“You need help?”
“Not really.”
Still, the young man lingered, offering commentary as Crow worked. “That’s a little tight, ain’t it?” he said of one lug nut. Then: “That’s a decent whip, but I prefer the Escalade or the Expedition. Like they say: If you gonna go, go big. These Lexuses is kinda small.”
And finally, when everything was done: “So can I have ten dollars, man?”
Even Crow found this a bit much. “For what? Giving me a flat tire or irritating the hell out of me while I changed it?”
“I tol’ you, I didn’t do shit to your tire.” A pause. “Five dollars?”
“I don’t think so.”
“C’mon, man. I’m hungry.”
It was a shrewd appeal. A white man in a Lexus SUV bringing food to a soup kitchen should be suffused with guilt and money, enough to throw some cash at a hungry adolescent, even one who had punctured his tire.
And it worked.
“You’re hungry?”
“Starvin’.” He patted his stomach and pushed out his lower lip. He wasn’t exactly a handsome kid, but there was something compelling about his face. The eyes might seem sly, but the grin was genuine, almost sweet. “Like those commercials. You know, ‘You can feed this child for seventeen cents a day-or you can change the channel.’ ’Course it’s more than seventeen cents here. We ain’t in Africa, ya feel?”
“Okay, get in the car, we’ll go buy you a sandwich.”
“Naw, that’s okay. I just wanted to buy groceries and shit.”
“How many groceries can you buy for five dollars?”
“I could get a sandwich, a bag of chips, and a large soda down at the Korean’s.”
“What about the Yellow Bowl? I’ll spring for a full lunch.” The Yellow Bowl was a well-known soul food restaurant not too far away.
An Elvis-like curl of the lip. “I don’t eat that country shit.”
“Look, you name the place and I’ll take you there for lunch.”
“Anyplace?”
“Anyplace in the Baltimore metro area.”
“How about Macaroni’s?”
“Marconi’s?” The choice couldn’t have been more surprising. The restaurant was one of the city’s oldest, a fussy, white-tablecloth landmark where H. L. Mencken had dined in his prime. The only thing that had changed since Mencken’s time was the wallpaper and a few members of the waitstaff. Tess, of course, loved it. But then, Tess suffered acutely from Baltimorosis in Crow’s opinion, a disease characterized by nostalgia for all things local, even when their glory days preceded one’s own birth by decades. A nonnative, Crow was less susceptible.
“Are you sure you want to go to Marconi’s?”
“Macaroni’s.”
Crow decided to chalk the choice up to that weird gentry vibe in the bling culture, the same impulse that had made Bentleys and Burberry plaid so popular. The kid was trying to aspire.
“Doesn’t matter how you say it, we’ll go there. It’s on me.”
“Man-I got things to do. Can’t you just give me a dollar or two?”
“What do you have to do? Go find another mark, slash his tire?”
“Didn’t do shit to your tire.” Still, he got in the car.
“My name’s Edgar Ransome, but people call me Crow.” Lately he was wishing that weren’t so. Childhood nicknames didn’t wear well as one approached the age of thirty. They yoked you to the past, kept you infantile. But he also didn’t feel like an Edgar, Ed, or Eddie, and his last name sounded like a soap opera character’s. “What’s your name?”
“Lloyd Jupiter.”
“Seriously.”
“I am serious.”
Lloyd scrunched down in the seat, sullen and unhappy at the prospect of being forced to eat at one of the city’s best-known restaurants. He did not speak again until Crow pulled up in front of the old brownstone on Saratoga Street.
“What’s this shit? I thought we were going to Macaroni’s.”
“Look at the sign, Lloyd. It’s Marconi’s.”
“I know what it says. I can fuckin’ read. But I wanted to go the Macaroni Grill out Columbia way. They got a salad bar. My mom took me there for my birthday once.”
Crow considered persuading Lloyd to settle for Marconi’s French-influenced menu, force-feeding him shad roe and lobster imperial and potatoes au gratin and vanilla ice cream with fudge sauce. It had to be a thousand times better than any franchise restaurant. Instead he turned the car around and headed south to the suburbs, to the place that Lloyd Jupiter had specified. A deal was a deal.
“Where is it, exactly?” Crow and Tess didn’t spend much time outside the city limits.
“Out Columbia way,” Lloyd repeated. “On that highway, near that place.”
“The mall?”
“Naw, on the highway to the mall. Across from Dick’s Sporting Goods.”
“You get those Tims at Dick’s?”
Lloyd rolled his eyes, perhaps at Crow’s use of the shorthand for Timberlands, perhaps for some other unspecified ignorance and whiteness and general uncoolness on Crow’s part. “Downtown Locker Room.”
“That the place to go, huh?”
Lloyd shifted in his seat, stiff and uncomfortable. Did he think that Crow was cruising him, taking him out to lunch and studying his material desires in order to extract some kind of sexual favor? Street-level life in Baltimore, as Crow thought of it, was viciously homophobic. Tess had that much right: White country kids would turn tricks and still consider themselves straight, but black kids simply didn’t try to play it that way. You were queer or you weren’t. And if you were, you’d better be ready to get your ass kicked or kick back.
Tess would laugh at him later. Laugh at tenderhearted Crow, insisting on buying lunch for the street kid who had punctured her tire and tried to extort money from him. Roar at the idea of taking said kid to Marconi’s, then acquiescing to his desire for the chain-restaurant glories of Macaroni Grill, slipping and sliding along slick highways on a day when people who didn’t have to drive were being exhorted to stay at home.
Still, he couldn’t help loving her, although loving Tess Monaghan was a challenging proposition, what a union man might call the lobster shift of romance. The summer he was nineteen, Crow had worked for exactly three days at a factory owned by a family friend. His job was to insert a metal fastener in a hole on a piece of cardboard, which would later be assembled into a floor display for a mattress. Because he worked the late shift, the lobster, he had received an extra twelve cents an hour-the lobster-shift differential.
He often thought that there should be a Tess differential as well. Not that life with her was as mind-numbing as those three days in the factory. Quite the opposite. But she required a lot of extra work.
There was a short wait at the Macaroni Grill-it was twelve-thirty now, and the restaurant’s vestibule was filled with a backlog of not-quite-homebound families, desperate to amuse their children on a snow day when there wasn’t enough actual snow to do anything outside. Crow and Lloyd sat on a bench opposite a row of newspaper boxes, and Crow bought a paper, but Lloyd wanted nothing to do with it, not even the comics or the sports section, although he did ask Crow how the Detroit Pistons had done the night before.
“Tell me about yourself, Lloyd.”
All he received was a narrowed-eye look in return.
“That’s my girlfriend’s SUV you vandalized, by the way. Her new-to-her precious baby.” Tess had bought the Lexus from a dealership that insisted on calling it preowned, a semantic shenanigan that had so annoyed Tess that she walked out in the final round of negotiations. The salesman had knocked off another five hundred dollars to get her back to the table.
“It looked like a woman’s car,” Lloyd said. “That’s why-” He stopped himself.
“What? That’s what you were counting on when you slashed the tire? A woman who would need help changing the tire?”