he’ll step into the bathroom and wonder at the smell of lavender, and it’ll take him a beat to remember that it’s her lotion. Her bathroom, for that matter—he and Henry moved their toiletries to the one downstairs. She’s beautiful, Kerasha, with sharp eyes, quiet feet, and quick hands. Shecky may be biased, but in his opinion, the three of them make a perfectly wonderful, perfectly Brooklyn family of misfits.
“I have an update,” Kerasha says. “My little project.”
“Let’s hold that thought,” Shecky says. He tilts his head toward Henry, who, thankfully, hasn’t looked up from his sketch pad. Kerasha gives Shecky a coconspirator’s tight smile: we’ll talk later. Then she turns back to her book.
Give the girl credit
, she’s been working from the day she moved in. And she didn’t bat an eye when he explained that the family business depended on compartmentalization. “I’ll trust you just like I trust Henry,” he told her. “But you’ll have to trust me about when to look away.”
How at ease, how in place she looks now, reclining on that leather armchair Shecky keeps in the corner. Used to be his own favorite seat, when he wasn’t at the table eating, but now he wouldn’t touch it without permission. And he’s glad for this, glad she’s claiming her own space here. She has a foot on the windowsill, another swaying to the rhythm of—wait, what’s she reading—Jesus fuck, it’s Sophocles. No lightweight, this one. But this morning it was a poetry chapbook. Each day means a new book for her, sometimes two, and this worries him.
They’re all stolen.
They can put her back.
The cage doesn’t care that she mostly grabs paperbacks, which, God knows, are worthless these days. All the cage knows is predicate felon—the pharmacy bust, then the escapes.
All the cage knows is, Welcome back.
But he won’t let it happen.
You mean you won’t let it happen again, a wicked voice whispers.
A dim memory from his cousin Paulette’s filthy apartment, which Shecky visited exactly once: a big-eyed skinny girl, small and quick. And those big eyes had fixed on him, reached into him—and then he’d looked away, and kept on looking away. For years. And then he’d heard she got caught, her sentence maxed, then extended, because of the escapes. And suddenly his half-forgotten visit to Paulette’s apartment was all he could think of, his memory of the big-eyed girl never leaving him alone. Her stare was on him again, defiant. Vulnerable.
I’m smarter, I’m faster, she said without saying. You don’t know what I can get away with. You don’t know what I’ve done. Her stare had been like a middle finger, but he’d sensed the longing behind it. She knew he couldn’t keep up, but she’d wanted so badly for someone to try.
And now, settling into his seat at his dinner table, Shecky finds himself back in the moment he completed the application to be Kerasha’s parole sponsor—which he’d signed here, in this very seat. He remembers how he’d turned the pages one last time, double-checking everything he’d written, and how it had dawned on him that he’d hardly had to lie at all. Almost against his principles, to submit a legitimate document like that. At no profit. But he’d felt, and still feels, that this submission was a promise.
You have a home here, he thinks at Kerasha, looking at her across the room. This is your home, and I’ll be your family.
As long as you’ll have me.
Kerasha, fucking mind reader that she is, sneaks him a melting half smile as she turns a page.
“My home, my family,” Shecky says, hearing his voice shake, hoping the kids wouldn’t tease him. My family—what’s left of it.
Someday he’ll tell the kids about Dannie, his big sister. He wants to tell Henry about the girl who, like him, was quick to raise her fists. And Kerasha might be interested to hear that Sophocles ran in the family, Dannie having played the title role in the high school production of Antigone. And Kerasha might laugh to hear that when Antigone’s suicide was announced in the play, Shecky—just a child then—had screamed so loudly, and so insistently, he’d had to be carried from the theater.
But think about what Dannie would see if she were here. The artist-enforcer, with his sketch pad. The thief and her poetry. And Shecky himself, a grizzled fixer who, following Dannie’s lead, dabbles in theater. Yes, if Dannie were here, she’d see a miracle. Home. Family. If there are any holy words left, here they are.
And Jesus fuck, Shecky needs them. Because there are unholy words, too, and the fuckers have been coming at him fast.
From outside: a car ignition. Shecky jumps, goes to the window—just a blur going around the corner, too late to see anything. Unsettled, he returns to the table with a put-on smile.
“Everything okay?” Kerasha’s eyes point him back to the window. She obviously wants to talk about her update, but he’s not ready, and besides, Henry’s here.
“Just a car. Startled me.”
But the truth is, Shecky is far past startled, and he has his reasons. The email from Bank of America last Wednesday: Transfer denied. Coming at him old school, on Saturday, a paper letter from Chase: Internal inquiry. And the Capital One letter in his drugstore PO Box just yesterday: Account closure.
Shecky has heard nothing definitive, and he can’t investigate when the accounts aren’t in his name. But these notices, when pieced together, form a question that could come only from the devil. And this question had Shecky springing up in bed at three o’clock this morning, had him coughing out fear until his eyes were wet.
They’re wet again now.
Blearily, then, he looks at Henry, sharpening his pencil. At Kerasha, turning another page. At the empty chair, where Dannie will never sit. And Shecky can’t ignore it any longer—the question that’s been whispering all this time.
Are they on to me?
* * *
Shecky rises and goes into the kitchen. Fires up the oven broiler. Opens the cabinets, takes down dishes, glasses. Considering, all this time, how little the kids know—about him, about anything.
Too fucking young.
How could they imagine that you could wake up twenty years old, and by the time you sit down for lunch, you’re fifty-eight. That it’s possible to have no real memories from half your life, that time can disappear in you, and a lonely heart can shrink and turn cold.
But how his races these days, thumping warm, thumping in double time, in makeup time, when he steps into a room and sees family. Over twelve years gone now, his cold, lonely quiet. Feels like a thousand.
Oven ready, apple-chicken sausage inside. Water boiling, rigatoni added. A dash of salt. In the wok: olive oil, green pepper, red pepper, sliced eggplant. Shecky, a part-time waiter when he was in his twenties, returns to the dining room with dishes, glasses, and silver. “How are we today?” he asks, setting the table. “What have we done, who have we seen?”
Silence, though Kerasha is giving him a loaded smile: Do you really want to know what I’ve seen? Now?
When Shecky shakes his head no, Kerasha shrugs and goes back to Sophocles.
Not like pulling teeth, small talk with these two. Teeth break off sooner than you’d think. More like pulling off hands. But fuck it, he’ll love them, he’ll be here for them, even after … Stop it. Don’t think about them leaving. Don’t follow that thought, don’t even look at it. But the thing about time is, you can turn away from it all you like, it’ll wash everything away just the same.
The table is set. Shecky makes a quick visit to the ground-floor bathroom, where he pushes open the frosted-glass window and scans the alley. Inventory: garbage bin, recycling bin. Two rusting bicycles, a cracked plastic snow sled, a pile of loose lumber. No sign of the tabby, no sign of danger—just an ordinary summer evening.
He wants so badly to believe this.
He closes the window. Flushes the toilet and runs the sink, for appearances. Comes out, returns to the dining room, and here they are, both of them at the table now—his kids.
“Guys, come on, I’ve been looking at spreadsheets all day. Give me something. A grunt. An anything. Kids, please.” Desperately: “Are you alive?”
The scratch of Henry’s pencil. Kerasha’s eye roll, but also the little upturn of her mouth.
Kids, he thinks, shaking his head at himself. Henry is twenty-two, Kerasha twenty-three. They’re already grown up, they’ll move out and on. It’s your core hope for them—it has to be—and when it’s fulfilled, you’re alone.
Shecky returns to the kitchen. Checks the sausage, turns down the flame under the vegetables. Returns to the dining room with beer bottles for everyone.
Guinness from a bottle—his father would reel, slap, shout. Fucking sacrilege, he’d say, and disown him all over again. But that’s fine, Shecky isn’t like his father. He’
s alive, for one, and thank Jesus. And second, he’s in the one place his father was never to be found: home with his family. Shecky wonders, though, what the racist bastard would make of this pack of mutts.
“Moving past the palaver,” Shecky says, as if he weren’t the only one talking, “and turning to the business.” Business: the word is hardly out and the kids’ eyes are up, they’re facing him, Henry even putting down his pencil. Money can divide a family, but in this house, there’s comfort in shoptalk.
“We’ve got two heavies tomorrow.” He looks to Kerasha to make sure she’s following.
She raises an eyebrow: Really, Uncle Shecky, you’re testing me?
Shecky smiles an apology, but it was just last week that he began her training. Explaining, as they chopped vegetables together, that a heavy was a heap of loose cash, ten thousand or more, which had to be magicked into bank money—clean, respectable, and pseudonymized.
“The first heavy’s a rough two-fifty in dirties,” Shecky says. “The second heavy is an exact three hundred thousand in crisps.” He again looks to Kerasha: You still with me?
Now she raises both eyebrows.
Shecky smiles another apology, but really he’s not sorry at all. Can’t be too careful. Profit from the two heavies tomorrow means a mortgage payment for the family. So, yes, Kerasha’s always watching, always listening, and can take in a room like a police wire. But it’s important that she understands how you can tell a client by the kind of cash they bring in: the office jobbers with their “crisp” cash, usually flat and clean. The street clients, whose crumpled, stained bills have to be handled with rubber gloves.