One fall day we sat on the stoop in front of our house, waiting for people to come buy from our garage sale. It’s not a garage sale, said Lorris. It’s a stoop sale. But that doesn’t sound as good, I said. A step sale then, he said. Fine, I said, a step sale. In the crevice from the sidewalk and the indentation that the bus made coming through every morning, there was a puddle of water, a quarter foot deep and buzzing with gnats. Lorris was picking up brick pebbles from our neighbor’s unswept stoop and landing them in the puddle.
An old woman stopped and asked how much the paperbacks were.
We’re selling them for one dollar, I said.
One dollar! That’s not enough, she said. I’ll give you three.
Told you, Lorris said to me.
The woman smiled fondly at Lorris. Do you like to read? she said.
Yes, said Lorris.
What’s your favorite book? she said.
His head dipped down and he became less excited. He hated questions about favorites: red versus blue, Yankees or Mets, the sport that he was best at. He didn’t like making choices.
He’s reading Sherlock Holmes now, I said.
The old woman patted his arm and he looked carefully at her sandals.
Can you tell me the plot from one of your favorite Sherlock Holmes stories? she asked.
Lorris’s face looked like when you press pause in a video game.
I’ll give you an extra dollar, she said.
We’d only made six dollars all morning.
How about if your brother helps you? she said. He still looked the same way. Or any story at all. Otherwise I’m leaving. She mimed walking away.
Lorris took his hands out of his pockets and put them on my arm, like someone had pressed start.
Tell her a story about us, he said.
ATTACHED
Lorris asked if he could get a ride home from the train station later that night somewhere in the neighborhood of three a.m. It was a Friday in December, and I hadn’t left the house in a week and a half, which is what happens when you live at home. I said, What, you don’t think I got plans of my own? He just stood there looking in the mirror in the living room adjusting the hat he’d borrowed from me and never returned, a little to the left, more to the right, until he got the perfect tilt he was after the whole time. It was a flat-brim, the first one I’d ever gotten, gray with the Mets logo in front. I’d never liked the color royal blue, and that’s what all the other Mets caps were. But this one I’d connected with, and I used to wear it everywhere, until Lorris started asking for it and I gave it to him one birthday. People are always giving people useless things for birthdays. That’s something I can’t abide with.
He said, And it might be closer to four—I’m not really sure. I said, How about you give me a call and we’ll see where I’m at, and if I’m in any state to drive. Really, I meant if I was awake. He said that sounded fine, and asked if I minded if he took some of the cologne Mom had gotten me for Christmas. It had a note on it that said, Something nice for someone nice. I told him it was in my junk drawer, which I hadn’t opened in a while, but it was somewhere in there, if he wanted to dig into it and look.
• • •
Nights I drove around. I had a 1991 Ford Taurus that my aunt had gotten rid of when she got a new job. She didn’t want to own a car that was practically twenty years old. She’d been working with Bank of America and then there was what she said they called the Little Slowdown, and she’d been out of work. Another place hired her a year later, with pay cut and demotion, but she took it, because it wasn’t so easy to get jobs anymore.
It was a dirty tan car, and whenever I drove my mother to the Key Food to get groceries, she insisted we stop at the gas station and fill up the tank. I wasn’t making much of an income. I worked at the cell phone place at Kings Plaza a couple days a week. That’s all the time they could give me, though they said they wished it could be more. I was good with following directions, went along with the company policy of introducing yourself and asking the customer’s name when they got in the store. I liked hearing the names, trying to guess what block they lived on, if they were on the right side or the left side of Flatbush. I wasn’t taking any classes that year. Sometimes these things just happen.