by Amelia Gray
David was standing at the end of his driveway. It wasn’t snowing, and people walking their pets mistook him for a man wearing a robe by the mailbox. He tucked the bundle of old mail under his arm and was walking alongside the people and their pets before he considered any of it further.
The lack of traction with the road, the way the terrain communicated through the soles, reminded him that he was wearing slippers. He tensed his body, wincing. The slush seeped in. Death made more sense in the winter, in the same way that doing the dishes made more sense in the evening, after a big meal. There was glut in death. David remembered a certain sagging and expanding, a feeling to which he could not assign an image. He created a list of items to help him forget the cold as he walked down the hill.
There was a bus stop at the base of the hill, one he had missed on his previous walks to town. He could imagine Franny riding the bus, a sack of salon tools in her lap underneath a magazine about celebrity home improvement. He imagined her exploring her own perfect tombstone teeth with her pink tongue.
He had no money for the bus. The bus stopped and released a black kid in a puffy jacket and a man with a blanket draped around his body. The two sat together on the bench, ignoring David and each other, waiting for the transfer. The bus driver regarded David’s robe and empty hands for a polite moment before snapping the door shut and driving on.
David shifted his bundle of mail from one arm to the other. A thin page advertising pizza fell to the ground, resting wet and looking like a stain or a sore on the sidewalk. “Sorry,” David said, stooping to pick up the page. “Does one of you have change? I’ve lost mine.”
The man in the blanket shrugged. He and David regarded the teenager in the jacket, who was at that moment bobbing his head at a tinny noise emanating from the buds in his ears.
“Kids don’t know,” said the other man. His blanket was secured with a length of rope. “Kids don’t respect.” He leaned over on the bench and jabbed his finger into the kid’s jacket.
“The fuck, man?” the kid said, scowling as a reflex, tucking his thumb under one earbud and popping it out.
David extended his hand. “Do you have a couple quarters for the bus?”
The two ignored him.
“The fuck you say,” said the guy in the blanket. He jerked his head down and back as if he was trying to physically navigate the words. “The fuck, you say.”
“Sorry,” David said to the kid. “I didn’t have any quarters.”
The kid retained the scowl and dug in his pocket for the dollar and twenty-five cents. “Here, man,” he said, leaning to deposit the money into David’s hand. David found a forty-cent coupon for laundry detergent in his bundle of mail. He extracted the page and offered it to the kid, who held up one hand to block the transaction.
“The fuck you say,” said the other man, grasping a piece of his blanket and tugging it tighter over his legs. David thought about how nice it would feel to be draped in a blanket at that moment. It had begun to snow. The blanket man was looking right at the kid, who had replaced his earbuds and was bobbing again, pressing the miniature keys of a phone he had produced from his pocket.
“Kids ignore you these days,” said the man. “Ten years ago this kid and I would have had a nice call-and-response, a pleasant altercation. We would have talked, you know? Like human beings need to talk? To be all right? Now kids ignore you. Back then more people were familiar with the concept of jazz.” He tightened his cord and leaned back into his side of the bench. It looked like he went to sleep immediately, but then he opened one eye and directed it toward David. “You familiar with the concept of jazz?”
“They’ve got all this gear now,” David said. He had never purchased a cellular phone. The weighty molded plastic of the real telephone cupped too nicely in his hand to give it up. Against his ear it felt like an actual method of communication. He had used Franny’s cell phone once, and it felt as if he was speaking into a potato chip. He didn’t want the daily experience. It was hard enough adjusting to the digital answering machine Franny had set up on the landline.
The blanket man closed his eye. “I don’t like the color of his jeans or the content of his character,” he said. “I know this is sounding real ‘kids these days,’ but man, kids these days, you know? These guys don’t even talk to their girlfriends anymore. They’ll sit and send them text messages all damn day, but the instant this gorgeous girl walks in and alights next to him like a thick-waist bird of paradise, the guy’s on the damn phone sending the text message. Girl’s all batting the phone outta his hand, ‘Come on, Regis,’ got that sweet little pout on. Regis wants to know the score of some damn game that’ll still be there when he’s done laying hands on this girl. Kids these days have no concept of jazz.”
The bus rounded the corner and shuddered to a stop before them. The doors opened and the bus hissed and lowered, coming to an easy angle with the curb. The man with the blanket stood and shuffled on first, while David waited behind and then followed. The silent kid looked up at the number on the side of the bus and back down to his phone.
33.
FRANNY had always been overconcerned with her small flaws, the spider veins sprouting like thin roots from the curves of her nostrils. She covered her face daily with thick creams and powders that caused her forehead and cheeks to resemble a tanned volleyball. Her complexion cracked when she spoke. In part because of the attention Franny brought to it, David remembered his wife’s face as easily as he forgot the town where they had lived. The town was composed of a main road with branching side streets and a few small shops surrounding the police station, where Detective Chico was likely sitting at his desk, regarding a set of photographs he had taken of David’s home. Between a sandwich shop and the furniture outlet was a long, thin split in the tanned brick with what looked like scorch marks emerging from either side. His old dental office had been on the north side of town, and he avoided walking past it.
He had to circle around the town square twice before he found Franny’s salon. Inside, the place was softly lit. Its building had previously housed a pool hall in one large room. The new owner built thick walls that stretched up eight feet before terminating in open space. It gave the whole thing the look of a television studio. As he approached the reception desk, David thought he caught a glimpse of boom mic rigging over the far wall.
The girl behind the desk had her black hair pulled up in the same wrapped style that Franny had always worn to work. A tattoo of a bear on its hind legs dominated the center of her chest, its haunches nestled in the cleavage of her tank top.
“Do you have an appointment?” she asked her computer. The computer did not respond, and she looked at David. “Sir?”
“Sorry,” he said. “Yes, I don’t have an appointment. I’m sorry. No.” He saw that she was looking at him hard, and he realized he was still carrying the bundle of junk mail. He tried to compress it in his arms.
“You don’t have an appointment?”
“I’m here to see my wife,” he said. He thought of Franny applying liniments to a face behind one of the half walls. “She’s not here, I mean. I’m here to see about her.”
The tattooed girl frowned. “Does your wife have an appointment?”
“My wife, Franny.”
The girl squinted at David in a confused way that still managed to suggest that he was an idiot. She leaned forward, observing his armful of mail. “You mean Frances?” she asked. She smelled clean and chemical, like a plastic bag.
David leaned in as well. “Did you come to my house the other day?” he asked.
The girl reared back and the bear reared with her. David gripped the reception desk, concerned that one or the other might strike.
“Let me get my manager,” the girl said. She tossed the phone toward its charging base, and David could still hear the beep-beep of a disconnect alert as she walked into the back room. With a tentative finger, he corrected the phone in its dock. It was a harmless phone, of course. The phone was
harmless.
Franny had moved through the rooms and doors of their home for years, but David felt something special standing there in this new place. It was a place he had never entered but one she knew well, and this gave everything a glowing outline of magic. Perhaps she had touched that very phone, gripped that doorknob, swept that floor. Surely she wore one of the shared black aprons to match the rest of the staff. Maybe, over the course of many years, she had worn all of the aprons. David felt like a tourist in the salon, standing in awe of each invisible attraction. He had just walked behind the reception desk when a short woman with shocking blonded hair emerged from the back room and put her hand on his arm. She looked the same, though he hadn’t seen her in years. “Aileen,” he said.
“I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Closer up, David saw that Aileen wore the same poreless mask that Franny had layered on every morning. He placed these two women in the same tribe, not old yet but older than the tattooed girls working around them. Aileen and Franny spent all day performing chemical peels on the curled rinds of aging skin, ministering to younger women just starting to understand the weakness and betrayal of the skin organ and seeking a solution in a burning enzyme. Franny had given him a chemical peel once, and he was aware of his skin screaming at the intrusion.
“It’s been so long,” Aileen said. She was holding two cups of water and offered David one. He accepted it, tucking the junk mail into his pocket, and she placed the other cup on the reception counter. “Frances was one of my closest friends,” she said.
“Then I’m sorry for your loss as well,” he said.
“Please, have some water.”
He brought the cup to his lips. A pond smell in the liquid stopped him from drinking. He imagined hidden microbes. “I’m not too thirsty,” he said. He put the cup on the counter. “Thank you, though.”
She picked the cup up and handed it to him again. “Thirst is your body warning you of dehydration.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “Thank you. I just drank some water at my home.”
“It’s important to drink when you’re not thirsty.” She touched his hand with her hands. They held the cup together. She lifted her hands up slightly, guiding the liquid toward his mouth.
“I’ve really had a lot of water already,” he said. “Thank you, though.”
Aileen regarded him with a smiling kind of distrust and released his hand. She turned and gestured toward the reception area with two open arms. “I’ve been throwing myself into updates,” she said. “I’ll give you the tour.”
He followed Aileen down the hall. The owner was a largely absent businessman from out of town who mostly franchised fast-food chains but had a soft spot for the beauty trade. He turned the daily hassles of running the place over to his senior attendants, which meant that in addition to their aesthetician duties, Franny had managed the stylists and Aileen enjoyed the privileges of decor and arrangement.
The salon waiting room was cluttered with useless delicate things. An ornate bar, ridiculously mirrored, held a full tea service, cookies and jams, a sleek black pitcher of lukewarm coffee. The tinkling beads of a miniature crystal chandelier caressed David’s forehead. The room seemed to be three feet too small from all sides, giving it the feeling of progressing in an orderly collapse toward the center. He imagined Franny’s head grazing the low ceiling. She would have to stoop to exit the room, and he thought of her emerging on the other side, smiling.
Aileen picked up the pitcher and shook it before placing it back on its tray. “The girls should refill this,” she said. “I decorated this whole room with pieces I found from estate sales. Frances loved it.”
David hummed a low response, and Aileen led the way to the salon area, equally appointed. Before he left the room, he placed the cup of water on the mirrored bar.
Stylists picked their tools from painted vintage tables as clients regarded themselves in a trio of heavy gilt mirrors installed over each station. The walls and concrete floor were stained a mahogany red. David watched the clients receiving scalp massages. Their bodies were wrapped in thin black robes. They smiled fatuously under the stroking of expert fingers.
He saw that one of these smiling women was Marie Walls, the woman who had sat at his table and completed a portion of his crossword puzzle while telling him about how he should feel. A girl was massaging her hands with a thick cream.
“Marie,” David said. “How are you?”
At the first sign of a third-party conversation, Aileen turned without further remark and made a circle of the salon floor, observing the stylists with her hands on her hips.
“Hang on, I can’t see you too well,” Marie said. “Come closer.”
He approached her chair, leaned in. “Hello, David. I’m perfect at the moment. There’s nothing like a rub, you know?”
“It looks nice.”
Marie narrowed her eyes to look at Aileen, who was plucking at a foil wrap. “Are you here for a haircut?” she asked David.
“I’m getting the tour. My wife worked here.”
“And how are you feeling?” she asked, examining her hand.
David tried to focus on the history of his emotions. All he remembered was the feeling of standing in the other room, the chandelier’s crystals against his forehead. “Fancy,” he said.
“You should come to my office and have a talk with me sometime. I’d be willing to meet with you free of charge. That’s a rare privilege I’ve extended to you.”
“That is kind.”
The girl moved from Marie’s hands and went to work massaging her scalp. Marie groaned. “Well,” she said, gripping the arms of the chair and closing her eyes. “We do what we can.”
Aileen returned with a pair of scissors. “These young girls,” she said.
34.
PHOTOGRAPHS of photographs tend to take on a strange quality of their own, independent of the subject they try to capture. The glass of the photo’s frame and the glass of the camera lens together offer an extra layer between the item and the capturing device, giving the air between them a darker quality. Of course, any dust on the picture frame or intruding natural light can further degrade the image. The resulting picture represents the murky edges, facial expressions blurred and unclear. The individuals in the frame are difficult to separate from the elements of scenery.
Detective Chico enjoyed the imperfections of the images in front of him. He had taken pictures of a few of the snapshots he found in frames on the kitchen counter while David was busy digging the threat out of its sugar bag. He didn’t want to bother the man or go to the unnecessary trouble of confiscating the pictures themselves.
It was a quiet town, and Chico’s area of expertise rarely extended past the boundaries of underage drinking and traffic stops. The last time the office had gotten worked up, it was because a semi driver rolled over the boot of one of the sheriff’s patrol. The steel-toed reinforcement had bent but not broken over the man’s foot and the driver stopped, expressed his regret, and later sent an unnecessary but appreciated formal letter of apology to the entire office. “I am a Respecter of our Nation’s legal enforcement,” the letter began.
Such a mystery as David’s was nearly new ground for Chico, who had enjoyed forty years without so much as a crossing guard fatality. He had stood at the scene of the potential crime, watching a man pull a threatening note from a bag of sugar, and felt the importance of his surroundings.
The detective had observed his surroundings with the interest of a man who had never truly been asked to do his job in years. He recalled his training. He took photographs and memorized the layout of the space in the event that he would have to reenter under duress.
Chico saw himself as a helpful spirit. He tried to give people what they needed, within the guidelines of legality. When the woman arrived asking for a random selection of old clothes from his evidence lockup, he was happy to oblige. There were clothes in there thirty or forty years old, the cases closed. The clothes would have be
en incinerated otherwise. The woman was doing him a favor, in a way. When she returned to ask him to give her nephew some work he obliged her, even when he learned that the boy was too young for a traditional internship.
It was important to give people what they needed. Sometimes, a woman needed to go to jail, or a man needed to be chased in a parking garage. In his years of service Chico had learned that people tended to know what they needed, even if they didn’t know how to ask for it.
The pictures were exactly the kind that Chico would expect to find on a kitchen countertop. There was a shot of the man and his wife in front of the town’s embarrassingly nondescript city hall, each experiencing formal wear in individually awkward ways, the woman wilting over her husband, a bouquet of flowers spread over her fist like stained lace. Another picture featured an older couple, presumably a set of parents, posing on the Great Wall of China. The detective looked closer and saw that it was only a representation of the Great Wall blown up to cover a concrete slab behind them. A child in the corner of the frame crouched to collect peanuts from a quarter candy machine. The woman in the picture looked familiar, and Chico, who never could forget a face, spent some time frowning at the image before he remembered her from the trial.
