The Night Counter (27 page)

IN MIRIAM’S MIND
, her marriage had not been that short. In fact, it wasn’t until three months after they were married that Miriam’s husband died in Vietnam. In the course of their highly sentimentalized marriage—lived mostly apart—Joseph Yusef had managed to leave Miriam with two things: a son still in her womb and a tremendous amount of debt. She had learned to manage both of his legacies, but not without great difficulty. Miriam never spoke to anyone about the sacrifices she had made and vowed to herself that Joe would remain a hero forever—a hero to everyone but Rock, the son she had named after the actor Rock Hudson, one of the many classic film stars she would have preferred to have married.

Rock had known since the fluid drained from his ears as he came out of the birth canal that his father was not a real martyr. His mother was.
They were a team, his mother told him, the only family the other had, and so they had to be honest with each other. She had been very honest with him.

“Joe couldn’t even live long enough to make me give you his father’s first name,” she told the six-year-old Rock when his dying namesake was on the cover of
Time as
the first famous closet homosexual to die of AIDS. “We’re throwing away all your G.I. Joes. Heaven sakes, no Rock of mine is going to play with dolls, even ones that are war heroes like everyone thinks your father was.”

“Good lord, your father gambled away all his money on stupid things,” Miriam said when Rock asked for an increase in his allowance to buy new amps for his band. “After Joe died and you were born, I started out at Smith’s kneading dough. Slaving at four in the morning. Imagine how hard it was to get a baby-sitter for you at that hour. It took me ten years to work up to head baker and fifteen years to clear his debt. That’s why they call money ‘dough,’ you better believe it.”

“For Pete’s sake, Joe never ate,” Miriam warned Rock when he turned down a second helping of hamburger hot dish. “They almost didn’t take him in the army because of his weight. He would have never died a hero then.”

“Holy moly, your father dreamed too much,” Miriam said when Rock announced that his band might get a gig in Youngstown or Akron. “If he was alive today, he’d have died alone with his fantasies. Did you know he talked about opening a hotel in Florida? I worked to the bone to pay off that swampland he bought. Me, I had no dreams, and I ended up being head baker and then assistant manager at Smith’s. That’s how life works.”

For all Miriam said about Joe, Rock allowed himself to think only one word about his father:
resentment
. He resented his father for leaving him a closet martyr for a mother. Starting with his mother and then his namesake, Rock had dealt with a series of people with closet issues all his life.

After Miriam had taken away all of his G.I. Joes, Rock’s head filled up with terrible thoughts he couldn’t stop from coming, thoughts about what life would be like if his father had come back, if they had moved to
the Florida swampland, what Joe would have done if Miriam had forced him to eat seconds of hamburger hot dish. Rock would always get headaches from those thoughts—until Walt Smith saved him. Walt Smith was Miriam’s boss and the owner of Smiths Supermarket. Rock was in third grade when Walt told him about square footage while he was explaining a supermarket remodeling he never went through with.

Ever since then, Rock had gambled nothing in life, dreamed nothing, eaten everything on his plate, and pushed away all terrible thoughts by squaring numbers in his head. He would pick a number and start squaring from there—3 squared, 9 squared, 81 squared, 6,561. When he’d get in the millions, he’d go backward. Twenty-one years later, Rock built homes for people moving on, subdivisions that cloned small towns into outer-ring suburbs of Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Today Rock was pounding nails into the roof of the last still-uncompleted “Mount Vernon Colonial,” the most popular four-bedroom, four-bath model for families planning to move to Sycamore Grove Estates.

“Yo, Rock,” Mike called over from the four-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bath Montebello model he was working on. “I bet if you hadn’t told the swucking architects to add straps to the roofs, this whole subdivision wouldn’t last through one blucking Doppler 10 tornado warning.”

“The ratio of square feet to perimeter was off by 0.1,” Rock called back. “My grandmother could have figured it out in her sleep.”

Rock was feigning modesty, but his spatial and mathematical adeptness, particularly the gift for squaring, was the reason he had gotten a partial scholarship to study engineering at Penn State. But the week of freshman orientation, Miriam had caught a bad cold, and so he had deferred college. She had sniffled that he should go, but her heart hadn’t been in the sniffle. A year later, Rock joined the military. Miriam didn’t get another cold then. She couldn’t have stopped him without looking like an antiwar war hero’s wife. He returned to New Castle after eight years because one doesn’t abandon a war hero’s widow forever.

“Come November, I might take the family down to flippin’ Dolly-wood,” Mike yelled over.

Mike looked forward to the off-season, but Rock hated the winter because he had to fill his working time with what he called the New Castle graveyard shift, literally digging graves. It got pretty hectic sometimes.

The money wasn’t that good, but Miriam didn’t charge him rent. Rock’s only expense was Brittney She was still a little kid, just eight years old, and so there wasn’t much to spend on her yet. Her mall days were still a couple of years off. He already had calculated how much to put aside every month for college.

“Wanna grab a brewski after work?” Mike shouted during a lull in hammering. “Sounds like we could pound back a few.”

Mike always laughed louder the lamer the joke.

“Don’t you got to go to my surprise party, bud?” Rock shouted back.

“Dang, I almost lucking forgot,” Mike yelled. “What the heck do you want me to getcha?
Gardner’s Mathematical Games?
”

“You bet,” Rock hollered. Ever since they had met in first grade, Mike had been getting him the latest
Gardner’s Mathematical Games
for his birthday and Christmas. Aside from becoming a born-again Christian and therefore no longer swearing, Mike had changed little since they were kids, when his academic performance destined him to this job as much as Miriam’s oppressive love had done the same thing for Rock.

After work, Rock and Mike carpooled back to New Castle in Mike’s sky-blue pickup. Rock had driven in the morning, and Mike had to readjust the driver’s seat as he had seven inches on Rock. During their morning drive Mike had slept, because he’d been up all night playing
Left Behind: Eternal Forces
, the Christian video game Rock had gotten him for his birthday.

“Don’t you ducking wish we could afford to live in the houses we build?” Mike asked as he drove. “Brittney’d like that, I betcha.”

“Of course she would,” Rock said. “Who wouldn’t?”

A person could get lost in the subdivisions’ conformity, never having to think about what shade the trim should be or even what door style to get. Rock couldn’t pick a door style without overthinking. It would start
with “What type of wood should I go with?” move on to “Which style would be too heavy for Brittney to open on her own?” shift to “Would Brittney know what to do if there was a fire in the house and she couldn’t open the door?” go on to “Were Brittney’s mother and stepfather thinking about her safety?” and end with “Why did my wife leave me for Mike?”

He didn’t ask Mike his last question as the pickup passed through the green and concrete highway landscape. He never did.

Near their exit, there was a sign that said, W
ELCOME TO
N
EW
C
ASTLE, POPULATION
28,000. Someone had graffitied below “down from 48,000.” Mike rolled through stop signs that had become unnecessary years earlier and drove past houses with yellow ribbons on the mailboxes, past boarded-up diners, bakeries, drugstores, and businesses. Smith’s Supermarket was one of the few places that remained open, as was Nahla’s Restaurant, a Lebanese diner that looked like a pancake house from the outside. “If Joe hadn’t brought me to this backward town, you would have grown up eating great Middle Eastern food in Detroit,” Miriam told Rock every time they passed Nahla’s.

Outside their old high school, two Marine recruiters were talking to a group of boys with hair several inches longer than military regulations. “You hear about Ryan Kapinski?” Mike said. “Sucking dies for their sucking freedom, while his own parents couldn’t afford to pay their Penn Power bill last winter. I’d like to show those prucking Johnny Jihads how to be grateful. Ever wish we were still enlisted?”

Mike made a fist and mimed shoving it through the window, as if the window were an Iraqi.

“Life right here is just fine,” Rock replied.

“Praise Jesus,” Mike said, readjusting the Bible on his dashboard.

Rock had loved the army. The military was the job that paid you to let them do the hard part for you, the thinking part. There wasn’t any better gig. Civilian construction workers sometimes had to calculate where to put the nail, but at Fort Bragg construction projects were mapped out very clearly. Combat was unlikely back then, and so there had been no need to think about killing Johnny Jihads or anyone else.

“You coming to Brittney’s Bible class graduation next week?” Mike asked.

“I got no other plans,” Rock said.

Rock had always hated Sundays the most because everyone was busy with churches, dads, family potlucks—all things that weren’t part of his life. Nowhere to go, plenty of time to think. Walt would come over with a chicken from his store about to hit its expiration date. Miriam would roast it with a rice and cinnamon stuffing, and then the three of them would watch a video Walt had chosen from the 99-cent pile at his store. Walt particularly got a kick out of bringing over
Rocky
movies. Still did.

“I’m goin’ to put in a new kitchen floor this winter,” Mike said. “Carla’s thinking we should get them new tiles, Spanish, they call ’em. I’m thinking plain blue, same as the truck.”

Rock hated how thinking now crept into mindless conversations with Mike, the one person in life who once had been his buffer to deep thought. Why would you put something as beautiful as Spanish tile in a kitchen where people could walk all over it? How had Carla and Mike gone from adulterers to domesticated Christian tilers? Would Carla have stayed with him if he had taken her to Spain or even to New York, as he’d promised, so that she could audition for a musical? Would Brittney end up with a great voice, like her mom? Would she waste her high school years in a band, as Carla had, thinking she’d be the next Madonna? Had he and Mike told Brittney enough times that the military was no place for a girl, even as a doctor, which he hoped she’d be?

Mike pulled up in front of a yellow Craftsman with early-summer daisies and marigolds in bloom. It looked like happy people lived inside.

“Get out so I can pick up your mucking puzzle book from Smith’s,” Mike said with a laugh. As he drove off, he shouted out the pickup’s window: “Too bad God won’t let me look at porn no more. Else I’d get you some.”

Before Rock could head inside, he was grabbed in a tight hug. Rock knew the hugger before he could see her face: Houda, a woman who was two-thirds his height and twice his age and width, was his father’s sister.
She wore her hair, which was just a shade less bright than her red nails, in what she thought was an elegant bouffant.

“Happy birthday, kiddo,” Houda said.

Dawood, standing in the shadow of Houda’s hair, stuck out his hand to Rock. He was some sort of cousin from the family’s village in Lebanon, and he always wanted to shake hands. Houda had taken him in five months earlier, after he’d lost his fry job at Aladdin’s Deli in Queens and ended up owing a lot of people a whole lot more than falafel. Dawood was just another stray for Houda, who had taken in seventeen dogs and three husbands since Rock was born. The dogs and husbands were all gone now. Dawood was the doughnut fryer at Smith’s. However, he preferred to be called a sous-chef.

“I checked your mail for you,” Houda said, and handed Rock several envelopes. “You got six cards.”

Houda opened the mailbox for him every birthday to see if all his other aunts had remembered to send a card. She was the baby-sitter Miriam had found during those 4
A.M.
shifts. Although Houda disliked Miriam, she had helped her maintain Joe’s heroic image. However, unlike Miriam, she didn’t share Joe’s flaws with Rock.

“You’re just like your father, Rock,” she went on. “All the men from our village are so strapping.” Rock was only five foot six, and Dawood was even shorter. What little height Rock had, he owed to Miriam, who was the shortest member of her family but taller than Joe had been.

“We’ll sneak in so your mom doesn’t yell at me for being late for your surprise party,” Houda continued. She gave Rock another pat on the cheek, scratching the bottom of his chin with her shellacked hair, which smelled like fried cauliflower and eggplant. Houda fried all her vegetables, but only secretly, announcing to the world quite convincingly that she had no idea why she was so fat when she was a vegetarian. “Don’t go telling anybody,” she used to warn Rock when she’d make him a fried zucchini sandwich topped with fried tomatoes, fried onions, fried potatoes, and fried mint leaves. His aunt, the closet fryer.