But he was looking ahead. He had spoken to Gerard again about a U.S. Postal Service job, and he had downloaded a sample of the 473E, the entrance exam. It was mostly memory questions, numbers, codes, addresses, routes, stuff like that. He was confident that he could score high. The criminal background check could present a problem, but he planned to visit his lawyer, Mr. Mirapaul, to see about the juvenile priors and the adult charges that were still on his record. Maybe Mr. Mirapaul could help him get those things expunged. It would take time. But that was all right.
It wasn’t just the U.S. Postal Service job that made him want to clear his record. He wanted to do volunteer stuff, too, and that would involve working with kids. He had other ideas as well. If he enrolled and took some college classes, maybe starting at UDC or Montgomery College, over the Maryland line, he might get the ambition to keep going with it and earn his degree. Maybe teach, eventually. Teach about books.
It was possible. It was.
One evening, coming out of Wall of Books on Georgia Avenue, Michael saw Anna and her husband seated at one of the outdoor picnic tables at the Midlands, having a talk. They looked serious. Her husband, Rick was his name, was wearing a hat that said TITLEIST across the front. He was drinking a beer. Anna was drinking water.
Michael didn’t walk over to the patio to say hello. It looked like they were discussing something important, and he didn’t want to bother them. Though he thought of her often, he hadn’t seen Anna or talked to her for quite a while. He had walked up to her neighborhood a couple of times in the past month, watched the soccer games at the rec center there, in the hopes that she’d come past on her bike. But she hadn’t, and it was better that way. He didn’t know what he wanted, but he knew that trying to take things further with her was wrong.
He had no desire to upend her life. But he missed her.
The next time he ran into Anna was during the dinner rush at the restaurant. She was picking up a pizza to take out, and he was delivering glassware to the bar. She was by the cash register, and she saw him and smiled. He walked along the bar until he came to where she stood.
“Anna.”
“Michael. How’s it going?”
“A little warm down there in the kitchen. But I’m fine. About to be the best dishwasher in the city, if I keep this up.”
“Is it a contest?”
“In a way. How have you been?”
“I’m still at the jail. We have an actual library there now, where the inmates can browse for books. Everything’s good.”
For a moment, neither of them spoke. He looked into her eyes.
“Seriously,” she said. “Are you doing all right?”
“I am. I’m thinking of enrolling in a couple of college courses. Like English. But it’s a blessing to have this job right here too.” His expression grew serious. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll buy a farm out in the country, something like that. ‘An’ live off the fatta the lan’.’”
Anna laughed. “You remembered.”
“How could I forget?” he said. “You’ve still got my number, right?”
“Yes. And you have mine.”
“You ever need anything, Anna, all you got to do is hit me up. You got a friend in this city, hear? For life.”
“As do you,” she said.
“Be easy, Anna.”
Michael turned and headed for the spiral stairs.
Anna walked home slowly, because she needed the time alone.
She was pregnant.
The next time Michael would see her, she’d be showing, or maybe she’d be out on the patio of the District Line with her husband and their baby. A stroller by their table, like so many others. Like all the young couples who had taken that next step.
Rick, once a die-hard stay-in-the-city enthusiast, had already begun to talk about putting their house on the market and buying something bigger, with “more yard” and space “for the kid to play,” in Maryland or Northern Virginia. Someplace near a golf course, no doubt. She’d end up compromising. It was a partnership. It wasn’t all about only what she wanted or liked.
She wasn’t unhappy. She knew she’d love her child and she wanted to be a good parent, as her own parents had been. And yet these things that were being put in motion couldn’t be reversed. She could see her trajectory.
Her mood lightened as she thought of tomorrow. Not the long tomorrow, but the immediate days that were to come. She was preparing for the next book club and had staged the cart for the Gen Pop unit the following day. There was a young man named Terrell in Gen Pop who had shown a growing interest in reading. She had chosen something especially for him, a positive memoir about growing up on the once-notorious block of Hanover Place, a book called Slugg, by Tony Lewis Jr. She felt certain that Terrell would like it.
Not everything was perfect, or would be. Anna was married to a good man she loved, and together they would make a family. She had her work. And a friend in the city, for life.
In his spare time, Michael Hudson had begun to venture out of his neighborhood and his quadrant to explore the wider city around him. He visited the renovated Mount Pleasant library, which held fifty thousand books, and the beautiful Francis Gregory Library, in Ward 7, designed by David Adjaye. At various libraries, Michael signed up for discussion groups and attended movie nights. And, for the first time in his life, he took advantage of the numerous world-class art galleries and museums in D.C. to which entry was free. He was growing.
On a day in early summer, as dark afternoon clouds began to gather, he walked to Petworth to pick up a novel he had ordered from the store on Upshur Street. The book was True Grit. Anna had recommended it to him when he was incarcerated. She knew he liked Westerns, and this one, she’d said, was a classic.
He paid for the book, an Overland Press trade edition, and found a seat on a bench. He opened the novel and read the first paragraph.
People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.
Michael closed the book and rubbed his thumb across its cover.
The clouds broke and drops began to fall. He was not near shelter, so he decided it was best to head home. Michael slid the book into his shirt, adjusted the watch cap that was on his head, and went south on foot. He was already thinking about the book, its marriage of story and voice. It had captured him immediately. It had taken him somewhere else.
To anyone watching, he was one of many out on the street, going along, stepping quick against the weather. They couldn’t know his inner life, or his history, or that he was a Washingtonian, born and bred, with a steady job, family and friends. A lover of books. A man who knew who he was and who he hoped to be.
Just another man who came uptown.
Walking in the rain.