“That would have kept her busy!” Avis smiles carefully.
The woman gives her a cool look. “Yes. The lady ate two, the son ate four, and the husband possibly one or none. They threw the rest to the pigs. All the food in that house was so beautiful. The house was like something from heaven — much grander than these around here.” She looks up and Avis senses something conjured, shifting between them. “I learned to mistrust beautiful things.”
“Your yard is beautiful,” Avis says softly.
She looks around, both of them taking in the orchids in the trees, the fountains of greenery, creamy blooms of gardenia and emerald shrubs that seem to Avis to have sprung up in a matter of days.
“It doesn’t belong to me,” the woman says. But something in her has relented. “You were the one who made those black cookies? With your own hands?”
Avis holds the box in her left hand and lifts her right. The woman studies it, as does Avis: the skin thickened and dry and loose as a work glove, the fingers crosshatched with fine white scars from nicks, thicker pink and red scars from varying degrees of burns, white crusts of flour along the nails and knuckles, the powerful wrist, the wiry, defined muscles of her forearm. “Not a white woman’s hands,” she says slyly. “Do your neighbors know you have hands like these?”
“I have no interest in the opinions of my neighbors.”
“In that case…” She places her hands on the bottom and closed lid of the box. “I shall accept your beautiful things. Perhaps even eat one or two.” She looks up from the corner of her eyes. “I won’t throw any to the pigs.”
She begins to move back toward the house and Avis follows, reluctant to lose her so quickly. “May I ask—”
The woman sighs, turns, mouth downturned, eyes liquid disapproval.
“What is your name?”
She lifts her black eyes. “What is yours?”
“Avis. Avis Muir.”
“Then I am Solange.”
“Solange.” It’s not as musical when Avis says it. Her breath is high and thin: she wants to ask where she came from, if she will stay, why she is here in this neighborhood. But the woman’s face recedes into a powerful remoteness, dismissing Avis. She waits another long moment and notices a flutter of red: a cardinal quivers in the bushes against the woman’s house. Avis wants something from her. There’s a space inside of Avis like a cookie form, which seems to be the very shape of the thing she wants from this woman. Heaven is the un-haveable, her mother said. She remembers Geraldine’s soaps that looked and smelled just like caramel cakes. Avis ate one when she was very small — then, aghast, spat it out. Her mother had said, That’s what make them so delightful — you want to eat them, but you can’t.
Still, Avis refuses to believe that she only wants to want: that was her mother’s illness, not hers. She rubs her knuckles over her lips thoughtfully and finally says, “I’d like — I would hope — we can be friends.”
The woman laughs, revealing beautiful, bright teeth. “Hope all you like, but I may not feel the same.”
Brian
AT THE INTERSECTION OF BIRD AND U.S. 1, BENEATH the shadow of the Tri Rail overpass, the Dominican woman in the peaked straw hat sits on the concrete divider beside her little array of mangoes and string bags of some sort of nut or pod. She also has a carton filled with bunches of small purple flowers. Brian waves a few bucks out his window as he pulls up to the light. The regular homeless man, skin burnt beyond race, is there as well, on the other side of the street. He notices Brian’s gesture and starts to move toward him, but the woman hustles over. They make the exchange and Brian is out of there — pulling into the stream of Benzes and junkers and Hondas — before the homeless man can come close.
At the Ekers Building entrance, Brian notes the way Rufus averts his gaze from the bouquet (he feels conspicuous, with a leather briefcase in one hand and the flowers — so small they’re almost a corsage — in the other). “Hello, Rufus,” Brian says as he enters.
“Hello, Mr. Muir.”
It’s a relief to have the elevator to himself: he and his flowers might just escape further scrutiny. Several mornings in a row now, he’s awakened with an uncanny sensation, as if he is turning into another person: an old, well-loved, and polished carapace breaking open, odd imaginings seeping in. He wakes from dreams of fighting with his son who becomes Brian’s old man. Or nightmares in which he wanders unlit marble corridors, footsteps in a dusting of powder, searching for something. He thinks again of how numb and distracted Avis has seemed this week. It’s Felice, of course. The missed meeting. Just days before her eighteenth birthday. He’d awakened early that morning to a metallic sound — swishing and clicking — through the bathroom door. When he went in, later, to take a shower, he found a dark swath of hair in the bathroom trash bin. He’d lifted it out of the trash, held it for a moment in the palm of his hand, some lost, tender thing. Quietly, he stole some thread from the sewing kit, tied up a lock, and slid it into his briefcase. What does he suppose a lousy bouquet can achieve in the face of this — slippage? He senses a kind of global slide, as if the material nature of his world is losing its integrity. The sight of his wife’s discarded hair was so painful in the moment, almost nightmarish: like a dream of spitting teeth into the sink.
Up to 32 he glides, ears popping. He starts to regret the flowers. Old-lady flowers, the sort his grandmother would’ve cultivated in her wheelbarrow planter. Dark lavender petals and bright yellow centers. It occurs to him that he should at least have waited to buy them on the way home. Now he will have to keep them fresh somehow. As he nears his office, there’s a sound of voices: Fernanda and Javier round the corner laughing, Javier’s hand slipping over the curve of Fernanda’s shoulder.
Javier spots Brian first. “Here’s the man now!”
“How are you, Brian?” Fernanda asks. He sees them both notice the bouquet; Javier’s forehead ticks back. Fernanda glances at her Cartier. “You know, I think I really can’t spare the coffee break right now, Javier. Rain check?”
Javier’s face darkens. “Fine,” he says coolly, already en route to the elevator. “I’ve got to get back to it myself.”
Brian watches him go. “That Javy,” he shoots for a humorously deprecating tone.
She glances at him, then laughs and says, “Oh, I know.”
Brian walks her to the door of her office, holds it open, and she looks at him over her shoulder. “Will you come sit for a few minutes?”
A little twist in his heart, he follows her in. The office smells different. Gone is the executive mosaic of leather, metal, and aftershave. He thinks he identifies gardenia and dendrobium — their neighbors the Regales grow them. He takes in the redecorated room: there is a journal bound in a speckled coral cover; a languorous yellow ceramic mug; a small jade ring. On the desk, beside the computer, he spots a figurine and a stone-colored disk. Fernanda sees him looking and picks up the figurine. “It’s Erzulie?” She turns the piece in her fingertips: beads and bits of feather and cloth. “She’s very powerful, this lady. A force of nature. My grandmother was from the Islands — she gave her to me. Erzulie was supposed to help me with my grades. Ha.”
“Like a saint?” Brian glances at Fernanda. “But I thought you were—”