Best Debut Short Stories 2020 Page 19

  But without question he had established himself as a regular at Lee’s new house out in the suburbs, as evidenced by his car’s presence there on each of four spot checks Miles had conducted upon receipt of the intelligence. It was there on a Sunday afternoon, a black sedan parked casually in the carport behind Lee’s dented Ford Explorer. There again the following Thursday as Miles inched homeward past the wire-crossed neighborhood in rush-hour traffic. There on a Friday after dark, the lights on in the little house behind it, a hint of movement within. And then, confirming Miles’s nauseated suspicions, there again the next morning at sunup, the house still and silent.

  Mariolive had said, At least this one has a car. Which was more than could be said of certain previous ones, like the one who’d needed Lee to drive him up to Philadelphia once a week to try to see his estranged son. Or the one who’d put the dents in the Ford Explorer driving down 95 in the dark after cocktails.

  But still: a grown man, well past any definition of middle age, living unashamedly off a woman with air between her ears. Who lived by the word of her daily horoscope and always kept a tambourine handy to punctuate moments of spontaneous group laughter.

  And also: a karaoke bar. An unforgivable fall from grace into the soulless and vulgar. Lee had met their father at a District jazz lounge that no longer existed, a place Miles had long imagined as dark and deliciously moody like the man himself, with threads of light piano melody curling through the air between sets. Their father was the MacHale third of the regular Tuesday-night trio Somebody, Somebody & MacHale (Miles thought he would never forgive Lee for this offense alone, her willful forgetting of the group’s full name, which no amount of internet searching could recover), the long-fingered bassist who looked a little like Gil Scott Heron and stood almost as tall as his instrument. MacHale never talked between sets, but he had a smile like a swallow of top-shelf whiskey. Lee had learned from him about melody and improvisation, about modality, how bebop could lift you, how the blues could crush you.

  From that she had found her way, albeit over some thirty-five years, into the drunken sump of some suburban karaoke bar. A place where, by very expectation, the music was shit.

  Mariolive estimated she’d been hearing consistent mentions of Mr. Signet Ring for two months. Caprice, marginally more reliable in temporal matters, thought it had been four. In his email to Theo, Miles had taken liberties: Bro. Hope you are well. Yet another motherfucker living up in Lee’s house for the past six months. You have time to go to Safeway?

  Theo, perpetually glued to his devices for work purposes, had written back within a minute: I’ll make time. When?

  HE WAS EXPLAINING again about the stakeholder grid. “It’s about maximizing your tools to push your agenda forward,” he said, drawing squares in the air with long fingers. “You look for the intersection of interest and influence—the people who want what you want and have some power toward achieving it—and you mobilize them. High interest, high influence: that’s your first quadrant. That’s who you need on your side. They can help you mobilize the folks in the other quadrants. As long as you keep your first quadrant happy, you’ll always have some muscle behind your agenda.”

  “Got it,” said Miles.

  “My mistake last time,” said Theo, “was thinking the girls were in the first quadrant. I thought they were with us and that I could use them that way.”

  “When really . . . ?”

  “Low interest, high influence. Not actually on the same page as us, not actually ready to go to goddamn Safeway, but influential. You know? Noisy. They have Lee’s ear and she listens to them, wrong as they are. They’re third quadrant. You keep third quadrant as far away from the task as possible, because otherwise they’ll destroy it.”

  “Ah.”

  “Which is why, this time, no girls.”

  This had been their mistake the last time: inviting their sisters. Mariolive and Caprice were a storm of emotion, almost as changeable and ridiculous as their mother. The last time, when things came to light fisticuffs between Theo and the squatter who had infiltrated Lee’s shoebox apartment in the District, both girls had simultaneously burst into hysterical tears. No, Theo, stop, they wailed, each one clutching one of Lee’s shaking hands. It’s fine, it’s fine, just let him stay. When only days earlier, they’d agreed that the non-rent-paying leech of a boyfriend needed to be escorted out of the too-small apartment. When only minutes earlier, they’d been helping Miles gather the boyfriend’s belongings—tattered books, crusted-over cookware—and toss them unscrupulously into the cardboard boxes brought for this purpose. Mariolive had thrown herself in front of the boxes, her thick black braid darting from side to side with each shake of her hair. Let him stay with Mommy. Which was why it had taken a total of two days, two trips back to the apartment, two separate escalations of physical contact, to get the lowlife to leave, believably for good.

  The time before that: uneventful. The brothers working alone, both of their sisters away at college, had sent the motherfucker packing for Philadelphia within twenty minutes of focused intimidation. Then, as now, Theo had been wearing head-to-toe black, and incidentally Miles had too (he had come straight from coaching football practice), and to the infiltrator they had appeared a powerful and unified posse; the infiltrator—a foot shorter than Theo, who had just reached his full MacHale height at that point—had actually cowered and promised he would never again take advantage of Lee’s generosity. Lee herself, crying and wringing her hands in the corner of the room, had been easy to ignore; each brother had a lifetime’s practice.

  ONCE, MACHALE HAD sent Miles a letter. The letter, etched out in blue ballpoint and in MacHale’s erratic, challenging script, confirmed Lee’s memory of their first meeting at the long-gone jazz lounge. She had been the girl who turned up to all his gigs in halter dresses she’d made by hand from colorful see-through scarves, swaying her considerable hips at front and center as though they’d hired her as a dancer. Perfect rhythm, and stacked as all hell; but too pretty, an almost unbearable distraction. And too silly to be bothered by the fact that everyone—including MacHale, losing notes on his bass—was watching her. He had never seen anything like her, a black girl with glowing cinnamon skin and hair the color of a well-traveled penny. Sometimes she wore an Afro with a shiny turquoise pick in it, even though by now it was the 1980s and people weren’t doing that so much in the District anymore, and on those days he couldn’t look at anything but her.

  She claimed not to know anything about jazz but somehow could hum all the staple melodies after hearing them once. Often, she brought her own tambourine and accompanied the trio from the lounge floor. The black men and even some of the white ones stared greedily at her, hollering their approval, and even then she didn’t stop, her craving for attention apparently bottomless.

  I’m sure you know the feeling, read the letter in MacHale’s faint handwriting. And even at his first read, Miles had known the feeling, having experienced Lee’s oblivious attention-seeking many times over, and having also experienced the misery of watching girls he wanted flirt with other men. By instinct he understood why his father had seen no choice but to set aside his bass one day and leave the lounge with her, thirty minutes before the gig was scheduled to end, or to marry her six months later and quit the gig altogether. He certainly didn’t need her, the someday mother of his children, swaying and twirling her hips into a future of infinite Tuesday nights.

  BELATEDLY, SOMETHING DAWNED on Miles. “Wait,” he said. “So you think I’m in your first quadrant.”

  Theo, thumbing through emails on his phone, grunted by reply. “If this is done in two hours,” he said, “I can get the 7:05 back to New York. There’s a gin-tasting event in Brooklyn that I want to get to by midnight.”

  “Gin at midnight is worth rushing back for?”

  “Networking. There’s these guys who’ll be there that I need to maximize face time with to kick off some new stuff I’m doing in the coding space, and if I hit them up while
they’re a little bit loose, I might be able to—” He faltered audibly, looked at his brother, and reconsidered. “Anyway, yeah,” he concluded finally. “I definitely want to get back for that.”

  Miles’s hand twitched toward the phone in his pocket but instead tightened around the steering wheel. Lauren called this, the type of work people like Theo did in places like Brooklyn, which no amount of description could clarify to outsiders, alternawork.

  “Unlike Lee,” Theo continued, “I can’t just leave money on the table. I think about those checks she never cashed, and I just—man.” He whistled, a low, pensive sound.

  Miles sensed, in the shifts of Theo’s upper body, that some familiar, troubled presence had joined them in the car. The mishandling of money had always offended Theo deeply; as a boy, he’d been brought to tears many times by Lee’s fretful comments about bills. And from amid the high-piled detritus of the many chintzy apartments Lee had occupied over the years, Theo had somehow sniffed out, and pilfered, MacHale’s forgotten child-support checks. There was something so pathetic in it that Miles was almost, almost moved to touch his brother’s shoulder and to apologize for it, for all of it, on Lee’s behalf.

  FOR YEARS THE brothers had been inseparable everywhere but at school, where they were two grades apart. Living the other two-thirds of their lives in symbiotic closeness, Miles the mouthpiece for both of them. From playing like the best of friends to fighting savagely at the drop of a hat, their feet and elbows always in each other’s face, a constant bodily closeness like nothing Miles would ever experience again. Like a first marriage.

  Among other things, MacHale and his wife had argued about this, whether brothers should be together so much, immersing themselves so fully in their two-person games. Lee had discouraged it, having gotten it into her mind that Miles’s engineer’s brain was stifling Theo’s fanciful imagination, or that they were conspiring daily to rearrange the carefully curated array of crystals and candles on her dresser into an unintelligible mess. She wanted them to be apart sometimes, at least long enough for Miles to complete his early homework assignments without Theo’s scribbles winding up all over them. She lived by the importance of occasional aloneness, shutting herself into the bedroom with the crystals for twenty-minute stretches while both boys pawed at the door, indignant.

  But in those days she had left them to their own devices for hours while she worked—sometimes impossibly long shifts at the Macy’s makeup counter, other times sorting garments at the consignment shop in Northeast, using her pretty face and her honeyed words to sell them to their second owners. Each day, when she was out the door, her long skirts trailing behind her like plumage, MacHale had gathered both boys, not giving a fuck about their aloneness, and sat them before the bass in his practice room to listen while he did his finger warm-ups, his spiderlike scales and arpeggios.

  He would play a song or two at a time, then go fix himself a Sazerac, and then do another few songs, delighting the boys by weaving made-up lyrics about Lee into the classics. Into “I Cover the Waterfront” he worked lines about how Lee left her men all home alone too much; “So What” became a song about her big butt and how she wore those skirts to show it off to the men at Macy’s.

  MacHale gave the boys little nips of his Sazeracs (nasty, and then gradually less nasty) and told them jokes he’d heard at the clubs where sometimes he still played jazz. He disliked television but every so often let them watch episodes of The Cosby Show; he sneaked them out to two Spike Lee movies in the space of a year. He said no to buying them a Nintendo, no and no and no again, each of thirty thousand times they asked; but in the afternoons before his gigs, he let them sit on his back to watch cartoons while he snoozed on the couch.

  And yes, sometimes he sent them into the master bedroom to swap any two of Lee’s crystals, laughing riotously and giving them double high fives when they returned triumphant.

  And then Lee, returning late at night from doing inventory at the consignment shop, was a wildcard who often shattered the consistent peace of daytime. She might be happy and pull out her tambourine, shaking it and her hips when the whole family was laughing. But she might just as readily make a beeline for the stove and wordlessly slam a pan onto it, storm clouds nearly visible over her slick copper-colored bun as she began to stir-fry chicken and peppers. MacHale making the boys laugh by mimicking her cooking posture with exaggerated flourishes, or pretending to bite the nape of her bare neck like a vampire.

  Her high drama, her hysterical turns of phrase. Tell it to the devil, you piece of shit, Miles once heard her scream on the front porch under his bedroom window, the words slicing their way into his dream. Her idea of a welcome-home as MacHale returned from one of the many gigs that didn’t end till well past midnight. She ranted with wild passion, her words otherwise shrill and indistinct, while MacHale responded at a blessedly normal volume, his low, moody murmur so comforting that before he knew it Miles had drifted back to sleep. In the morning it was as though nothing had happened; she served the boys their eggs and toast with a wide artificial smile, pretty as ever with a purple ribbon braided into her hair.

  AT ONE OF these gigs, MacHale broke his left tibia and fibula and landed himself in the hospital for a stay that dragged on like a prison sentence, forcing Lee to quit the Macy’s job and surrender several of her shifts at the consignment shop. (Are we going to be poor? Theo asked, practically in tears; and Lee laughed one of her untamed, destabilizing laughs. You thought we were rich before this?)

  After that MacHale was on the couch, suffering the television he so disliked with his leg stretched stiff before him, eating half of what Lee offered him and rejecting the other half, irritable each time she reminded him he could not drink whiskey—not even in cocktail form—on meds as strong as the ones he’d been prescribed.

  She was moving more slowly than usual, in the first bloom of visible pregnancy with the girls, and she complained often about her aching back and feet in a way that seemed to Miles to be wildly insensitive, considering. MacHale called the boys to him on a Saturday morning. We need eggs and sausage and green onions, he said, making eye contact first with Miles, then with Theo, looking back and forth between them; nothing he had ever told them had seemed so important. But I don’t like your mama swishing around in the streets like she does. You boys go with Lee to Safeway and you don’t let nothing happen to her. Nobody looking funny at her, nothing. You understand?

  The boys, with their small chests puffed out, gangly Theo actually walking on tiptoe to appear taller, flanked her dutifully on the walk to Safeway.

  The eggs were found easily, but in an aisle full of loitering men, so Theo stayed behind with Lee while Miles darted ahead and grabbed a carton, checking the contents for cracks as he’d been shown to do.

  Aren’t you helpful, said Lee.

  She forgot her purse in the aisle with the sausage but didn’t realize it till they’d reached the green onions five aisles over; Miles, able to see in his memory’s eye the maroon felt satchel slung over one of the shelves, deployed Theo back to that aisle, holding Lee in place with produce-related questions until his brother returned triumphant with the purse.

  In the checkout line they stood behind Lee, shoulder to shoulder between her and the other customers, because she was wearing one of those skirts and it just seemed like the thing to do.

  At home, their chests puffed out ever farther, they each received praise and a kiss to the forehead from MacHale, and the pride that hummed between them nearly overpowered Miles’s eight-year-old body.

  A week later, wobbling a bit on his new crutches, MacHale took his sons to the toy store and led them straight up to the checkout counter, behind which was kept all the costliest merchandise. With each hand palming one of his sons’ flocked heads, MacHale got the cashier’s attention and nodded up to the top shelf.

  A—what do you call it, Miles? A Super Nintendo Entertainment System, please. We’ll take one of those for these good, good boys.

  Happiness
hummed between Miles and Theo, their feelings in perfect alignment, one of the last moments in which this would ever occur.

  Some weeks after that, MacHale recovered the ability to walk without crutches, and then he was gone, driven away finally by Lee’s whims and her nattering.

  THIRTEEN YEARS LATER, Miles would break his left tibia and fibula playing college football and find himself bedridden for too long and slowed by a cast for even longer, a total of six idle weeks during which he thought he might scratch out his own eyeballs from boredom. When the cast came off, he would feel as though he’d been fired from a cannon, an unstoppable projectile who ran instead of walked whenever possible, and through this experience come to understand finally why after surviving all those years with Lee his father nonetheless could not survive a single solitary second with her post-crutches.

  And sometime thereafter, when MacHale’s letter, five dense handwritten pages addressed “To my firstborn on his twenty-first birthday”—only a few weeks late—arrived to confirm the projectile theory, Miles would find that he felt satisfied with this explanation. Not that he had ever felt particularly otherwise.

  BUT IN THE immediate, MacHale’s abrupt exit ripped a hole in their little house in Northeast, all its inhabitants left at Lee’s mercy. What outcome could MacHale possibly have foreseen but pandemonium? Before anything else, there was Lee’s unilaterally scrapping Ella and Pearl, the very good names MacHale had chosen for his daughters-to-be, replacing them with absurdities she’d dreamed up through God only knew what nutty arithmancy. There was an intolerable glut of visitors, relatives of Lee’s come out of the woodwork to rock the babies and distract Miles and Theo from their grief with nonsensical questions about school. There were foods served that MacHale never would have tolerated, the delicious staples replaced with eggplant and tofu and loaves of bread with pea-size seeds in them.