CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Lydia sat in the Plexiglas bus shelter across the street from Gas ’n Donuts and watched the Patels closing up inside: Mr. Patel counting out register receipts, Mrs. Patel zigzagging a mop over the floor. The soggy snow had been falling for hours now, so the entire city seemed covered in a coat of sopping cotton balls, and each time a car drove past, slush sprayed Lydia’s shins and knees and sometimes face. Something about actually tasting Colfax in her mouth felt appropriate for this reunion.
It was a welcome sight when Mr. Patel finally carried a blue padlocked bank bag to the store’s side door. He pulled on his coat, looked cautiously toward the sidewalk and again toward the alley, then quickly walked to the white Monte Carlo parked next to the shop. He started it and let it idle, then pulled out a snow scraper and dragged the brush back and forth over his slush-covered windshield. When he walked around the front of the car to wipe off the rest, crossing the headlights and tapping the scraper against his thigh, Lydia felt sick to her stomach.
A moment later he drove away. Mrs. Patel was finally alone.
Lydia jogged straight across the street and rapped on the Gas ’n Donuts window. Still pushing her mop, Mrs. Patel shook her head almost violently and offered a muffled shout of “Closed! Closed!” She was wearing a creamy knit sweater over a brown sari, and her left hand was wrapped in a dirty mitten of gauze. Seeing it, Lydia recalled Raj mentioning how she’d burned herself recently but had refused to miss even a day of work.
She stood below a painted sign that read Free Glazed with Fill-Up! and rapped the glass again. Mrs. Patel approached the window, shaking her head and then softening as she began to recognize Lydia.
“Lydia?”
Mrs. Patel fiddled with a ring of keys, struggling to grasp the right one through the gauze.
“Lydia?”
She barely had the door open before embracing Lydia and pulling her into the shop. She was still beautiful, though her beauty now had more character to it, as her hair had grayed straight through and she’d gained weight across the middle, and the thin wrinkles on her face gave it more texture and depth. She had ashy circles beneath her eyes and an ashy blemish on her cheek. “Raj said you were back in town! I’m so glad, Lydia. But what brings you here so late?”
It was difficult not to smile, not to return Mrs. Patel’s embrace, but Lydia stood stiff.
“You might not be so glad,” she said, “when you find out why I’m here.”
Mrs. Patel leaned back and her smile straightened out. She looked like a woman who lived in a world where unwanted babies had to be buried in the dark.
“Raj knows about Joey,” Lydia continued. “We both know about Joey.”
Mrs. Patel went pale, then began shoving her mop over the checkered floor, kicking a wheeled yellow bucket before her. A gumball machine rattled when she mopped its base. “Please close the door behind you when you leave, Lydia.”
“Joey just wanted a family.”
Mrs. Patel nodded grimly. Then she plunged her mop into the bucket, stirring gray waves. Lydia stepped forward and gripped the handle.
“Please sit,” Lydia said, and gestured toward the old booth where she and Raj had spent so many childhood hours. The speckled Formica, the creamer bottles, the sugar spouts were all the same.
“Rohan will be back soon,” Mrs. Patel said. “You cannot be here when he arrives.”
“Then please start talking. Or we can wait for him and talk then. I could even call Raj over. He’s really upset.”
“You have no idea.”
“Mrs. Patel. Please.”
Mrs. Patel had recently washed the tables, and they were still slightly damp and smelled of bleach. She expertly ripped a few napkins from the cubed dispenser and dried the surface beneath their arms. Once she settled in across from Lydia she didn’t say anything for a minute, just stared out at the traffic on Colfax and nodded, as if finally giving herself permission.
It started with a haircut.
A young mother with a baby on her hip had come into Gas ’n Donuts one slow afternoon when Raj was starting fourth grade, and as Maya Patel filled her box of doughnuts she found herself strangely drawn to her. The woman was slender, with skin the color of coffee, and she wore a gold-colored waitress uniform as if it were a gown. Her hair was shaved nearly bald and she had big plastic hoops dangling from her ears. The woman cooed to her baby as Maya rang her up, and after she left, Maya watched her stroll up Colfax until she became small and disappeared.
The woman had seemed so tall to Maya, so proud. She seemed to know exactly who she was.
For the next few days, Maya was unable to clear this woman’s presence from her mind, and soon she felt an urgent need to do something with herself. She’d always had long, lush hair, and spent fifteen minutes every morning and evening brushing it out, and she was careful to only use shampoos with scents that appealed to Rohan. He was a big fan of her hair, though he only showed it about once a week when he made love to her, leaning on his elbows and immersing his face within it, sometimes even holding it between his teeth like a ribbon as he emptied himself inside her.
Many times Maya had caught Rohan watching the women of Colfax, especially the ones who went braless in the sun or who wore short skirts and corky sandals, and she convinced herself that he would be pleasantly surprised if her appearance was to take a bold shift in their direction. She wouldn’t wear a tank top or anything too slinky, but she did buy a pair of Jordache jeans to wear instead of, or perhaps beneath, her sari, and even visited the stylist at the Glamour Guru salon down the street. He ran his comb through her hair, studied her from different angles, and recommended going short.
—Very short. Mrs. Brady short. Dorothy Hamill short.
Maya shuddered but agreed.
During those first days after the haircut, when Maya and Rohan passed each other behind the doughnut shop counter, he would barge though the space and make her step to the side, or he’d lift his hands, palms out, as if she were contaminated.
—I didn’t marry a boy, he told her. We’ll share a bed again when your hair is long.
These were his words to his wife of a dozen years, the mother of his child. Here she thought he would be aroused, but instead this marked the beginning of a long famine in their bedroom. Many of those nights, she slept alone on the couch.
A month or so after the haircut, in the depths of her marital misery, the corroded pipes in the doughnut shop crawl space burst. This was in the fall, long before the first deep freeze of the season, and Bart O’Toole spent the next two days working beneath the floors, lugging around his toolbox in that quiet way of his, and carrying lengths of copper pipe in and out of the storage pantry where the hatch to the crawl space was located. Rohan was at his side for most of the work, making sure he got the job done right, yet Bart still managed to throw looks at Maya all the time. She wasn’t sure if Rohan ever noticed, but she certainly did. Every time she turned around, this handsome, soft-spoken man was looking at her, but it felt more like an offering than a stare, as if he were rolling his gaze gently at her feet and asking her to pick it up. For so long in her relationship Maya had felt herself teetering between invisibility and repulsion, and here was this lean blond man with blue eyes and a mustache—the opposite of Rohan, she thought—pouring his desire on her. She felt like that woman on television, the one in the street throwing her hat in the air.
When the work was finally finished, Rohan inspected the job and clapped Bart on the back and that was supposed to be it. But early the next morning, before the shop had even opened and just after Rohan had left to drop Raj at school and pick up a new spray arm for the dishwasher, Bart O’Toole knocked on the glass door. Three minutes later he was in the crawl space, clanging around with his hammer and flashlight, and his toolbox sat on the floor outside the hatch. The shop would be opening in twenty minutes and there was work to be done up front, yet Maya poured him a cup of hot coffee, the first pot of the day, then crouched on the fl
oor next to the crawl space. Bart was on his back on the cold dirt in there, directly beneath some junction between pipes, trying to unstick an old valve that he’d soaked with penetrating oil the last time he was there.
—Nothing urgent, he assured her, just a precaution.
Maya found that from where she crouched she could see him from the neck down, and as he inched his way deeper into the crawl space, his shirt shifted and his belly became exposed, its faint trail of hair disappearing under his Coca-Cola belt buckle. Just as she was about to look away she realized with a ripple of pleasure that she didn’t need to look away at all—that because of the angle of the crawl space, he couldn’t see her seeing him—and she wondered if this was like the nudie booths she’d heard about at the adult shops down Colfax, the ones she was sure Rohan visited, where the men could drop in quarters and peer into two-way mirrors and see naked women on old blankets and red pillows, bobbing to music, and the women couldn’t see the men out there at all. Above the clang of pipes, Maya watched Bart’s slender body for what felt like a long time until, without warning, he’d scooched toward the opening and caught her consuming him with her gaze.
—Coffee, she blurted, and handed the lidded paper cup in his direction.
He sat up on an elbow.
—I don’t get this kind of service at home, he said. That’s for sure.
—At home? Pshh. Who does?
Bart took the coffee from her and screwed it gently into the cool dirt inside the crawl space, but Maya’s small hand remained extended, and he studied her fingers for a long time before reaching out and touching them. Within seconds they were on the tiled kitchen floor, mouth to mouth, breathing hard and fitting themselves together.
The crawl space hatch was sealed shut and Bart was out the door with his toolbox a full three minutes before Gas ’n Donuts opened.
After, Maya thought she would feel guilty, or terrified, yet all day long she could feel herself smiling, and when she closed her eyes she could still feel Bart sliding tightly inside her, his hands clutching the back of her head, right where her hair was the shortest. A few times she went into the kitchen and stood over the tiled space, as if to remind herself of their union. One of those times, Rohan appeared right behind her.
—Customers!
He clapped hard in her ear, startling her out of her trance.
And that was basically it for Maya and Bart. There was one other encounter, a few days into October, a snapshot of late-night stupidity in the front seat of Bart’s plumbing truck in the lot behind the shop while Rohan was doing his nightly bank drop-off. Maya’s sari got caught on a door latch and ended up with a small tear and a grease stain that would never fully come out, and Bart had clearly been drinking beer, and their sex felt awkward and ugly, more like an invasive trip to the doctor than a sensual tryst, and that marked the end of the affair, if these two encounters could even qualify as such.
Months passed. Maya’s misery remained. When she realized she was pregnant she went into a panic and did everything she could to seduce Rohan, to try to blur the calendar in his mind, but her hair was growing slowly and he was adamant about their abstinence.
—When you stop looking like a boy, he reminded her.
Maya didn’t go to the doctor, didn’t tell a soul.
Mrs. Patel’s eyes widened at the sound of a car splashing through the alley behind the shop. She appeared relieved when it moved on.
“Rohan will be here soon.”
She scooted out of the booth and grabbed her keys from her sweater pocket.
“I want to know what happened with Joey,” Lydia said.
“If you know Joey, you know the rest. I went away. I had a baby. I gave him up. I came back. Now, please. I have to finish.”
Mrs. Patel was clearly upset. She fiddled through her key ring but never singled one out.
“Will you exit out the back, please?” she said. “I can’t have Rohan driving up and seeing you through the windows. I don’t need the anguish, Lydia. Out of nowhere you come in here, digging through our lives. Please. Just leave.”
Lydia was feeling fogged by the confrontation and saddened by Mrs. Patel’s predicament. Yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was missing something, an elusive fragment that she couldn’t pin down. She wasn’t sure what else to do, so she followed Mrs. Patel past the empty display cases and coffeepots and through the kitchen’s swinging door. Only half of the lights in the kitchen were on. She remembered its stainless steel counters, its stacks of silver bowls, its walls of white tile, but it seemed far more dingy now, and everything was filmed with grease. Marching solemnly behind Mrs. Patel, she was bothered by how this visit had turned out and was thinking she should probably call—
On the counter next to the deep fryer sat an assortment of cleaning supplies.
Lydia stopped walking. Mrs. Patel stopped as well.
“Lydia. Please. He’ll be here.”
Just near a mound of rags, Mr. Patel had left one of his frayed hairnets, a squirt bottle of degreaser and another of vinegar, a wire scrub brush, and the pair of wadded latex gloves he always used to clean the fryer’s racks and frame.
Lydia’s memories rolled over each other like pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope.
She could picture Mr. O’Toole’s name, typed inside a tiny box and tucked into a file downtown: Bartholomew Edward O’Toole. Joey’s father. Mrs. Patel’s lover.
—i know.
She could picture Mr. Patel in the slush outside a little while ago, walking in front of his headlights with a window scraper in his grip.
—i know.
She could see the Hammerman’s hand, slapping off the light switch.
—i know.
His hairy wrist tucked into a white latex glove.
—i know.
His white latex glove gripping a hammer.
“I know,” she said, barely audible.
“There isn’t time for this, Lydia. This way.”
“I know what your husband did.”
“Lydia.”
Her thoughts came so fast and with such force it was hard to contain them with her voice. She heard herself begging. “Tell me!” She clung to the edge of the counter to stop herself from falling. “Tell me!” Mrs. Patel went pale and covered her mouth with her gauzy hand. “Tell me now, or I’ll get Raj and you can tell him!”
At three months along, Maya had begun to wear looser clothing and had found ways to hide her nausea, but she still hadn’t told a soul about her pregnancy—not Bart O’Toole, and certainly not her husband. But that would change one evening in January, just at the start of the biggest cold snap of the season. The stock show was going on over at the Coliseum, and there were more pickup trucks than usual carving through the snow on Colfax, and even more drunk cowboys waiting for the bus in sheepskin jackets. It was long after dark and the three Patels were at Gas ’n Donuts hours after closing because the BBQ Depot down the block had had a surprise visit that morning from a food inspector. Rohan was concerned that they would be inspected next.
As Maya scrubbed every surface and double-checked expiration dates in the pantry and fridges, Rohan lowered himself into the crawl space to make sure that the pipes that Bart O’Toole had replaced a few months before were holding up against the cold. Raj had been very gloomy lately, upset by Carol’s pushy takeover of his best friend, and tonight was especially bad because Lydia and Carol were having a sleepover and hadn’t invited him. Maya grew so tired of the complaining that she made Raj go out and clean up the trash around the dumpsters in the alley. As he stepped out the back door, Maya could see snow tumbling through the lamplights, and when she turned around Rohan was emerging from the crawl space hatch, holding two items in his hands. In his left, the cold cup of coffee Bart had screwed into the earth, untouched these past three months. In his right, the hammer that Bart, in his horny haste, had accidentally left in the crawl space.
As Rohan straightened out and stared at her with icy silence, Maya realized
that she was cupping her belly, as if to protect the life growing inside. Rohan clearly suspected that Bart had been there, in that dark and quiet place, without him, which meant that Maya had been there, in that dark and quiet place, with Bart. Maybe because of this, the words poured out of her before she could stop them.
—I’m pregnant.
Rohan looked confused for a minute, just as he did when he was puzzling over the columns of digits in his account binders. He seemed bigger than usual, wider through the shoulders. He pointed toward the bump of her belly with the hammer in his hand.
—Are you sure? he said.
—Fairly. Yes.
Rohan looked at the small initials scratched into the base of the hammer: BEO.
—Mr. O’Toole?
—Yes. Three months. About.
—Bart O’Toole?
—I’ve been planning on telling you. I was thinking I could take Raj somewhere for a while, until—
—Take Raj?
—Just for a while. I was thinking—
—And go away? No.
For months Maya had been anticipating this conversation and she’d always envisioned it as being more chaotic—more dangerous—but Rohan was so calm and cold, it was as if he was storing up his energy. It felt strange to wish he was more upset.
—How many times? he said. With you and him.
—Only twice.
Rohan stretched out his arm and touched the flat head of the hammer to her abdomen, and began to press, gently at first, then with a slight springiness, as if stoking a fire.
—Only?
—Rohan. Please.
She tried to step back but he followed her belly with the hammer, taking slow steps toward her, and she could feel its cold metal against her tummy and its forked end sharp through her shirt. He was pressing with more force now and she was feeling nauseous and scared, really scared, but in that instant Raj shoved open the back door of the shop and came trundling into the kitchen, eating a dumpling of snow out of his woolly glove. Maya and Rohan watched him glide through and disappear into the seating area out front.
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore Page 24
