Uncle Janice (25 page)

“That’s genius,” Pablo Rivera said. As they did after every disaster, the uncles had convened around Tevis, some of them sitting in chairs, others balanced on desk edges. “He staged the whole thing,” Pablo Rivera said. “It was a con game from the start! He knows IA’s coming to get us and found a way to leave without losing any of his benefits!”

“If that’s true,” Eddie Murphy said, “it was a fabulous performance.”

Morris the therapist said, “Or maybe he really did have a mental breakdown.”

“Or maybe,” Pablo Rivera said, reconsidering, “he was working undercover for Internal Affairs, sent here to spy on us, and this was how he extracted himself.”

“Isn’t it obvious?” James Chan asked, surprising everyone by speaking aloud. A war vet, a former paratrooper, he stared off into the distance, toward the wild saffron sunsets of Afghanistan. “He fought for the only reason there is: to prove his love.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Janice asked.

The uncles turned to her with obvious disapproval, annoyed that she’d disavow a crush they all knew existed, annoyed her witchy Caribbean enchantments had gotten Puffy banished from their work lives. “I didn’t ask him to hit anybody,” she said, unsure if she was arguing with them or herself. “I can fight my own fights.”

“The ones worth fighting for,” James Chan told her sadly, “always say exactly the same thing.”

“Oh, how fucking deep,” Gonz said. He was on his way past them toward Captain Morse’s office, most likely resisting the urge to rub his
sore head. “You want to know what I think?” he asked. “I think you’re all a bunch of immature faggots with nothing better to do than run your immature faggot mouths.”

Via speakerphone Richie the Receptionist thanked him for the pep talk. But it didn’t have the same zeal with which Puffy delivered the line.
Used
to deliver the line. Spines curved, the other uncles moped back to their desks.

At the end of her shift, she skipped the communal happy hour at A.R.’s Tavern and drove to a random dive bar closer to home, with buffer stools between the lonely patrons and almost nonexistent lighting. She’d never been there before. She didn’t even know the name of the place, just that its windows were thickly dark. She ordered a Guinness with a Jameson chaser. Or a Jameson with a Guinness chaser. However you want to call it. A framed photo of Mr. Met’s encephalitic head stared at her from the wall. Video screens played the keno numbers. She’d left the headscarf in her car but was still wearing the rest of the burka, which somehow did not discourage a balloon-bellied Guyanese man from offering to buy her a drink. She let him. He wore too much hair gel and body spray, which is to say he wore hair gel and body spray, and when talking he had a bizarre habit of rubbing a pinkie across his left eyebrow, but—silver lining—his Adam’s apple protruded like an arrowhead, which for some reason she’d always found attractive.

She bought the second round: more Guinness, more Jameson. The fourth round was a kickback round and so she was still on the hook for the fifth. Eventually, boringly, he asked her about the burka. She told him she was an actress, which was sort of the truth but didn’t actually answer his question. He told her he was a fourth-year law school student at Columbia, which wasn’t the truth—she felt fairly certain law schools lasted only three years—but she didn’t call him out on it. She even let him buy another round, no beer this time, just the whiskey. When his screaming wife showed up in a parka over sweatpants, Janice closed out her tab.

Careful now. Because she knew most drunk-driving accidents occur within a couple of miles of home, she drove with her car seat slid all
the way up and both hands on the wheel. At this late hour there were only a few other drivers on the road, but still … she must remain vigilant. The radio stayed off. She didn’t talk and drive, or text and drive, but she couldn’t have anyway because she still didn’t have a phone. A pothole clattered her teeth, a reminder to slow down, that the road was disappearing too rapidly beneath her car. As she turned off Atlantic Avenue onto a more safely deserted side street, she checked her rearview and side-view mirrors, Tevis-style, perhaps lingering a little too long in the world behind her. When she looked back out the windshield, something twisted and screaked. Too close, the airbag broke her nose. Maybe broke her nose. Blood gurgled in her throat. The turn signal kept clicking. Already deflated, smelling like clothes-dryer exhaust, the airbag lay pathetically across her lap. She’d hit a parked car, it seemed, a red Subaru hatchback, sideswiped it before crashing into a telephone pole. She needed a do-over machine. Outside the windshield, the purple night canted left.

“Shit,” she said, suddenly sober.

She stepped out of the car and was almost roadkilled by a pearl-white Mustang zipping past her, its driver going forty, forty-five down this residential street. A sticker in its back window said
ALL AMERICAN CAR CLUB
. Another sticker beneath it said
THE UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE
. Without stopping, the Mustang raced through a red light; high above the intersection, a camera flashed, catching his license plate, his face, and maybe even Janice in the background, pinned to her car with a hand against her chest. She could get fired. If patrol officers had caught her driving drunk, she could tin them, tell them she worked Narcotics, and they’d probably let her go—maybe even follow her home to make sure she made it—but not if she’d caused an accident, not with all this damage. On her own car, nothing terrible: a busted headlamp, a dented fender. Per usual she’d given out worse than she took. The Subaru’s front and back doors had crumpled inward. Its broken glass pebbled the street, reminding her of the glass outside the Laundromat on the night Caspars and Barnes were executed, a memory that didn’t even belong to her. The side mirror hung dangling from where she’d knocked it off. Or
maybe re-knocked it off. Red duct tape was wrapped around the mirror’s base, as if applied after some previous accident, the owner taking the trouble to buy a color that matched his paint job. He probably lived right here on this block. Maybe in one of the apartments that still had its lights on. When she heard what sounded like a window sliding up along its grooves, she hurried back into her car. Her first bit of luck all day: the engine turned over on her first try, praise the Almighty. She kept to the speed limit all the way home.

Fuck my life. She woke up the next morning needing water, coffee, huevos rancheros with lots of Sriracha, a teeth-scrubbing, a tongue-scrubbing, a hot shower, an alibi, a mechanic, and more sleep, but the first thing she did was go to the window. No squad cars sat parked outside her house. Not yet at least. The woman reflected back at her in the glass looked destroyed. Dark bruises mottled the bags beneath her eyes. Blood crusted her nostrils, but the nose itself felt merely stuffy, not broken. She went into the bathroom to cover up the bruising with bronze-colored concealer and must’ve done a pretty good job of it, too, because when she came into the kitchen her mother didn’t seem to notice anything unusual, other than that Janice was awake and sentient at seven-something in the morning.

“What’s going on?” Vita said. She sat at the kitchen table amid her never-shrinking stacks of unopened mail, her eyes peeking over an early-edition copy of the
Post
. “Escape!” said the back headline. “Duke Survives Scare.” Behind her, soap bubbles gushed out of the dishwasher. Like an oil stain, they rainbowed the light, oozed across the floor mat and tiles. “You hungry?” she said. “You want me to make you some breakfast?”

“Did you put the wrong kind of soap in the dishwasher?”

“Shit,” Vita said.

She knelt on the tiles to mop up the water with what was nearest at hand: her copy of the
Post
. A newsprint photo of Senator Obama disintegrated beneath soapsuds. The front and back covers fell apart. She seemed frantic, unable to pull out sections of the paper fast enough, too mind-muddled to stop the problem at its source. Janice turned off the dishwasher.

“Maybe we should go out for breakfast,” Vita said from the floor, looking up at her like a child.

“I wish I could, but I got some errands to run before work.”

“Errands?” she asked with a mother’s instinct for entirely justified suspicion. “What kind of errands?”

“Like buying you flowers. A huge bouquet to show you how much I love you.”

“Yeah right.”

“Yeah right, what’s your favorite flower?” Janice asked, hopeful she’d remember the answer was lilies.

Kneeling in a mess she’d have to clean up all on her own, with little bubbles clinging to her ankles and fingers, Vita offered only the standard good-bye: “Be good,” she said. “Don’t forget to call if you get overtime.”

Janice took side streets into the Cypress Hills neighborhood of Brooklyn, only ten minutes from home. With her headlamp busted, she wanted to get off the road as quickly as possible and so she turned into the first auto-body repair shop she saw. The little sign on the door redundantly said
WELCOME! OPEN!
The big sign in the parking lot said
WOMEN FRIENDLY
, which she didn’t know whether to find offensive. She expected a dark garage, manned by mechanics in overalls, but instead walked into a temperature-controlled waiting room with a coffee bar and leather couches and a young black guy, her age, with more grease in his hair than under his fingernails.

“I gotta get my car fixed.”

“Well, you have certainly come to the right place,” he said from
behind his counter. He had a nervous tic of some sort that caused his eyes to blink rapidly. “Have you used us before? Are you already in the system?”

“The system?” she said, and was handed a paper questionnaire asking for her name and address and phone numbers, work and private. The make and model of her car. Her license plate and credit numbers. Her insurance info. An accident report (if applicable) made out by the New York City Police Department. She said, “Do I still have to fill all this out if I pay in cash?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you mean, what do I mean? If I pay in cash, do I have to fill all this out?”

“Uh,” he said. “I guess … I don’t know? I guess it’d depend on the sort of repairs you were looking for?”

She told him she needed a new headlamp, a new fender, and a new airbag, but said nothing about the accident. She told him she was also thinking about different tires and maybe a color change. In response he blinked his eyes, as if snapping mental photographs.

“You can talk to my boss,” he said. “If you want. But I think once the airbag’s been deployed, we have to make an official report to the—”

“Thanks for all your help.”

“Hey, are you all right?” he called after her as she went through the door. “You want a cup of coffee or something? It’s free!”

She drove one-handed back to Queens, repeatedly punching the stupid roof of her stupid car. When her knuckles began to hurt, she banged the back of her stupid head against the stupid headrest. It was early still. The Subaru’s owner may not have left for work yet, but if he had, he hated her now without knowing her. Don’t worry, pal: she hated herself even more. To find somebody skilled and sleazy enough to fix her car without draining her bank account or requiring an accident report, she drove from the Jackie Robinson Parkway to the more congested Van
Wyck, then went farther east on Roosevelt than she ever did on foot for work, past Shea Stadium, past orange construction cranes erecting the platinum-blond trophy wife of the Mets’ future stadium, Citi Field, a half-completed brick-and-steel husk of a ballpark with enormous gray scaffolding bags hanging off the rotunda walls like scabs on a wound. She turned onto Willets Point Boulevard, a valley of ashes and auto repair shops, the sky there grayer than anywhere else in the borough. Semitruck trailers, stripped of their wheels, sank into the mud along the sides of the road. Graffiti covered the shops’ security gates, which were raised only a few feet off the ground so mechanics could scuttle in and out beneath them while keeping the garages’ inner workings concealed. Exclusively male, each one of them in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, they peered under hoods and pulled gravid garbage bags out of trunks. She had never driven herself here before, but she knew from countless backseat trips where to go, where to turn, when to slow down for workers running out into the dirt road with paint buckets and sandblasters, when to roll up her window to avoid the errant seat-soaking spray of an industrial hose. Throw a dead cat and you’d hit a shady mechanic; throw a dead cat with money in its mouth and her father would catch it.

It had been double-digit years since her last visit—with Judith, knocking golf balls up and down the artificial putting surface in their father’s office—but the shop looked exactly the same, except on the roof two American flags snapped at attention instead of just the one, the second likely added to reinforce Brother’s patriotism after men who looked vaguely like him knocked down the Twin Towers. She parked out in front, beneath an awning that said
BROTHER AUTO PARTS SALES
. For reasons she never thought to question until now, the phone number listed on the sign had its area code in quotation marks. They were probably cheaper than full-on parentheses, she realized, and the realization—the power it gave her over her miserly father—made stepping out of the car just a little bit easier.

She found him at the back of the shop, surrounded by bulky tool chests and motor-oil smells, with a golf putter held behind his neck as if to stretch out his shoulder muscles. He annoyingly wore the blue-and-orange
tracksuit Judith had given him for his birthday. A sweaty Latino, one of Brother’s many shifty employees, was trying to explain the housing magnet issue in a remanufactured windshield-wiper relay. Whatever
that
meant. Janice couldn’t really follow what he was saying, nor could her father, who didn’t even seem to be trying. He kept nodding along without actually listening. His obvious disinterest, his heavy wristwatch, the putter across his shoulders, and the bulging stomach beneath his tracksuit were all meant to indicate to anyone who passed through here that Brother Itwaru was a super-important Big Boss.