4
Hai headed back to HomeMarket the next morning. He cupped his hands over the store window and saw Sony wiping down tables in the dining room. It was ten a.m., an hour till opening.
“Go out back,” Sony said through the cracked door.
“There’s a back?”
“Yes, to load supplies. Go back and wait. BJ will get you when she’s ready.”
“Why can’t I just sit there at the tables? It’s an interview.”
Sony rolled his eyes with exaggerated annoyance. “You gotta start at the asshole of things before you can get to the heart. That’s what BJ always says. And it’s true.” He shut the door and locked it with a click.
The back of HomeMarket was a strip of unmarked pavement that stretched toward an abandoned apartment complex whose windows were mostly boarded up, the brick along the edges black with soot from a fire that must have swept through years ago. Hai sat on a cinder block outside the back door and waited. He was there about ten minutes before this skinny white kid with a nose ring came out. The kid nodded vaguely in Hai’s direction and leaned on the wall fishing for a cigarette. He had a once-white apron on that was so filthy it looked dragged in mud then washed out in a river.
“You BJ?” Hai said.
“Hell nah, dude,” he said with a stoner’s chuckle. “I look like a boss to you? Hey, you got a light though?”
Hai threw him his BIC and the boy lit up, his fingertips black with grime. He leaned on the wall smoking for a bit, both of them staring at the dead buildings across the lot. Vines and chokegrass had already pulled some of the nailed plywood off the windows.
“Dude,” the kid smirked, his braces catching the sun. “Ever heard of a strawberry shortcake?”
“I think so.”
He started to explain it, but Hai wasn’t really listening. He was trying to time how long Grazina’s last dose would last and whether he had to rush back to the house after the interview.
“…so that when you’re banging the chick, right? Then, just when you’re about to pop, you turn her around and knob her right there, in the fucking nose. Then you just”—he made the gesture of an explosion with his hand—“psssssh.”
Hai turned back to the ruined buildings, the iron bars on the ground-level windows, trying to think of the people who had lived there. Did they smell roast chicken each night before they went off to bed? Did it leak into their sleep? How many of them worked at this very HomeMarket? How many of them had to leave in ambulances that must’ve parked in this lot so that EMTs could bring them out on stretchers past the drive-thru menu board and its crackling voices, the cars snaking around it?
“It’s fucked up though, for real,” the stoner mumbled. He looked like a character in a haunted house. Hai had grown up with people like him, guys and girls alike, and learned that if you just uh-huh your way through whatever they were saying, they’ll like you enough to leave you alone or give you a nickname they’ll call out in various stages of intoxication.
“This guy I knew said he did it to his ex, but he bullshits all the time. He told me about this other one, though—you know about the Irish plower?”
The kid blew a shaft of smoke that engulfed the side of Hai’s head.
“How much this job pay anyway?” Hai turned to him, coughing.
“Shit is what it pays.” He dropped the half-burnt bogie and stepped on it. “Why? You trying to get a job?”
“Trying.”
The kid’s phone buzzed. He flipped it open and laughed. “Yo, check this out! My cousin Danil just sent me this.” He shoved a cell phone in Hai’s face. Hai pulled back and squinted at what looked like a heavily pixelated video of a squirrel being shot off the roof of a shed by paintball rounds, followed by multiple people shouting, one of whom was a woman who kept saying, “Get off my lawn, you cunts! Get off my fucking lawn!”
Before Hai could respond, the metal door swung open. The white boy was already slipping the phone back in his pocket and retying his apron.
Sony stepped out and stood by the door, sentry-like, chin high and staring straight ahead. From the shadows of HomeMarket, a heavyset figure filled the doorframe, then stepped into the light.
“Drive-thru,” the figure said and nodded toward the door. To which the white boy bolted inside.
This was clearly BJ. Six foot three with a buzz cut fade and shape-up over a forehead beaded with sweat.
Hai stood, pulled his jacket tight around him, and gave her his hand to shake.
“Hold your horses,” BJ said, gently pushing down his hand. “This the cousin you talked about?” she said to Sony, her gaze fixed on Hai.
Sony nodded. “Affirmative, he’s looking to join the ranks.”
BJ shifted her weight, sand grating under her Skechers. “Open your eyes, man. No, wider.” She hunched to examine each of Hai’s eyeballs. “Hmm. Pupils still big. Least he’s not on heroin,” she said to Sony, cleaning her teeth with her tongue. “And if you’re on meth, at least you won’t nod out on us, right?” She chuckled. “Alright, follow me.”
When the fog on Hai’s glasses faded, the place came into view, so small you could take three steps in any direction and touch a wall. What followed was a “tour of the facilities,” as BJ called it, though the entire back area was no larger than an RV. There was the three-paneled industrial oven, where trays of corn bread were spinning as they rose into golden, palm-sized mounds crusted with sugar, and the long stainless-steel sink where a teenage girl with black eyeliner was now scrubbing away, sweat glistening on the nape of her neck. Then the broom closet, and next to that a door with a Sharpied Post-it note that read Office. It looked like any other fast-food place: rubber mats on tiled floors, blocky steel appliances, fluorescent lights, all of it smelling vaguely of ketchup and used dishwater. The whole tour took all of five minutes.
“Now let’s show you the front. Where the magic happens,” BJ said, rubbing her hands together as Sony hurried behind her. “This right here, this is the main protein we serve.” She pointed to the back wall behind the counter where, spotlit by overhead gallery lights, was the seven-rack rotisserie oven where the man he saw yesterday was now carving an entire chicken on a polyplastic butcher’s counter stained brown and slick from thousands of carcasses.
“This here’s Maureen,” BJ said, pointing to a redheaded woman. Maureen nodded, not so much smiling but rather moving her lips to another position. “Show him how to make a meat loaf sandwich, no mayo,” BJ commanded. Hai was ready to put on a pair of gloves but realized BJ was talking about the computer system when he saw Maureen’s fingers fly across the screen, pressing various colored blocks for ingredients and dressings. In about thirty-five seconds, which to Hai didn’t seem very fast, a receipt shot out from the ticket machine down the counter.
“She’s good, huh?” BJ said. Maureen beamed for the first time. “And that over there is our chicken man, Wayne.” She leaned in close. “He tells everybody he looks like Al Green, but it’s more like the current Reverend Al Green, you know what I’m saying?”
“Definitely not from the ‘Love and Happiness’ days.” Maureen nodded toward Wayne, a rotund, profusely sweating man whose squat neck barely rose an inch above his collar.
BJ turned to the sneeze-guard counter that held the rectangular vats of food. They were heated from above by Nemco commercial halogen lamps and from below via pools of hot water circulated through copper wire. The sterile and cold furnishings served to amplify the hues of the products, giving the food a brilliant luminosity, which was engineered, he later learned, by a corporate subcommittee backed by decades of behavioral research conducted at an institute in Ohio funded by the wife of a Raytheon board member.
“So here’s what we’re doing, buddy,” BJ said. “This counter here, this is the heart of HomeMarket. This is where America is fed.” BJ, Hai realized, was one of those people whose entire existence hinged on being perceived as an expert. And though experts often made him nervous, he was intrigued by her pristine zeal for this place, which seemed no more than a tiny cafeteria.
“HomeMarket,” she went on, “is not like other fast-casuals—and it sure as hell’s not like those bums down the road like Wendy’s, Taco Bell, and Burger King, run-of-the-mill-type shit. Understand?” She looked around, gathering momentum, but no one was really paying attention. The white kid with the nose ring was leaning against the counter by the drive-thru window, his arms folded, bored.
“Affirmative, ma’am!” Sony chirped from behind Hai.
“Good,” BJ said. “Because when folks walk into this place, and I do mean this specific store,” a spray of spit shot out as she said this, one Hai was too timid to duck from, “they’re walking into Thanksgiving. Except in here there’s no fucked-up relatives, no nasty dried-ass turkey, no cooking or basting or cutting. Hell, not even the shitty decor and moldy pumpkins, none of those stupid cone baskets with squash in them for no reason. This is all about home cooking. And you know what? Even Denny’s, which some people got the nerve to call a sit-down restaurant, has a goddamn microwave. Have you ever seen a microwave in this establishment?” She waited for Hai to look around, then pulled up her pants and inhaled dramatically. “Russia,” she called to the white boy with the nose ring, “you ever see a microwave in here? I didn’t think so. What we give to America is the taste of the holidays without the pain of holidays. When people come in here, we give them the sensation of home. And they don’t even know they’re getting that until they bite into this, for example.” She scooped a spoonful of the mac and cheese and let it plop back into the vat, then did the same with the sweet potato pie. “See this? See how our pie has the slightly burnt marshmallows on top, just like how their grandma used to make it? Except she didn’t!” A vein pulsed wildly along BJ’s temple. “Hell, they might not even have a grandma, but you bet they’re gonna see her face when they got this pie in their mouth.”
Maureen pointed at a greenish gruel cooling in one vat. “The creamed spinach is my favorite. Know why?” She raised her brows at Hai. “Cause it don’t taste like vegetables. It tastes like dinner.”
BJ, slightly annoyed at the interruption, nonetheless nodded in agreement. “That’s right. HomeMarket is what’s for dinner. Except all the time.” She took a step back, stared intensely at the passing trucks on Route 4 outside, and shouted, “We are magicians!” Wayne turned around, startled, and gave her a confused look. She slammed her hand on the counter, knocking a packet of cookies off the register, which Sony quickly put back in place. “We turn food into feeling, folks. You get me? We transform it.”
Hai glanced around to gather the other employees’ expressions; all remained unmoved save for Sony, whose lips trembled with a mix of awe, reverence, and fear. It seemed this wasn’t the first time the crew had heard this.
“You think this is all about being full?” She turned to Hai, who hastily shook his head. “It’s about taking care of people, giving them happiness that their shitty jobs suck out of them. Our customers aren’t rich pricks in mansions, okay? They come in here tired, broken down by the world. Some of them, like Miss Mabel, haven’t seen their family in over twenty years. She knows everybody here by name and even calls Maureen over there her daughter.” BJ pointed at Maureen’s face. “Isn’t that right, Maur? And didn’t she give you a ten-dollar tip once?”
Maureen bit her lip and nodded.
“But not all this happens cause of the company. It happens because of our team members. And good teams are nothing without good leaders.” BJ took from her back pocket an American flag bandana and mopped her dripping forehead. “Now, I’m not out here to be anybody’s hero, or even to toot my own horn, but we, lest we forget, folks, are the third,” she shoved three fingers in front of Maureen’s face, who didn’t even blink, “the third-best-grossing HomeMarket in all twelve locations in the Northeast.”
“Is the one in Reading, Pennsylvania, still number one?” asked Wayne.
BJ sighed and nodded solemnly. “You know very well that one doesn’t count. The one in Reading is in the middle of nowhere, Wayne. A food desert. If our store was in the sticks like them, we’d make ten grand a night, easy. Out there, where it’s just cow pasture for miles, HomeMarket might as well be Times Square!”
“Exactly,” said Sony.
The second-best-grossing location was inside Boston’s South Station, which was only that high, BJ explained, because people are naturally hungrier when they’re waiting. “It’s just nature. The more you wait, the more you eat. So, in a way, we’re actually number one. Now, you might be asking yourself why that is, and I’ll tell you why.” She leaned back on the counter and folded her arms. “Amanda, bring that corn bread out here!”
The dishwasher girl scuffed out from the back carrying a tray of corn bread and dumped it into a metal cradle on the heat counter. BJ picked one up, held it to the light, then gingerly broke it in half. A puff of steam exhaled from the bread as yellow crumbs flaked onto her palm. She held one half to Hai’s lips and said, “Go ahead and taste this truth, friend.”
Hai took the piece in his mouth and chewed. The bread, crispy at the edges, quickly dissolved on his tongue, a salty sweetness spreading to a uniform consensus of corn, as if, incredibly, the bread inherited the essence of corn—sweet, nutty, mildly buttery—while preserving, perhaps even enhancing, that very corn-ness, despite being transformed into a baked good. It was corn bread more corn-like than any corn he’d ever tasted. The way peach rings are peachier than peaches.
BJ swallowed her half, smiling. Russia’s face finally wore an expression: vague agreement. “You gotta admit, that shit’s bomb,” he said.
“And it’s all because of me, BJ, aka Big Jean. And that’s pronounced Jaaang, the proper French way, we clear?”
“Big Jean,” Hai nodded.
“Sure, I might’ve invented the perfect corn bread—whose recipe only I know, by the way—but I also happen to be one of the top-performing managers in the Northeast.”
“Oh God,” said Maureen, whose accent Hai now clocked to be from the Midwest. “Here we go again.” She turned around and started opening a box of napkins.
“Follow me.” BJ headed to the other end of the dining room, where a narrow hallway led to the bathrooms. On the wall was the “Employee of the Month” section with twelve picture frames. All except two displayed BJ’s grinning face, with varying lengths of buzz cuts and fades. Sony, who had followed behind, stepped forward and pointed to Maureen’s mug-shot-looking photo for the month of June. “This was, of course, when BJ was in Martinique to take care of her grandmother, who was hospitalized for kidney failure.”
“Maur was a trooper,” BJ said, shaking her head. Then, in a lower voice: “Even though I know she eats the cookies without paying, I let it slide.” She patted Hai on the back. “You see. It’s a give-and-take world, my friend.”
“Who’s that?” Hai asked, nodding to what appeared to be a man in a basketball jersey whose portrait took up the latest month of August.
“That is none other than Samuel Dalembert.” BJ lifted her head and brightened. “A center for the 76ers.”
“How come your name is under his photo?” Hai asked.
Apparently corporate had a retirement party last month for one of the founders, so the usual photographer wasn’t able to come. Dalembert was BJ’s placeholder. “Besides,” BJ went on, “as a fellow Caribbean, he and I share a lot of attributes: hardworking, big in the paint, tenacious under pressure, and, let’s be honest, one of the finest performers in our respective fields.”
“Oh hell no,” shouted Wayne from behind the counter. Everyone turned to him. “You can’t make nonsense claims just because the guy comes from the same hemisphere as you. He’s, like, alright—but your guy blocks one or two shots a game, does a layup here and there, and maybe catches an alley-oop once a week. That’s what we call a role player in the real world. He’s no Shaq or Duncan or even Mutombo.”
BJ, her trembling hand finally removed from her mouth, said with suppressed calm, “Dalembert is the pride of the French Caribbean. And my grandmother watches basketball because of him.”
“That’s all good,” Wayne went on, “but you can’t say he’s ‘the best in his field’ just cause you have whatever in common. Kevin Ollie’s Black too, but I must say that my man objectively…sucks.”
“I like Vin Baker,” Maureen said, looking bored. “He’s from Hartford and became an alcoholic. When my son was alive, we’d watch Vinny every week. He was so handsome in that Sonics uniform.”
“Hey Russia,” Wayne said. “You like that NBA player, AK-47?”
“The Sonics’ green was better than the Celtics’ green,” Maureen went on. “Kinder looking, more class. My father loved the Celtics, that asshole.”
Russia pulled off one side of his headset. “What AK-47?”
“Yeah, Andrei Karo-something, that Russian player on the Jazz. You think he’s the best in the world just cause he’s Russian?”
“I don’t like basketball,” Russia said, “too much dribbling,” and snapped his headset back on.
“Whatever. You all get my point.” Wayne turned around and resumed carving up a meat loaf, shaking his head.
BJ faced Hai and Sony. “Don’t listen to him. He’s been battling diabetes for over a decade and says some wild things, that Wayne.” She sighed and looked away. “But he has a good heart. Look, what I’m trying to say to you, kid, is this: I don’t call the shots around here.” She tapped Dalembert’s grinning face. “I just make ’em.”
When the tour was over, Hai followed BJ into the office, which was the size of a large porta-potty. A desktop Dell computer was showing a screen saver of the HomeMarket girl dancing across the screen and tossing corn bread from her basket. BJ dug into a cardboard box under the desk and handed Hai a black polo shirt and an official HomeMarket visor cap. “It’s a large but you can tuck it in.”
“Wait, I’m hired? What about the interview?”
“Look at me, man. What’s the key word in interview?”
Hai blinked at her. Sony, somehow still behind him, was breathing heavily on his ear.
“It’s view. Inter-view. And you got a good view of the place, didn’t you?”
Hai nodded.
“Put on that shirt and cap—oh, and this apron too.” She handed him a few papers from a drawer. “You start at $7.15, just like any rookie. If you’re not a bum you’ll be up to $7.25 in no time.”
“What’s ‘no time’?”
“Two years, give or take.” She gave him a pen and directed Sony to turn around so he could sign on his back. “There’s a ceiling here, though, I gotta warn you. Don’t think you’re gonna work your way up to owning one of these bad boys. HomeMarket isn’t a franchise. We’re like Starbucks.” She paused to let this sink in. “They don’t just hand off Thanksgiving to anybody, you know—not even to me. Corporate keeps that shit in the family.”
“HomeMarket controls its teams from the headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia,” added Sony, “like an army command center.”
“That’s right.” BJ folded her arms. “This is like an army and I’m…like its Jesus, I guess.”
“Don’t you mean general?” Hai said.
“BJ’s as sharp and steadfast a leader as General McClellan,” said Sony.
“You stupid?” BJ said to Sony. “Didn’t you say he was opposed to freeing the slaves? Pick another one.”
Hai hit Sony on the shoulder. “Would you quit with that Civil War stuff already?”
“He can’t help it. It’s his thing. He’s acoustic.” BJ pointed at her own head and gave Hai a knowing look.
“It’s not a thing,” said Sony, buttoning his polo collar. “It’s scholarship. I’m a historian.” Sony stepped forward, one hand on his heart like the Pledge of Allegiance, and spoke in a rush: “And while there’s no denying McClellan’s initial moral corruptions, he was the most seasoned and capable field marshal at the time, having graduated top of his class at West Point. I could compare you to Sherman, but that would be categorically false as he was far less superior on the field and relied on cruel slash-and-burn tactics, especially in the Southern theater.”
BJ glanced at Hai, then at Sony, considering this. “I’m gonna stick with Jesus.”
With his shirt and cap on, his papers signed, Hai followed BJ to the front of the house. “Excuse me, team members!” BJ shouted louder than necessary, causing Maureen to cover her left ear. “Please join me in welcoming our newest member to the third-best-grossing HomeMarket in history!” There was a smattering of applause; even the dishwasher girl clapped from somewhere in the back.
Sony shook Hai’s hand and said, seriously, “I’m proud of you, private.”
Something like warmth seemed to flow from Hai’s fingers, which startled him. The room spun, then gleamed with colors. He didn’t expect this current of relief to flow through him so cleanly. He had a job, which meant he had regained a real, quantifiable foothold in the world. He had a uniform, a cool-looking visor with the logo stitched neatly in cardinal red. His name tag was on the way from the command center in Georgia. He also had coworkers—no, a team, one that was the third best at their job. Never in his life had he been so included in something as to be swallowed by it, invisible among a visible human mass.
As the applause died, Russia came over and handed him a chicken drumstick. Hai bit into it and froze, the flavor mounting the feeling already on his chest.
“The hell?” said Wayne, wincing. “Why the fuck is he crying? Come on, dude, it’s not even noon yet. I can’t work with tears around me. I’m allergic.”
Russia said, “Yo, hey, you good, man? You need a break or something?”
Hai shook his head and wiped his mouth of chicken grease. “The chicken’s amazing, that’s all.” Which was partly true. He took another bite as the faces around him warped into watery colors and felt granted into a realm much greater than his sad, little life, which made his troubles seem suddenly ethereal and elsewhere. He not only had a position in the company—but the company had no idea what his past looked like because none of that mattered. He had become an employee and thus had obtained an eternal present, manifested only by his functional existence on the time card. He had no history because one was not required of him, and having no history also meant having no sadness. Instead, he was part of a workforce that fed people. He was America’s fuel. And he was burning to be used, to be useful.
“See, Wayne,” Maureen laughed. “Your chicken’s so good it’s making the kid cry!”
Wayne swayed on his feet, taking this in. “Really that good, huh?”
BJ placed her hands on her hips with a practiced smile. “Alright, kids, let’s open up this damn place already!”
Sony was already at the front door and clicked the lock open.
Hai spent the rest of the day being trained by Sony. First, he had to go inside the broom closet, where they had a twelve-inch TV set and VHS player hooked up on a shelf of paper towel rolls. Hai stood in the dark watching a half-hour customer service instruction video where he was shown how to hold the paper bag of food: arms cradling the bottom of the bag, “like it was a precious baby,” said the lady with plastic-looking hair. All of this was demonstrated by a strategically multiracial cast of actors wearing the same uniform he wore, except their teeth weren’t jacked up and they looked like they all belonged on Hanes underwear packages. When it was over, Sony opened the door and checked his watch. “You should be done.”
“Yeah, I know everything now,” Hai said.
“Impossible. Now come with me.”
Sony then showed him how to clean the toilets, change the urinal cakes, how to load the roll of toilet paper, which was the size of a car tire, onto the commercial dispenser (by using your knees as a loading bench). Finally Hai was shown how to clock in and out on the keypad outside of BJ’s office, by entering his own company code. Sony requested his to be 1865, the year the Union won the war, to which Hai said, “Makes sense.”
Hai’s number was 2163. He didn’t care what that meant but secretly wished it would be the year the sun finally drank up all its gas and blew up the solar system.
“There, you’ve worked ten seconds so far today,” Sony said, pressing Enter.
“Wait, why didn’t you clock me in before? I’ve been here, like, four hours already.”
“Human error.” He scratched the mole under his left eye and walked away.
That’s when BJ’s head appeared from the office doorway. “Hey, rook, you got a sec?” Her face was weirdly serious.
Hai stepped inside and she shut the door behind him.
“Sit down and listen here,” she said in a throaty voice.
Hai sat down. “BJ, I really…I don’t mind not getting paid for the four hours—it was just a joke.”
She gave him a pinched look, then reached over to type something on the computer, her massive shoulders blocking the screen. When she backed up, a QuickTime player bar appeared, accompanied by ripping heavy bass, followed by someone screaming unintelligible lyrics over the track. Only when BJ gave Hai a playful shove did he realize it was her voice he was hearing, her fingers jabbing at his chest as she lip-synched through the track.
When she finished, his face—only a foot away in the tiny office—was soaked with spit.
“That’s, like, kinda good. Right?” he asked.
“You think so?” BJ wiped her neck with her American flag bandana, then, clocking his wet face, gave his cheeks a cursory pat. “You’re not just saying that cause I hired you?”
“Not at all. I mean, you have, like, a really good tone. Like System of a Down but, slower kinda?”
“Really? Cause that’s what I’m going for. A mix between System and Metallica. Man,” she clasped her hands together, “I’m so relieved. This is gonna be the best entrance song ever.”
“Entrance song?”
“For wrestling,” she said, like this was obvious. “I’m an amateur wrestler on the local circuit. Well, amateur for now, that is. Look, HomeMarket is alright and all, but it’s not where I’m about to die, you know what I’m saying? I’m blessed with talent. And my mom said I can’t waste that.” She spread her arms wide, her fingers touching the frayed schedule sheets pinned up on the corkboard, the chair groaning under her weight. “If God calls on you and gives you a figure of gold, you can’t settle with being just a manager. I’m gonna be the next Rikishi someday.”
“Use your skills to get the gold. Right, that makes sense.”
“No, no. These arms,” she flexed both biceps, “are gold. That’s the difference between the true ones and posers. Posers want gold but legends are gold. It just has to be shined. Never forget that, rook.” She leaned back, cocked her head, and looked at him carefully. “How old are you anyway?”
“Nineteen.”
“Hmm, I could be your father,” she nodded to herself. “I’ll be thirty-seven in March.”
“Okay,” he said.
It was dusk by the time he left HomeMarket, his uniform smelling of grease and bleach. The evening’s red embers flaked off the ridges and settled as soot on the valley floor where he now crossed the strip mall toward the bridge, his uniform inky as the night around him. He spotted, glowing in the far corner of the lot, Sgt. Pepper’s Pizza, the grand opening sign still up, but the wind had yanked off one of the corners, folding it over, the sign now reading Grand Op. The owner, who must’ve been Sgt. Pepper himself, was sitting on a counter lit by a row of cold fluorescents, sipping a bottle of Coca-Cola, the place utterly empty. Meanwhile the HomeMarket, according to the register he counted out before leaving, must’ve raked in two grand during his shift alone.
Hai stood a minute in the cold, bituminous air. Someone down the river was chopping wood, probably lit at this hour by the headlight of a car, the axe bites sounding ancient and otherworldly as they pinged up the slopes. He watched the empty pizza shop, his thoughts drifting, for some reason, to his mother. How one night, years ago, she had come home from work after a thirteen-hour shift saying she was craving pizza. Being the sole wielder of English, he got on the phone and ordered one. He must’ve been eight or nine. After the pizza came and they were all eating, he looked up and saw that Ma had fallen asleep. But not only that—she had face-planted onto a half-eaten slice on her paper plate, making a greasy stain on her white shirt the shape of a warped heart. It was one of those images he could never shake loose from his mind, even though it held no meaning.
Hai had turned to his grandmother, hoping she knew what to do.
“Don’t bother her,” Bà ngoại said as she placed another slice on his plate. “Let her sleep, son. She’s been working since the rooster woke.” It turned out his mother had taken NyQuil for back pain when she left work that night and was now deep in a painless dreamland.
Bà ngoại picked up the white plastic divider thing they put in the center of the pizza and set it on the floor. “You see this thing? This is why we always buy from Pizza Hut. They have respect for ancestors.”
“How so?” Hai asked, his mother snoring now behind him.
“No other restaurant ever thought to give you a little table to serve the spirits with. Only Pizza Hut.” She tapped the crust with her fingernail and smiled. “Give me your other slice.” She placed the pizza on top of the three-legged table, making it look like the slice was floating off the floor. Bà ngoại clasped her hands together and, in a low voice, started inviting their dead to come feast on this one piece of mushroom supreme pizza, her body swaying as she chanted. Then she placed the slice back on his plate. “There, we’ve fed the spirits on their own little table. Now the food is filled with their desire to live, making it more powerful.”
He discovered later that the plastic thingy, shaped like a dollhouse lawn table, was there to prevent the top of the pizza box from crushing the pie during delivery.
“The owners of Pizza Hut,” Bà ngoại said, glancing at her daughter, “they actually thought about people like us. Can you believe it? Americans making pizza thought of Vietnamese customs.” She sighed and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “That’s why we support them. Good folks,” she said, reaching for another slice.
The axe pings were long gone now, along with his grandmother’s voice. He turned home, shaking the memory from his head. The sky was raked by an arrow of brant geese calling to each other as they searched for a tree to shelter for the night, and before long the darkness engulfed them. By the time he got to the bridge, the smell of woodsmoke blew off the bluffs, and he saw Grazina’s window at 16 Hubbard Street glowing like a scrap of morning among the pitch.
Inside, Grazina was so happy she could barely speak, and kept putting her hand over her mouth and asking, “Do they pay you good? Huh? They pay you fair over there?”
“It’s okay, $7.15,” he said. “The minimum.”
“That’s not bad at all. That’s two TV dinners when they’re on sale at Webster’s.”
“Oh, here.” He put the paper bag he was carrying on the kitchen table and opened it, revealing one of the last corn breads of the day. He held it under the kitchen bulb, like BJ did earlier, and broke it open. It was cold but still moist inside. “Go ahead and try it. It’s corn bread.”
“I know what this is. I didn’t come here yesterday.” She took the piece, weighing it in her hand, and gave him a skeptical look. “But is it soft enough for my teeth?”
“Trust me.”
She bit into it. He thought he saw her eyelids flutter.
“Oh Jesus Mary,” she whispered, yellow crumbs dotting her upper lip. “But how? How do they make it like this?” She shook her head, incredulous, the girl inside peeping through her green eyes.
“Right? I don’t know. It’s crazy.”
“This will be perfect dipped in Salisbury steak gravy. Labas,” she gripped his shoulder. “You’re working for geniuses. You should be proud of yourself.” She brushed invisible dust off his uniform, then grabbed the second piece and swallowed it as she stepped back and regarded him, beaming.
“Ah! Before I forget, Labas…” Her brows arched. “I have something for you too. Come.” Grazina walked to a brown door right outside the kitchen, and opened it. This whole time he’d assumed it was a closet. “Go in.” She stepped aside and made like an usher.
Through the door was a stairwell leading to a basement full, nearly to the ceiling, with junk. He reached the bottom of the stairs and was immediately confronted by a life’s worth of salvaged goods: pots and pans, black garbage bags lumpy with linens and clothes and who knows what, a half dozen filing cabinets partly obscured by old and broken furniture, two sewing machines, a wooden rocking horse with one of its eyes gouged out, a box full of vitamins from the seventies nestled between rolls of film and cassettes, broken vinyl 45s. It turned out Grazina’s husband, Jonas, who died in 2004 from a stroke, was some sort of hoarder.
Grazina came down behind him. She leaned on the horse, its hideous head lolling over her shoulder, and told him how Jonas would go on these long walks and come home with armfuls of odd items. As his Alzheimer’s got worse, he came home one time carrying an entire front door from an unidentified house, having no recollection of how or where he got it. Baffled, Grazina suggested he toss it out, but he replied, as he always did, by valiantly raising his right hand to the sky, as reenacted by Grazina, saying, “Don’t you remember the war? You never know, you never know, woman!” before dragging the door down to the basement. Now it lay across an iron sewing machine velvet with dust.
“Look, I made a path today. I spent all day making a path for you. Go.” She ushered him down a single winding path, slightly wider than his waist, that led to a back room. Walking single file, they went deeper, careful to avoid knocking over the towering piles of junk.
Near the far side was a pull string for a single brownish lightbulb. He yanked it and the bulb swayed above them. There, set in an alcove in the wall, were shelves of books, some stacked three volumes deep, running from floor to ceiling. Mostly mass-market pulp fiction from the fifties to the eighties. At the back wall was a white sheet that Grazina now pointed to. “Open her,” she said. “That’s where you wanna go.”
Hai worked through the dust, one arm over his mouth, and peeled back the sheet. As spores swirled through the cone of light, he saw the books, all of them paper gold. Rows and rows of the perennial classics: Homer, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Austen, Montaigne, Flaubert, Turgenev, Faulkner. But there were also Nabokov, Toomer, Salinger, Atwood, Baldwin, Morrison. Most of them paperbacks, like the ones from Bantam, the pages thin as newspaper, cheaply bound and printed for vast distribution. But that didn’t change what was inside. There was also the entire leather-bound collected library of Steinbeck and Hemingway. His mouth agape, heart tapping, dust in his lungs, he ran his fingers along the spines. “Holy shit,” he said, breathless. “How did you do this?”
“I didn’t do squat,” she said. “I told you. My husband was one of those nerds. He read everything. He read so much his eyes dried up in his head. It made him blind, these damn books.” A film of dust had covered her glasses. “He used to read me from that Vonnegut book you’ve been reading,” she added in a fallen voice. “We were in Dresden at the same time, that little Billy Pilgrim and me. What a sham, all of it.”
This must be why her husband was obsessed with translating the book into their native tongue, he thought. It was an American novel that told their story, if only in brief, apocalyptic glimpses.
Grazina surveyed the shelves and sighed. “My daughter, Lina, is just like her father. Also a nerd. She loved Isaac Asimov. But Jonas never liked her much. She was too close to him, his clone. Strange how that is.” She leaned on a felt mannequin and wrapped its arms around her shoulders, making it hug her from behind. “He hated it when he saw her read on the couch. He’d yell, ‘All you read about are aliens and goblins. You’re stuck in la-la land for Chrissakes. Get yourself back in the real world, girl!’ And I’d say, ‘Ha! The real world? Where there’s poverty, war, babies chucked off the Brooklyn Bridge? What a lovely place, the real world.’ ”
“He sounds like a dick,” Hai said. “Why’d you marry a dick?”
Her face softened and she waved her hand dismissively. “He wasn’t so bad. Just a coward, really. A wet biscuit of a man, but he hated her for some reason. Maybe he saw in her too much of his own mother, who knows. Parents make babies, God gives them personalities. But one time, you know, I ran away from him, from this very house.” Her eyes narrowed and she looked across the room into the past. “They denied him promotion at train yard, so he was a real pain in the ass that week. Just screaming vile things at the poor girl trying to read her little make-believe books. And I said, ‘That’s enough,’ and I grabbed my baby, she was maybe nine or ten, packed a bag, and walked downtown and booked a room at the motor inn—you know the one with just five rooms and an ice machine? I ordered us a pizza, all the toppings. I had two hundred dollars saved up from working at Woolworth’s, and those days you can be a king for a day with that much. I sat on the bed, eating pizza and watching my daughter read to me, a smile on her face. It was the sixties and mothers don’t just make themselves disappear like that, you know. I felt like the most powerful woman in the world.” She pushed her glasses up her nose, causing Hai to do the same with his. “With money I earned by myself, I gave my daughter a room just so she can read in peace for a day. Just one day. And I sat there and watched her read, sipping a scotch from the bar. And I cried like a baby. And Lina, my little Lina, she said, ‘Mama, why you crying?’ And I said, ‘I know how God feels now.’ A stupid thing, really, to say to a little girl, but who cares. She must’ve thought I was finally crazy.” Grazina let out a broken laugh. “And hey,” she pointed her pinkie at him, “she wrote poems too, you know, my little Lina. Better than Robert Frost, if you can believe it. What did he do anyway, look at trees and feel bad? That’s no way to live.”
“You’re probably right.” There was a long silence. Hai searched his pockets for a cigarette he didn’t have.
“Maybe you can make use of this mess, huh?”
“It’s a good mess,” he said, scanning the spines.
The years had glued the covers together, and as he attempted to dislodge them from the shelves, some books came out attached in twos, even threes. Others were eaten, almost entirely, by rats. He lifted a trio of Camus’s books and peered into a golf-ball-sized hole burrowing right through The Stranger, The Plague, and The Rebel.
But there was one book whose spine caught his eye. The Brothers Karamazov. It was the book he and Noah were going to read together the summer before he died. This will take us, what, five years to finish? Noah had said. He wasn’t much of a reader but picked up a copy when they were thrifting at Goodwill, saying he liked the title. Brothers. Later, while eating Wendy’s french fries in Noah’s truck bed, Hai read the first chapter aloud as Noah stared at the stars, the engine ticking beneath them as their heads buzzed from oxy and strawberry milkshakes. A week after Noah’s funeral, Hai found the book at the bottom of his laundry basket and tossed it in the trash, the bookmark just two chapters in.
He took it off the shelf, a cheaper, smaller edition, the edges fraying, and turned it in his hand.
“You like that one, huh?”
“Think I’ll give it a shot.” He pressed it to his chest.
“Good, take it. Take it all. It’s just kindling at this point. Well, we did it, Labas,” Grazina said as the bulb swayed, throwing their shadows about. “Just make sure to bring more of that corn bread tomorrow, yeah?”
Throughout the following week, since he had no laptop and no internet, he would stay up deep into the night, often holding vigil over Grazina’s volatile dreams, the pages of The Brothers Karamazov ringed with mold and falling apart in his hands. He would turn a page and it would break right off, the book literally disintegrating as he read it.
How strange to feel something so close to mercy, whatever that was, and stranger still that it should be found in here of all places, at the end of a road of ruined houses by a toxic river. That among a pile of salvaged trash, he would come closest to all he ever wanted to be: a consciousness sitting under a lightbulb reading his days away, warm and alone, alone and yet, somehow, still somebody’s son.
