Harlem Shuffle(53)

Miss Laura rose to show him out. “Time goes by,” she said, “and a girl’s got to wonder if a man like Willie’d like to know that someone’s dogging him. He’s a fucking miser, but surely that’d be worth something. Right? To know that someone is out to get you.”

    She called down to him when he put his hand on the door to the street.

“Get it done, Carney. You get it done.”





SIX


Marie gave Carney the message that his aunt expected him at four o’clock. Also told him that she and Aunt Millie had ended up talking and now his aunt was visiting the store next week for a sandwich lunch. “When she said she hadn’t seen the store since you did all this work, I made her promise.” Carney, in turn, hadn’t been to his aunt’s house in a long time. Most of their interaction these days centered around her panicked calls over Freddie. Where is he? Have you seen him? Now she wanted Carney to leave work early, in the middle of preparations for the Labor Day Weekend Savings Bash. What kind of mess was his cousin in now? The last time he’d seen Freddie was in the Big Apple Diner, back in June.

Aunt Millie had lived on 129th since before Carney was born. It was two blocks from where he’d grown up. Back then, the Irving sisters had dinner with the boys most Sundays—their husbands usually who knows where—and usually at Millie’s. Big Mike was unpredictable and rarely happy to come home and find people in his kitchen, family or no.

Carney avoided the block he grew up on. He only found himself there if he was preoccupied with the store, or money, and his homing mechanism misfired. Safer to direct nostalgia for those days toward his cousin’s place on 129th Street. He knew 129th between their house and Lenox Ave by heart and still considered it his kingdom, even if no one paid him tribute. New neighbors were identified by the different curtains and lamps and Jesus paintings visible through the windows, the emergence of an intrepid plant on a sill, a Puerto Rican flag limping on a fire escape. The landlord of number 134 had finally sprung for some new trash cans. He and Freddie had busted up the old ones with firecrackers July 4, 1941. The cousins had never run so fast and never would.

    “Look at you,” Aunt Millie said, taking stock in the apartment hallway. She pulled him in and kissed him. “Those little kids rubbing off on you—you look great.” She was one to talk. He did the math—if his mother, Nancy, was born in 1907, and her sister was two years older, Aunt Millie was fifty-six. It clicked when he smelled that cake. This wasn’t about Freddie. It was his mother’s birthday.

“You know the way,” she said, meaning the kitchen. Of course he did. For two years, this had been his home. When his mother died, his father tore off on one of his jaunts, only he didn’t come back after a day or a week. He dropped Carney off here and didn’t resurface for two months. Now that Carney thought about it, he might have been doing some jail time. When he returned, Aunt Millie suggested that Carney stay with them. He didn’t protest.

It was fun. Uncle Pedro built a bunk bed for Freddie’s room. He was around more then and did fatherlike things, like take them to the park or the pictures. Aunt Millie was a good cook, and Carney didn’t have that blessing in his life again until he married Elizabeth. The best part was Freddie and him living like brothers. Freddie’d kick the top bunk to wake him: Hey, you up? Can you believe the look on his face? I got another idea…They had devised a jokey shorthand and way of looking at the world. When they shared a room it was like that private mythology was carved into stone tablets, by dancing fire, like in The Ten Commandments.

    Carney cried the day his father came for him and took him those two blocks home. The same building and same apartment layout, but two floors lower. Same crummy everything else.

Carney and Aunt Mille took their old places at the kitchen table. Freddie’s seat was piled up with magazines, last week’s Amsterdam News on top. Aunt Millie wore a simple blue dress and her hair was pulled back in a bun, which meant that Pedro was away. She only fixed herself up when her husband was home for a visit; who else was there to look pretty for? Lately he spent most of the year in Florida, where he had another woman and a young daughter.

Aunt Millie had made a butter cake with a cherry glaze. Carney complimented her energetically.

She asked after the children and he gave her a May and John update. Elizabeth’s father had made a demeaning comment at their wedding, and now it was hard to get his aunt and his wife in the same room. The four of them, him and Elizabeth and the kids, had run into Aunt Millie on the street on July 4th, which was nice. “You at the hospital tonight?” he asked.

“Six o’clock.” She’d take day shifts for a long stretch, then switch to night shifts. A few years ago she’d been promoted to some supervisory role, but most of her job was still nursing.

“I liked talking to that Marie. She comes in all the way from Brooklyn?”

“Every day.”

“Raymond! With employees who take the subway in from Brooklyn!” She told him his mother would be proud—of his education, his store, the way he took care of his family. By implication: as opposed to how his father had conducted his life.

His mother died of pneumonia in ’42, and the next year these birthday get-togethers started, at this kitchen table, Millie and the boys. Nothing fancy, nothing long, sometimes they didn’t even mention Carney’s mother at all. Jawed about movies. Freddie was the first to miss one, four years ago. Last year Carney missed it because of bronchitis. This time he’d forgotten it altogether.