Uncle Janice (34 page)

She rubbed at her eyes, but nope: he was still there. Afraid her mother might be cooking him French toast or possibly coming up out of the basement with a basket of his laundry, Janice poked her head into the kitchen.

“Mom went to church,” he said, anticipating her. “Because I’m the Antichrist, I guess? I offered to drive her, but she said she wanted to …” He turned two of his fingers into legs and walked them across the table over another heap of junk mail and bills. “There’s no talking to her sometimes, you know?”

“Church?” she said. With apparent seriousness, one of the hyenas was claiming it took five innings to return to his seat after leaving for the bathroom, minimum, five innings
minimum
. She turned off the radio. “And you decided to—what?” she asked. “Just stick around?”

“Oh, I came to drop off your car. The one that I fixed for you. And repainted. Free of charge. You remember what I’m talking about?”

“Thank you.”

“Well, I hope you like hot pink.”

He was kidding. He’d fixed it, sure, but he’d repainted it black, the cheapest color, or rather he had someone who owed him a favor repaint it black because his own auto-body shop didn’t handle that kind of detailing. She thought it nicely suited her new status as a villain. Rather than block the alleyway and risk stopping Mr. Hua’s heart, Brother had parked on the street, in an impressively tight spot between SUVs. He ran his hand along her new front bumper with genuine pride. The temperature had pushed up into the fifties, warm for a March morning, but still too chilly for her robe. As she hugged herself against the cold, her father pointed out all the bodywork. He’d put in a new air bag, he said, and replaced the oil, coolant, sparkplugs, and transmission fluids. But all this of course came pork-barreled with a hitch, albeit only a minor one: she’d have to drop him back off at Willets Point. Actually? Since he couldn’t sit in a passenger seat without continually pressing a phantom brake pedal, she’d have to come with while he drove himself back to work.

“Let me go change,” she said.

“But I like you just the way you are!” he told her, because despite everything he remained a dad, incapable of ever resisting a stupid dad joke.

When she came back outside in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, he was still trying to extricate himself from that parking spot, putting that new front bumper of hers to work. She got in next to him. Three years she’d been making payments on this car, a graduation present to herself after making it through the Academy, but never before had she sat in its passenger seat. At least not that she could remember. She had of course sat up front next to her father in plenty of other cars to plenty of other places: school dances, bat mitzvahs, the Crown Fried Chicken on Archer Avenue. To afternoon dives where sympathetic bartenders let her play with the soda-fountain gun. Around Richmond Hill on cool-out trips whenever Vita locked herself in the bathroom. Once, when Janice was ten, maybe eleven, he took her to Long Island, to a white lady’s house with a front yard full of pebbles. While Brother and this woman she’d later know as Barbara supposedly looked under cars in the humongous garage, Janice watched
Inspector Gadget
on the humongous television, certain something was wrong without knowing exactly what. At the commercial breaks she’d wander into the kitchen and throw away expensive-looking cutlery. Later, on the drive back to Queens, he purchased her silence through incrimination, by taking her to the big R-rated movie that summer,
Die Hard with a Vengeance
, which her mother had forbidden her to see. She fell asleep before the end, not that it mattered. She had broken the rules just by going. He didn’t ask her not to tell Mom; he hadn’t even needed to take her to the movies in the first place. Daddy’s little girl and a junior spy, she could be counted on to hoard all his secrets.

Back then, like now, he drove with an unbuckled seat belt. Back then, though, the cars didn’t seem to mind, unlike this one, its dashboard dinging at him with a shrill insistence, stubborn but not half as stubborn as her father. It gave up after only a block, defeated.

“So how you been?” he said into the silence.

“Fine. The usual.”

“And work? Everything’s good over there?”

“Sure,” she said.

She tried turning on the radio, willing to listen to even those yapping hyenas, but Brother’s mechanical tinkering had apparently activated its antitheft microchip, an intended deterrent to petty boosters like Henry Vega. If only. To override the chip, she needed to enter her secret security code, which she of course did not know.

“Mom tells me you went to bed kinda early last night,” he said. He looked over at her. “She told me a lot of the time, though, you’ll hit up the bars before coming home. Like an after-work thing? A stress reducer? How many nights a week you think that is?”

“You’re kidding, right?” She tried laughing. “Is there a point to this brand-new curiosity of yours?” she asked. “Because it’s sorta coming out of nowhere for me.”

He fluttered his lips to show her she was exhausting him. Without checking blind spots or even signaling, he turned onto the Van Wyck, which would take them on a straight shot to Willets Point. A ten-minute drive. Maybe fifteen, the way he was soft-footing the gas. For perhaps the first time in his driving life, he did not rush over into the express lane but stayed put on the right-hand side of the expressway, barely above the speed limit.

“It’s a poison,” he told her. “Alcohol, I mean. Everyone knows that, of course, that it’s a poison. But what happens is once you start drinking enough of it,
you
become poisonous. I definitely was. When I was drinking? I was toxic, poisoning Mom—”

“You were beating the shit out of Mom.”

“Yup,” he said. “Poisoning her. Poisoning you girls. Bouncing off walls, couldn’t even walk straight. And maybe I’m the last person in the world you want to talk to about all this, I get that, but you gotta reach out to someone because it only gets harder. I’m telling you, Janny. It’s an awful thing, an
awful
thing, having to run away from everyone you love just so you don’t end up poisoning them to death.”

Her martyr father. All the sacrifices he’d made on the uphill road to
his Great Neck mansion. Questions she could’ve asked him: Did he miss birthdays sixteen through twenty-four because he thought he might poison her? With his presence? His voice on the other line, his signature in a card? Did he think he would’ve poisoned her if he’d shown up to her high school commencement ceremony like Georgia Hawley’s father, who’d clapped enthusiastically in the back row, eventually reuniting with Georgia’s mom, eventually having a reconciliation baby Georgia couldn’t even visit in the hospital because the nurses assumed she was too old to be a sibling? Would Brother have poisoned anyone if he’d sat unseen in cavernous Madison Square Garden for Janice’s Academy graduation? Or maybe he had. She could’ve asked him that, too: Were you there? All this time? A benevolent ghost raising the tiny hairs along the back of my neck? “You don’t have to worry about me,” she told him.

“I can’t help it,” he said. “It’s my job.”

“I appreciate what you’re doing here. With this whole—what would you even call it? Like an intervention? But I’m fine. Really. I’m okay.”

“Really?” he said.

“Really.”

He reached across the console to put his hand on her knee. She let him. On the other side of the window, construction barrels dotted the shoulder for miles. Drivers drifted out of her side-view mirror to pass Brother on the left. The speedometer sputtered into the early forties. When the car itself began to curve toward an off-ramp, miles away from the Willets Point exit, she realized he’d stayed in the slowpoke lane not to extend their time together, or at least not only to extend their time together, but so he could merge more easily onto Queens Boulevard. He headed west, in the opposite direction from where he worked.

She squeezed the hand on her knee. “What are you doing?”

“Calling bullshit,” he said. “You’re fine? Don’t worry? Jesus Christ, pumpkin. Who do you think taught you how to lie?”

Always prepared, probably having looked it up ahead of time, he drove her to the only AA meeting in Queens with a Wednesday meeting at that
particular hour: the Woodside Catholic Charities Diocese, located in a block-long brick building around the corner from Roosevelt Avenue. An older obese white man with tennis balls on the bottom of his walker went shuffling up the steps to the main entrance, followed by a young black guy carrying a blue duffel bag and wearing a Huxtable sweater.
MENTAL HEALTH CLINIC
said a sign out in front. Her father backed the car into a metered spot. With a practiced flourish he slipped her NYPD parking plaque from behind the sun visor and flung it onto the dash. He had to be kidding, although of course she knew he wasn’t. He probably hadn’t paid for parking all week. The smile he turned toward her was falsely apologetic, entirely infuriating.

“This is one of the twelve steps?” she asked him. “Drag your daughter to a meeting?”

“The twelfth,” he said. “Carry the message to other alcoholics.”

He came around to the other side of the car to open the door for her, but she wouldn’t get out. She looked past him, at the dilated black pupil of a security camera above the building entrance. The weirdest thing: her legs were shaking and she didn’t know why. She had a couple of hours before she needed to show up at work; an insurance risk, she had another couple of hours before she even
could
show up at work. Her father’s knees cracked as he squatted in front of her.

“I’m not going to force you to do this,” he said.

“You can’t.”

“That’s right.” He tilted his head toward the building. “It ain’t really how it works, anyway. The company line is if you don’t want to go, don’t go. But I think it would be good for you. Seriously, Janny, I don’t see what you got to lose.”

“I work around here,” she told him. “I probably got half the people in there locked up.”

“It’s not NA,” he said defensively. Still squatting, a heavy man on old haunches, he gripped the door to keep himself from dropping into her lap. “Well, actually,” he said, “we do get a
few
drug addicts every now and again. But that could work out perfect for you, right? With your cover, I mean. To boost your street cred?”

She explained that her street cred gets irrevocably shattered every
time she makes a buy. Forget about her street cred. Her
cover
gets irrevocably shattered every time she makes a buy. She explained that when dealers get cuffed, they’re told they’re under arrest for selling to an undercover cop.

“But the guy can’t necessarily know that it was you, right?”

“They usually figure it out when the cops show up right after I leave.”

“But that’s so stupid! Why wouldn’t they wait?”

“It is what it is,” she said, the line popping out of her for the first time, and her eyes widened with embarrassment.

“Understood,” Brother said, not really understanding. He looked at his Movado’s numberless face. “You don’t gotta wait for me,” he told her. “I’ll just take a cab when it’s over. But if you change your mind, the meeting’s in room four, you can’t miss it.” With a hand on his back he stood up, groaning. “And feel free to keep that parking plaque,” he said. “I made plenty of copies.”

Having squatted for too long, he hobbled up the steps to the main entrance with less mobility than that morbidly obese white guy. She crawled over the console into the driver’s seat. Terraza Café, she knew from experience, didn’t open until four, but the nearby Ready Penny had started serving drinks hours ago. Not that she would’ve gone there or anything. It was just a thought, a cloud passing through. She punched possible PINs into the radio until the screen locked up on her. Vita right now was probably praying for Janice’s soul. Maybe even kneeling in a confessional booth on her behalf, but for what? A petite white girl with short blond hair climbed the steps into the building. Janice pulled her sweatshirt’s hoodie over her head. She tightened the drawstrings as much as she could, but when she looked in the rearview she still saw too much of her face. Enough to get recognized. Her head slumped. Her stupid legs wouldn’t stop shaking. She rolled her eyes, reached into the backseat for the burka.

For once, movies and TV had gotten it pretty much right, probably because a depressingly high number of those screenwriters attended
daily meetings. She’d expected gray walls, stark lighting, metal chairs arranged in a circle, a banquet table with coffee and cookies, and everyone to be staring at her as she came into the room. She got tan walls, stark lighting, metal chairs arranged in rows, a card table with percolating coffee but no cookies, and everyone staring at her as she came into the room. The burka was supposed to disguise her, not make a mockery of the meeting, but the young black Huxtable, who’d been reading aloud from a leather-bound book, stopped in the middle of a sentence, and the old obese white man looked as if he’d just caught a sudden whiff of shit. The only one smiling was her father. He was also the only other person in the room. She hadn’t expected him to recognize her so quickly, but maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he just appreciated the idea of an alcoholic devout Muslim trying to take it one day at a time. Before she could escape, he hurried over to pour her some coffee. Up at the front of the room, to an audience of three now, Young Huxtable resumed reading.

“I saved you a seat,” her father whispered.

They sat in the middle, surrounded by a dozen empty chairs. The petite blonde she’d seen enter the building earlier wasn’t an alcoholic apparently, or maybe she was and had just gotten lost in this enormous labyrinth. Maybe she was in the bathroom knocking back a shot of vodka and would walk flustered through that open door any moment now. Janice hoped so. She wanted another woman in the room, but really she would’ve taken just about anyone. The more people, the less likely she’d have to speak, the very idea of which terrified her for reasons she didn’t want to think about. Hello, my name is Janice and I’m an alcoholic? It seemed impossible. So far, though, as Young Huxtable continued to read aloud, the Woodside chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous seemed like—knock on wood—a nonparticipatory lecture, like church or high school civics, or even a bar late at night with a single blowhard holding forth while everyone else pretended to listen. Her unwashed breath cooked the inside of the headscarf. She leaned forward in her seat and tried to pay attention, for no other reason than to shut off her logorrheic brain. With his more frequent pausing and the way he now stammered through words, Young Huxtable appeared to have gone off book, but he still stared straight ahead at its pages as if afraid to make eye contact.
Her father once again put a hand on her knee, this time to quell her jiggling legs. Huxtable was saying something about free will. About the culture’s misguided obsession with personal agency, headier stuff than she would’ve imagined. Protected by metal bars, a clock ticked loudly on the far wall. If meetings lasted an hour—and from TV, she thought they did—then there were only fifty-four minutes to go.