The Big Kahuna (Fox and O'Hare #6)(54)

“Nothing,” she said. “I just stood there like an idiot. I was petrified. You remember what A.J. was like.” She told me about the slur he’d written in blue marker on her locker. The principal had made him wash it off and apologize, but didn’t suspend him; the school’s wrestling team was competing that weekend.

The strange thing was that I could barely remember this particular incident; it had happened the year I’d lost my mother, when school was little more than a blur. The memories I had of Nora were from a later time. They were like little treasures I’d saved up in a box: how her skirt hiked up her legs when she sat down at the piano in music class; how she’d throw her head back and laugh when she and Sonya were at the ice-cream parlor together; that time she’d stood under my umbrella, her hair spilling over my arm while we waited for the school bus to take us to Big Bear Lake.

“And he wrote it without the second a,” she said. “He couldn’t even spell raghead.”

It was a word I’d heard nearly every day when I was in Iraq. Hell, I’d used it myself. Around the chow table that kind of talk was common. Hajji. Camel jockey. Dune coon. Ali Baba. One guy in my platoon even called Iraqis monkeys and savages. Back then I had thought of this behavior, if I’d thought of it at all, as part of the war: we had to dehumanize the enemy in order to fight it. But now, hearing her talk about the slur on her locker, I felt shame overtake me, followed by a private rebellion. This wasn’t the same thing, and I sure as hell wasn’t like A.J. “I’m sorry,” I said, touching her elbow, where the scrape from the other night had scabbed.

“I remember we had health class together once,” she said. “The teacher was talking about genital warts and A.J. said, ‘My mom gets them all the time.’ I was kind of stunned, so I turned to look at him. He pointed to the corner of his mouth. ‘She gets them right here,’ he said. I laughed—I couldn’t help it—I laughed. I said, ‘That’s not what genital means.’ After that, he hated me even more. And then a few days after 9/11, he defaced my locker.”

A memory surfaced. “He used to call me Jabba,” I said.

“Jabba?”

“Like Jabba the Hut. Because I was fat.” Even at a distance of many years, the insult still stung. I could still hear A.J.’s voice behind me in algebra class. Hohohoho Jabba Jabba.

“That’s awful,” she said. She turned the heat off and served the meat, potatoes, and carrots on a single plate.

“You’re not eating?”

“I already had something, I’m not hungry.” Carefully, she spooned the tomato sauce on top of the meat and set the plate on the table for me.

“Will you sit with me, then?”

She took the chair across from me and watched me eat. The sauce tasted familiar and yet different at the same time. I detected paprika, which I knew well enough, but also cumin, parsley, coriander. The meat was tender and came easily off the bone. “Amazing,” I said. “You’re a great cook.”

“I like your optimism.”

“Yeah?” I reached for her hand and kissed her palm.

“I didn’t make it,” she said with a smile. “I can’t cook. Not anything like this, anyway. My mom made it. I had lunch with her after the hearing and she sent me home with more food.”

“Well, it’s tasty either way.”

She took my fork and tried some of the stew for herself. “It is amazing. She should’ve been the one who started a restaurant.” She handed me back the fork and rested her chin on her hand, once again lost in thoughts about the court hearing. “I can’t believe I just stood there, speechless, while A.J. said how sorry he was for my loss and how this was just a tragic accident. That’s what he called it, ‘tragic.’ And when he offered me his hand, I shook it. As if nothing had happened. As if he weren’t on his way to bail out his father.” Her eyes were dark and probing. With her hair wound in a tight bun like that, she could have passed for an officer of the court—a prosecutor or a defense attorney. “Meanwhile, his father is still trying to make it look like it was a random mistake. Like he just happened to run over and kill the man he’d been fighting with.”

“You really think it was murder?”

“I know it was. I know it in my bones. And now he’s out on bail. He could go out and do it all over again.”

The image of Fierro at West Valley came to me suddenly. How eager he had been to leave the jail, how he hadn’t even bothered to shake hands with me before he was out through the double doors. A strange uneasiness settled on me. I wiped my mouth with my napkin.

“You were right about Coleman, though. She’s a good cop.”

I gave a quick nod and went to the sink to wash my plate, looking out of the window at the backyard as I dried it. It was the third week of May; the days had grown long. In the yucca shrub beneath the window, bumblebees drunk on nectar flung themselves into new blooms. “Want to take a walk?” I asked.

“Sure. Let me change out of this, though.”

When she came back, she was in a blue sundress, flat-heeled sandals, and all her jewelry was gone, save the necklace her father had given her. This was more like her, I thought, taking her hand. We walked the mile from the cabin to the main road. At the corner market, we bought fresh grapes and ate them on the way back. An old man walked by with his dog, touching the brim of his hat with a finger when he passed us. Two joggers ran on the other side of the road, kicking up dust in their wake.