Chapter 8 - The Car

The floor manager ran checkout at two-fifteen. Each dancer came to the podium at the back of the bar to settle the house fee and sign the ledger. The ledger was Ricky's rule. From his position near the main door, Teo watched the room thin itself. The last customers went out. The bartenders ran their final counts. Overhead fluorescents came up to full brightness for the first time all night and the room looked like what it was.

The dembow cut at two-twenty. Without music the room was a smaller room, voices audible now, the sound of stools being lifted onto the bar. Teo had been on his feet for six hours and his shoulders were heavy at the joint. He stretched his neck once, left and right, and held his position at the door.

While he was watching Ese lock the VIP corridor, the dressing room door opened at the far end of the hall.

She came out with her bag on one shoulder and her hair down, the curls loose after whatever had been keeping them pinned during the set. She had changed into street clothes. She moved through the thinning back half of the room without looking at the men still finishing their drinks, the stage performance set aside. He had watched her work the stage for forty-five minutes. The woman moving through the bar was a different velocity.

She was going to walk past him.

Teo said it before he had decided to say it. "Oye. You need a ride?"

The words came out flat. She slowed without stopping and turned the look on him that she had been turning for three weeks, the one that read him as something she had not yet finished categorizing. Her weight was on her back foot. Her bag strap was in her hand.

"To where?" she said.

"Wherever," he said.

She looked at the door, at the parking lot through the door's narrow glass panel, the sodium-orange of the overhead lights, the empty service road. Then she looked back at him.

"Okay," she said.

---

His car was the fourth spot from the entrance. A 2009 Honda Civic the color of asphalt, 143,000 miles on it, one headlight sitting slightly higher than the other, a crack across the passenger-side dashboard he had run a strip of black duct tape along and not thought about again. It had belonged to a cousin first. He had bought it for nine hundred dollars and a favor he did not specify. Everything Reyes ran on that arithmetic.

She got in without comment. From the driver's side he pulled his door shut and the parking lot sound dropped away. The Honda's interior had three working speakers and a pine air freshener on the rearview that had stopped smelling like anything two months ago. She looked at the air freshener once and looked away.

He turned the key. Heat came up immediately from the vents, the engine already warm from the ride in.

The car stayed where it was. She let it stay.

Through the windshield was the parking lot and the tire shop next door with its chain-link fence and the shapes of cars in the dark. Above all of it, the sign. Red neon of La Reina Roja, the cursive R and R with one letter dimmer than the other. The sign had been there every night for eleven years and would be after Teo stopped working here, in whatever version of the future that was.

His hands stayed on the steering wheel. The car was not going anywhere.

---

"You been working here long?" she said.

"Not long."

"That's what everybody says."

He had heard this from her once before, in the corridor three weeks ago, the same exact sentence. The first time it had closed the conversation. This time it did not.

"What's the right answer?" he said.

She leaned back against the headrest. "There isn't one. I'm just saying that's always the answer."

The expressway was audible from here, the low continuous frequency of the Bruckner above the service road. Teo had grown up within earshot of one expressway or another and stopped hearing it as a child. He heard it now because the car was quiet.

"You like October?" he said.

She turned her head toward him, still against the headrest. "That's what you want to know?"

"Yeah."

"Nobody asks that."

"I'm asking."

She looked at the windshield for a moment. "I like it better than August. August is too much. October you can breathe."

"Yeah."

"In Philly October always smelled like something burning. From the refineries. You couldn't see them but you could smell them."

She said Philly and then stopped, one syllable and then a door. Her hands were in her lap, loose, not the stillness that meant something was wrong.

"What part?" he said.

"Kensington."

The name landed and stayed. Kensington. He didn't know it. He said nothing.

She looked at him sideways, small attention. "You're not going to ask."

"No."

Heat from the vents settled into the interior, which was small enough that two people warmed it quickly. Outside, a car moved slowly down the service road without stopping, its headlights sweeping across the parking lot. Teo tracked it without moving his head. It kept going.

"I did a delivery job before this," he said. "Restaurant supply. Boxes. Tipped in cash, never enough."

"How long?"

"Since I was fifteen. Three years."

"Three years of boxes." Something moved in her face, near a smile. "What kind of boxes?"

"Depends on the order. Produce, mostly. Olive oil bottles. One time a hundred pounds of napkins."

She made a sound he had not heard from her before, a brief exhale that was also a laugh, coming from her shoulders before her face caught up with it. The laugh lasted maybe three seconds before she put it away.

"A hundred pounds of napkins."

"They were heavy."

"Paper's always heavy."

"Yeah."

Her face turned back to the windshield. The overhead sign threw its red tint across the lot, diluted by the distance, pink on the dashboard.

Teo looked at the sign for a second and looked away.

The rear right speaker was blown. It had been blown for a month. The crackle was on the low end, almost inaudible under music and completely audible when the car was quiet. He had the radio off. In the silence the speaker complained once every few minutes. Nobody was going to fix it.

"You want music?" he said.

"No."

"Okay."

She shifted in her seat, finding a position, and the space between them got about an inch smaller. He kept his eyes on the windshield. The side of his body knew anyway.

"The book in your bag," he said.

She looked down at her bag, then at him. "You saw that?"

"In the corridor. Three weeks ago. The spine was showing." He remembered the color and the font of the author's name without remembering the title.

"Zora Neale Hurston." She said the name and left it there, the bag still on her lap.

"I don't know her."

"She was from Florida. She wrote about Black life in the South." Her pause was small. "And love. The way people think they know what they need and find out they were wrong about what they needed."

Teo sat with that for a second. "Have you been reading it this whole time?"

"Twice." Her head tilted slightly. "You have to read it twice or you miss what she did the first time. You read?"

"When I have time."

"What?"

"Whatever's around. Fernando has some stuff." In his head was the apartment, paperbacks on the shelf by the window that Fernando had not touched in years. Crime novels, mostly. A thick one about a war. "Nothing like that."

"You should read her. She doesn't waste anything."

His eyes went to the windshield. "Nobody who doesn't waste anything has time to tell you about it."

Her mouth moved sideways after a beat. "That's almost smart."

"Almost."

The corner of her mouth moved slightly. He kept his eyes on the parking lot.

---

At some point she had turned slightly toward him, her left shoulder against the seat back, her knees angled his way. He had not tracked when. The passenger seat sat closer to the center console than it should have, because the adjustment lever had been broken since his cousin owned the car and held at two inches of compression. The Honda left less space between two people than another car would have. He had not considered this when he made the offer.

He was considering it now.

Neither of them addressed it. The heat ran. The expressway held its frequency.

"You grew up here?" she said.

"Courtlandt Avenue. Born and raised."

"You didn't want to leave?"

He ran the thought for a moment, actually ran it. "I didn't know what leaving looked like. There was always something here that needed doing."

"Fernando."

She had turned the word over. He had mentioned Fernando to her once, three weeks ago in the corridor, in a sentence about going home after his shift. He did not remember saying the name. She did.

"Yeah. Fernando."

"What does he need?"

"Less than he thinks. More than I can give him right now." His hands stayed on the wheel. "He does okay."

The attention she put on him had been keeping him in this parking lot for twenty minutes already.

"You don't have to do that," she said.

"Do what?"

"Make it smaller than it is."

Through the windshield was the R and R, the expressway sound underneath it.

"My uncle drinks." He spoke to the windshield. "Long time now. Worked markets until his back went and then he didn't, and the drinking got bigger because there was more room for it. He's not a bad person."

"I know."

"You don't know him."

"You say his name and then you defend him in the same breath. People do that with the ones they love."

He looked at her. Her eyes were on the sign through the windshield.

"That's a psych thing," he said. "You learn that somewhere?"

The pause was small and precise. "I took some classes. A while ago." She gave him one fact and stopped there.

"Where?"

"Couple of years of credits." Her eyes stayed on the sign. "Mostly intro stuff."

That was the deflection. He let it stand.

"What did the classes give you?"

"The kind where they tell you what people's behavior means." She turned toward him again. In the red light from the sign her face was watchful. "Mostly made me better at noticing things I already noticed."

"Like what?"

"Your hands were still the first night I saw you. Everyone else in the room was either showing off or checking to see if someone was watching them. You were just still."

He kept his eyes on the windshield.

"I noticed that," she said.

---

Thirty-five minutes in, the gap between her knee and his was not a gap. He could not have said when. The broken seat adjuster had something to do with it. She had turned toward him, shifting her weight. Neither of them was moving away.

Her knee was against his right leg.

He felt it completely and did not show it. His hands stayed on the steering wheel. The wheel was not warm anymore. He had been holding it for twenty minutes for the wrong reasons, because he did not know what else to do with his hands in a situation that was not a threat and was not work.

The rear right speaker crackled once, briefly. She heard it. Her attention moved to the speaker grill for half a second and then she let it go. The crackle stayed unexplained. Neither of them named it.

The quiet held. Teo had sat inside two kinds of silence in his life. Machete's silence between jobs was the economy of not saying things that did not need to be said. Fernando's silence was a man who had run out of things he wanted to say. This was a third kind, and Teo did not have a name for it.

She was talking about October again. Something about the light in October being different from other months, lower in the sky, making long shadows in the afternoon. He listened to the words and felt the pressure at his knee and did not move.

"You don't get long shadows up here," he said. "Too many buildings."

"You do in some places. By the water."

"I don't go to the water much."

"Why not?"

He had been to the Port Morris waterfront for the initiation. He had been to a stash house by the water twice since. Whatever she meant by water was not what water meant to him.

"Work," he said.

"Hm." Her eyes went to her hands. "I used to go to Penn's Landing in Philly. With my grandmother. When I was small. She'd bring bread and we'd feed whatever came by. Ducks, pigeons, didn't matter. She treated them all the same. She's like that."

"Is she still there? Your grandmother?"

"Yes." She landed the word with a precision that cost her. "She lives in Kensington. She thinks I'm waitressing."

He received this without reacting. The weight was in the word waitressing. He had told Fernando variations of it for months.

"Does she call?" he said.

"Every Sunday." Her hands, in her lap, were not entirely still. One finger moved against the back of the other hand, back and forth, barely. "Mira, I call her, actually. Easier that way. I know what time she'll be up."

"What time?"

"Nine. She goes to early mass and I call her when she gets back." Her eyes went to the windshield, then to him. "I don't usually tell people that."

"Why not?"

"Because then they ask questions I don't want to answer. You didn't."

Her plainness was something he was going to think about later. For now his hands went off the steering wheel and into his lap, finally, and the wheel was whatever it was without him holding onto it.

"I had a grandmother," he said. "She died when I was ten. She used to make rice that I've never tasted anywhere else since. Fernando knows the recipe but he doesn't make it the same way."

Cami was quiet for a moment. "He make it close?"

"Close enough to make it worse."

The shoulder-laugh came back, shorter this time, pulled back almost before it started. It had been there. He had seen it happen.

Outside, a car turned slowly off the service road into the lot and took three seconds to confirm the lot was empty before continuing out the other side. Its lights tracked across the Honda's interior, front to back and floor to ceiling, gone. Teo tracked the car without moving anything above his collar. When it was gone his eyes went back to the sign.

The R and R held there with one letter dimmer.

He was in Ricky's parking lot with a woman who worked in Ricky's house, sitting in a car that had not moved for thirty-five minutes. The club was dark and the service road was empty and the heat was running and none of that changed where they were.

The lot was empty now. The club's front windows were dark. Only the sign stayed on, automated, on its own timer. The temperature outside had dropped enough that the car's heat was earning its keep. Windows were beginning to fog at the edges, a soft border at the corners of the glass.

Teo looked at her.

"Cami," he said, "I don't— Cami, that's not something you have to—"

He lost the sentence because she was looking at him directly. The full weight of her attention, no management in it, none of the calibration he had watched her apply to every room she had been in with him. Her eyes were dark and specific and they were on him.

He stopped talking.

The expressway held its frequency. The sign held its pink-red tint across the car's interior. Her knee was against his leg and she had not moved it and he had not moved and the windows were fogging at the corners and none of it required a word.

He looked back at her.

It lasted longer than seconds measured it. Long enough to cross a line he had not known existed until it was behind him. He breathed out through his nose.

"Okay," he said, because he had to say something and that was the only thing that was accurate.

The corner of her mouth moved, not quite a smile. Her eyes went to the sign through the windshield, the familiar neon, and then she unclipped her seatbelt. She had been wearing it the whole forty minutes in a parked car. She had put it on when she got in.

She reached for the door.

"Cami—"

"Tomorrow." She said it over her shoulder, the door already partway open, the cold coming in sharp from outside. "Come back tomorrow."

It was not a question. She was already out, closing the door, the parking lot receiving her. He watched her through the window, through fogged edges and a clear center, walking toward her building a block and a half down the service road, her bag on her shoulder. She was not rushing. Her stride was steady.

She did not look back.

He sat in the car with the heat running and the windows fogging and the sign in the windshield and he did not move for ten more minutes. His hands were in his lap. The car was warm enough that it did not need the heat anymore, but he left it running.

Tomorrow.

The sign held its unevenness, one R a little dimmer than the other, the cursive bending slightly, nobody fixing it. It held over the lot and the service road and the tire shop and the chain-link fence and all of it.

He looked at the sign for a while longer.

He drove home.