Pacific Avenue (2 page)

I liked being alone in the building at Eighth and Pacific
after the shop closed. When I lived with Richard, there were always people
around us, and unless they were friends of ours, I had to worry about what they
might do.

When we first moved to New Orleans, we lived in a
rooming house, a sagging wood building at the far end of Bourbon Street. It was
a dump, but we were lucky to have it. The first two places we’d tried, the
landlords said they’d just accepted someone else. We were sure they were lying,
but what could we do? I’d gone alone to apply for this room, and the manager
had rented it to me. But now he’d seen Richard, and we were afraid he’d kick us
out on the smallest pretext.

One night we got home so late, we started tiptoeing
when we were two houses away. Shushing each other, bumping through the unlit
hallway like clumsy burglars, we crept upstairs to our room. Even after the
door was shut behind us, we tried to be quiet. We didn’t dare turn on the
lamp—the manager might see light coming through the transom and get mad about
it.

Richard was silent, invisible in the dark. I guessed
where he must be and reached out for him, but my guess was wrong—my hands
plunged into empty air. For a moment, I felt a familiar stab of aloneness. Then
his hands grasped mine, and spread them open, and he kissed my palms, brushing
them with his lips. My fingers read his face like a love letter in braille—the
downturned eyelids, the short eyelashes with their tight sudden curl, the
softness of his mouth. We made love stealthily, the way you do in your parents’
house. Because somehow, everyone was our parents.

Everyone and no one. I’d lost my parents because of
Richard. When I told them I was moving to New Orleans with him, I knew how Mom
would act. But Dad surprised me.

“You’re making a mistake, honey,” he said. “Please
don’t do this. It can’t possibly work out.”

“Baton Rouge is nothing but rednecks,” I said. “Teenage
kids who sound like George Wallace, almost like Adolf Hitler, if you really
want to know. It’ll never change. New Orleans is different. We can live
there—no one will mind.”

“Maybe someday,” he’d said, “but not now. Not even in
New Orleans. No one should give a damn what color Richard is. But they will.”

“‘A person’s skin is an eighth-inch thick, and we’re
all the same underneath it,’” I reminded him. That’s what he’d always told us
when we were kids, when everyone was fighting about where people could go, or
sit, or which drinking fountain they were allowed to use.

“That eighth inch is going to be your whole life.” He
didn’t sound as sure of himself as he had when he’d said everyone was the same.

“Someone has to change it.”

“You want to be first?”

“You mean, ‘Not my daughter.’”

“I’m not even sure the two of you can love each other
in the middle of all this.”

“You know all about not being able to love.” I slammed
the door as I left.

That was the end of one conversation. But it wasn’t when
I lost him, and it wasn’t why.

Once I got to San Pedro, the past closed behind me like
water behind a swimmer. I wasn’t sure there was a future, but if there was, it
had a name: five years. Richard’s sentence.

It was my sentence, too. A different kind of “someday,
but not now.” This time, I didn’t have a choice.

I did my best. I didn’t feel like getting up most
mornings, but I did. Got up and went to work at Giannini Concrete. After a few
days, I didn’t even hear the stutter and whine of the dim fluorescent lights,
or the rumble of the mixer trucks in the yard. Didn’t notice the dingy gray
concrete everywhere. I belonged there. I was dim and dingy too.

Not like Lacey, Mr. Giannini’s secretary. Lacey Greer
was anything but drab. She even laughed about the building. “Here we are in a
concrete box—concrete walls, concrete floor, concrete
ceiling.
You’d think we’d have better sense than to keep
making more.”

The second week I worked at Giannini’s, a man came in
and talked to Lacey in a foreign language.

“I don’t speak Spanish, I’m sorry,” she said.

He stomped out, yelling, “You damn snob, won’t even
talk to your own people!”

She shrugged. “Happens all the time. A lot of people mistake
me for Hispanic.”

“What are you, then?” I felt rude and nosy, blurting it
out, but I wanted to know.

She ticked it off on her fingers. “Martiniquean, Greek,
and Cherokee.”

“How did they ever get together?”

“My father’s family is from all over the South,
Tennessee originally. That’s where the Cherokees come from.”

“What about the others?” I wasn’t sure what a Martiniquean
was.

“Well, there’s more kinds of people in the Deep South
than you might think. New Orleans is one of the biggest ports in the world—lots
of people from foreign countries settle there. I grew up on the Gulf Coast.
Moved to California when I was about your age. You ever been to the South? You
must have, if your parents are from there. Ever been to New Orleans?”

I hadn’t counted on having to fool another southerner.
I played dumb.

“No, my family’s all in Illinois. What’s New Orleans
like? I want to go to Mardi Gras someday,” I said.

Lacey snorted. “Mardi Gras. Willis—that’s my husband—he
sometimes drags me down there for Carnival. He loves it. I see all those poor
tourists in their resort clothes, shivering like Jell-O. They buy coats after
they get there. Scarves. Umbrellas. The stores double their prices—they make a
fortune.”

“I want to see the parades.”

“Beer bottles up to your ankles, barf in the gutters,
and pickpockets on every corner. Stay home, girl.”

I’d felt sick then, and I felt sick now.
Everything
is my fault because I didn’t know what to do that day, because I never know
what to do. I want that afternoon back. Maybe if I had another try, I’d get it
right.

“You okay?” asked Lacey.

“Yes,” I said.
I’ll never be okay till I forget
Jamie. Which is never.

“We gotta finish these meeting reports,” said Lacey.
That’s what we did for the rest of the morning.

Why didn’t I go to Mr. Giannini, or at least to George, and
ask where Kathy’s résumé was? Why did I just file her papers as if nothing was
wrong? I turned it over in my mind a lot for the next few days. What was the
point of stealing a résumé? What was the point of lying about where she came
from?

I pictured it again, the glimpse I’d had, Kathy palming
those papers like a magician—or a shoplifter. That worried me a lot. Lord knows
we didn’t have much cash lying around, but we handled checks for hundreds of thousands
of dollars. If Mr. Giannini found out Kathy had swiped her résumé back, he’d
let her go, no hesitation.

He’d probably forgotten he’d told me to follow up on
her references—but if a big check went missing along with our new assistant,
he’d remember in a hurry. If I had the brains God gave a goose, I’d tell Mr.
Giannini right away that George had hired Kathy on the spot, and that I hadn’t
been able to call her references because they’d disappeared.

On the other hand, Kathy was just a kid. What would she
know about the kind of money in heavy construction? Probably she was running
away from a bad marriage or a mean stepfather. I felt sorry for her, and I’d
feel terrible if she lost her job because of something I said.

I
could
try to
find out what her problem was. Most likely, it was only a family
misunderstanding, something like that. I might get Kathy to confide in me. If
that didn’t work, there was always Marilu Collins. She didn’t have a lot of
sense, but she must have gotten
some
background information before she rented to Kathy. The more I thought that idea
over, the more I liked it.

Of course, there were about a dozen ways the whole
thing could blow up in my face. I was starting to wonder if I was getting a
little nutty, the way my husband had been hinting ever since our daughter moved
out. But Willis was imagining things—and anyway, it wasn’t nutty to help a kid.
Anyone would do it.

So, I started trying to get Kathy to open up. I baked
cookies and brought them in, and I told her little things about Willis and
Angela. She ate the cookies and she listened politely enough to the stories,
but she didn’t tell me anything about herself. Of course, that made me wonder
even more.

It was easy to see she was unhappy. She came in
red-eyed a few mornings, and I heard her crying in the restroom once. When I
asked her if anything was wrong, she said no. I shut right up. Better not scare
her off the way I had Angela, asking questions and giving advice.

But my first impression that Kathy was a good kid held
up, too. She was obviously well brought up. Not society or anything, but she
was always polite. I asked her right off to call me Lacey instead of Mrs.
Greer, but I appreciated her showing me respect. She was funny when she asked
about how dingy the office was, way too tactful to come straight out with it.

“Did the company just move here?” she asked, looking
around.

I knew what she meant. We didn’t have anything extra,
no carpet or good furniture. But most of the people who walked in were likely
to have concrete on their boots, so there was no way to fancy the place up. It
was an industrial building with mixer trucks parked in back and the office
stuck in like an afterthought.

“No, we’ve been here awhile. Mr. Giannini built this
building five or six years ago.”

“You’ve worked here
six years
?”

“Nearly eight—since my daughter Angela was in high
school. She’s starting graduate school this year.”

Kathy looked astonished. Was she surprised that a black
woman’s daughter would go to college?

“I thought . . . .”

I waited. She stuttered, looking around like a cornered
cat. Finally she said, “I thought you were about thirty.”

“No, I’m in my forties.”

“I’m sorry.” She looked out the window, like something
interesting had turned up out there all of a sudden. Her mouth was trembling—she
was close to tears. This did not make sense.

“Don’t be sorry. Nothing wrong with looking thirty. I
wish I did!” I kept my tone light and pretended I didn’t notice anything was
the matter.

I could see why she might think she put her foot in her
mouth. If I were white, it would be a compliment for her to think I was
younger. Not being able to guess my age would be different—too much like what
the rednecks used to say: “They all look alike.” A nice girl like her would
have been embarrassed to say anything that sounded like that. But I couldn’t
figure out why she would be so upset.

To change the subject, I gave her a whole bunch of
stuff to type. I spread papers all over my desk and faked being busy. She
turned to her typewriter and got started.

I remembered to rustle my papers once in a while as if
I was working. But I didn’t see them. My mind kept picking at me about who she
was and what was going on, the way you pick at a ragged cuticle till it looks
like hell.

The entry hall had two black metal mailboxes with holes cut
out in front to show when a letter was inside. White showed through mine. I
opened the box.

Two letters. One envelope was addressed in my sister’s
writing. The other was in Richard’s.

I plodded up the stairs,
feeling like the five minutes before a math test. When I got to my door, I
dropped the key twice before I got in. I stood in the living room and tore
Richard’s envelope open. Might as well get it over with.

Dear Kathy,

I love you.

Richard

I dropped his letter on
the floor and opened my sister’s.

Dear Kathy,

I was really worried when you took off like that. Are you
all right?

I wish you hadn’t left my car
at the cemetery. The last thing I needed was go back there. Anyway, thanks for
sending the card with your address. Please don’t move again without telling me.

Love,

Sharon

Well, it could have been worse. I’d been afraid she
wouldn’t even answer my card. I wasn’t sure she’d still be speaking to me. Mom
wasn’t. I didn’t think she ever would again. When the emergency room nurse came
to tell us Dad hadn’t made it, Mom turned on me.

“Was your little pickaninny worth killing your father
for?” And she walked off behind the nurse without looking back.

Sharon put her hand out to stop me from following. “Let
it go. She’s upset.”

But I wasn’t following. I couldn’t have. “I didn’t make
him have a heart attack,” I said. “It’s not my fault.”

“Look, Kathy. I’m not saying Mom’s right. You know I’m
on your side.”

“But it’s not my fault. And that was a horrible thing
she said about Jamie.” I didn’t even try to wipe away the tears running down my
face.

Sharon pulled a package of tissues from her purse and
passed one to me. She wiped her own eyes and nose with another one. “I know,”
she said. “Mom’s pretty out of it. I don’t think the two of you should even be
talking right now. How long are you staying in Baton Rouge?”

“I hadn’t thought. I mean I didn’t think—”

“Stay at my place. I’ll be over at Mom’s most of the
time anyway. She’ll need me to help with the arrangements.” She sighed.
“Everything’s so awful—do me a favor? Please? Keep out of sight at the funeral.
We don’t need anything more. Please, Kathy.”

“But it’s not fair.”

“I know. But don’t let her see you anyway.”

On the morning of the funeral, she took a taxi over to
Mom’s. Sharon was riding in the limo, so she gave me her car keys.

It was easy to keep Mom from seeing me at the church,
because it was filled with Dad’s friends. I stayed in a back pew, hoping no one
would notice. If they did, they’d push me up front with the family. I kept my
head down.

When the funeral procession left for the cemetery, I
waited until last in the queue. The police escort rode behind me on their
motorcycles. At the grave, I couldn’t hear the priest—the wind took his words
away. In the church he’d said, “We brought nothing into this world, and it is
certain we can carry nothing out.” I kept thinking of that, over and over. Dad
had so much—his friends, the house, his garden, his work.

His daughters.

His granddaughter.

I sat on a cold iron bench a long time after the last
of the crowd was gone. Just stared at the patchy grass, at the leaves giving up
and letting go of the trees. Finally, I stood up, chilled and stiff. I didn’t
go to the grave. I didn’t want to see it. Or Jamie’s, right next to it.

When I got back to the car, it wouldn’t start. I’d
forgotten to turn off the lights, the funeral procession lights. The battery
was dead. Dead—the word hit me like it hadn’t done before, and my teeth started
to chatter.
I always thought that was only an expression.
I clenched my jaw.
Don’t think about it.

I called a cab from the cemetery office and went back
to Sharon’s place, trying not to shake in front of the cabbie. I left a note
about the car and got all my stuff, which wasn’t much. I took another cab to
the Greyhound station. The next bus that didn’t go somewhere in Louisiana was
an express for Los Angeles. It didn’t leave for two hours, and I spent the
whole time sitting on one of the station’s hard plastic chairs, looking at the
terrazzo floor between my feet. The dirty globs of gum trampled into it were
just like me.