“Only a few more weeks,” Carney said. He slid the silverware into the sink so it didn’t clatter.
“Leland and I were thinking,” his mother-in-law said, “what if Elizabeth stayed with us until the baby came? With the doctor’s orders to stay off her feet, it’s been so difficult. The heat.” That kind and gentle register in her voice. She’d never tried to sell him something before and was unsure how to go about it. “It’s comfortable there, and with you working in your store. I can look after her all the time and take her off your hands.”
“That’s nice of you to offer, but we’re doing okay right now.”
“It’d be easier for May, too,” she said, “with the spare room. That’s how they built them, for cross ventilation.”
“May, too? That’s the deal here?”
“She wouldn’t want to be apart, obviously. At that age. With you at that store all day. It makes sense.”
“Sense.”
“We think it’s reasonable. My mother always said—”
“Did your mother ever tell you to mind your own fucking business?”
“Raymond!”
“？‘With me in the store all day.’ Did your mother ever tell you to mind your own fucking business?”
“You’ll wake May,” Alma said.
“She sleeps like a rock. With that train all night? She sleeps like a rock.” He had never talked to her like this, but he had been waiting.
She had been waiting as well. Alma dried her hands on the dish towel. Draped it over the sink faucet, perfectly even. She said, “Talk to me like that—who the fuck do you think you are, nigger? I’ve seen street niggers like you my whole life, hands in your pockets.” She slouched in imitation and her voice went low and colored. “I’m-a just out here trying to make a dollar. You think I don’t know what game you’re running? With your whole jive?”
On the one hand, her honesty. On the other hand.
The phone rang in the living room. And once more. Alma straightened her dress and went to answer it. Carney put his hands on the sink. Outside the window, he caught four floors’ worth of kitchen windows in the building next door: one dark; another lit up but empty; the next featuring two hands deep in suds; and in the last a thin brown hand tapped cigarette ashes outside. People trying to make it through the day. The 1 train pulled into the 125th Street station, he felt it in his toes. He couldn’t see the line of windows in the train cars, the people pour out onto the platform, head down the stairs, but he pictured them scatter to their private dramas. Regular as sunsets and arguments, this movement. People heading home to their private cars, light spilling from the square windows of kitchens. As if they lived in trains stacked on top of one another.
A fence, and also a thief. He had stolen her daughter, after all.
She wasn’t getting her back.
Alma’s passionate account met a friendly ear and he gathered it was Leland on the phone. If their words hadn’t wakened Elizabeth, then she was asleep for the night, arms reaching out for May, with that new baby in between. Carney split.
* * *
*
Out on the street, the first Saturday-night shift was busy. They were loud: jeers, rhythm and blues, disputes on the cusp of fistfights. Carney walked among the couples heading out for a special dinner, or for one at their usual haunts, where they knew what to avoid on the menu. He dodged the dirty kids who should have been in bed, running and screaming themselves sick, and the teenagers wringing out the last bit of the day before they had to return home to pant by the open window next to their beds. In tenements and split-up townhouses, the second shift made preparations for their entrance. Loitering in the bathtub, ironing their best duds, rehearsing alibis, and confirming orders of business: We’ll meet at Knights and take it from there. Plus the second-shift men and women meeting no one at all, taking one last confirmation in the mirror before they gave themselves to Saturday-night destiny.
And then there were the crooks, who tied their shoes and hummed jumpy songs, for soon the midnight whistle would call them to the factory.
There was no question where he was headed: Riverside Drive. He crossed the street to avoid the street preacher, then crossed the street again to go around the mission church on 128th and its night congregation filing inside. He’d had enough of sales pitches today. Don’t hurt me, I’ll talk. Tell me what I want to know or else. Then Alma with, Let the girls stay with us. Give Elizabeth enough time and she’ll come around, Alma and Leland must have told each other. Wake up to the poverty of her choices. He was the rat that crept out of the gutter and squeezed under the door.