“Um… my mom was,” I say.
“Okay, well, that means you’re Jewish. As you know. Good. They can usually tell.”
She hangs up. They can tell?
I find Iris and tell her I’m taking another shift.
“On a Friday?”
“I’m going to Borough Park.”
“Really?” Iris knows that my mom grew up in Borough Park. She’s offered to go there with me and walk around, just to see. But that always felt too much like a search. I am not searching for my mother. Not actively, anyway.
“You want company?” she asks.
“I’m good,” I say.
Iris, who is loose and Friday-drunk, laughs. “I love you, Rebekah Roberts.” She turns to Brice, who is standing at attention behind her stool. “Rebekah Roberts is my fucking hero.” She hugs me.
“I’ll text you,” I say.
“Be safe,” she says. “And don’t forget poor Tony.”
Tony is at the other end of the bar, kneeling with a clipboard in front of a mini fridge. I wave and he smiles. He finishes whatever he’s doing, then comes over.
“Scoop’s got a scoop?” he says.
The night we met I told him I worked for the Trib and he teased me, named me Scoop. I rolled my eyes, enjoying the attention, but cringing at the truth: I’ve never gotten a scoop. Not at the Trib, at least. There are reasons for this. Scoops, for the most part, come from sources, and sources come from being in the same place for more than a couple hours. As a stringer, my job is to go where I’m told, get some information, repeat. I’m in a different borough every day-one day a murder on Staten Island, one day a press conference in Midtown, one day an old woman dead in a broken elevator in Brownsville-and nobody knows my name or face until I show up. Every day I have to ingratiate myself to a whole new group of people. Different ages, different languages, different values and occupations and prejudices and levels of intoxication or hostility or shame.
“I’m going to Borough Park,” I say.
“Yeah? What’s the scoop?”
“Dead lady in a crane.” I feel strong when I shock people-ooh, look how hard she is-but Tony’s face tells me what I already know, which is that my characterization was crass. “Sorry,” I say. “I was at this scene today. They found a woman, a naked woman, in a scrap pile. They had to lift her out with a crane.”
“And you watched that?”
I nod. “She looked cold.”
Tony shakes his head. I take a gulp from the pint, thinking, I could use a little buzz as I head into the neighborhood where my mother was born. The neighborhood that has haunted my imagination for my entire life.
“They don’t know who she is yet,” I say. “Well, we don’t, the paper. But there’s an address for the company that owns the yard. I’m going there, to see if they have any information.”
“By yourself?”
I nod and finish the beer. Tony seems about to say something, but stops himself. I appreciate his concern almost as much as his self-control. I don’t want to stiffen up with him again, but I can’t seem to help it-sometimes it just takes one wrong word.
“They’ll probably send a photographer,” I say. “Plus, Borough Park is really safe. Come on, how much Jewish street crime do you read about?”
“Just because you don’t read about it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.”
I smile. “True.”
He seems pleased to have bested me, but not too pleased. He’s very hard not to like.
“I’m sorry I have to bail,” I say.
“Me, too,” he says.
“What are you doing tomorrow night? Do you have to work?”
“I don’t.”
“Wanna have drinks near me?” I ask, bracing myself, just in case he says no. I can stand angry brothers and haughty teenagers telling me to fuck off when I try to interview them for a story, but in my personal life I do not take rejection well. Another thing I learned in therapy was that each rejection “brings up” the rejection, and all of a sudden I’m just an orphan. But I try not to think about it that way.
“I could be into that,” he says.
“I’ll call you,” I say. I step up on the footrail along the bottom of the bar and lean in. “I’m sorry I was shitty,” I say again.
Tony smiles. He has really long, almost feminine eyelashes and cloudy-day blue eyes.
“Stand me up and I’ll go Brooklyn on your ass,” he says.
I lean in closer and kiss him, feeling wet and a little drunk.
“Maybe you’ll go Brooklyn on me anyway,” I say.
Oh Rebekah, she’s so hard.
CHAPTER THREE
I got my job at the Trib five weeks after I moved to New York City. My dad gave me three thousand dollars for graduation. Enough to put down my half of our first month’s rent and security deposit, buy a monthly MetroCard, and float me for a little less than a month. I wanted to do daily newspaper work. I’d listened to my professors and read various memoirs of successful journalists and they all espoused the virtues of the daily grind. They also recommended staying away from major markets, like New York City, where competition is fierce-for jobs and for stories. But New York City was nonnegotiable. New York City was the goal. I decided I could temp if I didn’t get a job right away. Plus, Iris was going. And yes, partly, it was about my mom. Being close feels like forward movement.
I’m not actively trying to find her; I’ve gone over the ways that would turn out in my head many times and each time the conclusion, even if I find her, is sadness. She and my dad never got married, and if she was smart, which my dad says she was, she probably never told anyone she’d had a child in that lost year when she ran off with a Methodist from Orlando. I used to feel nothing but hurt and hate for her. I hated that what she’d done was even possible. Then I got pregnant my freshman year at college and I experienced what it felt like to know that I just couldn’t take care of a child. I wasn’t in love-or rather, I was in love, but he wasn’t-and while I imagine that my mom’s trepidation probably began as soon as she found out she was pregnant, having my father there with her, ecstatic, proposing marriage, ready to be a family, postponed the realization that she couldn’t-or wouldn’t-shed everything she’d been bred to believe her life was about. I had an abortion at ten weeks. I think it was the right thing to do.
So New York City it was. On my fourth day in town, I interviewed for, and got, a position at The New York Star. Official title: Reporter. It was magical. Iris and I invited everyone we could think of to our apartment to celebrate. We drank and smoked weed and then pranced through the streets like we owned them. Which we kind of did. I fell completely in love with New York that night. Who was I? Some motherless white chick from Florida, and yet every sidewalk and storefront and street corner and subway car was mine.
Then the Star folded. Apparently, New York City can sustain five major daily publications, but not six. The next week I interviewed at the Staten Island Advance and The Jersey Journal, but they were just “informational interviews,” as there were no actual openings. I found a weekly paper in Brooklyn that needed writers, but their “freelancer guidelines” were seven single-spaced pages long, and they only paid twenty-five dollars per article. Iris had started buying my food when I got an e-mail from a reporter at the Queens Chronicle, where I’d sent my résumé. The reporter said that they weren’t hiring, but that I might contact his buddy Mike Rothchild at the New York Tribune. “They’re always looking for stringers,” he said in the e-mail. “Feel free to use my name.” I did, and two days later I was walking into one of those black glass Midtown high-rises with half a dozen revolving doors to the lobby. The reception desk called up for Mike, and I waited until someone came to fetch me and take me upstairs.