“Fuck you.”
Officer Como lunged at Sunny, grabbing the handlebars and pulling them down to the sidewalk. Sunny fell over the bicycle, landing hard on her knee and forearm. Officer Como shouted, “Fuck me? Is that what you said? Little bitch!”
“Stop it!” I cried, barely able to keep myself from assaulting the officer. She’d turned just in time and by training had automatically unsnapped her holster. The sight of her reaction enraged me. “You cannot speak to my daughter that way. How dare you make such horrible accusations? This is slanderous. A public servant should not exhibit such unbecoming conduct.”
“Doc—”
“I must ask you to leave her alone! If she’s not done something illegal, you should move on and pursue your duties elsewhere. There are many other young people who are in fact committing crimes in this district, vandalizing and loitering. Why don’t you berate and intimidate them? My daughter does sometimes go to the city with her friends, and what a felon says to you has no weight at all. None at all. Now please let us end this, Officer. You and I have a good relationship and I don’t wish to see it ruined.”
The officer nodded to me and stepped back from Sunny. With anyone else, certainly, Officer Como would have set in her heels, leaned in and returned to me what I deserved, but in deference (and respectful gratitude for my past efforts on her behalf) she grabbed her lunch bag from the roof of the cruiser and went around to the driver’s side.
“I’m truly sorry, Doc, that I upset you,” she said, opening her door. “I am. I wish you hadn’t seen me just now. But I think you know better, too, about the real truth of things. Your daughter is this close to getting into some serious trouble, the kind you can’t ignore or forget once it happens. I don’t mean to upset you, but you’re a good man and so I’m telling you just as I see it. I’m sorry that I am, but there’s nothing else I can do. I don’t really like your daughter and maybe I don’t even care about her, but I owe you too much and so I won’t lie. I’m sorry, again. You can call the station and ask for me whenever you want.”
She drove off and left the two of us there by the parking meter, Sunny picking herself up from the pavement. I made her follow me inside the shop, for onlookers had begun to gather. The skin on her elbow was raw but not broken. When I tried to examine the abrasion more closely she shook me off, her hands raised diffidently in that long-familiar gesture of hers, as if my closeness were an unbearable weight. But this time the feeling was also mine. For the first time, I felt cold to her, like an ice sheet had fallen between us, and a picture of her began entering my mind, her dark form moving through the corridors of a dingy, slovenly house, peals of surly laughter trailing after her.
“Why must you insist on always provoking the police?” I said. “Officer Como wouldn’t have bothered you had you not been so insolent. But you gave her no choice.”
Sunny wouldn’t answer me, instead propping her bicycle against the counter and drifting down an aisle, her back to me. When she was a young girl, she would skip along the racks and shelves, ticking the merchandise with her little fingers as she went, murmuring a made-up song. Back then I used to toy with the thought of her taking over the business when I retired, running Sunny Medical Supply as her own, even expanding it to open satellite stores across northern Westchester. I imagined her as a kind of mini-mogul who was raised in the trade, that she’d be well known in the business circles and be asked to speak before the audience at the colloquiums and conferences. Of course none of these hopes had much to do with who Sunny truly was, her personality and character, though it was my belief that she was actually well suited to the commerce of every day, for although she wasn’t overly talkative she was strangely comfortable dealing with people, whether for better or worse.
“I’m going to ask you to stay here on the weekends from now on. I don’t want you to go down to the city anymore. You’ve gone there all summer, and with school in session you ought to be studying more on the weekends.”
“I haven’t been going to the city,” she said, handling a pair of aluminum crutches. She started using them, pretending to favor the knee that was skinned. “So there’s nothing to change.”
“Are you saying that you’ve been at that man’s house, as Officer Como mentioned?”
“There and other places,” she said. She ambled awkwardly to the far end of the store. The crutches were for a taller person, and she had to hop up slightly over the arm pads with each step. “What did you think, that she was making it up?”
“I assumed she was making a point.”
“She wasn’t.”
“What are you doing there, then? Tell me, I want to know.”
“Do you really?”
“Yes! Now tell me!”
She had turned back and slowly lurched forward, landing on both feet. She collected the crutches and looped them on the display hook.
She said, “I have friends there. But Jimmy Gizzi isn’t one of them.”
“The house is his?”
“I guess so. He’s hardly there.”
“Is he a dealer of drugs?”
“I suppose so. But I don’t do them. I’ve never done them.”
I believed her, for Sunny had never hidden anything from me, or told me untruths. It was actually mostly a matter of my confronting the issues, simply posing the questions.
“So then what do you do there? Are there other girls with you?”
“Some. Not always.”
“So you’re there alone, sometimes.”
“It happens.”
I asked her: “Are you having intimate relations?”
Sunny chuckled a bit and said, “What exactly do you mean?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“I guess I do,” she answered. “Is that what you had with Mary Burns?”
“Please don’t speak about her like that,” I said. “You know very well we’re not spending time together anymore. It’s disrespectful.”
“I guess you’re not,” Sunny said, her expression souring. “I’ve been wanting to ask you about that. It’s like she never was, isn’t it? You just decided it was finished.”
“I did nothing of the kind. The decision was mutual. But this is none of your concern.”
“You’re right,” Sunny said. “Why should I care? What does she mean to either of us anymore, right?”
“I’ve asked you a question, Sunny.”
“Yes, then.”
“Yes?”
“I’m having sex, yes,” she answered, “if that’s what you want to know.”
I could hardly speak in the face of her bluntness. Then I said, “Are you in love with this person?”
“What?”
“The person you’re involving yourself with. Are you in love with him?”
“Are you kidding?” Sunny said savagely. “What do you think I’m doing, having a love affair?”
“I don’t know,” I said, confused by her sudden anger. “I’m trying to understand what you’re seeking. What you may want for yourself.”
“I don’t want anything,” she said, as though saying the words harshly enough would make it so. “Nothing. I don’t want love and I don’t want your concern. I think it’s fake anyway. Maybe you don’t know it, but all you care about is your reputation in this snotty, shitty town, and how I might hurt it.”
“This is nonsense. You’re speaking nonsense.”
“I guess I am,” she said. “But all I’ve ever seen is how careful you are with everything. With our fancy big house and this store and all the customers. How you sweep the sidewalk and nice-talk to the other shopkeepers. You make a whole life out of gestures and politeness. You’re always having to be the ideal partner and colleague.”