Uncle Janice (30 page)

The apartment door slammed behind him, startling his mother, who should’ve known better. She sat at the kitchen table with her fabric scissors and tomato pincushion and foot-pedal Singer, making her rainbow-fish quilt for yet another one of the expectant mamas in the building. He waved at her. Since morning, every twenty minutes or so, he’d pit-stopped
into the apartment for snacks, bathroom breaks, inhaler hits, and glasses of the powdered Gatorade she had to make by the gallon. There was nothing at all for her to be suspicious about, except perhaps that for the first time in his life he closed his bedroom door softly behind him. A chair went under the knob. The search for his brother’s stash took only seconds, Mikey finding it exactly where he expected to find it: in a VHS clamshell case that on the outside said
DAZZLING DUNKS AND BASKETBALL BLOOPERS
, but on the inside contained pictures torn out of nudie magazines, a pocketknife, their father’s dog tags, and a little plastic baggie of weed, stems, and seeds. He removed only one bud, not knowing if it would be enough to get a little joint going. He hoped so. If his brother happened to notice any of his weed missing—unlikely, but if he did—Mikey felt prepared to make a full denial and he would be believed, he knew it, because like every criminal in their mother’s mystery shows, he was the least likely suspect. The bud radiated heat in his fist as he walked out of the bedroom. With a strained attempt at innocence and the handball bulging his back pocket, he crept past his mother, who asked him to please not let the door slam, but by the time he’d heard her it was already too late.

He must’ve taken longer than he’d thought—invisible movers had filled up the elevator with furniture—but the lady was still waiting for him outside the building, on the sidewalk where he’d left her. The loser Mikey felt a little disappointed. And you know what? There must’ve been a loser part of her, too, because she seemed almost disappointed herself, smiling without pleasure or warmth, as if she’d hoped he wouldn’t have come back. Or maybe he was imagining things, overthinking things. Only after slipping the bud into her palm did he realize he should’ve put it in a baggie first.

“It’s really good shit,” he said, by way of an apology.

She nodded, still looking disappointed. The bud seemed preposterously small in her hand, unfit for the littlest of little joints, but when two
burly white men came out of the building carrying a futon, she shoved that weed deep into her pocket. Her hat came off, her hair shorter than he’d expected. She tried to give him a twenty-dollar bill, but he waved her away.

“It’s on the house,” he told her.

“Don’t be silly.”

“No, seriously.”

“No, seriously,” she said back at him, a little scary now. “You have to take it.”

“I don’t even have any change.”

She patted the pocket where she’d put the weed. “It’s really good shit,” she reminded him. “It’s worth at least twenty bucks.”

Well, all right, fine, but only because he already had a list brewing of what he could do with the money: since the weed was technically his brother’s, he could sneak the twenty into Chris’s sock drawer (yeah right); or Mikey could hoard it himself for a future occasion; or take Tiffany Chen to see
Meet the Browns
at the Jackson Triplex; or, most tantalizing, order off eBay a pair of padded Owen 922 handball gloves, which cost exactly $19.95 including shipping. He had money, he had options. After the woman walked away, he whacked the ball off the ground and into the bricks, forgetting for a moment that he was supposed to be playing American.

Four down. None to go. Now what?

Later that night, from behind her regal desk, Lieutenant Prondzinski said, “I shouldn’t even be telling you this. It’s not … it’s not the proper way, but I thought you’d want to know sooner rather than later. So you could prepare yourself. Get that anxious brain of yours in the right headspace. It’s not proper maybe, to pass news like this directly, and so
early, but I figured I owed you as much after your tenure here in Narcotics. Your entirely admirable tenure, I should add. Next week, not this week upcoming, but the following week, the start of next month, you are to report right here for work, do you understand?”

Not at first. For an entirely absurd moment Janice thought right here meant
right
here, as in this office, as in she was getting leap-frogged to lieutenant, but when that entirely absurd moment passed she was able to understand that right here meant the rumpus, as in not patrol, as in she will officially last the magic eighteen months with Narcotics, she’s made it, mission accomplished. And so again: now what?

“Thank you,” she said.

“The gears tend to grind slowly, so I’m thinking it’ll probably be a few more weeks before you can get sworn in at Police Plaza. But your pay bump will be postdated from the first of April, that I can guarantee. And rest assured, this isn’t an April Fool’s gag, ha-ha!”

“Ha-ha,” Janice said.

“All joking aside? I’m proud of you. I hope that doesn’t sound condescending. I don’t mean to talk down to you, Itwaru, but I am legitimately proud of the work you have done here. I’m serious. You are an asset to this department. But now that you’re going to be a detective, three buys a month just isn’t going to cut it anymore. It just isn’t going to get the job done. As a detective, you’re expected to make better numbers than that, okay? Not from me. I understand how hard it is to bring in three in a month. I get that, Itwaru. But these expectations are coming from up high, understand? The bar has been raised. And I, for one? I am completely confident you’re going to rise to this new and exciting challenge.”

“I made four buys this month,” Janice told her.

Prondzinski looked down at the mess of file folders on her desk without actually opening any of them. “Is that what the buy board says?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it hasn’t gone up yet?”

“Well, whatever. Three buys, four buys, you’re gonna have to do better from now on.”

“I’m a little confused,” Janice said. To keep herself from sliding out of the rigged chair, she gripped the sides of her seat, her fingers feeling
only wood, no scratched-in initials or wads of gum. “You told me I had to make four buys. You
said
that. You said I wouldn’t get promoted otherwise. But now you’re telling me you thought I had
three
? And I was gonna get the shield anyway?”

Prondzinski shook her head vigorously. “What you’re talking about sounds like a quota system, and we don’t do that here. You’re getting promoted, Itwaru, because of the exceptional promise you’ve demonstrated these past eighteen months. And also? To be real for a second?” Behind her, a shadow play of rain drifted across her paper-covered window. “With this Sean Bell fiasco, with the new hiring standards, with your boy Puffy gone, with recruitment dropping across the department, how the fuck would I find a warm body to replace your ass, even if I’d wanted to? Now, if there are no further questions …”

Back at her own desk, in her own seat, Janice battled claustrophobia with small sips of air as the uncles surrounded her. Four buys! In a month! With a week to spare! She was a natural, she was a gangster, she made them all look bad, seriously, don’t do that, stop making us all look bad. Fiorella, more excited than anyone, wanted to celebrate at A.R.’s Tavern. Tevis said he’d come for a drink. Klondike and Morris looked up from their
Post
s—the headline, honest to God, read “Why Sad Women Want Sex”—to offer to buy the first round. At the promise of free booze, Grimes slid jeans on over his pajama pants. Eddie Murphy couldn’t go because he was in a California recording studio doing voiceover work for the next
Shrek
, and Gonz couldn’t go, either, because he wasn’t invited, although he reassured them he wouldn’t have gone anyway because he had to take a trip to pound town—his words—with the chubby white girl from Jackson Heights. Pablo Rivera kept asking Janice if Prondzinski had mentioned Internal Affairs at all. James Chan of course said nothing, but everyone assumed he’d come to A.R.’s because he always went to A.R.’s. Five miles away, Mikey Sharpe sat in the 115 Precinct’s Youth Office handcuffed to a metal bar as he awaited
an overnight transfer to the juvenile detention center in Jamaica. Richie the Receptionist promised she wouldn’t have to pay for a single drink, but she bowed out with the excuse that she’d already called a cab to take her home. The uncles accused her of ditching them for the third night in a row, of acting all uppity now that she was making detective. She said she felt sick.

Late Monday morning, Internal Affairs woke her up with a phone call. She pulled off her sleep mask. The number on her phone had come in as unlisted, but she answered anyway, hopeful it was her sister. Instead it was a Caribbean-sounding woman requesting Janice’s presence for an informational meeting that afternoon at Internal Affairs’ Manhattan offices. Whether the information at this informational meeting would be for Janice’s benefit or theirs, the woman didn’t say. But she did give her the address: 315 Hudson. Third floor. Bring your ID and badge. If Janice was coming from home—because they of course knew where she lived—the woman suggested the Van Wyck Expressway. Or, if Janice preferred public transit—was that irony winking there through the woman’s maddeningly chipper tone, as if she understood perfectly Janice’s problematic car situation?—the E train to Spring Street, although, fair warning, that would probably take twice as long.

“Can you tell me what this is about?”

She was already out of bed, pacing the carpet, a finger wedged into her free ear. Her father’s beat-up
I Ching
almost tripped her. On the other end of the line, long Caribbean fingernails clicked at a computer keyboard. If the woman had been calling from the rumpus or any other precinct, Janice would have heard papers rustling, but Internal Affairs employed more technologically sophisticated methods.

“I’m afraid,” the woman said, sounding completely unafraid, “that any questions and concerns will have to be brought directly to your case officer at this afternoon’s informational meeting. Would three thirty work for you?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question.”

Janice had her hand on the bedroom’s doorknob, ready to go running out of the house. “Do I
have
to go to the meeting? Is it mandatory?”

More typing, which Janice understood now had nothing to do with her or her situation but was instead just the woman multitasking, trying to catch up on her backlog of other numbers to call, other dumb cops IA had caught in their vise. “Again,” the woman said, trying to get her off the phone, “you’ll have to address that with your assigned case officer at the meeting.”

“I have to go to a meeting to find out if I have to go to a meeting?”

“Until further notice we strongly advise that you keep this entirely confidential, for your own benefit more than anything.”

Janice hung up on her. She wished she had a landline to slam into a cradle, not this flimsy plastic cell phone with its pathetic tiny cancel button. Her arm hairs stiffened, a prelude to diarrhea, but before she could get to the toilet, her mother banged on the bedroom door asking if she wanted train tracks: a soft-boiled egg with sliced toast. No! It was an overzealous no, a child’s no, and it made Janice feel even worse, but if her mother saw her now, she’d press her fingertips beneath Janice’s eyes and tell her she had nothing to worry about, she hadn’t done anything wrong, she couldn’t have done anything wrong, offering unequivocal forgiveness without even knowing the charges because it was Vita’s job to offer unequivocal forgiveness, and Janice would then puddle and evaporate and miss her informational meeting.

“You okay in there?” Vita asked, with her bandaged hand surely hovering over the other end of the doorknob.

“I’m fine!”

When Janice finally did get downstairs, she vacuumed all the rugs, its motor plenty loud enough to prohibit conversation. She could’ve called Tevis for help, or Fiorella, or her union rep, or she could’ve dusted her
mother’s crystal dolphin collection. She dusted her mother’s crystal dolphin collection. In the living room Martha Stewart was showing Vita how to deseed a pomegranate. In the kitchen Janice threw away her unasked-for portion of eggs and toast, certain she wouldn’t be able to keep it down. She changed the refrigerator’s lightbulb. To resuscitate the carnation petals, she chopped another inch off every stem. Because her mother was never going to do it properly, she cleaned the table and its chairs of
all
their receipts, junk mail, outdated newspapers, and credit card offers, which she ripped in half without opening, but before tossing the supermarket circulars she forced herself to examine the photos of missing children above the address label, their faces age-progressed to the current moment. Those poor parents, those poor mailmen. Upstairs she took such a long, hot shower that afterward she couldn’t find herself in the mirror. It was only one o’clock in the afternoon. IA had not called her back. Perhaps they expected—perhaps they knew—she’d arrive promptly for her meeting even though she’d hung up on them. Maybe they were used to that. She got under the covers and tried to pretend she was dead, but her eyes stayed stubbornly open, just like on a real corpse, and she was still awake an hour later when Jimmy Gellar rang the doorbell.

“Jan!” her mother hollered up the stairs. “There’s a mister here to see you!”

For the first time since dementia had struck there were four perfectly decluttered chairs available in the kitchen, but both Jimmy and Vita seemed too nervous to sit. They beamed at her as she came down the stairs, as if she was wearing a long silk gown with room on the shoulder strap for a corsage, instead of these frumpy shorts and pit-stained tee. Vita looked especially pleased. She must’ve thought it all made sense now: Janice’s morning moodiness, the neurotic cleaning, her lack of appetite, the ridiculous amount of time spent stowed away in the bathroom. A boy! Of course! And a polite boy, too, one who’d already removed his shoes and set them neatly by the back door.

“You got a haircut,” he said. “It looks great.”