The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry(48)

IN THE MORNING, she wakes before him. “I’m going to make you breakfast,” she says. He nods sleepily, and then she kisses him on his shaven head.

“Are you shaving this because you’re balding or because you like the style?” she asks.

“A little of both,” Lambiase replies.

She sets a towel on the bed, then leaves the room. Lambiase takes his time getting ready. He opens the drawer of her nightstand and pokes around her things a bit. She has expensive-looking lotions that smell like her. He smears some on his hands. He opens her closet. Her clothes are tiny. There are silk dresses, pressed cotton blouses, wool pencil skirts, and paper-thin cashmere cardigans. Everything is in smart shades of beige and gray, and the condition of her clothes is immaculate. He looks at the top shelf of the closet, where her shoes are neatly organized in their original boxes. Above one of the stacks of shoes, he notices a small child’s backpack in princess pink.

His cop eyes clock the child’s backpack as out of place somehow. He knows he shouldn’t, but he pulls it down and unzips it. Inside is a zipper case with crayons and a couple of coloring books. He picks up the coloring book. maya is written across the front. Behind the coloring book is another book. A flimsy thing, more like a pamphlet than a book. Lambiase looks at the cover:

TAMERLANE

AND

OTHER POEMS.

BY A BOSTONIAN.

Crayon marks scar the cover.

Lambiase doesn’t know what to make of it.

His cop brain clicks in, formulating the following questions: (1) Is this A.J.’s stolen Tamerlane? (2) Why would Tamerlane be in Ismay’s possession? (3) How did Tamerlane get covered in crayon and who did the coloring? Maya? (4) Why would Tamerlane be in a backpack with Maya’s name on it?

He is about to run downstairs to demand an explanation from Ismay, but then he changes his mind.

He looks at the ancient manuscript for several seconds longer.

He can smell the pancakes from where he sits. He can imagine her downstairs making them. She is probably wearing a white apron and a silky nightgown. Or maybe she is wearing just the apron and nothing else. That would be exciting. Maybe they can have sex again. Not on the kitchen table. It is not comfortable to have sex on a kitchen table no matter how erotic it looks in movies. Maybe on the couch. Maybe back upstairs. Her mattress is so soft, and her sheets’ thread count must be in the thousands.

Lambiase prides himself on being a good cop, and he knows he should go downstairs and make an excuse to her now about why he has to go.

But is that the sound of an orange being juiced? Is she warming syrup, too?

The book is ruined.

Besides which, it was stolen so long ago. Over ten years now. A.J. is happily married. Maya is settled. Ismay has suffered.

Not to mention, he really likes this woman. And none of this is Lambiase’s business anyway. He zips the book back into the backpack and puts the bag back where he found it.

Lambiase believes that cops go one of two ways as they get older. They either get more judgmental or less so. Lambiase is not so rigid as when he was a young police officer. He has found that people do all sorts of things, and they usually have their reasons.

He goes downstairs and sits at her kitchen table, which is round and covered with the whitest tablecloth he has ever seen. “Smells great,” he says.

“Nice to have someone to cook for. You were up there a long time,” she says, pouring him a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Her apron is turquoise, and she is wearing black exercise clothes.

“Hey,” Lambiase says, “did you happen to read Maya’s short story for the contest? I thought the kid should have been a shoo-in to win.”

“I haven’t read it yet,” Ismay says.

“It’s basically Maya’s version of the last day of her mother’s life,” Lambiase says.

“She’s so precocious,” Ismay says.

“I’ve always wondered why Maya’s mother chose Alice.”

Ismay flips a pancake, and then she flips another. “Who knows why people do what they do?”

Ironhead

2005 / Aimee Bender

For the record, everything new is not worse than everything old.

Parents with heads made from pumpkins have a baby with a head made from iron. I have, for what I assume will be very obvious reasons, been thinking about this one a lot lately.

—A.J.F.

P.S. I also find myself thinking of “Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff. You might give that a read, too.

Christmas brings A.J.’s mother, who looks nothing like him. Paula is a tiny white woman with long gray hair that has not been cut since she retired from her job at a computer company a decade ago. She has made the most of her retirement in Arizona. She makes jewelry out of rocks that she paints. She teaches literacy to inmates. She rescues Siberian huskies. She tries to go to a different restaurant every week. She dates some—women and men. She has slipped into bisexuality without needing to make a big thing about it. She is seventy, and she believes you try new things or you may as well die. She comes bearing three identically wrapped and shaped presents for the family and a promise that it isn’t thoughtlessness that has led her to pick the same gift for the three of them. “It’s something I thought the whole family would appreciate and use,” she says.

Maya knows what it is before she’s even through the paper.