The heart finds what it needs to find.
21. Thanksgiving
When Melanie arrives each November for Thanksgiving dinner, she brings a sweet potato and caramelized pecan casserole and a bottle of wine.
“You were too young to remember, Jess,” she says each time, “but that’s what I did for the last Thanksgiving on Long Island, before, you know...”
“I know, Mom.”
“Your father’s parents always came, and your grandmother had extremely strict rituals that had to be obeyed. The only nonkosher element was my casserole. It was the last time...”
“I know, Mom,” Jessica says, embracing her. “Mom, I want you to meet a friend of mine from Iowa.”
The name means nothing to Melanie, though the guest vaguely reminds her of someone she might once have known. “Have we met before?”
“Possibly,” he says.
She watches the way he cavorts on the carpet with the children, the way he plays cowboys and Indians from behind the sofa-fort and the circled wagons of cushions.
“You are very good with children,” she tells him.
Halfway through dinner, she asks, “Why do you keep staring at me?”
“I’m sorry,” he says, blushing and looking away. “I didn’t realize.”
“I think I missed your name.”
“That wasn’t my real name,” he says. “My real name is Joshua.”
Melanie goes very white and still. Her hands tremble. After some minutes she says quietly, “You are a very nice man, but you are not my son. Jessica, I think I’ll go upstairs and lie down for a while.”
Melanie drifts into sleep and uneasy dreaming. She is in a vast and confusing railway station, bigger than Grand Central, and it is essential that she not miss her train, yet every platform is blocked with NO ENTRY signs. Somehow she has wandered from the concourse into the lobby of a huge hotel — the Hyatt Regency, perhaps? — and there is a room she must find. Yet every elevator she takes will not stop at the floor she needs. She tries the floor above, the floor below, and frantically hunts for stairs, but they don’t exist. She walks miles of corridor, then begins running because time is almost up. She climbs out a window onto a fire escape which is moving the way an escalator moves, except that it moves very slowly and only goes down. It tips her into a back alley near the Midtown Tunnel and she descends into dark.
Vehicle headlights blind her.
She makes her way along a treacherous catwalk meant only for emergency workers.
She runs and runs and runs.
I will be lost forever, she thinks, but I will keep on going until I find my way home.
And then, suddenly, there is sunlight ahead and the tree tunnel of Main Street and puppies tethered to bike racks and she is inhaling the most glorious smell of fresh-baked bread. Without any effort on her part, she is inside Ryan’s, and through the window she can see the stroller.
She sees the van pulling up.
There is still time.
She rushes outside and scoops her babies into her arms.
“Thank God,” she tells Ryan, bursting back in through his doorway. “I’ve found my way home.”
Ryan cannot tell if she is sobbing or laughing, but he wraps all three of them in tissue and perfumes them with cinnamon and yeast.
Melanie covers Joshua and Jessica with kisses and whispers in Joshua’s ear, “We’ve found our way home and we’ll never leave again. I promise that this is where we’ll stay.”
Richard Lange
Apocrypha
From Bull Men’s Fiction
If I had money, I’d go to Mexico. Not Tijuana or Ensenada, but farther down, real Mexico. Get my ass out of L.A. There was this guy in the army, Marcos, who was from a little town on the coast called Mazunte. He said you could live pretty good there for practically nothing. Tacos were fifty cents, beers a buck.
“How do they feel about black folks?” I asked him.
“They don’t care about anything but the color of your money,” he said.
I already know how to speak enough Spanish to get by, how to ask for things and order food. Por favor and muchas gracias. The numbers to a hundred.
The Chinese family across the hall is always cooking in their room. I told Papa-san to cut it out, but he just stood there nodding and smiling with his little boy and little girl wrapped around his legs. The next day I saw Mama-san coming up the stairs with another bag of groceries, and this morning the whole floor smells like deep-fried fish heads again. I’m not an unreasonable man. I ignore that there are four of them living in a room meant for two, and I put up with the kids playing in the hall when I’m trying to sleep, but I’m not going to let them torch the building.
I pull on some pants and head downstairs. The elevator is broken, so it’s four flights on foot. The elevator’s always broken, or the toilet, or the sink. Roaches like you wouldn’t believe too. The hotel was built in 1928, and nobody’s done anything to it since. Why should they? There’s just a bunch of poor niggers living here, Chinamen and wetbacks, dope fiends and drunks. Hell, I’m sure the men with the money are on their knees every night praying this heap falls down so they can collect on the insurance and put up something new.
The first person I see when I hit the lobby — the first person who sees me — is Alan. I call him Youngblood. He’s the boy who sweeps the floors and hoses off the sidewalk.
“Hey, D, morning, D,” he says, bouncing off the couch and coming at me. “Gimme a dollar, man. I’m hungry as a motherfucker.”
I raise my hand to shut him up, walk right past him. I don’t have time for his hustle today.
“They’re cooking up there again,” I say to the man at the desk, yell at him through the bulletproof glass. He’s Chinese too, and every month so are more of the tenants. I know what’s going on, don’t think I don’t.
“Okay, I talk to them,” the man says, barely looking up from his phone.
“It’s a safety hazard,” I say.
“Yeah, yeah, okay,” he says.
“Yeah, yeah, okay to you,” I say. “Next time I’m calling the fire department.”
Youngblood is waiting for me when I finish. He’s so skinny he uses one hand to hold up his jeans when he walks. Got fuzz in his hair, boogers in the corners of his eyes, and smells like he hasn’t bathed in a week. That’s what dope’ll do to you.
“Come on, D, slide me a dollar, and I’ll give you this,” he says.
He holds out his hand. There’s a little silver disk in his palm, smaller than a dime.
“What is it?” I say.
“It’s a battery, for a watch,” he says.
“And what am I supposed to do with it?”
“Come on, D, be cool.”
Right then the front door opens, and three dudes come gliding in, the light so bright behind them they look like they’re stepping out of the sun. I know two of them: J Bone, who stays down the hall from me, and his homeboy Dallas. A couple of grown-up crack babies, crazy as hell. The third one, the tall, good-looking kid in the suit and shiny shoes, is a stranger. He has an air about him like he doesn’t belong down here, like he ought to be pulling that suitcase through an airport in Vegas or Miami. He moves and laughs like a high roller, a player, the kind of brother you feel good just standing next to.
He and his boys walk across the lobby, goofing on each other. When they get to the stairs, the player stops and says, “You mean I got to carry my shit up four floors?”
“I’ll get it for you,” J Bone says. “No problem.”
The Chinaman at the desk buzzes them through the gate, and up they go, their boisterousness lingering for a minute like a pretty girl’s perfume.