"My mother is too self-absorbed to spare me much curiosity. She is relieved I have steady employment, and contribute now to our expenses. But we come and go in our apartment as strangers." This is not quite true, it occurs to him. The other night, during an unusual, well-cooked dinner together at the old round table where he used to study, she asked him if he had ever felt anything "fishy" at the furniture store. Not at all, he told her. He is learning to lie. To be honest with Charlie, he tells him, "I tJiink recently my mother has suffered one of her romantic sorrows, for the odier night she produced a flurry of interest in me, as if remembering that I was still diere. But this mood of hers will pass. We have never communicated well. My father's absence stood between us, and tJien my faith, which I adopted before entering my teen years. She is a warm-natured woman, and no doubt cares for her hospital patients, but I tiiink has as little talent for motherhood as a cat. Cats let the kittens suckle for a time and then treat them as enemies. I am not yet quite grown enough to be my mother's enemy, but I am mature enough to be an object of indifference."
"How does she feel about your not having a girlfriend?"
"I think she is relieved, if anything. An attachment to my life would complicate hers. Another woman, however young, might begin to judge her and hold her to a certain standard of conventional behavior."
Charlie interrupts: "There's a left turn coming-I think not this light but die next-where we get Route 512 to Summit, where we drop off the dinette set with the cinnamon finish. So you haven't gotten laid yet?" He takes Ahmad's silence to confirm his assertion, and says, "Good." The dimpling smile has returned to his profile. Ahmad is so used to seeing Charlie in profile that it shocks him when the man turns in die shadows of the cab and shows him botJi sides of his face. Having done this, Charlie returns his gaze to die shifting lights seen through die windshield. "You're right about Western advertisers," he says, picking up an old thread between them. "They push sex because it means consumption. First the liquor and flowers diat go with dating, and then the breeding and the buying diat goes with that, baby food and SUVs and-"
"Dinette sets," Ahmad supplies.
When Charlie is not kidding he is so serious he invites teasing. The lone eye in his profile blinks and his mouth makes a swigging motion, as if he has tasted a sour truth. "A bigger house, I was going to say. These young couples spend and go deeper and deeper into debt, which is just what the Jewish usurers want. It's die 'buy now, pay later' trap-very seductive." But he did hear the teasing; he goes on, "Sure, we're merchants. But Dad's idea was, reasonable prices. Don't encourage die customer to buy more dian he can afford. Bad for him, and eventually bad for us. We didn't even accept credit cards until a couple years ago. Now we do. One must join the system," he says, "until the moment."
"The moment?"
"The moment to give it a blow from within." He sounds impatient. He seems to think Ahmad knows more than he does.
Ahmad asks him, "When does such a moment arrive?"
Charlie ponders. "It arrives when it has been created. It can be never, or can be sooner than we think."
Ahmad feels he is balanced on a scaffolding of straws, in the dizzying space of tlieir shared faith, revealed when the other man spoke of the Jewish usurers. Having been admitted, die boy feels, to a rare level of Charlie's confidence, he in turn confides, "I have a God to whom I turn five times a day. My heart needs no other companion. The obsession with sex confesses the infidels' emptiness, and their terror. "
Charlie says, perking up, "Hey, don't knock it till you've tried it. Here we are. Number eight eleven Monroe. One cinnamon dinette set, coming up. One table, four chairs."
The house is a hybrid colonial, red brick and white wood, on a well-watered small lawn. The young lady of the house, Chinese-American, comes out on her flagstone walk to greet them. As the two men carry in chairs and an oval table, her two children, a kindergarten-age girl in hot-pink overalls with duckling appliques and a male toddler in a food-stained T-shirt and a sagging diaper, stare and cavort as if another set of siblings is being delivered. The young mother in her happiness of fresh acquisition offers to tip Charlie a ten, but he waves it away, giving her a lesson in American equality. "It's been our pleasure," he tells her. "Enjoy."
There are fourteen more deliveries that day, and by the time they get back from Camden long shadows have crept across Reagan Boulevard, and die otJier stores are closed. They approach from die west. Next to Excellency Home Furnishings, on the other side of Thirteenth Street, there is a tire store tJiat used to be a service station, with the gas island still in place though the pumps are gone, and next to it a funeral home, converted from a private mansion before this section of town went commercial, with a deep porch and white awnings and a discreet sign, unger amp; son, out on the lawn. They park the truck in die lot and wearily clump up onto the resounding loading platform, into die back door and die hall, where Ahmad punches his card on the time clock. "Don't forget, you have a surprise," Charlie tells him.
The reminder surprises Ahmad; in die course of the long day he has forgotten. He has outgrown games.
"It's waiting upstairs," says Charlie in a voice too soft to be heard by his fadier, who is working late in his office. "Let yourself out the back when you're done. Put die alarm on when you go."
Habib Chehab, bald as a mole in his musty underworld of furniture new and used, emerges from behind his office door. He looks pale even after a summer of Pompton Lakes, with a sickly puffiness to his face, but he says cheerfully to Ahmad, "How's the boy?"
"I can't complain, Mr. Chehab."
The old man contemplates his young driver, feeling a need to say something additional, to cap a summer's worth of faithful service. "You the best boy," he says. "Hundreds of miles, two, three hundred miles many days, not a dent, not a scrape. No speeding ticket, either. Excellent."
"Thank you, sir. It's been my pleasure"-a phrase, he realizes, he heard from Charlie earlier in the day.
Mr. Chehab looks at him curiously. "You going to stay with us, now Labor Day here?"
"Sure. What else? I love driving."
"I just thought, boys like you-bright, obedient-go for more education."
"People have suggested it, sir, but I don't feel the need yet." More education, he feared, might weaken his faith. Doubts he had held off in high school might become irresistible in college. The Straight Path was taking him in another, purer direction. He couldn't explain this very well. Ahmad wonders how much the old man knows of the smuggled cash, of the four men in the Shore cottage, of his own son's anti-Americanism, of his brother's connections in Florida. It would be strange if he were totally ignorant of these currents; but, then, families, as Ahmad knows from his own family of two, are nests of secrets, of eggs that lightly touch but hold each its own life.
As the two men move toward the back door to the parking lot and their own separate cars-Habib's Buick, Charlie's Saab-Charlie repeats his instructions to Ahmad about activating the alarm and closing the door with its oiled double lock. Mr. Chehab asks, "The boy stays?"
Charlie puts a hand on his father's back to urge him forward. "Papa, I've given Ahmad an assignment to do upstairs. You trust him to close up, don't you?"
"Why ask? He is good boy. Like family."
"Actually," Ahmad hears Charlie explaining to his father on the loading porch, "the kid has a date and wants to freshen up and put on clean clothes."
Date? Ahmad thinks. He has already figured out the surprise Charlie has for him: it will be a hassock, like the one he delivered, stuffed with money, an end-of-summer bonus. But as if to make Charlie's lie to his father good, Ahmad does, in the little lavatory next to the water cooler, scrub the day's grime from his hands and splash water on his face and neck before making his way toward the stairs, in the middle of the store, up to the second floor. With silent steps he climbs them. The second floor displays beds and dressers, side tables and armoires, mirrors and lamps. These things bulk in the dim light of a distant bedside lamp, while the headlights of the evening rush flicker at the high windows. Unlit lampshades knife into the shadows with their acute angles; overhead fixtures dangle spiderlike. There are padded headboards, and headboards of florid wooden shapes, and others of parallel rods of brass. Bare mattresses, side by side on both sides, present a pair of receding planes raised up by the thickness of box springs mounted on metal frames. As he moves between the two receding planes, his heart beats and his nose is touched by forbidden cigarette smoke and his ears by a familiar voice. "Ahmad! They didn't tell me it would he you."