When we hadn’t gone to the grocery store in a little while or I didn’t have any extra to put in the tank, I walked around. There’s a painting-poster my dad has, on the wall leading up to our bedrooms, of a café somewhere with people sitting in it, the sky dark at the top and the only light coming from inside the café. He said it was Barcelona, but he’d never been. Why don’t you go there and talk to someone, if you’re so attached to it? he said. It’s not like Marine Park had that, though it wasn’t so bad. I could stand for hours looking at the Lott House, the old Dutch estate between Fillmore and S, the one that was Parks Department property and that the Brooklyn College archaeologists were doing excavations on, to find old slave quarters. I’d been on the porch once, when they decorated for Christmas. Every night, they put a candle in the top middle window, and I liked leaning on the fence looking at that and the old wood. The windows were shuttered up, and there were signs to stay off the grounds around the house. They thought the ground was unstable, because there were supposed to be Underground Railroad tunnels underneath. This had been one of the last stops. They’d get them out at night somewhere through a false plank in the kitchen floor.
• • •
Lorris texted the first time at midnight, said, Place is lame, but somewhere else soon. Also, you could come, call if you want to. He always wrote in full sentences in texts. Some girl had berated him about it once, he said. She said, You’re going to Williams next year and you write like this? At first he just did it for her, but then it was easier to be right for everyone.
I was still in front of the TV at home. Mom was sitting in the kitchen, ice on her legs for the shin splints, massaging her feet. A few hours before Dad had said he was going out for a movie. Do you want to go? he asked Mom aggressively. Does it look like it? she said, pointing at her feet. She’d had the ice on since she got back from work. I told her, Mom, maybe take a day off from running once or twice, and they might feel better. She’s like, I’m a school secretary. I sit at a desk all day long. You ever see a school secretary take a lunch break? she says. I have to move around a little or I’ll forget how. She’s scared that she’ll get Alzheimer’s like her mother did.
I texted Lorris back that it was nice of him, but I was a little busy at the moment. Didn’t want to make something up, because you could always tell—the name of such and such club, friends that didn’t live here anymore. Too easy to say too much and get caught in the lie. That would have been the embarrassing part. He couldn’t even drive yet. I said, Let me know when you do need the ride, I’ll probably be OK to come get you.
We live in the worst possible place for getting anywhere. It’s a twenty-five-minute walk to the subway, or a bus, the least-served area by the MTA in the whole goddamn city. I checked on a map one day. My dad always complains about the fact that Mom moved him into a two-fare zone. He means that you have to pay twice, once for the bus and once for the Q train, if you’re trying to get yourself into Manhattan, or even downtown Brooklyn, where everything that’s happening is. I’m pretty sure he knows that it’s all one fare today, even if you have to transfer, but he’s been driving so long now and takes trains so infrequently that you never know. He got mugged too many times in the eighties, even when he was on dates. That’s the kind of embarrassing thing that’d drive a guy to the DMV, no problem.
At one thirty I turned off the third straight Law & Order and went through the kitchen out the back, past Mom, who had fallen asleep across three chairs. I could’ve woken her, but I don’t think she really sleeps soundly until she hears Lorris back in the house. She’d go up and pretend to be in bed before we got back. I pulled out of the alleyway, quietly, then turned the music up higher. It’s a five-minute drive to the station at Kings Highway, and at this time of night I found a spot half a block from the entrance. I shut the car off and waited.
• • •
The only time I ever remember going into the city all together by train was when we did family outings to the Met. When we were little we used to do it once a year, in the summer, at that point in July when me and Lorris were too jumpy with being out of school and Mom was tired of babysitting us. Then Dad would take a day off from work at the driver’s ed place and we’d all get on the B2 bus to Kings Highway. When Dad took a day off he didn’t want to drive, period. So we did it the whole way, public transportation, as if we didn’t have a car.