Everybody Loves Somebody (29 page)

“Did not.”

The girl started to cry. The boy started to cry. “Mama,” they wailed together, running toward the gravel path leading up the
hill, each of them vowing to the wind to tell their mama what had happened. But when they finally made it up to the reservoir
path where their mama and aunt were walking off the fat of their behinds, they found themselves caught up answering questions:

“Why you all alone? Where’d your cousins go?”

“They just ran away.”

“They ran away and left you?”

“Sure, they just left us all alone.”

Forgetting that they were mad at each other, the two children led the women back down to the lilac grove where they’d been
abandoned. They found the big kids in a heap by the tennis courts, pounding and pulling in a terrible fight. When their mama
found out that a plastic walking stick had caused all the trouble, she grabbed it from the hands of one of the twins and promised
to use the stick to whack the butt of any child who wasn’t back at the car within ten seconds. “One,” she began to count as
the children took off, calling, “Twothreefourfive...” behind them. With her sister, the mother dissolved in laughter and twirled
the plastic cane like a baton before flinging it into the weeds.

T
HE RAIN STARTED TO FALL
at dusk. At first it was a prickling rain—tiny drops like the snipped heads of needles falling from a dull gray sky. Then
the cloud bed turned the green of old copper, and the rain stopped for an eerily still period, and the air became thick and
damp, sucking the street noises into a vacuum of silence. At about nine the real deluge began, three inches of rain in an
hour reported at the airport, the winds breaking branches and whipping apart power lines, the sky pulsing with lightning,
bolts cracking trees in two right down the middle, thunder crashing like waves against stone cliffs.

On the reservoir hill rainwater collected in the gully of the path leading down to the field. Soon a full stream was flowing
along the track used by joggers and mountain bikers, softening the dirt to a thin mud that bubbled out of the ruts and spread
across the grass beside the tennis courts. Bushes crumpled beneath the flattening force of the wind. Twigs and refuse collected
in swirling bunches. The rain fell through the night, turning the lilac field into a swamp. Birds clung to broken nests. Worms
washed into the sewer. A huge branch snapped from a silver maple and landed on a tennis court, collapsing the net. And in
a weedy patch at the base of the hill, not far from the path, the Lucite cane sank bit by bit into the melting earth until,
by morning, it was completely buried.

W
HEN CORKY’S CRAVING PARLOR
at the corner of Monroe and Culver was still Sal’s Mini-Mart and Delite’s daughter Ta’quilla was three years from being born,
two years before Abraham Groslik took his last walk across the park and one year before the city got to work building up the
curbs and bricking the crosswalks, the two girls from East High discovered that Sal wasn’t easy anymore. “Blame the feds,”
he said. “No ID, no sale.”

Oh, come on, Sal. They would give him ten dollars for a five-dollar six-pack. Fifteen dollars. Okay then, how about twenty
dollars? They didn’t have twenty dollars between them, but if they did, would he sell them the beer? It’s Friday night, they
reminded him. They knew what day of the week it was, though they hadn’t been to school since April. But Delite knew it was
Friday because she’d seen the rabbi covering the temple’s bingo sign across the street. And Merry knew it was Friday thanks
to the calendar behind Sal. It’s Friday, Sal, come on. They weren’t planning on getting drunk and running their car into a
tree—they didn’t even have a car. All they wanted was beer to go with their pizza. But they’d spend the whole night thirsty
thanks to Sal, who wouldn’t sell them the beer.

“Now get outta here, girls, go on. And hold the door for ol’ Abe while you’re at it.”

But Delite didn’t hold the door for no Jew man. Delite was no slave girl.

“Whoa, wait a sec. What did you call Abe?”

“I didn’t call him nothing.”

“You sure did call him something. You better say sorry for that something.”

Abe just stood there blinking against the store’s strong lights. He hadn’t heard Delite’s slur and wasn’t quite sure what
was happening or why. He’d spent another lazy day in his apartment reading the newspaper. Now all he wanted was orange juice.
He was determined to get the carton juice. Sal kept putting the bottled juice on discount, and Abe kept falling for the trick.
That’s a real entrepreneur who can sell you juice in a bottle when you prefer juice in a carton. Abe intended to ignore all
signs advertising sales. But first he had to remedy the situation of the angry girl.

“Hello,” he said, blinking.

The girl stared at him. Abe watched as comprehension slowly lit her face.

“You stop condescendin’ me!” she said.

What did she mean, condescendin’ her? And why for God’s sake was she flicking open that sharp little blade? Abe noticed specks
of rust on the metal and tried to remember when he’d last had a tetanus shot. He wondered if the girl could be mollified with
a dollar. He wondered what her friend was thinking.

One girl was angry. The other was scared. “Girl,” the scared friend asked, “what you doin’?”

“Let’s talk about this,” said Abe, who used to be known for saying inappropriate things to his friends, when he still had
friends, before they all died one after the other of heart failure and stroke and pneumonia. He knew that he was awkward and
that with each passing year he was getting awkwarder. Or was it more awkward? No matter what he’d heard and read along the
way, when old age hit him he wasn’t prepared. Old age is a crime against humanity, he thought.

“I done with talkin’,” said Delite, clearly borrowing her dialogue from television. That was sad, too—the hours young people
spent in front of the television these days.

“Delite, let’s go,” said her scared friend.

“Sal, we gettin’ that beer. Merry, get that beer. We takin’ it and walkin’ out.”

“Let’s just go.”

“Shut your mouth, pisshead.”

The way girls talked to girls. The lives they lived. Their hopelessness. Abe figured the angry girl could tell a lot of sad
stories, though she wasn’t yet sixteen. Or was she?

“How old are you?” he asked. He knew from the girl’s expression that it was a stupid question, unworthy of a reply. She could
only roll her eyes at Abe’s stupidity. She had beautiful eyes with shapely lids dusted with pollen, yet Abe could guess that
she didn’t know how beautiful she was.

“I wonder if anyone has ever told you you’re beautiful,” he said. He meant it only as a compliment. So why did the girl stamp
her foot as though she were flattening a sand castle and say with icy sophistication, “I declare, I hate this white man”?

Why did she hate him? Why did the good Lord extend the capacity for hatred to beautiful young girls? Why wasn’t tomorrow yesterday?
These were a few of the many questions that deserved to be asked. But Abe knew better than to try to interview a girl who
was holding an open switchblade in her hand. Despite his reluctance to leave the situation unresolved, he didn’t have a choice.
“All right, then. Good day.”

But you didn’t just up and “good day” Delite when the day wasn’t near good. The day had been flawed by the issue of disrespect.
It all went wrong as soon as Abe walked through the door.

“Dirty ol’ man callin’ me beautiful without even knowin’ me.”

Did he have to know her to know the kind of girl she was? Luckily, he didn’t ask this question. Instead, he asked the scared
friend if she liked Sal’s ice cream. He assumed that the question conveyed his obvious intention—he would buy an ice cream
cup for both the girls. He thought it a generous offer, and he was surprised by the girl’s expression of bewilderment. “You’re
looking at me,” Abe said with a gentle smile, “like I’m from another planet.” The comment felt appropriately self-deprecating
and helped to put him at ease, despite the confusion and danger. He decided to continue along the same line. “Like I don’t
speak English.” He knew he could be amusing. If he put his mind to it, he could steal the show. The amateur actor in him took
possession. “I’m a speaking English, ain’t I?” He tapped his cane against the edge of the door for emphasis. A glance at his
reflection in the glass assured him that he was as funny as he thought he was. “Ain’t I?”

“You,” said the angry girl. “You.” She couldn’t find a predicate to attach to the pronoun. She couldn’t think of anything
to say, so instead she used the knife in her hand to communicate her disgust, thrusting it up until the tip dented the grizzled
cushion under ol’ Abe’s chin.

“Ouch,” he said.

“Ouch is just the beginnin’,” she said.

“Oh, Delite, we’re in trouble now,” said her friend.

“I tell you who’s in trouble.”

“I say we’re in trouble.”

Even at that moment, when the experience of being in the world was magnified by the possibility of an abrupt end, Abe wanted
to smile once more at the girls. And to think that the angry girl was so absorbed in her anger she remained unaware of the
scowling man in uniform who had appeared behind her like a shadow when a light comes on.

“Drop the weapon,” ordered the officer.

Outside in the summer dusk, a car moved slowly along the avenue toward the intersection ahead. Inside, Abe heard for the first
time since he’d entered the store the sportscaster on Sal’s radio. He became aware of a rotten smell, the smell of frozen
fried fish thawing in the sun. He thought about the castor oil his mother used to serve him in a metal thimble. For a moment
he pitied himself, or pitied with cold detachment the individual named Abraham who had survived eighty-two years of indignities.
But in the next moment he was remembering the pleasures of lovemaking. He thought about his wife, who’d died in 1989. He thought
about how he was prepared to admit that despite the hundreds of times he’d wished himself dead so he could be with her in
heaven, he felt lucky to be alive.

Here he was in time—an old man who’d come to Sal’s to spend a portion of his Social Security on carton orange juice. What,
he asked himself, was meant to happen next? Abe reasoned that he should take the time to think of words that might change
the outcome. But the desire to do something immediately was overwhelming, and though he sensed it was a mistake, he couldn’t
stop himself from knocking the girl’s arm away with the handle of his cane in a single brisk motion, which caused the scared
girl to scream, the angry girl to stumble, and the officer to pull his finger back against the trigger.

Y
OU WATCH A MOVIE ON TV
, you want the guarantee that by the end it adds up to something. But this worthless movie—Raymond made the mistake of watching
the whole thing, wasting the two hours he should have spent finishing his paper on Thomas Jefferson.

It was too bad that Raymond had to think about Thomas Jefferson. All he wanted from the future was to become a rich lawyer
and spend his time suing his neighbors for negligence and fraud. He had a plan. It was too bad that his plan involved a little
education.

But let me tell you about this movie,
Raymond wrote in an e mail to his girlfriend, Clarisse, who lived in Buffalo.

Theres this teacher accused of downloading child porno stuff and tho the charges thrown out in court hes fired from his job
and then he cant land another job teaching he cant even get jack in another state and then he tries to make a living at the
mall but he freaks after lacing up 27 pairs of sneakers for some idiot who cant decide what to buy he just up and quits and
then he ends up washing dishes somewhere but the manager hears that this faggot has a thing about kids and thats it the guy
is out of work again and now he cant even bring himself to go looking for another job anyway it turns out its easier to collect
a check from social services and when its used up he sits on street corners and begs he does ok by begging but he spends the
money on booze so thats his life he begs all day and gets drunk all night he doesnt wash he doesnt pick up the phone he doesn’t
even have a phone and thats the end.

Raymond didn’t add,
It was one of those movies with some sneaky truth in it.
He didn’t admit that the story got him thinking about what mattered. He didn’t say that all he wanted in life was Clarisse.
He didn’t want to work the graveyard shift at the grocery store on East Henrietta plus finish the essay on Thomas Jefferson
so he could get his high school equivalence and apply to college. He didn’t even want to go to college. He wanted to get on
the bus and go to Buffalo and spend the rest of his life with Clarisse. As long as they were together, everything else would
work out.

Fingers idling against the keyboard. Desk awash in the white light from his screen.
Baby,
he wanted to write,
we got to be together.

Clarisse was everything to him. And yet he’d never been able to bring himself to tell her exactly this because he was afraid
he’d scare her away. What if he wasn’t everything to her? What if she was biding time, waiting for a better opportunity, and
Raymond Johnson was just a trial run?

Or else she was biding time waiting for Raymond Johnson to make his move.
What you waiting for, Raymond?
Suppose he wrote,
Clarisse, will you marry me?
Suppose she was waiting at the other end to say yes?

The enigma that is an eighteen-year-old girl. What did Raymond know for sure? He knew what he felt about Clarisse. He wanted
to believe that she felt the same for him.

Anythings believable,
he typed, almost without volition.
One thing leads to another,
he typed, then paused, resting his fingers on the keyboard, and took a deep breath.
One day I met you and the same day I fell in love with you. Clarisse Clarisse Clarisse I love you.

He didn’t hesitate—he sent the message on its way then quickly shut down the computer since he didn’t want to stare at the
screen waiting for a reply.