Uncle Janice (26 page)

“My God,” he said when he saw her. A little flustered maybe, he blindly passed the putter over to his assistant. “What are you doing here? Is everything all right? Is Mom okay?”

Never your mother, never your mom, only ever Mom, as in where’s Mom, don’t tell Mom, let’s make Mom some breakfast, let’s put salt in Mom’s sugar dish, lookit what I bought Mom, you think she’ll like it, you better because I bought you girls the same thing. To her face she was always Babe.

“I need a favor,” Janice said.

The Latino kept his head down as he walked away. A mechanic in the valley of ashes, where shop owners occasionally burned their garbage and favors were understood to be of a criminal nature, he knew enough to leave them alone. He crab-walked under the security gate, taking the putter with him, perhaps to practice his stroke in anticipation of himself one day becoming the Man.

“A favor,” Brother said. “From your dear old dad, huh? Well, isn’t that interesting.”

“Are you gonna rake me over the coals on this, or are you gonna help me out?”

“This is how you ask for favors?”

“This is how you help people?” she said, but her voice—bouncing back to her off the titanium rims along the wall—sounded childishly bitter. She took a three-second breath to help her start over. “I can pay you,” she told him. “Whatever’s fair, I’ll pay. I’m not trying to get anything off you for free.”

“You’re an exhausting human being,” he said. “You know what your sister told me? When you stormed out of the house on my birthday?”

“Is this your fifty-first birthday we’re talking about?”

“She told me that if I wanted you back in my life—and obviously I want you back in my life—then I needed to win you over with tough love. ‘Man up,’ she told me. ‘No more groveling.’ ”

“I don’t remember any groveling.”

Now it was his turn to take a deep breath. To impress upon her that he did not have all day to waste on a prodigal daughter—credit his new Judith-inspired toughness—he looked down at his watch, a faceless Movado like the one Korean Marty had worn, except her father’s was almost certainly real, almost certainly having fallen off some unlucky gambler’s wrist.

“I was in an accident,” she told him. “And I was hoping you could take a look at my car. Please.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

He must’ve been thinking especially hard about something because his tongue filled the pouch of his lower lip. “Was anyone hurt?” he asked. “No one.”

“Are you sure?”

It must have been her haircut. The haircut he hadn’t even commented on yet. It must’ve made her look like somebody else, a ruthless, toothless scumbag who hurts people then lies about it, so you have to ask her twice. Afraid of the mounting pressure behind her eyes, she addressed herself to all the doorless cars stacked behind him like books. Never mind, she said. She apologized for coming down here, and before he had a chance to respond she walked away, under the security gate and onto the dirt road, where two men walked past her carrying a pane of clear glass. The air felt charged for a rainstorm. Her father’s putter lay abandoned on the ground. She stepped over it and so did he, coming out after her, not to beg any sort of pardon but to inspect firsthand her car and its damage. In a kind, pacifying tone he told her this particular Ford Focus model had notoriously touchy air bags, too easily engaged.
He slapped at the headlamp’s dangling eye with an expert’s bold gruffness. He asked if the engine had been making any funny noises since the accident, which out there in the road he called the incident.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“What do you mean, what do I mean? Has it been making any funny noises?”

“Like what?”

“Like whoopee cushions and joy buzzers,” he said, annoyed, or maybe just pretending to be annoyed. “Go get behind the wheel so I can take a look. And stop being such a poop stain.”

While he tinkered under the hood, she revved the engine in park, a gearshift away from running him over. On her sixteenth birthday, eager to better prepare for the police academy, she had begged him to teach her how to drive, not in this hunk-of-shit Ford, but in the Brown Beauty, his 1971 Pontiac LeMans, a hardtop four-door sedan with beautiful whitewall tires, the same car Popeye Doyle commandeers at the end of
The French Connection
. Brother lasted one instructional trip around the block. A little more patient, her mother took her out for two lessons—two!—before finally sending her to the Alamo Driving School’s Mohammed Ahmed, a chatty instructor whose foot continually hovered over the shotgun brake, a teacher not unlike Tevis in that regard.

“Switch,” her father said, and so they switched. He took her seat while she stood outside the car looking in. He kept his cowlicked head turned away from her, the better to hear the
vroom
of his foot on the gas. “I think you got lucky,” he told her. “I think you’re just gonna need a little bodywork.”

“How much would it cost for a new paint job? Maybe new tires?”

“How about a different license plate?”

“Just so we’re clear?” she said. “Nobody got hurt.”

“Then you’re doubly lucky. Were you drunk?” When she didn’t answer, he folded up the air bag and tried stuffing it back into the steering wheel, but it only spilled back out across his stomach. “You need to be careful,” he said. “You’re genetically … what’s the word? Predisposed. Maybe socialized, too. At a young age. I don’t know.”

“When should I pick up the car?”

“I’ll call the house.”

“Call my cell,” she said, a little too quickly. She needed to buy a new one, but she imagined she could retain her old number. Whatever it took to keep him from resuming contact with Vita. “It’ll just be easier to get ahold of me that way,” she said. “What with work and—”

“Sure, sure, I’ll get the number off Judith,” he said, as in:
Oh, you thought this would be a secret? Oh, you didn’t know I talk to your sister every night? That she’s number two on my speed dial, after voice mail but before Barbara, before my AA sponsor, before all my great Great Neck neighbors, my alleged jogging buddies, this shop right here with its 718 area code?
He smiled and said, “So how’s Mom?”

Mom? Mom was banned for life from the Starbucks on Queens Boulevard because she’d gone behind the counter to scream at a barista, although she says she went behind the counter only to look at the bulk tea prices, and started screaming at the barista only after the barista had screamed at her for crossing an apparently sacrosanct border that was poorly designated in the first place and open to debate. This morning she filled the dishwasher with soap instead of detergent. The green beans, the rubbing alcohol, the picture-stick, the mouth-painter, Jimmy Gellar’s name on the whiteboard: she’d forgotten them all. She said she didn’t send you that photo of me in uniform, but maybe she did and can’t remember, or maybe she’s started lying. A formerly anal bookkeeper, she can no longer be trusted to pay the monthly bills. She has dementia,
that’s
how Mom’s doing, but to answer your question the way she would want it to be answered?

“She met someone,” Janice improvised. “A little while ago. She just seems sorta … I don’t know. Just sorta smitten, I guess.”

“Really?”

“You sound surprised.”

He attempted what he probably considered was an innocent-looking shrug. Obviously uninterested in continuing this conversation, he picked her purse up off the passenger seat and passed it to her through the open window. “You need a ride wherever you’re going?” he asked.

“No thanks,” she said. Because she was an idiot, because she was hungover and had dementia stalking her DNA, she hadn’t entirely realized that when she left here, she would necessarily be leaving without her car. She looked up. Dormant raindrops grizzled the clouds. She said, “I was actually looking forward to the walk.”

You couldn’t call her ungrateful, she did thank him for the offer. Closer to work than to home, she walked to the Willets Point train station, where she caught a 7 local to the end of the line. She expected to step off the el and into a rainstorm, but here in Flushing, only one stop away, the sun was brightly shining. Chinese sidewalk merchants encouraged her to buy their ox bones and toy helicopters and miniature leather Bibles. If only drug dealers were as friendly. Somehow, at the nearby Flushing Mall, she got bamboozled into an iPhone, which came with Internet access and downloadable apps and an extended memory voice-memo program in case she ever needed to dictate her autobiography. After taxes and the sucker warranty it cost almost seven hundred dollars, but at least she got to keep her old number. Jesus Christ, though. In penance she ate lunch at a frighteningly inexpensive dim sum restaurant, which didn’t provide English menus but did display Queens’s most depressed catfish floating in a tank of green water. Janice tapped an apologetic finger against the glass. She thought about calling her mother on the new phone but didn’t want to find out that the police had come by the house. Hours early for her shift, she took the Q65 to the rumpus, not realizing until she walked through Richie’s reception area—once again blame the hangover, the hungry dementia—that she’d left all her keys dangling in the car ignition, not to mention a burka in the backseat.

“Ah, shit.”

“Is it that obvious?” Richie responded. “You can see it in my face? I tell you, Itwaru, you called it. With the penne alla vodka? I get a big magnum bottle of the stuff. What I don’t put in the sauce, we’re using for shots, and this is in addition to the red wine. Then the roommate? She opens up another bottle of vodka. The sauce, it probably came out terrible, you could strip paint with it, but it don’t matter to us because at this point? We’re hammered. All three of us. Okay, so now what? I go,
hey, who wants to lie down? Anyone feel like lying down? Next thing you know, the three of us are in my bed, the girlfriend from Payroll, the lesbian roommate, and me in the middle, jumping out of my skin. Now you got me this far, kid. You told me, ‘Alcohol.’ If I wanted to make it happen, ‘Alcohol.’ But what came next, how to truly seal the deal, that was always gonna be on me, right? So I go, ‘Hey, is anyone sort of hot? Should we maybe get a little more comfortable?’ The girls, they’re just giggling like they don’t really know what I’m talking about. Actually, though? I
am
sorta hot. I don’t know if it was all the steam from the pasta, and the alcohol, of course, that played a part. I always get flush from red wine. Especially if it’s South American. Anyway, long story short, the girls start making out with each other. Right there in the bed, with me lying in the middle. Fact. Then they start touching each other, like for real, heavy duty, but I’ll spare you all the details because I don’t
know
all the details. I’ve already passed out. The only reason I know any of this at all is because when I finally wake up in the morning, the roommate’s vamoosed, but the Payroll girlfriend’s still there. Sobbing. She says she is quote unquote sexually confused now. Is that incredible? So now I’m suddenly single, I’ve got a hangover feels like an elephant literally took a dump on my face, and don’t get me started on all the leftover pasta in my fridge that’s got me sick just thinking about it. Story of my life. But the whole reason I’m telling you all this? Other than that it’s nice to get off my chest and I’d figured you’d want to know, but the whole reason really is that I wanted to thank you for at least getting me halfway there with the drunk girls in the bed and all that. Things didn’t turn out the way we hoped, but that’s my fault, not yours. Seriously. And if you ever need a favor? Consider it done. Guaranteed. That’s an official IOU.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” she said, unsure if he was messing with her. “I really don’t think I should take credit for any of that.”

“Itwaru?” he said. “I’d be upset if you didn’t.”

The main takeaway from Richie’s story: there weren’t any dark-suited Internal Affairs investigators waiting for her in the rumpus; otherwise he probably would’ve led with that. Actually, there weren’t
many people in the rumpus at all. She’d never seen it so empty. Half the uncles were out making buys; the other half, like her, still had hours to waste before they’d have to show up for work. Desks were occupied only by investigators. She was alone in the forest to see the tree fall. Without any uncles around, the investigators didn’t mix martinis or parade cigarette girls, as she might have imagined, but instead filled out forms responding to the endless call-ins—my building’s superintendent smokes weed, my rival drug dealer sells drugs—that clogged the department’s already sluggish arteries. Janice meanwhile had nothing to do. To please Tevis, she could’ve asked Prondzinski for that partner change, but she didn’t want to bother the lieutenant now in case IA showed up later, plus she worried Prondzinski might have unfairly held her responsible for the Puffy/Gonz fiasco, plus of course she was still hoping to get Tevis to forgive her. Nothing’s easy. Because insurance concerns forbade her from even pretending to do work before her shift started—what if she got a paper cut?—she signed into her new Facebook account, not on a rumpus computer like a cavewoman but with her twenty-first-century smartphone. Jimmy Gellar’s name was waiting for her in the message box.