21
He stood in the unlit living room back at 16 Hubbard, gathering himself, the Dilaudids down to a quarter bottle. Somehow he made it home and two days had passed. Somehow he called out of work, twice. Normally the TV would be on, humming with the eleven o’clock news or reruns of The Young and the Restless, Grazina talking to the characters like they were guests in the parlor, but now the quiet was immense and amplified by the scratching of a mouse somewhere in the kitchen.
Hai climbed the stairs, eyes lingering on Grazina’s blow-dryer hung by a nail on the wall. He walked into her room, picked up random items on her dresser. A porcelain powder jar, a makeup case, the foundation long dried and scraped clean, a half-eaten box of Walker’s Shortbread cookies, the endless bottles of medications. One of them was filled with baby teeth, most likely from her two adult children. There was also a photo of her and her husband, her daughter on her hip, staring into the camera from the steps of the rail house. Next to that was a single wool glove surrounded by cough drop wrappers. All this, the debris of her living, somehow made her absence feel absolute and stifling. She was everywhere and nowhere at once.
A sharp agitation coiled through him. He thought of the stupid pizza bagels and how the Sgt. Pepper’s pizza shop would be destroyed because of them, the corn cake, BJ’s futile and ingenious scheme, the fake school in Boston, the fake life in East Gladness and the true lies that did nothing but prolong their nights in this crumbling house at the edge of the world.
He placed another pill on his tongue and lay curled on the floor beside Grazina’s bed, waiting for sleep to rise from his feet to the tip of his mind as the day fell away like a photograph snatched by wind.
It was almost three in the afternoon when the hospital van pulled up. He rose from the floor, wiped his eyes, and hurried downstairs. An icy wind had blown out the sun and the street was a sick monochrome. An aide in blue overalls, who could have easily been a janitor, pushed Grazina, slumped in the wheelchair, down the walk. Hai watched from a sliver in the curtain and opened the door as the wheelchair tapped the front steps.
“This your…” The man looked him over, mustache twitching. “This your grandma? She’s supposed to be dropped off here—was told there’d be somebody to take her in. Are you…” he checked the notebook in his chest pocket, “Lucas Vitkus?”
“That’s my uncle. You can bring her up.”
The man picked up the wheelchair, carried it up the steps, and placed it in the sunroom. Grazina moaned, her head unmoving. “I’m home? This Hubbard Street?”
“Sure is,” said the custodian. “Go ahead and sign here for me?”
Hai scribbled on the clipboard and the man left.
Grazina cocked her head, dazed. “You have anything to eat?”
“Of course we do. But how you doing?” Hai squeezed her hand. “They treat you alright in there?”
“I’m not dead.” She winced a smile. “But I don’t wanna go back, Labas. It’s too dark in there. They have no lights, and my owls.” She struggled up from the wheelchair and shuffled inside. “Oh God, my owls.” She grabbed a plastic barn owl from the fireplace mantel and pressed it to her cheek, cooing into it. “It’s much better with them around.” Her hospital gown drooped from her bony shoulders—she seemed to have lost ten pounds in four days.
“Here, come sit down,” he said, pulling out a chair. “I’ll put on some tea.”
While Grazina sat staring at the tablecloth, he emptied the contents from a paper bag onto a plate and set it before her. “Corn bread,” Grazina said cheerfully, and bit into it. “Thank you, Labas. Thank you. Oh, she’s perfect, this batch.”
“You can thank HomeMarket.”
“Yes, HomeMarket. They still good to you, boy? They give you raise yet or what?”
“No—but I never asked. Should I ask?”
“Ask what?”
“About raising it—maybe to $7.50 an hour?”
“Who was in it?” She peered about the room as if following something he couldn’t see.
He put the cups on the table and drew closer. “Never mind. Listen, you wanna take a nap or something?”
“Me or you?” she said, still chewing.
“We can both take one. I could use it.”
Grazina shrugged.
The kettle started to whistle. He poured the tea. She took the sugar spoon and rubbed it along her teeth but stopped when the metal clanked against her molars, then held it up and frowned.
“Hey, don’t do that. You’ll chip a tooth.”
“No I won’t. But…but I…” She stopped. “What was I saying?”
“I dunno. You had a spoon in your mouth.”
“I have to brush my teeth. They didn’t let me brush in there. I kept telling the little girl at my bed to get me a toothbrush, but she only spoke Croatian. So it was all kaput.” She looked up at the ceiling. “Looks like Timothy fixed the roof. We didn’t have a…well, it was an older car, so it broke down. Nissan—Japanese stuff. No good.” She placed the last piece of corn bread in her mouth and stopped. “Labas? Am I going crazy? Or is everything still?” She stared open-mouthed.
“No, no. You’re just having trouble remembering, that’s all.”
She gave him a warm, doubtful smile.
“How about this. Let’s go watch the Easter dinner tape again, okay? We can finish it this time.”
Grazina had showed him, a couple months back, a home video of an Easter dinner at the very house they were in, the band of Scotch tape on the VHS reading Easter ’89 in black marker.
Before long they were slumped on the couch as the room filled with voices that once filled the room. The decorations and furniture in the video remained identical to how they were now, down to their exact orientations. The only owl in the grainy film, however, was a woven tapestry hung next to the TV, the same RCA model with wood-grain panels.
The camera, which was held by her husband, Jonas, was pointed right at the TV from the couch, the same one they were sitting at now, so that the exact scene they lived in was doubled behind the screen—only the room was brighter in the video for having been newer, the objects less dusty, luminous with human use. Grazina sat nodding and mumbled names as faces flashed by: Ludva, Markus, Daiva, Sigitas, Patrukas, Lina, Darius, so-and-so who moved to Missouri, someone else who died of pancreatic cancer, another gone back to the old country. But mostly she was indifferent, as if naming streets on her way to the doctor’s. The bowls of food floating from smile to smile, the glasses of wine, skipped through the warped film.
Then, at the stove, with her back turned, the back of whose head Hai could recognize now from across the river, was Grazina. “Say hello! It’s Easter, it’s Easter!” Jonas said from behind the camera, followed by something in Lithuanian. Grazina turned around, shy but happy, quickly stepping aside to showcase the potato latkes she was cooking, the gleam in her eyes sharp and capacious—the personality inside them overflowing. “Here’s Mama making her famous pancakes!” The camera panned down and revealed Lucas, in his forties, planted on the same chair Hai had sat on earlier.
She started pointing to something on the screen when there was a knock on the door.
Hai flipped off the sunroom light and peered through the curtain. It was getting late. On the steps was an official-looking woman clutching a folder—never a good sign. Behind her was Lucas, his thinning, cotton-candy hair shivering in the breeze. Hai opened the door halfway and the woman, seeing him, stopped mid-step.
“Out of the way,” Lucas said. “Where’s my mother? Ma? You in there?” He brushed past the boy into the house. “It’s time to get you somewhere safe.” His voice had altered, Hai noticed, pitched with performed distress. Lucas glanced around the corners of the sunroom, searching.
“Sir, who—may I have your name?” said the woman. “And what’s your relation to Mrs. Vitkus.” She was handsome and tall, with the presence of a CEO, but in a lumpy sweater.
“No relation,” he said. “But I live here. She asked me to live here.”
The woman jotted this down and stepped inside. “Okay. And you do realize Mrs. Vitkus has a medical history. And that she suffered a bad fall here last week? Which means this space is no longer safe for her. And whatever you two have going on, I think we need to—”
“I take care of her. I do my best and I have a job. I’m not a bad person—and she’s not crazy. She’s—”
“No one said she’s crazy.” The woman stood taller. “And we’ll do the proper evaluations to know where she’s really at.”
“Look, she doesn’t want to go to a home. She already has one and you’re standing in it.”
Grazina let out a distorted cry from further inside the house. Hai rushed to the kitchen, where he found her sitting in the chair behind the dining table stacked with magazines, barricading herself from Lucas.
“Ma, seriously. I’m gonna get you some help. Remember, I’m your son. The scientist.” He was clutching the table so hard his fingernails whitened.
“Ma’am, are you doing alright?” The counselor came in. “Do I need to call an ambulance?”
“Let’s just go ahead and do it now, Tonya. Call the ambulance, maybe even the cops.” Lucas glared at Hai.
“No!” Hai ducked under the table and put his arm around Grazina. “What are you doing? She clearly doesn’t wanna go. You can’t just take people against their will like this.”
“Don’t you dare touch my mother.” Lucas was spitting at this point. “I’m the guardian. I also have power of attorney. And she needs to go. For her own well-being,” he added. The nursing home counselor stood at the threshold, thinking, her eyes flitting across their faces. The Easter video was still running, its voices leaking into the kitchen.
“Sergeant Pepper,” Grazina said, her voice wavering. “Sergeant Pepper, help me. They’re going to take me to the camps. Pepper, please.”
“They won’t take you. They can’t violate your basic human rights.” Hai said this loud, directed at the nurse. “The international code for displaced persons during wartime,” he mimed, “as signed by the Geneva Convention, article 11.5, section 12, states that no refugee shall be taken against their will by any representative of any belligerent state other than their own. All other authorities are null during wartime as protected by international law. Which was all made evident at Nuremberg,” he added, spouting the last dregs of his World War Two vocabulary.
Grazina nodded. “Please, Lucas, listen to the sergeant. Be a good boy.” She spoke to him in the tone mothers use to put their sons to bed. “I’m not crazy, I promise. I was making it all up, okay? It’s just a game, really. I still have all my brains. I make it up because I’m lonely old lady.”
“What’s going on here?” The counselor looked to Lucas, whose teeth were the grey of loaded dice.
“Sergeant, please…” Grazina shut her eyes and grabbed the boy’s arm, tears running down her cheeks. “Don’t let my son call me names anymore. Please. I don’t smell like piss. I’m a good person. I’m clean.”
“Lucas.” The counselor took a step toward him. “What’s she talking about?”
“Are you kidding me?” he stammered. “I’ve never ridiculed you and you know that. And what the hell is this Dr. Pepper crap you keep spouting? This fucking kid is messing with her mind. Can’t you see he’s manipulated her? She’s never talked like this before.” He pointed at Hai’s face. “You weasel your way in and—”
“Lucas.” The woman put her hand up. “Let’s regroup, okay?”
“Of course.” Lucas straightened up and picked something off his shirtsleeve.
As the counselor turned to speak to Lucas in hushed tones, Hai slipped the salt and pepper shaker owls from the table into Grazina’s hands. “You ready for a special mission?” he whispered. “I’ve already loosened the pins for you, and you know what to do, right? Just like our training. On my mark, okay?”
Grazina nodded.
“Okay, guys.” The nurse faced them.
“Get out of my house, you Nazis! They already killed my cousin in the raids. Why do you torture us simple peasants?” Grazina cried. “Why do you come to take over my country?”
“That’s it!” A vein pulsed on Lucas’s forehead. “Call the police. I’ve—”
“Now!” Hai cried.
Grazina, in what appeared to be slow motion, chucked the owl saltshaker at the cabinet above the counselor’s head—where it shattered. She did the same with the pepper grenade, which bounced off the cabinet and exploded onto the tiles. She then lifted the lid off the clay sugar jar on the table and flung fistfuls of sugar at them.
“Let the devil take you, cowards! I curse you! I curse you with holy salt!” The kitchen was small enough for the sugar to burst and ricochet with surprising violence.
The counselor shielded herself with the clipboard and hurried away, calling for Lucas, who ducked out behind her.
“Now shoot ’em,” Hai shouted.
“With what?” Grazina asked.
“Your pistol, remember?”
Grazina raised her finger-pistol and fired. And Hai did the same. “Bang bang. I’m hitting them in the balls,” she said.
“Good, me too.”
“I gave you a chance, now I’m coming back with the cops!” Lucas shouted as they headed out. Hai ran to the front door and locked it, then stood guard as the car sped off.
In the kitchen Grazina sat back in a heap. The sugar, mixed with sweat, had coated her hands with white crystals. She shrugged at Hai, then started licking her fingers.
“They’re gone.” He pushed the table out of the way and dragged her chair out of the corner, then grabbed a wooden owl from the china cabinet and placed it in her arms. “There, just hold this and calm down a bit. Just breathe for me, alright?” He took a second owl, this one made of resin, and sat on the floor by her feet, cradling it in his lap. They sat rocking the owls as the heaters clicked on.
“Where’d you get these, Sergeant Pepper?”
“America.”
“Ah—that’s why they have more open faces.” She examined the owl as if it were alive, turning her head to see its features. “Americans are optimistic. It shows in how they make their owls. The Romanian owls, like that one there,” she nodded at the case, “the one Lina got me when she was exchange student, have tiny eyes, skeptical.”
“Hey, who am I right now?” He wanted to check in to reorient himself. “Am I Sergeant Pepper or am I Labas?”
He thought he saw her eyes flutter. She tilted her head as if listening to voices in another room, but the Easter video was long over. Then, rocking the wooden owl in her arms, she got up and opened a drawer in the china cabinet. She placed on the small table a mason jar filled with what looked like pebbles, then sat down and pushed it toward him. “My husband—he collected these.”
“I know, he was a hoarder.”
“No. These things,” she tapped the table with her forefinger, “these came from inside him.”
Hai put the owl down and picked up the jar, the yellowish stones shifting as he turned it.
“In old country, they had to bury the horses with big stones from the river. No time to dig holes with Russians coming. When horses were killed by air raids, we kids would go out and find stones. I never thought humans can make stones from the river inside them. But they said Jonas had too many rocks in his organs. This whole time he was burying himself. I thought he was getting promoted. He was conductor for Amtrak, and he was making more salary, watching our children grow, going on trips, picnics at the Lithuanian camp in the summers in Massachusetts, but he was slowly covering himself with stones. Just like he covered the basement with garbage.” She held the owl at arm’s length, frowning, then brought it to her chest. “You never know how big a horse is until you have to bury it.”
But Hai’s mind was snagged on something else. “You said to the nurse that your cousin was killed in the raids—but wasn’t it your brother?” He studied her face, then decided to ask what he’d wanted to ask for some time. For weeks he’d had the nagging feeling she’d been embellishing a minor diagnosis into a pageantry of chaos.
“Grazina, are you making this all up? You can tell me if you are.”
He said it so gently that she turned her whole body to face him. A thin, nearly imperceptible smile crept along her mouth, then vanished. “Stouffer’s,” she said.
“What?”
“We’re down to two Stouffer’s.” She patted the back of the owl’s head. “Now, don’t think too much about the stones, boy. They’ll just weigh you down.”
Just then the cuckoo clock went off; a headless owl emerged from the door and swiveled as it chirped above them.
“I guess Stalin’s invading Vilnius again,” he said, nodding toward the sound.
“No.” Grazina was looking out the window at the bridge. “That’s 6:43 p.m. The time Lucas was born.”
April came on. The steam, which all winter had covered the top half of the windows of HomeMarket, dissolved as the outside temperature slowly equaled the inside—cause for Wayne to look up in the midst of carving and shout “Spring’s here!” before returning to his knife work, now whistling as he went. In a stretch of brown pasture along Route 4, migrant farmers had begun planting sweet potatoes, calling to each other in Spanish across the wind-swept dust. One of them, a woman in overalls and ponytail tied through the loop in her cap, had fingernails painted turquoise blue, likely at one of the three Vietnamese nail salons in the five-mile radius. Some of these potatoes will be shipped to the plant in Missouri, where they’ll be mixed with other spuds from Louisiana and New Jersey, then cooked down in 150-gallon vats to be shipped back to the HomeMarket down the road from where they were grown, as Grandma’s Sweet Potato Pie.
In the days since Lucas and the nurse left, Hai and Grazina would peek through the curtains half expecting the medical vans to come charging up the block. But it had been two weeks, and so far the road to their dead end sat still and empty.
Grazina also lost a tooth. She held up a Fig Newton to Hai’s face one morning at breakfast, the snaggled incisor sticking up from the cookie like a tombstone on a plot of earth. “Now what?” she said with delight. It was not only her teeth—it seemed her mind was loosening too, the sundowning getting worse. One time at HomeMarket, Hai picked up his cell to the sound of Grazina sobbing about a flood, saying the water from the river had seeped through the back door into the kitchen. Outside the store windows, the rain was a bright curtain of water. He hung up and rode home so fast he nearly slid off the muddy embankment at the highway overpass. When he got in, sopping wet, Grazina was sitting at the kitchen table reading a magazine, dry as stone. “Why you early, Labas?” she said, without looking up from her 1986 issue of Better Homes and Gardens. He took a deep, patient breath, then turned around and went back to work.
And Maureen’s lump, to everyone’s relief, turned out to be a cyst, a warning of potential malignancy in the future—but not yet, not with the green season on the cusp of breaking open and the days about to melt into a stream of hours under fluorescent lights, time so vast and empty, pulled forward by the promise of summer, longer days and more light to live by.
But then came the morning when Mr. Vogel returned. Wayne caught him coming in and gave him a polite “How’s it going?” to which Vogel answered, without slowing his stride, “Monday.” BJ was in the office fiddling with time sheets, her head bobbing to the bass of her new entrance song, when the RM opened the door and slammed it shut behind him.
The crew, sensing danger, hushed themselves and tried to eavesdrop, though nothing could be heard. Two minutes later, the door swung open and Vogel walked out, his fist-head red like it just punched a wall. He got to the front door, turned around, and pointed at BJ, who was lumbering out of the office, her face drooping. “I gave you three weeks, Cheryl. Three!” For some reason he put five fingers up when he said this. “So now I did your job for you. So don’t ask me, How come I can’t be a regional manager? Why do you guys always skip me for promotion? It’s because you have no discipline, Cheryl.” He bit his lip, then, noticing the three identical headshots of Samuel Dalembert on the “Employee of the Month” wall, snatched off the latest one, crumpled it into a ball, and flung it in their direction. “Now tell them what I told you and get it over with.” He turned and left. A customer who was about to come in but instead got caught behind his diatribe pressed a hand to her mouth and backed out.
The place was empty. Somehow even the TV was off.
“Tell us what?” Maureen said, touching the spot where they’d just drained her cyst. “I don’t like secrets, they give me palpitations.”
“Also, who the hell is Cheryl?” asked Wayne.
“Shut the fuck up, Wayne.” BJ gave him a look you could collect debts with. Then she told Hai to flip the sign to Closed and called everyone to the front.
Sony emerged from the back, along with Russia and the dishwasher girl.
BJ pulled her pants up by the belt, took out her American flag hankie, and patted her shiny forehead. “A while back Vogel told me I had to let somebody go.” A collective groan spread though the room. “Was supposed to do it weeks ago, and—well, I dunno. I thought we could’ve proved to them we’d be alright but…” She trailed off, her hands lost in her pockets and her eyes shut. It was the first time Hai had seen her so bereft, lacking possession even of her own size. There was a long silence before she broke it.
“It’s Sony,” she said at last, giving the boy a half glance, then looking down and away. “He said something about the origami penguins being a waste of time or some shit. I dunno.”
Hai could feel the heat crawl up his temples. He thought he heard Russia and Wayne say fuck in perfect unison. “But what about his mom? I mean, my aunt. He’s my cousin.” Hai stepped forward. “They can’t just do that. He has to get a package or something. Does he get a package?”
“The hell you think this is, FedEx?” BJ kept patting her face with the handkerchief. “There’s no packages here, not for part-timers.”
Sony stood still as a cut flower beside the soda fountain. Hai heard him mumbling something before he realized his cousin was reciting the names of Civil War battlefields. “Shiloh, Fredericksburg, Antietam, Second Manassas, Murfreesboro…”
“He’s getting sacked cause of penguins?” Russia said in disgust. “What a dick.”
“Look, maybe he can have one or two of my shifts,” Wayne said from behind them. “I’d give more, but I got…my kids and my dogs and all that.” He gave Hai this knowing, withered look, then pulled his cap over his eyes.
“What if he takes my spot?” asked Maureen. “I was offered, in secret, the store manager job at the HomeMarket in the airport last month. Before my operation.”
“They filled that two weeks ago,” BJ said.
“Okay, so get this.” Russia took off his headset. “You take one shift from Wayne, and I’ll give him half of mine. We can make it—”
“No,” Hai said, “we’re not touching yours. Not with your sister and shit.”
“Only for a little while,” Russia said weakly, but you could tell he was relieved.
That’s when Sony bolted for the door.
“Oh, come on,” called Wayne. “Don’t act like you’re in a movie!”
Hai ran after him, but when he got to the entrance there was a crowd of twenty or so customers huddled outside. They had all just gotten off the shuttle from the nursing home in Millsap. It was Senior Monday, he remembered, and was now surrounded by grey and white perms and sweater vests. “Where you going? Sony, stop!” he shouted over their heads, but Sony was already rounding the corner outside.
The customers, impatient from waiting, filed through the doorway, pushing him back. Hai ran toward the lockers to grab his stuff, but BJ stopped him.
“Can you just ring up five or six orders so we don’t drown here? I get it, I get it. But I’m down a man as it is and that fucker Vogel’s still around and I don’t need him coming back and seeing this damn line.”
Hai started ringing the customers up, his fingers trembling over the screen. After a number of them had their orders in, he rushed into the walk-in fridge and called Aunt Kim. A corrections guard answered and told him it’d be about five to ten minutes before they could get her on the phone. Hai stayed on the line as he punched out and gathered his stuff.
Soon he was riding out the lot, the air crisp and fragrant with pre-spring clarity. Blue and white hues smarted across the sky, and the wind came off the hills in waves, buffeting his bike as he struggled down the busy thoroughfare. He was riding up and down the roads, standing up on the bike and peering into the distance for Sony’s black cap, when the line clicked and Aunt Kim’s voice came on.
“I need your help. Sony’s gone and I’m scared he’s gonna do somethin’ bad.”
“What do you mean gone? Where’s my son?”
“He got fired and just left…I dunno.”
“Trời o’i chê´t cha rô`i.” Her voice slowed, realizing something.
“What is it?”
“He’s going to Vermont. What a fucking idiot! For God’s sakes. What have I done?” She was talking to herself now, near tears.
Hai assured her he was going to fetch him way before he’d get to Vermont. “I tried calling him, but he’s not picking up. Maybe you can try?”
“There’s something else you need to know.” She went on and told him about how she’d been writing letters to Sony from prison. “Except I’ve been doing it as his dad. All this time, for four years—even before I was locked up. I’ve been doing it with this shitty Viet-English dictionary. And he believed it because his dad also had shitty English.” She was crying now. “I told him, as Uncle Minh, that he could come up and work with me at my wife’s taco bar if he wanted.”
“What the hell is wrong with this family? Why does everything have to be a lie?” A semi blared by and Hai was shouting over it.
“What family are you talking about, boy? This isn’t a damn family. Are you living in a fantasy? You’ve let that American bullshit rot your head in. Who the hell got the time to sit down at a dinner table with you and be a family?”
He scanned the road for his cousin and saw nothing. “Sorry.”
All this time she was writing to her son, making up a future for his father while the man was a pile of ashes. “I know it’s horrible and I feel awful, I really do.” She blew her nose. “Can you just please get him and bring him here? I’ll tell him everything. I’ll make it right, I will. I promise.” She instructed him to follow the railroad; Sony always wanted to take the train north to see his father and had been studying the Amtrak maps.
Hai hung up and plunged the bike toward the tracks at the end of the county road, where it turned into a gravel slope toward a rock quarry that fed into the tracks. He looked both ways down the ties but couldn’t see his cousin. He knew the river where he’d just come from was south, so he headed the opposite way. He stood up on the pedals and humped the bike over the gravel ditch beside the tracks until, among the brown-washed April landscape, a wavering black speck came into view.
“Sony!” he screamed. “Sony, stop!”
Hai gained on him, yelling the whole time until he saw the thin frame turn around.
“What the hell are you thinking?” Hai said when he caught up. He was bent over catching his breath.
Sony’s face wore the eerie calm of an NPC in a video game. “They don’t want me no more. So I’m gonna go up to see my dad.”
“You can’t go to your dad.” Hai paused to think. “I mean, yes, but not now. We can take a bus or something. We can talk about it first.”
Sony shook his head and kept walking. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
“At least get out of the damn tracks. Hey—”
“There’s nothing to talk about when this country’s falling apart by the seams and I’m out here trying to preserve this, our Union.” Sony gestured wildly with his arms, his face flushed. “And you know what those rebels did in Kansas, don’t you? They went out and whipped up their own militia and put holes in the city hall with ten-pound cannons. That’s no way for a country to be, General Hai. There’s no proper decency out here anymore.”
“No, there’s not. You’re right. Look—”
Sony turned and walked on.
“You can’t go, man. Please.” Hai let the bike drop. “Your dad…Your dad’s not up there. The letters you’ve been getting from him are from your mom. All of ’em. He’s dead, okay? Your mom told me. Your old man, the diamond guy, he’s gone and—” Hai saw a flash of clouds, a blue sky, the sun, then realized, with the track trestles hard against his back, that Sony had just punched him in the mouth.
Sony stood over his cousin and looked him dead in the eyes, unblinking, his apron flapping in the wind. “I know.”
