“I gotta go.”
“Delia, please. Let me see you again.”
Delia bit her lower lip. She could hear the feeling in his voice. Men were always so much more romantic than women. She counted to ten in her head.
“You can come over tonight at eight.”
“Your place?” Ted inhaled, growing worried.
“Don’t flatter yourself. It’s just easier for me because I’m going to the gym after work. Would you prefer that I go to your place?”
“No, no. That’s fine. I’ll see you there.” Ted hung up after she did.
When Delia let him in, she was still wearing her gym clothes. Lycra running pants and a large hooded sweatshirt over her jog bra. She had run for an hour on the treadmill. She had just enough time to wash her face, but no shower. She waved her bottle of Gatorade toward him.
“No, thank you,” Ted said, smiling. He sat on the sofa. “I missed you,” he said.
Delia swallowed. She’d missed him, too, but didn’t feel like saying it.
“I was thinking about what you said.”
Delia raised her eyebrows.
“About being in a sexless marriage. For the rest of my natural life.” He widened his eyes in a kind of sober fear.
“I’m sorry I said that.” Delia made a face of regret. “Sometimes I can be so mean. I don’t really know how these things truly play out. I just know some of the things I hear about right after the fact. You know. Don’t listen to me. I was angry that Casey knew about us. That was private. Maybe you and your wife will work everything out. Just forget what I said.” Delia wanted to take back what she’d said. Casey had said that Ella was a kind of saint. And Delia wanted to say that she herself was no saint. Far, far from it. She had done so little good in her life. “Anyway, good luck to you.” Delia didn’t want to talk about him and his wife anymore. She didn’t even know why she’d let him come. But she’d felt guilty somehow that he had to face the music by himself with his wife.
“How are you doing?” Ted asked. He wanted to stay with her.
Delia shrugged. The only thing she thought about lately was how she couldn’t get pregnant. For four years she had tried with Santo to get knocked up. Santo didn’t know that she was trying to get pregnant with him. And Ted hadn’t known, either. The doctors had said everything looked fine for her. She was thirty-four years old, and it seemed that for no apparent reason she could not conceive. At her age, her mother had already had three kids.
“Do you want some dinner?” he asked. “I could go out and pick something up for us.”
Delia studied him. What could she say? He was lonesome. He still wanted to be with her.
“Take the key. I’m going to take a shower. We can eat after. Okay?” she said.
Ted reached for the keys on the table. “What do you want? Are you hungry?”
“Surprise me, Ted.” And what she wanted was to believe in him again.
Delia went to the bathroom to wash her hair. Ted went to buy their dinner.
9 CUSTOMS
EUROPEAN CLEANERS I WAS LOCATED on First Avenue between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth streets. It was a large dry-cleaning store of its kind—that is, a Manhattan drop shop where dirty clothes were brought, sent to a plant in Brooklyn to be cleaned, then delivered to the customers’ homes. A drop shop shouldn’t have been a thousand square feet of Sutton Place real estate, yet its size was justified by the volume of work handled through there. It was the flagship store of a sixteen-location chain strung across Manhattan and Brooklyn—all owned by an aging Korean immigrant, Seung Ho Kang, who lived in a Georgian brick mansion in Alpine, New Jersey. The flagship and the crown jewel of the European Cleaners dynasty was managed ably by Joseph and Leah Han.
Years ago, Mr. Kang, a war refugee with dyed black hair and a barrel waist bisected by a Pierre Cardin belt, confided to Joseph that his sons were all good boys but with shit for brains. “Well,” he said, “that’s what you get for marrying a pretty face with perfect legs—stupid sons.” Mr. Kang possessed a sense of humor about the world and history. “Oh well, what can you do?” He giggled loudly, as if he were getting another one of God’s private jokes. “You’re a blessed man, Han jang-no,” addressing Joseph by his church title as elder, for Mr. Kang was a man who’d found the gospel late in his life but now bought the good news wholesale. “You’ve got a pretty wife and two smart daughters who went to real colleges.” Only one of Mr. Kang’s sons had finished community college, and three had gone straight into their father’s business after high school. Mr. Kang also owned car washes and coin-operated Laundromats in Philadelphia and Bergen County. Mr. Kang’s favorite mottoes were “Everybody loves clean” and “No money, no honey.”