Alternate Side(25)

Nora dropped the corer into the murky gray soup at the bottom of the dishwasher. “How sick?”

“That thing, whatcha call it, Ollie had.” And here Charity made a sound as though she were trying to eject her own lungs.

“Croup?” Nora said.

“That one,” Charity said.

“Tell me when you see him and I’ll give them my humidifier. That made a big difference. It’s down in the basement, isn’t it?”

“Upstairs. Rachel use it sometime to open her pores, that kind of nonsense.”

But Ricky had not appeared, and Nora decided to take the humidifier to him. It was too unwieldy to take on the subway. “The man can buy his own humidifier, the prices he charges,” said Charlie on his way into the office on a Saturday morning, apparently because some deal was falling apart.

Nora still remembered that day as a disaster in every way possible. She had had a hard time getting the car out of the narrow opening to the lot, and had to be directed out by George, who was pleased as could be to have the opportunity to condescend. Then she had misread the signs, taken the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey, and found it hard to find a place to turn and head back in the right direction. Construction in the Bronx had closed the exit her directions had given her, and the Indian man she asked at the gas station kept nodding and smiling, repeating “Grand Concourse,” until she realized she was actually on the road she had been trying desperately to find. She slid into a parking space in front of a bodega and locked the car while two teenagers with three inches of boxer shorts above the waistband of their jeans stared at the two feet between her car and the curb. She heard them laughing as she carried the humidifier in her arms. It was heavy.

In front of her a man strode down the street, greeting the old people who sat in the shafts cut into the front of the apartment buildings, getting as much light and air as there was to be found on a side street in the South Bronx. A kid leaned out a window and called something to the man, and he waved but walked on. He was wearing a leather jacket and snug jeans, and there was a swivel in his walk, like he was hearing music in his head the way Nora often did during her walk to work, although she was certain she had never moved quite like that. Four older men were playing dominoes around a card table on the sidewalk, hunched in coats that were too heavy for the weather. They raised leathery hands to the younger man as he walked by.

Nora said, “Twelve fourteen?” to a woman in a wheelchair with a New York Yankees blanket over her legs. The woman pointed at the man. “Follow him,” she said. Nora passed a sign on the next building that said NO LOITERING. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. The man in front of her bent down to pick up an empty beer can from the sidewalk and flipped it into a trash can at the curb. It wasn’t until she got to the steps of the last building on the block that he turned, and she realized it was Ricky—but a different Ricky, a Ricky at home, in his zone, not in uniform, not in character, or perhaps in his real character, a lighter, brighter cousin to the Ricky she knew, almost unrecognizable until he saw Nora Nolan standing behind him. The way his face changed made Nora sad, as though just by showing up she’d turned this buoyant character into the leaden facsimile he took downtown each day for work.

“Missus, what are you doing here?” he said, taking the box out of her arms.

“I’m sorry,” Nora said, only in that moment realizing to her dismay that there were lines between people as clear as the median on Park Avenue or the narrower one she’d almost run over on the Grand Concourse, and that you were supposed to respect them.

“No, no,” Ricky said. “No problem.” But it was. It was a problem.

“I heard your boy had the croup. And Oliver had the croup when he was five—it was just awful, that sound of him coughing, I remember staying up all night with him in the bathroom, with the shower running for an hour so the steam would fill the room. It was the only thing that helped, and then the pediatrician said, Get a good humidifier, a good one, not one of those cheap ones from Duane Reade, and we set it up in the room and I’m pretty sure that’s what got him over the hump, the steam all night long, so that all that stuff in his chest got loosened up—”

“Rico!” yelled a voice from above them. “What the hell?”

A woman was leaning out a window. Her arms were folded on the sill and she was hunched over them so that she had stupendous cleavage. Her mouth was as tight as her eyes were hot.

“This is Mrs. Nolan,” Ricky said.

“Nora,” Nora called, waving. “You must be Nita. I’ve heard so much about you.” Charity had told her that Nita was a home health aide, moving from elderly person to elderly person in the Bronx as each one died. Looking up at her flamethrower of an expression, Nora wondered if she helped kill them.

“You’re taking your sweet time,” Nita said.

“I brought a humidifier,” Nora said. “My son had the croup. It really helped.”

“Thank you,” Ricky said.

“You deaf, Rico?” Nita shouted.

“I have to go,” said Nora.

“That humidifier really helped a lot,” Ricky had said when he came to fix the dishwasher Monday morning, the handyman Ricky now, not the man who had strutted down the street in a leather jacket. Nora should have minded her business. On the way home she remembered a story Cathleen had told once during their lunch group, about running into one of her high school nuns at the beach wearing a black bathing suit. A one-piece with a skirt, but still. Both the nun and Cathleen had been so embarrassed they’d pretended when school resumed that it had never happened.