The Best American Short Stories 2018

by Roxane Gay

  “I was telling Shirley what we talked about on Friday,” she said. “She thought you were gonna give me lip, but I said Oh no, my boy gets it. Look, I know you loved Marvin. He was like kin to you. But following his people around ain’t what’s right for you. I know you know it. Can’t look back. It’s like the Bible says: Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee. Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established. Turn not to the right hand nor the left—”

  “Ma, don’t you gotta go?” Curtis said.

  She waved him off with a gloved hand, flashing yellow, flicking suds and drops of water across the kitchen. “My baby is home,” she said. “Ain’t no thing to put some soap and water to a couple dishes.”

  That’s right, he thought. Your baby. Can’t get a job, can’t get my own place, can’t open a goddamn bank account. You wouldn’t even care if I pissed the bed.

  His mother snapped off her rubber gloves and glanced up at the clock. She blinked slowly, keeping her eyes closed a beat or two longer than necessary, opening them as she took in a great draft of breath. Curtis steadied himself for what was coming. This had the look of one of her speeches, the ones that began, Baby, you know the Lord has forgiven you. Now you just need to forgive yourself . . . Curtis wasn’t sure God had forgiven him. He wasn’t sure God agreed that the accident couldn’t have been avoided. He wasn’t sure about God. If God was true and had forgiven him, then why did He keep sending the woman into his dreams at night? Curtis had to do it the other way. If he forgave himself first, maybe then God would follow.

  He steadied himself, thinking of beautiful things and filling his head with their music: The words of the man on the promenade, grabbed by the wind. “The Payback.” Freedom on his tongue like the taste of curry chicken and macaroni pie from Culpepper’s. “Someday We’ll All Be Free.” A pretty woman opening her legs and arms for him. Devil in a Blue Dress. “Ruby.” Marpessa Dawn taped to the wall. “A Felicidade.” Marvin, his friend. Andre, who looked so much like his father. “They Reminisce Over You.” “Little Ghetto Boy.”

  Curtis followed Lena into a bank one afternoon that week. He tried to make their encounter seem like a coincidence, but could tell she knew better. They talked uncomfortably for a few minutes, both averting their gazes. Then he apologized for the other night and told her he wanted to see her. After some hesitation that seemed to him like a ceremony, Lena gave him her phone number.

  When they got a room together on weekdays, Lena would tell Andre she was working an extra shift, but they usually got rooms on Saturday afternoons. Curtis brought her home once, while his mother was at work. Lena told him it was fine, but he felt humiliated being with her on such a small bed, in a room filled with his childish things. He was morose after they slept together. Even the scent of their sex couldn’t distract him from the pervasive smell of his mother. When Lena tried to comfort him, he asked her to tell him about the night Marvin died.

  She flinched. “Y’all were like brothers,” she said. “You know all about it.”

  “I wasn’t there.”

  “I wasn’t there either,” she said. “You had to know that much.”

  “But tell me about the last time you saw him.”

  She was quiet for a while before she spoke. “I was waitressing back then too,” she said finally, “the late night shift at a diner over by Coney Island. I like waitressing. You get to know folks and they get a kick out of you remembering them and they tip you good—well, as best they can.”

  “What about Marvin?”

  “Like I said, I was working the third shift, and that started at midnight during the week. Marvin had already lost his construction job. Then he lost his side gig too. You know how hard things were for him.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Well, he couldn’t handle it. Poor thing was always beat from looking for jobs all day, every day, but he liked to stay up and watch me get ready for work. Tried to keep himself awake with a book of all things. Can you imagine? He was one to think reading in bed would keep a tired man awake.”

  “What was he reading that night?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said.

  “Did he like Easy Rawlins and Mouse?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And the fire?”

  She looked at him for a long time and then studied her hands. Her voice, when it came, was cold now: “You must’ve heard how it happened, Curtis. It was just like that.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I told him not to smoke in the bed, especially when I wasn’t around. But the man was tired, always, and with every job telling him no, he was a bundle of nerves. I kept telling him to ask for help, but he had to do things all by himself. Too proud. He wanted life to be different for us, and for his mama. All that debt . . .” She shook her head. “He thought we deserved to be in a better place.”

  “I heard his spirits were low.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “You would know better than me.” Curtis tried to say this with some tenderness, but she flinched again. For the first time she seemed genuinely pretty, even beautiful to him, like a woman grieving calmly in a painting. He pressed on: “Do you think he . . . ?”

  “What?”

  Curtis looked at her.

  “Took his own life? Is that what you mean?”

  He nodded. He knew he was being cruel, but couldn’t help himself. He wanted to hurt her.

  “What, in his right mind he just lit a match and let it fall on the damn pillows? You asking me if he meant to destroy his own self? Why would you say such a thing? Why would you even think it?”

  Curtis sometimes imagined that his friend would understand what it was like to feel that blue, but he knew Marvin had loved life too much to take his own. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. The faded Knicks poster on the far wall hung askew. “He wouldn’t have done that with Andre on the way. He knew about the baby, right?”

  Lena seemed baffled. “Whatever did or didn’t happen, it wasn’t because of what was growing inside of me.”

  Curtis nodded, but meant nothing by the gesture. “Tell me the last thing he said to you.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “As far as we were concerned, it was just another day.”

  “Last time we saw each other, he gave me a hug.”

  Lena lay with her back pressed to him, her knees drawn up and touching the wall. “That’s no surprise. I never heard him say a bad word about you,” she said. “What in the world happened between you two?”

  Curtis didn’t reply. After that Sunday afternoon by Drummer’s Cove, Marvin eventually reached out to reconcile, but Curtis ignored him. He met any attempt to talk or spend time together with silence. When they finally did talk, Marvin begged to borrow some money.

  “I lost both my jobs, man,” he said, “and nobody’s trying to hire a brother. I can’t catch a damn break.”

  On the phone, Curtis stayed quiet.

  “I’m having a real hard time, man.”

  Before he hung up, Curtis said, “Well maybe that bitch you got can help you out.”

  He didn’t tell Lena any of this, and it was obvious that she didn’t know. He listened to her breathing now, the steady in and out, the deepening. He closed his eyes. In a while he was startled awake by his recurrent dream, and then startled again by a cold hand on his shoulder. Curtis saw it had taken a great effort for Lena to reach out to him, even though they had no space between them on his bed. Her reddened eyes, taut mouth, and fingers roughly scratching at the points of her elbows meant she knew she could never be loved by him—he had told her as much as they talked before falling asleep. Maybe she already knew she couldn’t love him either. He held her, though, in the little bed, and then she held him too. As they lay there, he decided he would never bring her to his mother’s house again.

  Lena eventually got in the habit of inviting Curtis to the apartment, just for meals at first: dinners or late Sunday breakfasts where he
got to see Andre. On Sundays, the pancakes were dense. Lena piled the bacon in the pan, so it always came out soggy. It was greasy and almost sweet on the tongue. As it slid down his throat, Curtis held his hand to his mouth and gave Andre a funny look, but the boy seemed to like the food. He didn’t seem pleased with much else.

  In the beginning, Lena told Andre the simple truth that Curtis was his father’s good friend. “He’s like your uncle,” she said, but the boy rolled his eyes. When he called Curtis uncle he said it with a hint of derision. The two of them got along well enough though. By the end of the fifth month, Curtis was frequently at their apartment; by the sixth, he and Lena stopped getting rooms. They both danced around the question in such a way that either of them could claim the other had asked about him moving in. When Curtis told his mother it was happening, she cried the way she did when he was sentenced to prison. He invited her to visit them, but she said she would need some time.

  Curtis pretended Lena had never called him the boy’s uncle, but Andre went on calling him that anyway, still with a mocking tone. He liked to say it in the mornings when Curtis emerged from Lena’s bedroom, or right before he went in at night. “Morning, Unc,” he’d say, or, “Have a good night, Uncle Curtis.”

  When they were in bed Lena would signal Curtis by rubbing her cold feet along his legs, and then there would be lovemaking. The first few times they slept together, he was surprised at how much pleasure her skinny body gave him. He wasn’t gentle with her, and the things she whispered to him made it clear she didn’t want him to be. But now he hated the little sounds she made, the words she said, loud enough that the boy would be able to hear. Sometimes, not quite meaning to, Curtis covered her mouth.

  When summer arrived, Curtis took Andre to the basketball court in Lena’s old neighborhood and watched him hang listlessly from the rims. They took long walks together, though Andre complained. “Why don’t we just take the train?” he asked. They had macaroni pie at Culpepper’s, but the boy said Lena’s was better. Curtis told him about his time in prison. Andre seemed uninterested until Curtis began to exaggerate, and then the boy asked him if being locked up was the way they showed it in some movie Curtis had never even heard of. His reply was yes. Exactly like that.

  One of Andre’s favorite things to do, because it made him laugh so hard, was to ridicule his mother. It bothered Curtis afterward but he joined in anyway, making fun of his own mother too. He laughed with Andre at the promenade when the weather was nice, tears wetting his eyelashes. Curtis often fell silent and made a show of watching the young women walk by.

  “What makes mothers the way they are?” Andre asked one day. It was the first time he posed a question like this to Curtis, that of a boy seeking the wisdom of a man.

  “They lose themselves and get all kinds of ridiculous,” Curtis said. “Ain’t no mystery to it.”

  But Andre was quiet, and it was hard to tell if he was listening. Curtis fixed his gaze on a jogger in red shorts, and leaned forward to keep her in sight as long as he could. He pointed so that Andre would look too. Then the joke from the old song leaped into his mind. “Goddamn,” he said. “Do fries go with that shake?”

  Andre turned to look out at the harbor, his eyes a bit dulled. His taut lips shifted from side to side, as restless as the river.

  Curtis kept up the banter about the jogger. “You like that, huh?”

  “If you say so,” Andre replied with a shrug.

  “Well, she looks like a college girl to me anyway, young buck,” Curtis said with a laugh. “Might be out of your league.”

  “Man, I’ma be so glad when I go off to college.”

  Curtis nodded and listened as Andre continued talking about his future, his life of success, of accumulation and bachelorhood. “There’s one thing you gotta do, though,” he told the boy. “A house. When you make it big like that, you gotta get your mother a house.”

  Andre seemed taken aback, and was quiet for a long time as he considered the idea. “Ain’t you supposed to do that?” he said. “I mean, I can come visit and everything. But you gonna be with her, right? You can make that happen. She’d like that, wouldn’t she?”

  Curtis didn’t say so, but he supposed she would.

  “Hey,” he said, “you never ask me anything about your daddy.”

  Andre shrugged again.

  “I got a lot of good stories. Don’t you want to hear them? You should get to know who he was.”

  “What for? He’s still gonna be dead.”

  “Your father was a good man,” Curtis said. “And—”

  “I know, I know. You loved him like a brother.”

  “No,” Curtis said. “That’s what people keep on saying but it was more than that, a lot more.” He was startled by the sound of his own voice, the force of it. He gazed down at his curled hands, unable to bear the gentle, curious way Andre was looking at him. He couldn’t find the words to explain the affection he felt, still, for the boy’s father, and in this moment he didn’t want to be misunderstood. Another jogger went past but neither of them paid her any mind.

  “What happened the night you killed that lady?” Andre said.

  “I was drunk,” Curtis said. “They said she had some drink in her too. She came out of nowhere and got in my way. That’s all.” He rubbed his palms against the knees of his pants. “I did something I shouldn’t have done.”

  Since no one would hire Curtis for steady work, he was often free to spend time with Andre, when the boy allowed him to. Lena supported them, sometimes working extra shifts at the restaurant. She stood aside and let Curtis try to deepen his relationship with her son. She put a smile on her face when Curtis, and sometimes Andre too, made fun of her Sunday bacon, picking it up by one end and wriggling it in the air. She must have noticed the way they both looked at her when she reached for her cigarettes. Soon enough she stopped reaching for them, and then Curtis no longer saw them in the apartment at all. She didn’t buy tickets for movies on Fridays, unless she was going to the theater by herself. When the woman Curtis had struck with his car kept entering his dreams, Lena didn’t put her hands on his shoulder. If she ever cried at night, she refused to be comforted by him. She still signaled him with her cold feet, however. She still made her little demands for intimacy, and sometimes he did too.

  Before they slept, she lay beside him in bed and listened as he talked about Andre, unable to stop himself. “He seems happier, doesn’t he?” Curtis asked one evening, and she agreed, as though he truly understood her son. It was true, Lena told him, and she called them her men, her two men, which she was in the habit of doing, as if they were all she had ever wanted. “I think Marvin would be glad,” he said, but wondered. Lena agreed again and appeared pleased at the thought of all her contented men. Curtis forced a smile onto his face too. He kissed her cheek, lightly, his lips barely making contact with her skin. He and Lena wouldn’t love each other, but there was love they openly shared, and that would be enough, for now, to make a kind of family.

  Yoon Choi

  The Art of Losing

  from New England Review

  Watch the boy, she had said.

  Or had she? Some things he knew for sure. His name was Han Mo-Sae. His wife was Han Young-Ja. They had been married forty years, possibly fifty. The wife would know. They had two children: Timothy and Christina. They would always be his children but they were no longer kids. He had to keep remembering that.

  Tunes. He was good with tunes. He could retrieve from memory music he hadn’t heard in decades. “The Mountain Rabbit,” “Ich Liebe Dich,” Aretha Franklin’s “Operation Heartbreak,” which he had first heard in his twenties on the Armed Forces Network in Korea. He had a good singing voice. He had been Tenor 1 in the church choir; years before that, he had led off the morning exercise song in the schoolyard. These performances had given him an appetite for praise and notice, although no one, seeing the old man he had become, would know it.

  His wife had no particular distinction—had had n
one, even in youth. How could she? Her childhood task had been survival. She was the oldest of three sisters who were orphaned as they fled south during the Korean War. In Busan, she had worked on the rubber processing line, removing trapped air from rolled products. She told him about it years later, in another country, sitting on a weedy patch of campus lawn. Once, she had snapped a dandelion stem, allowing the milk to run. Did he know that the sap of the dandelion was a form of natural rubber? Latex? It was one of the few things he learned from her and he never forgot it. It altered in a small and precise way his notice of trivial things: the soles of his shoes, the elastic in his waistband.

  They had met in Philadelphia—when was this, the 1960s?—through the area’s one Korean church. He was working toward a master’s in mechanical engineering; she tailored and mended for a dry cleaner. At church, he was a star. His fine singing voice, the impressive school he attended. But at the university, he was struck dumb. Every morning, he would tear out a page from his English dictionary, memorize it, and eat it. Still, the language would not take. And things grew worse. He began to dread not only the classroom, but also the grocery store, the post office, the blank pages of his dissertation.

  One night, he had gone to Young-Ja’s rented room. As he removed his shoes, he noticed a hole in the toe of his sock, which he made no attempt to hide. He was too good for her—that much was assumed. She made no argument for herself. She had not made herself up or even changed after work. Her hair was short, like a man’s. Her hands were rough. Her dark sweater showed snips of thread and lint from altering other people’s clothes. In a glance, he could see the perimeters of her life: the toothbrush in a cup that she brought to the communal bathroom, the single hot plate, the twin mattress on the floor.