What Piper was thinking, in order of least to most importance: If I don't eat that lo mein today it's going to go bad; look for something suspicious; how the hell am I supposed to know what looks suspicious; thank God I finally got assigned a real story; the only reason they gave me this story is Gil Manly is covering the police shooting of Trevor Barber; I bust my ass every day for this paper and now they're cutting me out of Harlem's most newsworthy event.
The last thought was the one that resonated the most, whose hum had endured since she'd listen to Cole Jr. dole out the stories four days before. The Trevor Barber shooting was the big story; the NYPD shoot an innocent, unarmed black man every year or two and it's always the big story. Piper's big story was she was being denied it. The ripples of that fact grew as they moved farther away from the source, leaving questions in their wake. These questions varied greatly in their complexity, creativity, and merit but were uniform in their destructiveness as well as their subject matter: the worth and prospects of one Piper Goines. To drown them out, Piper began creating new ones of her own. They were good ones. They included such enticing distractions as: Why would a building that's just been built burn down as fast as a nineteenth-century log cabin? Isn't it a little convenient that the bane of this community was thwarted before it could even fully open its doors? Who will champion justice for the three parolees who died if I don't?
"Oh snap, it's Sherlock Homegirl!" was Dumbass's response as he clanked away at the pipes under Piper's bathroom sink with his immaculate tools. He'd been eavesdropping on her and his wife's conversation, his rare visit to the third floor sparked by a brown water stain that had appeared on his office ceiling directly below. "Sister of my love, just because you didn't get the story you wanted doesn't mean your fire is going to magically become more than just that. The dryer in the basement had a bad cord, they already said so on TV. That police shooting is already dying down anyway. I mean, the mayor himself reported the guy had a bunch of sexual assault convictions. Who cares about a hood like that?"
"Jesus Brian, those were supposed to be sealed juvenile records, the mayor broke the law just by leaking them, and they were almost a decade old. Are you going to tell me you're as gullible as those cynics think?" Piper rolled her eyes for emphasis. Dumbass didn't know what he was talking about. Piper would consider that a general assessment of her brother-in-law's worldview, but in this instance it applied more specifically. Brian hadn't spent the afternoon shifting through files at City Hall, pulling evidence on past building code violations of 437 West 121st Street's contractor. Brian had no idea who Maverick Construction was, let alone that it had been cited on four different occasions in five years for using subgratle insulation, including Propex, a highly flammable form now banned. Brian hadn't spent the week learning what burn points or burn patterns were, or had a connection from his alumni association who worked in the arson division whisper that there'd been only one of the former, and the latter was defined by the ignition of the insulation in the interior basement walls. The fire had shot up a crawl space that went — against several building codes uninterrupted from the foundation to the roof. No one else knew these things, either, or, she hoped, would until the New Holland Heralds next edition.
Brian also didn't hug Greg Tanen's mother every time she broke down describing her son's life, see the photo from Quinn Jefferson's prom where he smiled as big as the date his arms could barely wrap around, or listen on the phone as Dio Demilo's sister kept repeating, "He was just turning around his life, you know?" so Piper tried to forgive him for saying the following:
"An armed burglar, a telephone con artist, and a habitual car thief, and a center that was going to bring more of the same if it stayed open the rest of the week, I mean, come on. It's messed up, sure, but you can hardly be surprised the Red Cross isn't handing out Kleenex on 125th Street."
"I don't know if you know this, but not everybody got to have both parents around growing up, OK? Not everybody got to belong to Jack and Jill. There are actually some people out there who don't have private school educations, who didn't get to go to college, or have their frat brothers hook them up with high-paying jobs for the rest of their lives."
"No! Really?" Brian jumped up, leaned out the bathroom door to see Piper sitting on the couch in the living room, his shirt wet and monkey wrench in hand. "Are you sure about this? Oh my God! Honey, quick, get me Cornel West on the phone. Underprivileged black people — why, who knew of such nonsense? I tell you, once my man Cornel hears about this, there's going to be some changes around here!"
"Leave me out of this. Do you want onions in this?" Dee asked her sister. Dee was in the kitchen cooking omelets. They weren't for her. They were for Robert M. Finley, author of The Great Work, and for her sister who would leave them on the skillet and pretend to reheat them when he got there.
"Yeah, but could you caramelize them separately before adding the eggs to the pan?"
"Oh right. Isn't that funny how someone who claims not to cook knows how to properly prepare caramelized onions?"
"I can't cook," Piper told her, "but if I could cook, that's how I'd do it. I hate it when they throw in pieces of raw, crunchy onions. It's tacky. Who wants to seem tacky?"
"I thought you weren't interested in this guy," Dumbass chimed in. "This is the mover, the guy you wanted me to punch in the mouth if he kept calling the house a couple months ago, right? See honey, I told you it was that guy. So what, he broke down your defenses?"
"This is not someone I'm interested in, OK?" Piper protested. "This is a talented published author, someone whose work I admire. We had a very long, very enjoyable conversation at the Horizon Ball, and he turns out to be a very sweet guy. He enjoys my work as well. We have an artistic connection."
Brian came back out from under the sink again for this one. "Wait a minute, he told you he likes your paintings? Those paintings in there, the ones I've seen? Fascinating," he said, hand on chin. "This guy must really be in love."
"Stop," Dee ordered, distracted by her attempt to wrap both ends of the egg evenly underneath it as instructed. "You guys want to talk about art, look at this, this is art. You sure you don't want these on a plate? I'm feeling very homemakerish at the moment. I could make a garnish with toothpicks and turnip shavings."
When Piper's phone rang, Dee picked up because she was the closest and it was her habit if not her privilege. By the time Piper had risen to take it out of her hand, the person had hung up. Dee handed the dead phone to Piper anyway, along with the message that Robert M. Finley, author of The Great Work, had canceled.
"Forget him. That's rude, that's not how a man handles things. If he was considerate, he would have called hours ago," Brian offered. "If you want I can still go and beat him up. Uh, he was that real skinny one, not that big, mean-looking bastard, right?"
"No, it's not like that," Piper responded. "The guy like had this huge crush on me. I mean, why would he just blow me off after I've gone to the trouble of preparing a meal and everything? Did he say he was sick?"