Authors: Christopher Hebert
“That’s what I’m talking about,” R.J. said. “A couple weeks ago it was something else, a place that used to make shoes.”
On the sidewalk, firefighters picked through a small pile of rubble, while a stooped man in a wrinkled suit watched over their shoulders. Beyond a police barricade, just at the edge of the frame, stood several onlookers. There was a stocky Hispanic guy with a ponytail. And there was a black man April vaguely thought she recognized. And between them, as if April had known all along, stood McGee, dressed in the same wig she’d had that night at HSI, blond hair reaching down to her shoulders.
“Oh God,” April said, placing her hand over her mouth. “Oh God.”
“What?” R.J. said, scanning the page.
“What has she done?” April tried to stop them, but one of her tears got away, blazing a trail of blurred ink down the newspaper page.
R.J. saw her tears, too, and April could tell he didn’t know what to say.
In her notebook McGee kept two lists. If she opened it in the front, spiraling back the tattered, duct-taped cover, there were addresses. The addresses came to her on scraps of paper—receipts and wrappers and corners of magazines. She was in charge of the master list, a column spreading down the left-hand margin, all in the same blue pen, all in her tidy rounded print. Every day, the list grew.
Michael Boni seemed to work by memory, adding places that for one reason or another had pissed him off: a garage that had sold him a worn-out clutch; a bank where the tellers had always looked at him funny; a grocery story where he’d once gotten a can of bad ravioli; the club where he’d been robbed.
Though he later admitted he hadn’t actually been inside the club when the robbery happened. He’d been walking past, on his way to get a coffee, someone in a puffy coat sticking a nine millimeter in his ribs. The club hadn’t even been in business at the time. But still it made the list.
It felt wrong to her, humoring such petty grievances. But they had to start somewhere. Otherwise there was just too much. And anyway, the places were all empty now, the people who had wronged Michael Boni long gone. For all she knew, the owners themselves had their own bad memories they’d just as soon see forgotten.
Darius’s additions to the list were just as arbitrary. To her at least. They were places he passed on the bus on his way to work, depressing sights that caught his eye. Obstructions in the skyline—towers full of gaping windows, like spent candy Advent calendars; and smokestacks caked with dead soot. They were offenses to the eye, which meant they were often large and prominent and hard to get rid of. On their first try, still working out the kinks, they’d managed to inflict barely more than a blemish.
To the entire list, she’d contributed just one address. And she was saving it for when they were ready.
If she opened the notebook in the back, the plain brown cardboard holding on by just a few untorn tabs, she could see the other list, the dozens of letters she’d begun and then abandoned.
Dear Myles:
I love you, though you think I don’t.
Dear Holmes:
I know it was you who broke my mug, the one with the glazed yellow sun. I forgive you.
Dear Myles:
You always smelled best coming in from the cold.
Dear Fitch:
Last New Years Eve I laughed so hard I peed on your couch.
Dear Holmes:
I was the one who broke your watch, the one with the peeling leather strap.
Dear April:
I tried to like Inez. I really did.
Dear Myles:
I don’t know what to say.
Dear Fitch:
Did you know, the first time we met, that your cousin was trying to set us up?
Dear April:
I also question your taste in men.
Dear Myles:
I know that you don’t understand. I’m not sure I do either.
She meant every word. And that was why the letters were impossible to send.
Only one had she succeeded in signing and folding into an envelope, addressed to April, three states away. That one had been easier—also full of things she meant, but all of them comfortably buried in a lie. A lie somewhat softened, she hoped, by cookies.
The knotty pine booth came from a private club in Hamtramck, a dingy, subterranean dive pretending to be a mountain lodge, bear traps and beaver pelts mounted to the walls.
The bright red molded-plastic booth looked like a piece of playground equipment; she’d found it in a hamburger joint on Woodward.
The third booth came from an east side diner, marbled laminate edged in imitation chrome.
“I was in a library,” Dobbs was saying as they staggered across the floor at either end of a wrought-iron patio table. “I had one of those encyclopedias—you know, the big, heavy kind.” With a melodramatic shiver, he fell silent, implying what she supposed was more of his grisly comic book violence.
He liked to talk about his dreams. He was the palest, unhealthiest person Constance had ever known, but he dreamed blockbuster action movies: explosions, chases, high-wire fight scenes. The villains were interchangeable, but Dobbs was the indestructible hero. Except
of course there was nothing heroic about him. Even the table had him gasping, nearly breathless. More than forty years younger than she was, and he let down his end first. At this rate it would be days before they finished.
“The thing is,” Dobbs said, “I’ve never even been in a real fight.”
Constance said, “No kidding.”
By the time they were done for the night, it was three o’clock in the morning. The place didn’t look half bad. They’d managed to squeeze in six tables, three in the center and the three booths along the back wall. No two of them matched. And there was a van full of chairs and lamps and assorted stuff from the housing project, still waiting to be unloaded.
Dobbs sat down at the red booth and poured himself a cup of coffee. “What are you going to call the place?”
Constance came over to join him, her bottom nearly slipping out from under her on the slick plastic bench.
“How about Constance’s?” he said. “Simple but classic.”
“I’ll leave that to you.”
Dobbs lifted his cup, waved it vaguely around the dining room. “This is the future, you know. When everything else collapses—”
“You make it sound romantic.”
“People will remember you,” Dobbs said. “What you started.”
“I prefer when people don’t talk like I’m already dead.”
Dobbs raised his hands in protest.
“Tell me about your parents,” Constance said.
“My parents?”
“These dreams of yours …” Constance said.
He gulped his coffee like water. “You think I’m damaged goods? The product of a troubled childhood?”
She shrugged. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
“They’re lovely people,” he said. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“All right,” Constance said. “Then let me tell you about mine.”
In 1941, Constance said, when she was six and Darrell, her brother, three, her family moved into the Brewster Projects. Getting into Brewster then was like winning the lottery. The place was a marvel, clean and shining and new, the same age as Constance. For a family even to be considered for an apartment, at least one parent needed to have a job. Constance had only one parent, and as far as she knew, her mother had never worked a day in her life.
Constance measured her childhood by her mother’s illnesses—birthdays and holidays entertaining herself in dark, curtained rooms. When her mother was away in the hospital, it was Constance’s job to take care of the apartment and of Darrell. This was when most of Constance’s happiest memories took place. Left to themselves, Constance and Darrell slept curled up together in their mother’s bed. In the morning they strolled to school singing “Chickery Chick” in off-key harmony, and each night they ate lukewarm soup in front of the radio until they dozed off, fully dressed. But the bliss never lasted. As soon as their mother was discharged and sent home, Darrell turned feral, tearing at the couch cushions with his teeth and nails, charging at his mother and sister, butting their legs with his head until their mother shouted, “I guess I have to do everything!” and then closed the door to her bedroom until it was time for Constance to bring her dinner.
Her aunts didn’t believe Constance’s mother was really sick. They thought her illnesses were just a way of getting attention, now that she’d lost her looks. Her mother had been pretty once, the best-looking of all her sisters. Constance had seen the photos herself: tall and generously curved, almond-shaped eyes. But now her skin looked like the dust Constance let gather in the far corners under the dresser.
The doctors must have had a name for it, but Constance’s mother referred to her sickness only as “my condition.” Her condition
required meals in bed. Her condition made it impossible for her to work or wash dishes or buy groceries or do anything strenuous. Her condition responded well to foot massages and heavy doses of rest. Her condition made noise intolerable, except for when she needed to shout orders at Constance through the bedroom door.
Constance did whatever her mother asked. It had never occurred to her that she had a choice.
“And that,” Constance said, “is everything you need to know about my mother.”
Dobbs was slumped in the corner of the plastic bench, half asleep.
She got up to refill the coffeepot. “These dreams are your conscience,” Constance said. “You know that, right?”
“Yeah,” Dobbs said. “I know.”
§
Constance got the oven from Michael Boni. She traded him her old microwave. The stove had been his grandmother’s, and he had no use for it. Everything he ate came straight from a can. He treated eating as if it were a burden.
But the oven still needed to be moved, and only she and Michael Boni were there to do it, now that Dobbs had disappeared.
She hadn’t seen Dobbs since the night he’d helped with the booths and tables. She’d known him only a couple weeks, but she’d gotten used to him, had made the mistake of counting on him to show up. But for three nights in a row, he’d failed to appear at the garden. And Constance wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. Last evening, while she was out watering peas, Clementine had emerged from the weeds, saying, “I know where he is.”
Constance had waved her off. “We’ll manage,” she’d said, though in fact the list of chores she’d assembled for him was already longer than she could remember.
“I can take you,” Clementine had said, offering her hand, determined for some reason not to give up. “There’s these mattresses—”
Constance had cut her off with a shake of her head. “I don’t want to know.”
“He’s getting things ready,” Clementine said. “They’re almost here.”
“It’s okay,” Constance had said. “We’re fine without him.”
Michael Boni was shifty too, but he was almost always there when she went to pound on his door.
They’d set out from his house with the stove an hour ago. He was able to hump the old hunk of steel about three yards at a time before having to stop and rest. So far they’d made it about thirty feet, to the middle of the street, where Michael Boni now squatted with his head between his knees, trying to catch his breath. It was a good thing there wasn’t any traffic.
“Does your son know about this?” Michael Boni said, reaching around to massage his own back.
Constance opened the oven door and peered inside. “Are you sure this thing works?”
“It better.”
She let him rest another couple of minutes. Then Michael Boni wrapped his arms back around the oven and grunted. They made it maybe nine more feet before it all came crashing back down.
“Why do you even want a restaurant?” he said, gasping again for air.
He was doing a lot of whining for someone who still had another whole block to go.
“Did I ever tell you about Charles?” she said.
Charles, Constance said, was one of those people everyone knew. Not just the whole school—the whole neighborhood. But Constance
had always been a grade behind him, and Charles had no reason to notice Constance until she turned seventeen and inherited the figure her mother had lost.
There was an intensity to Charles that drew people toward him. He wasn’t athletic or outgoing. He wasn’t exactly handsome, but he was striking, his brow and his cheekbones so pronounced that his small, deep-set eyes seemed to disappear between them. Even standing face to face, Constance sometimes couldn’t tell where he was looking. It made her uneasy, not knowing if she had his attention. That was Charles’s allure. His gaze was like a gift.
Her only problem with Charles was his friends, James and Bobby. James and Bobby were large and shovel-faced and enjoyed cornering girls in stairwells. Like anyone with any sense, Constance had long made a point of avoiding them. But suddenly they were everywhere she was. Charles and his friends spent most of their time hanging out at the rec center, Constance now in tow. James and Bobby were both trying to become the next Joe Louis, but James was too slow and Bobby’s left arm was stiff as a broom. When the two of them met in the center of the ring, they looked like pigeons tussling. But Charles took their training seriously. Charles took everything seriously. While the boys sparred, Charles would stand at the ropes and take turns waving them over and whispering in their ears. Charles didn’t know the first thing about boxing, but Constance found his confidence transfixing. Watching from a bench in the corner, she was prepared to believe he could do anything.
Michael Boni scraped the stove up onto the sidewalk. “Is that right?” he said, lifting his shirt to wipe the sweat from his face.
“We got married the summer I finished high school,” Constance said, but Michael Boni wasn’t paying attention. He sat down on the curb, looking as though he were about to pass out. “How much
farther?” he said, though he knew perfectly well all they’d managed so far was to cross the street.
Where had she found such feeble men? “We’ll finish it another day,” she said.
Michael Boni looked up at her with hopeful eyes. “The stove or the story?”
“Both,” she said.