The Other Americans(34)

The lady detective walked down the concourse toward me, and introduced herself as Detective Coleman. A black woman, about forty years old, with hair cropped very short, like a man. I don’t know why women do that sort of thing, it’s not attractive at all. Anyway, she said she was investigating the hit-and-run that took place half a block down from the bowling alley. I could tell straightaway that she wasn’t from around here, but I couldn’t trace her accent. “Were you working on Sunday, Mr. Baker?” she asked me.

“Sure,” I said. “Same as any other Sunday.”

She wrote down my name in her little notebook, and started asking me all kinds of questions, like what time I open and close, if I’d seen anything unusual or suspicious, anything at all. I thought about it while I unplugged the vacuum-cleaner cord and wound it firmly around the hook in the back. “It was just a regular night,” I said.

“Do you have any security cameras?” she asked.

I almost laughed. “This isn’t Chicago,” I said. “We’re a quiet little town. We don’t really need that kind of thing here.”

“So, no cameras?”

“No.”

She was quiet for a minute, I could see she was disappointed by my answers. “What about your customers?” she asked. “Any chance I could talk to them? Someone might’ve seen something.”

The accident had happened on a Sunday night, which is usually a busy night for us, and we’re closed on Mondays, so by Tuesday morning, when she was asking me all these questions, I honestly couldn’t remember who had been there. “I don’t keep tabs on my customers, you know.”

“Maybe I could look through your receipts from that night?”

I stuffed my hands in my pockets, jiggled the change in them. “Is that legal?”

“It is, if you let me.”

I wasn’t convinced, but she had asked nicely and I’ve never minded helping the police. They have a tough job to do, sometimes, a thankless job. “All right,” I said. “Just give me a minute.” I rolled the vacuum cleaner into the utility closet and walked to my office in the back. She followed close behind. “What time were you looking for?” I asked her over my shoulder.

“No specific time. Anyone who came here that night.”

I sat at my desk and looked through the blue plastic organizer by the computer. I’m not a young man anymore, and even a small task like hoovering the carpet can get me winded, so I pulled out my handkerchief and wiped down the sweat from my forehead while I sifted through the papers. There were a lot of cash receipts from that Sunday night, but I found six or seven credit card slips and handed them to the lady detective. She took a picture of each one with her phone. “We really need to have a stoplight at that crosswalk,” I told her.

“Hmm-hmm.”

“You should tell your boss about it.”

“I’m afraid that’s not in the purview of his work.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“That’s something for the city council to decide.”

“Right. I was just saying, is all.”

She slipped her cell phone in her pocket. “What about your employees?”

“You mean Betty?” I said. She worked the cash register, but unless she was making a sale she was always on her phone, playing Solitaire. She wouldn’t have seen anything. “She doesn’t start until three. You’re welcome to try her then.”

“All right,” Coleman said, handing me her card. “If you recall anything else, Mr. Baker, please give me a call.”

We walked back through the concourse area together. The light above lane 3 flickered, which meant I had to check the wiring again, a nuisance I’d been dealing with for weeks. At the entrance, I opened the door for Coleman, then stood behind the glass, watching as she went back to her car. I’d only ever seen lady detectives on TV shows before.





Nora




From the nest above the swamp cooler came the cooing of the turtledove. It had woken me up earlier that morning and now I lay in bed, watching a spider climb the window screen, the sky behind it a brilliant blue. The spider moved with elegance and without hurry, unconcerned about the past or the future, one as immaterial as the other. Time was passing—nine days now—but I felt stuck, as if I’d only just heard that my father had died. In the Muslim tradition, the period of mourning lasts forty days. Why forty? Moses spent forty days without bread or water before receiving the covenant on Mount Sinai. Between his baptism and his return to Galilee, Jesus was forty days in the wilderness, resisting temptation. Muhammad was forty years old when he secluded himself in the cave at Hira, and Gabriel appeared to him. Forty was a potent number, a promise that ease would come after hardship, that good tidings would follow bad. But my grief would not end in forty days. Or forty weeks. Or ever, it seemed. All I had left of my father were memories, each as fragile as a wisp of smoke.

I thought about his last visit to me, the previous spring, when he’d come to watch me perform at the Botanical Gardens. He’d worn a pin-striped suit and a black tie and, looking at his reflection in the full-length mirror in the hallway of my apartment, he had said, “Nor-eini, wait.” I was already at the door, the folder with my music tucked under my arm, my hand halfway to the light switch. “Wait, Nor-eini.” My father took off his jacket and, sitting on my piano bench, brushed his shoes until they shone. He wanted to look his best for the performance. Come to think of it, he always wanted to look his best when he ventured out of his work clothes, as if any trip into the wider world—the whiter world—was a test he might not pass someday, if he wasn’t careful. At the Botanical Gardens, he’d asked a passerby for a photo of us standing by the marquee with my name on it. Where was that picture now? In the drawer under my bedroom window? Or somewhere on the desk I shared with Margo? I’d have to look for it when I got back. I needed to get back to my new piece, too; I wanted to finish it in time for fall fellowship deadlines.