Uncle Janice (27 page)

She thought she must’ve had herself mixed up with somebody else: a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl with elaborately layered pushdown socks and multicolored jelly bracelets. That embarrassed, embarrassing eighth-grader shared Janice’s rumpus desk with many other Janices, all of them fighting for armrest space. She hadn’t felt this crowded with selves since the LeFrak disaster. There was, for example, the rabbinical Janice who scrutinized Jimmy Gellar’s Facebook responses with a Talmudic attention to detail. Why didn’t he have any classes on a Monday afternoon? Did his less than subtle probing into her marital status indicate less than platonic motivations, and if so should she have clarified that she intended to pay for her own pizza and hot dog(s)? A more present, embodied self—reluctantly engaged in actual, more serious problems—mistook every rumpus shadow for an IA investigator. When Tevis showed up for work, a groveling Janice asked him to extend the deadline on their partnership dissolution. Because she’d be the uncle tomorrow and he’d only be the ghost, he acquiesced to a couple of more days, so long as she promised not to enter any apartment buildings. Done. Still groveling, she thanked him with chicken parm subs from Benateri’s. Suddenly suffering—cheap dim sum
and
chicken parms?—she peed diarrhea up in her secret third-floor handicapped bathroom. Add to those Janices the nail-biter, the hair-tie-snapper, the crackhead Janice Singh and the superhero Captain Richmond Hill and her alias Gabby Guyana and finally the latest Janice, the newly forgetful Janice, her mother’s daughter, whose shift had ended before she remembered to call for a cab.

Tevis spotted her on his way out of the parking lot. She stood shivering with her hands retracted up her coat sleeves, her back to a pretty yellow house abutting the Narco building, a house where if the inhabitants ever smoked weed they had better first cram towels under the doors. Tevis drove a couple of car lengths past her before backing up. He was either curious or concerned or both. His window rolled down. He asked her what the heck she was doing.

“Waiting for a cab.”

“Where’s your car?”

She heard R&B out of his speakers but couldn’t really see him sitting in the dark of his Buick. She went over to him. She leaned her face through the open window, as she’d done to Sergeant Hart two days earlier, another accidental echo she hadn’t asked for or known how to interpret. The little care tag stuck up out of the back of Tevis’s T-shirt. To her surprise he’d apparently joined her mother on the short list of people Janice was unwilling to lie to.

“I hit a parked car and telephone pole last night,” she said. “Then fled the scene because I was drunk.”

The passenger’s-side door unlocked for her. Because Tevis was the most conscientious human being she’d ever met, he made her call the cab company back and cancel her order. After she got off the phone, she expected him to immediately launch his interrogation, or at least tell her an instructive anecdote, but he seemed content to just stare at the road. She would’ve had more questions to answer in a taxi. Where we going? What do you want to take, College Point Boulevard or the Grand Central Parkway? Tevis, without asking, without a fare to pad, headed straight toward the Van Wyck. They drove in silence almost all the way home, through a post-mortgage-crisis Queens stuck in developmental limbo with unmanned cranes on either side of the expressway. Public-housing skeletons waited for stimulus money to finish their windows and doors. Up in the sky, planes beat a path out of JFK.

“Shit,” she said, by far her most commonly expressed sentiment of the month.

She put the probability of her mother remembering at roughly 33 percent. And even if she did remember, there was only like a 51 percent chance her feelings would be hurt, for an overall potential disappointment score of … something or other. She could’ve figured out the exact number on her fancy new cell phone, but it didn’t matter. She said she’d do it, so she had to do it. Plus,
Sway: The Art of Gentle Persuasion
suggested that you can get people to trust you—and she of course wanted Tevis to trust her again—by asking for a super-small favor, one
that can’t be politely turned down, and afterward the antagonist will convince himself that he can’t dislike you
that
much, otherwise he never would’ve done the favor in the first place.… Never mind that Tevis was already doing her a favor by driving her home two out of the last three nights.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“I’m sorry, but can we make a stop real quick? I promised my mother I’d get her some flowers.”

“Are you kidding?” he said. “There’s nothing I’d rather do.”

They pulled into the alleyway with a gas-station bouquet of droopy carnations that cost more than they should have. Because it was dark out, after midnight, he insisted on waiting in the car until she could get herself into the house. Even though she was a grown-up. Even though she had a gun in her purse. But, of course, no keys. She rang the bell, thankful to have these carnations to hand over—sorry to pull you out of bed, swarm your chest with panic, make you scamper down the stairs fully convinced that I’ve been killed—but Vita opened the door right away, completely awake, in a lovely black-and-white dress with jade earrings brushing the tops of her naked shoulders.

“My baby girl,” she said.

Tevis stepped out of the car with what appeared to be an automatic reflex. He fiddled with his belt, his pinkie finger discreetly checking to make sure his fly was all the way up. Forget small favors. Forget chicken parm subs. Janice had her irresistible mother. As he climbed the back steps, Vita turned to him, perhaps to position herself more flatteringly under the porch’s golden light, and when she did she gave Janice a clear view into the kitchen, where her father sipped tea at the cluttered table. A white moth flew into the house through the open door. Her father raised his mug in Janice’s direction, as if to toast her good health and fortunes.

“You look stunning,” she heard Tevis say. Brother leaned forward,
suddenly interested, but from where he was sitting he could see only Tevis’s hands, Tevis’s black hands, stealing the flowers from Janice so he could give them to Vita himself.

“So what’s the big occasion?” Tevis asked her.

Brother had already left his chair. He came over to lean against the doorjamb, one foot on the porch, one foot still in the kitchen, as if reluctant to step entirely out of the house, as if worried he might not make it back in again. His shoes and socks were off. He’d missed a loop on his Movado wristwatch and she wished she could remember if it was like that earlier. “I think you’re the occasion,” he told Tevis. “She got all dressed up because she knew you was coming. And with flowers! The big charmer!”

“I’m sorry,” Tevis told Vita. “I didn’t realize you had company.”

“Oh, that’s not company,” she said. “That’s the degenerate ex-husband. Degenerate ex-husband, I’d like you to meet Detective Chester Tevis.”

“A cop!” Brother said. “How perfect! Brother Itwaru, Detective Chester Tevis. So very nice to finally meet you.”

Their hands met in the middle for a quick shake. Not at all the tarsal-crunching macho pump-athon that Janice had expected. But why should she have? They were all adults here, right? Even her. Even though—sleep deprived, half delirious—when she’d first seen her father inexplicably sitting at the kitchen table, part of her had wondered if she’d somehow stumbled up to the threshold of 1999, if the refrigerator was back to being covered in photographs instead of magnets and the microwave had a turn dial, the telephone a curly cord, if Judith was up in the attic bedroom IM-ing her boyfriends on a Y2K-prone computer.

“Brother?” Tevis said. “Is that your real name?”

“One of them,” he said. “How long it take you to grow a beard like that?”

She didn’t hear Tevis’s response. She was watching the moth flutter back out of the house. It flew toward the porch light, a typical moth, singeing a wing on the bulb before careening down the alleyway. The men, typical men, hadn’t seemed to notice it, but Vita did, or at least
appeared to. She hugged the bouquet to her chest, aware that ghosts took many forms.

“I’m cold,” she announced. “Chester, would you like to come in? I got some leftover pepper pot I can reheat.”

“You do?” Brother said.

“I really shouldn’t impose,” Tevis said.

“You should do what you want,” she told him. “Or? You know what? You should do what I want. And I want you to come inside and eat some of this pepper pot.”

She brushed past Brother into the kitchen. She went in forward, not backward, a mistake inviting all the neighborhood’s malevolence to go streaming in after her. Like, for instance, her degenerate ex-husband. He hung a conspiratorial arm across Tevis’s shoulders, pushed his wicked mouth close to Tevis’s ear. “Next time?” he said. “If you really want to get her going? Splurge a little and buy lilies.”

Janice slumped down at the kitchen table. There were four chairs, room for everybody in theory, but two were already occupied by the pagoda stacks of voided checks, credit-card offers, and presidential campaign letters. Vita stood over at the counter, chopping half inches off her flowers’ stems, while the boys simultaneously, to their apparent embarrassment, reached for the only other available chair.

“Oh, sorry,” Tevis said. “Were you sitting here?”