Our coffee came. I added Sweet’n Low to mine but he sipped his black, his eyes on me. On the ride over he’d asked me if Legal Aid had a lawyer for me yet and I told him yeah, then Connie Walsh’s news about the county already auctioning off the house. Now he looked down at the tabletop and shook his head. “Boy, they don’t fool around, do they?”
“It’s not hard to rescind these things, though, is it? That’s my lawyer’s plan.” I felt shaky at his reaction. I lifted my coffee cup, but then put it back down; I felt a little sick to my stomach. I lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out the side of my mouth.
“I really don’t know much about that, Mrs. Lazaro.”
“Kathy. Nicolo’s my maiden name.”
“It suits you.” His eyes stayed on mine a second, then he glanced out the window. I wanted to ask if he had any kids; I wanted to know that, but I didn’t ask and took a drag of my cigarette.
“Anyway, we never should have been charged a tax at all, and I only own half the house in the first place. My lawyer’s confident, though, so I’m trying not to harp on the negative.”
“Your husband hold the rest?”
“My brother. He doesn’t know about any of this yet. No one does.”
The waitress came by and topped off our coffee. Lester Burdon smiled at her, but sadly, I thought, like he knew something about her that wasn’t good. His face changed when he saw me studying him and he sipped his coffee.
“Do you have any kids, Mr. Burdon?”
“Two.” He put his cup down and folded his elbows on the table. His eyes were on mine again, but this time he didn’t look away and neither did I. I wasn’t used to being looked at so closely, to being seen.
“My husband left me eight months ago. No one back home knows that either.”
“You always keep so many secrets?”
“Just when I have to.”
He kept his brown eyes on me, and I looked away to stub out my cigarette.
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
“I think so.” He nodded once, the way cops do.
IT WAS A short and strange ride back to the motel. Neither of us talked and the fog still moved slowly through the streets. The lights over the diesel pumps at the truck stop looked misted at the edges, so did the blue and red neon beer signs in the bar window, and across the lot the tall yellow letters of the El Rancho Motel over the office, all dulled and spread out a little.
He pulled into the lot and I put my hand on the door handle. “I want to go back to my house, but I’d have to break a window just to get in there.”
He touched four fingers to my knee, lifting them just as quick, but they left a warmth in my leg that loosened something in me all the way to my diaphragm.
“Do you mind if I give you some professional advice?”
“I guess not.”
“Keep your head and do it all through your lawyer, Kathy. If I were you, I wouldn’t even drive up there until the keys were back in my hand.”
He looked dark-eyed and somber again and I didn’t want to get out of his car, but I didn’t want to stay either. “Thanks for stopping by.”
He looked at me with his handsome face and crooked mustache and I got out and closed the door, watching his little station wagon turn up the foggy street, its taillights vanishing in no time.
SATURDAY AND SUNDAY all the coast towns were fogged in. I spent the weekend in my room smoking and reading magazines, watching my own color TV I’d pulled from the storage shed. When I got hungry I went out for fast food. Late Sunday night I drove under the freeway to go buy cigarettes and a Snickers Bar and when I got back, I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I saw Lester Burdon’s car pull away from the curb across the street, its small foreign engine straining to shift gears.
I LOOK AT MY NADI OVER THE PIZZA WE ARE EATING UPON THE FLOORof our new home. She is dressed in a fashionable sweat suit the color of roses. She wears no cosmetics upon her face, and there are shadows beneath her eyes. Esmail has worked very hard all weekend, and he reaches for a fifth slice even before he has finished chewing his last. But Nadereh will not return my look. She has spoken to me very little, in Farsi or English, since I yelled and broke her cassette player by throwing it in the bedroom of our pooldar apartment. We complete our eating and I give my son permission to leave the sofreh for his room. Nadi rises to prepare the samovar.
The movers finished with their business by nightfall yesterday, my wife working until midnight bringing order to her new room, the largest, with two good windows overlooking the rear lawn. My room and Esmail’s are smaller and face the front grass and the street and woodland beyond, and we will share the bathroom as a family. Even though she would not speak to me, I enjoyed listening to Nadi talk with the large moving men in English,informing them please to be calculated, and please to work slowful and avoid to shatter very supreme furniture, thank you, sirs.
I lie back upon one elbow on the carpet, but I can no longer see my wife in the kitchen area due to the bar counter and its stools. This is something quite western, the design of a drinking saloon in one’s own home, and if I were not planning to sell the property to Americans, I would have it removed. The sound of televised laughter comes from Esmail’s new bedroom. Yesterday he was excited to discover this hill brought as many programs to his screen as the pooldar apartments, and for two hours today, after he had organized his room, my son rode his skateboard down the long hill of Bisgrove Street again and again, those minature wheels sounding on the road like a quite distant F-16 in the clouds.
Nadi rests the tea and sugar at my bare feet, then quickly removes the empty pizza container and returns to the kitchen, which she has been putting into order all the afternoon. Upon the sofa are unpacked boxes, lamps, folded drapes and blankets. She is reserving this room for last, which is good, for I know she has enough work to keep her busy for at least the first week. Fardoh, tomorrow, I will for her purchase a new cassette player and even a new tape or two, Googoosh perhaps, that zeebah Persian woman who is a less sentimental singer than Daryoosh.
I rise and carry my tea out the front door and walk barefoot upon the grass. The blades are long, at least two centimeters, and as I walk around to the side of the house I make a note to purchase a grass cutter as well, something used, nothing extravagant. The sky has lost most of its light and my new neighbors have turned on the lamps in their homes. I was disappointed there was no sun all the weekend long, only that strange cool fog, but I am grateful for the tall hedge bushes around our little bungalow, and I like the heavy smell of pine they release into the air. Through the kitchen window I can barely see my Nadi working for she has turned on no light. Tomorrow begins my new work, that of buyer and seller. I will give it the best hours of the day, like any office position, and that is what I must do with my room, arrange it with a proper desk and chair and a telephone and perhaps a typewriter as well. But first I must become a seller; I must double my investment with a buyer very soon. And of course this must be handled more delicately than anything else. I cannot push Nadi too far too quickly, asking her to pack and move again so immediately. Perhaps I should wait a month or two for her to settle herself here, away from all the lying and play-acting of our life at the high-rise of our ruling pooldar. But will it not be more difficult, after I sell the home on the open market for a fair price, to ask her to move once again? But then I will of course be able to show her eighty or ninety thousand dollars in our hands, the opportunity to purchase another auction property to sell for profit or even begin a business of some kind right away.