‘Why not? I’m up.’
‘Fine. Be up. But why early?’
‘Your boss doesn’t like it when you’re late.’
‘On time isn’t late.’
‘True. But neither is early.’
He put down his spoon and looked into my face, his own face open and childlike.
‘Is earlier better?’
So, what was I going to do? Lie to him? Take advantage of the guy because I wanted to see a girl, and I couldn’t hang on ten minutes?
‘Maybe not. I don’t know. We should probably just go at the regular time.’
We were cruising by Nazir’s Baked Goods, on the way to the market, when I saw it.
Someone had spray-painted both front windows, in letters several feet high. The first window said, ‘GO’. The other said, ‘HOME!’ With an over-sized exclamation point that dribbled on to the brick under the window.
‘Oh, shit,’ I said.
‘That’s a bad word. You said a bad word.’
I hit the brake. Stopped dead. Right in the middle of the street. Nobody else was on the road with us, though. So it hardly mattered. Except to Ben.
‘Don’t stop here!’ he shouted. ‘Why are you stopping?’
‘I’m looking at that. I’m looking at what someone did to the bakery.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh, no.’ Like it was his job to clean it up. ‘That’s bad.’
I was looking for her in the kitchen. But I couldn’t see any movement.
A honking horn startled me out of my coma, and I jumped the clichéd mile. There was a car waiting behind me. It was Monday. And somebody else was awake. I waved to him in my rear-view mirror and drove again,
nursing
a sick feeling at the very bottom of my gut.
‘Do they sell hardware-type stuff at your market?’
‘What kind?’
‘Like a can of paint stripper?’
‘What does the can look like?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’m not sure, then.’
‘Can we ask? When we get there?’
‘I guess.’
I pulled into the parking lot, shut off the engine, and walked to the market door with Ben. It was hard to slow my stride enough to match his.
He didn’t have to knock. A perky blonde woman walked by the door, caught sight of us, and smiled. She unlocked the door with her key, and levered it open a couple of feet.
Ben ducked by her into the store and disappeared.
‘You must be Ben’s brother,’ she said. ‘Ben talks about you constantly.’
‘He does?’
Great. Complicate my thinking even more, why don’t you?
‘Every day. All day. We’re glad you’re safe, by the way. We were all worried for you. Plus if something had happened to you, too, I don’t know what Ben would have done.’
Nice, yet distracting. What was I going to ask about, again? It was important. Oh. Right.
‘Thanks. I was wondering if you guys sell paint stripper.’
‘Funny you should ask. I just checked when I got in this morning. We have one can. But I’m wondering if I should save it for the El Sayeds. Did you see what someone did to their windows?’
A last name. Progress.
‘That’s actually why I wanted it. I was going to go by and help them with that. With their windows.’
‘Oh. Good.’ She seemed a little surprised. Or maybe more than a little. ‘Good for you. I’ll be right back.’
I waited, blinking, in the near-dark, staring into the glow of the closed market. Then she reappeared with a rectangular metal can.
‘How much do I owe you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Really? Nothing?’
Was there something wrong with my money in this town?
‘I think it’s terrible, putting that on their window. They’re citizens. They’re naturalized. They
are
home. I thought it was disgusting, so if you’re going to help get it off there … no charge.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Anything for Ben’s brother.’
So maybe that really was my new name.
When I pulled up in front of the bakery, there was a man out front. The light still wasn’t good, and I couldn’t see him well, but I figured I was about to meet Nazir El Sayed.
I thought, She called her father when she saw it, so he could help.
Too bad. I could have helped just fine. It could have been the two of us.
He was scraping at the paint on the window with a carving knife. He’d barely managed to make a dent in the letter G.
When he heard me shut off the engine, he spun defensively. He stood straight and ready, and watched me approach.
He was only a couple of inches taller than me, but he somehow managed to appear formidable. His body was stocky and thick, his face heavy. His skin was dark, even darker than his daughter’s. He wore a rather imposing black mustache.
‘What is it?’ he barked in that now-familiar accent. ‘What do you want?’
‘Just coffee and a donut. I brought paint stripper. I thought that would make me welcome.’
I watched him breathe some of the volume out of his shoulders, some of the stiffness out of his neck.
‘I apologize sincerely,’ he said. ‘I am a little on edge.’
‘Understandable. I think everybody is. You must be Nazir.’
He peered at my face more closely in the dim light.
‘Should I know you?’
‘No. I’m just going by what it says on the window. I know your daughter. A little. I’ve been coming in early for coffee and donuts. She’s been very kind.’
‘Oh,’ he said, as if all of life were suddenly laid out at his feet, sorted and clarified. ‘You are Ben’s brother. Anat told me about you. I am very sorry for the loss of your mother. A tragic turn of events.’
‘Thank you. Where’s Anat this morning?’
‘Home. Sleeping. She is off on Monday and Tuesday. Nobody should have to do the morning donuts seven days a week. The early schedule is too hard on the constitution.’
Of course, my heart fell. Wednesday was forty-eight hours away, which felt a little like having been told I’d see her in my next lifetime. But I had a task at hand. No point mourning when I could just as well get at it.
‘I’ll need gloves, and some kind of cleaning rag for this,’ I said, attempting to perform that complicated squeeze-press-and-turn motion that’s supposed to keep the paint stripper cap from coming off accidentally, or in the hands of a child.
By the time I got the cap off, and saw that there was a thin safety film of metal underneath, it was too late to ask him to bring me something I could use to puncture it. He came around the dark corner and handed me rubber gloves and a linen dish towel.
‘It’ll ruin the towel, you know.’
‘Go ahead and ruin it. I just want to get this off here.’
My eyes landed on the carving knife he’d been using to scrape paint. It sat on the edge of the brick under one window. The ‘GO’ window. I picked it up and placed the point of it down on the inner metal cap, and hit the
handle
of the knife hard with the base of my palm. It punctured easily. So I did it again, at an angle, to form an X. I figured we’d need a lot of paint stripper.
I pulled on the gloves, soaked the rag and then rubbed hard on the top of the G. At first nothing. Then, in a few swipes, it started to smear. In a few more swipes, the G had no top.
‘Oh. I just thought. Will this hurt the good paint?’
‘Good paint?’ he asked.
‘Your sign.’
‘The good paint is on the inside of the window.’
‘Ah. Good.’
I looked over to see that Nazir had more gloves and another towel. I watched him soak it in paint stripper and go to work on the H.
‘Anat told me you washed off some eggs yesterday. We don’t know why you would do that. We hope you are just a nice young man.’
I hope so, too, I thought. But I didn’t say it out loud.
’Purely selfish. I wanted her to keep working on those donuts.’
He said nothing in return. In time, I turned and looked at him. He was studying me closely, seriously, his hand still scrubbing at the letter H.
‘But that is more like a joke,’ he said.
‘True. You’re right. Honestly? I’m not sure why. I didn’t take a lot of time to think it out. It just seemed like the right thing to do. I guess I thought I could do it more unemotionally than she could. It wasn’t an insult
directed
toward me, so I guess I felt like, if she never even had to see it, then the insult would never be fully delivered. Which was good.’
I looked over again. He was still staring at me.
‘You are a nice young man,’ he said.
‘I hope so.’
I finished the G and moved on to the O. It was going fast. Hearteningly so.
‘This is what will be hard.’ He indicated the bottom of the exclamation point. ‘Paint on glass is better. Paint on brick is bad.’
I watched him scrub at the bricks with his towel, but it only smeared the paint around.
‘Maybe we should just soak a towel with paint stripper and let it sit on there for a while. Really soak in.’
‘I guess that’s worth a try,’ he said. ‘I have the donuts nearly ready. I started them because I did not see. I did not see this. I could not see it from the inside until it got just a little bit light.’
‘You came in through the kitchen,’ I said. Not really as a question.
‘No. I slept last night in the room over the store. We live in the country, a long drive away. I sleep upstairs when I have to open. I don’t like to take the drive so early, because I am sleepy and it doesn’t feel safe. In any case, when we are done here, you will come inside, please, and have coffee, and eat anything you want as my guest. You will be my guest.’
* * *
Nazir and I stood side by side at the industrial double sink. Washing our hands. And washing. And washing. And washing. At least four times so far we’d washed, rinsed and dried, smelled our hands, then started over again. Even through the gloves, the paint stripper smell was slow to fade.
‘You see?’ he said, startling me. We had fallen into silence for some time. ‘That is the problem with a thing like this. You think you know how to fix it. How to make everything all right again. But that method to fix it leaves a bad smell behind, and it stays to remind you. When anything is very bad, usually the method to fix it is also bad, and keeps you from putting it completely behind you.’
‘Hmm. I’ll have to think about that.’
‘You seem like a smart young man. I think you know what I mean.’
‘I do,’ I said. ‘I know what you mean.’
I sat up front, drinking the only true coffee on earth and eating a jelly-filled donut. Nazir made the donuts in a slightly different order. Now and then I raised my head and watched him work in the kitchen.
‘Did you hear about the Sikh?’ he asked. After a lot of time silent.
‘The what?’
It was a spelling issue. I was thinking s-e-e-k, and so the sentence made no sense.
‘The Sikh man at the gas station.’
‘Oh, God. Yeah. Ben told me. Made me sick.’
‘Imagine how sick it made me. This is why, when you came up to me in the dark, I was not kind to you.’
‘I wasn’t worried about that.’
‘For myself I don’t even care so much. But when I think about my daughter.’ His voice hardened as he spoke. Rose in volume. ‘Even the thought of some anger directed at my daughter.’ Reached a crescendo. ‘Makes me want to explode.’ The last sentence felt explosive.
I felt my face break out in a cold sweat, my stomach turn weak.
‘Please don’t explode,’ I said. ‘Too many things have been exploding in my life lately. I couldn’t take much more.’
‘I am sorry. I can’t help being protective of her.’
We fell into silence for a while longer. I looked at the remaining half of my donut and waited for my stomach to settle again.
‘I need to tell you something about my daughter,’ he said.
And, of course, that foreclosed upon any chance for a settled stomach. I pushed the plate a few inches farther away.
‘Anat is a good Egyptian girl. And that is unlike an American girl. An Egyptian girl is raised with traditions of morality. An American girl, you meet her, you text her, to her cell phone, you talk two or three times. Then you “hook up”, and she is OK to “hook up” with you,
because
she is raised to think that way. That is not how I raised my daughter.’
I actually put one hand on my stomach. It was that tipped.
‘I have no dishonorable intentions toward your daughter,’ I said.
I guess it sounds like I was stretching the truth. But it didn’t feel that way. I didn’t want to text her three times and then hook up. It was nothing like that. And he didn’t say it was immoral to think I might love her. Or at least that I could.
‘Good,’ he said. Sounding completely convinced. Apparently not doubting my word for a moment. ‘Good. That is as it should be. You will forgive me for speaking this way to you, but you are a man, and you have been around early when no one else is around.’
‘Only because I have to take Ben to work before seven.’
‘Understood. Please, you will forgive me. But, as I say, I am protective. You will have something else to eat?’
‘No. Thank you. I’m all done.’
‘I sincerely hope I have not made you lose your appetite. Anat said you have a big appetite.’
‘Oh. Well. When she met me, I had some catching up to do.’
‘The first of the bread is about to come out. You will take some bread home with you.’
‘You have to let me pay you, though.’
‘No. I will not hear of it. I owe you. Besides, it will
only
go to waste. We make half what we used to make, and we throw more than half of that away. It’s a crime. I don’t know what we will do.’
‘I think people will get over this after a while.’
‘I hope so. I hope they get over it soon. Sooner than we will be out of business.’
Just as I was leaving, my arms laden with not one but three loaves of bread, Nazir asked one last question.
‘Who does such a thing, and why? Can you tell me this?’
‘People get scared,’ I said. ‘And it brings out the worst in them. Probably somebody was drunk. Most people know better, till they get drunk. And then they do stupid things. Probably a bunch of guys went out and got drunk. And put each other up to it.’
But then I thought, It was Sunday night. Who goes out and gets drunk on Sunday night?