“Ma, he’s from the company, I’m sure he’s straight.”
“I don’t care. Your father is God knows where; there is a stranger in the house, in our bedroom, right now.”
“It’s the middle of the day. He wouldn’t.”
“Get up there now.”
“It’s embarrassing—you always say—”
“You want to leave our house exposed to the whole neighborhood? Leave your mother defenseless here?”
Basketball would have to wait. A good guilt-trip is more potent than a well-aimed threat from a well-aimed gun.
The gentle morning sunlight peeked through the shutters, seeping hints of mild April splendor through our second-floor windows. Finches chirped in the backyard, luring my second parakeet, Ricky, to mutiny and join them in unfettered freedom. Poor African Ricky was deaf to their American-tweeting inveiglements.
And there was I, a 6-year resident of the
The awkwardness set in immediately. “Would you like something to drink?”
His back turned, he wiped the sweat off his forehead with an elbow. “No thanks.”
I needed a pretext to stay. Pretending to look for something (I quickly caught myself—must stay away from Mom’s jewelry box—too obvious), I foolishly picked up the first thing I saw—a feather duster. Only one thing to do with a feather duster unless you’re a French maid. He turned, reaching for the pliers, and I quickly dropped the easy giveaway.
What else?—The TV! There’s a Yankees game on…Oh, right. It was then that he solved the problem for me.
“Know what? That drink offer still good?”
“Uh, sure. Juice, soda?”
“Cold water’s fine.”
Shit. I realized the fatal flaw of my innocently proffered beverage. Mom was in the basement doing laundry and the parakeet wasn’t trained for racist surveillance. A good half-decade away from the cellular revolution that swept our family, I was unable to hatch a devious text-messaging scheme. I had to chance it.
“You want ice?” Of course he did.
The sprint downstairs must have been record-setting—if Guinness ever recorded such dubious numbers. Races motivated by antediluvian attitudes and fear-mongering were almost certainly unofficiated. I almost tripped on the way up, but not a drop of water lost—a feat worthy of Eddie Murphy’s Golden Child obstacle course. It seemed I, too, had what it takes to be The One.
I looked around the room anxiously with my parents’ eyes. I always preferred not to know. Drawers intact. Correspondence in place. What am I forgetting?
“That it?”
“Oh, yeah, sorry. There you go, Sir.” Absently, I handed him the cup with my eyes fixed on Mom’s hand-painted lacquer jewelry box, on which a frisky troika was pulling a rose-cheeked maiden through a frozen riverbed. He took the cup from my hand without turning, the stepladder wilting under his bulky frame and steady legs. We were both in our own worlds.
“You should be all set. There a bathroom here?”
Perfect—he’d be gone for 2, 3 minutes at least!
Elated, I gave him directions to the downstairs bathroom. Like a drowning man barely beating suffocation for that sweet, nourishing gasp of oxygen, I snatched the lid off the box. Looks good. Relieved, I started for the stairs, to graciously welcome our guest from the bathroom with the candy bin and a $5 note. But before I could fete my operation’s success, or grasp there was no way for me to verify the contents of the box came a loud thud and the jarring crack of skull meeting thick wood drowned out by an agonizing “Jesus Christ, my fucking head!”
It was too late to look away. The man was sprawled out on the stairway, taking the first hard-earned break of the day. With heavy hand and breath I went back inside the room and took the cordless. Somewhere in the distance, my grandma’s voice carried from her upstairs cloister.
“Did he put in the TV yet? All day without the TV!”
2 comments:
Dude, this is really crazy. You guys had real, non-stolen cable at some point?
Just fiction my friend...
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