The Night Gardener

'Stop it,' said Regina.

'We're playin, honey,' said Ramone. 'It's real good.'

Alana had her face down near her bowl, trying to suck up a forkful of spaghetti. She was an intense eater who thought and talked about food often. Ramone liked to see a grown woman enjoy a meal, and he loved it in his little girl.

'Want me to cut that up for you, Junior?' said Diego.

'Uh-uh,' said Alana.

'Make it easier to eat.'

'Nope.'

'You eatin it like a pig do,' said Diego.

'Does,' said Regina.

'Leave her alone,' said Ramone.

'I'm just tryin to help.'

'Worry about yourself,' said Ramone. 'With those sauce stains on your shirt.'

'Dag,' said Diego, noticing the splatter marks on his wife-beater.

The talk turned to Diego's homework and his repeated claim that he'd done it at study hall. Then the Laveranues Coles trade and Ramone's assertion that Santana Moss was a sideline receiver only, as he tended to drop passes in the middle of the field when he heard footsteps. Diego, who had a jersey with Moss's name on the back of it, circa the Jets, disagreed.

'Who's Ashley?' said Regina to Diego, apropos of nothing.

'Just a girl at school,' said Diego.

'I saw her name on the caller ID,' said Regina.

'That a crime?' said Diego.

'Course not,' said Regina. 'Is she nice?'

'What's she look like?' said Ramone, and Diego chuckled.

'Mom, she's a girl I know at school. I don't have no one special, okay?'

'Anyone,' said Regina.

'But you are saying,' said Ramone, 'you're saying you do like girls.'

'Go ahead, Dad.'

'I was beginning to wonder.'

'It's private,' said Diego.

"Cause you never talk about girls.'

'Dad.'

'It's okay to be like that,' said Ramone.

'Dad, I'm not gay.'

'I'd still love you if you were. Like that, I mean.'

'Gus,' said Regina.

They talked about the Nationals. Diego said baseball was a 'white sport,' and Ramone told him to look at all the black and Hispanic players in the major leagues. But Diego could not be moved. He told Ramone to check out the faces in the stands at RFK. Ramone agreed that most of them were white but finished by saying that he didn't see Diego's point.

'Dad closed a case today,' said Regina.

'What's a case?' said Alana.

'He locked up a bad guy,' said Diego.

'This guy wasn't all bad,' said Ramone. 'He did something bad. He made a bad mistake.'

After dinner, Regina read to Alana, and Alana, who was coming along in sounding out her words, read back to her. Ramone and Diego watched one of the last regular-season Nationals games on TV. At the end of the seventh, Diego gave his father a pound and went to his room. Alana kissed Ramone and went to her room with Regina, who read to her some more and put her to bed. Ramone cracked a bottle of Beck's and watched the rest of the game.

Regina was washing her face in the master bathroom when Ramone came up and undressed for bed. He noticed her outfit, one of Diego's football team T-shirts and worn pajama bottoms, and read the message: no sex tonight. But he was a man, as dim and hopeful as any other. He wasn't going to let some dowdy old outfit stop him completely. He'd give it a try.

He closed their door and slid between the sheets. She joined him and gave him a chaste kiss on the side of his mouth. He got up on his elbow and tried another kiss, just to feel her out.

'Good night,' she said.

'So soon?'

'I'm tired.'

'I'll make you tired.'

Ramone put his hand inside her pajama bottoms and stroked the inside of her thigh.

'Alana's gonna be in here any minute,' said Regina. 'She wasn't even asleep when I left her room.'

Ramone kissed her. Her lips opened and she moved a little closer to him in the bed.

'She's gonna walk in on us,' said Regina.

'We'll be quiet.'

'You know that ain't true.'

'C'mon, girl.'

'How about I just yank you off?'

'I can do that myself.'

Regina and Ramone chuckled softly, and she kissed him more deeply. He began to pull her bottoms off, her back arched to let him, when they heard a knock on their bedroom door.

'Damn,' said Ramone.

'That's your daughter,' said Regina.

'That's not my daughter,' said Ramone. 'That's a seven-year-old chastity belt.'

Five minutes later, Alana was snoring between them in their bed, her small brown fingers splayed on Ramone's chest. It was true that he was a little disappointed. But he was happy, too.

Led's had a bit of a crowd, and the music from the juke was turned up loud. Holiday got a couple of head nods as he crossed the floor toward an empty stool back near the kitchen doors. He was known here, so there wasn't that stare thing that went with a white guy walking into an all-black neighborhood bar. It had gotten around the Leo's regulars that he had been a cop who'd been forced out under a cloud. It wasn't entirely true, since Holiday had resigned rather than face the official inquiry, but he let them think what they wanted. Dirty cop did hold a certain mystique. But he hadn't been dirty. He had never been on the take, nor had he worked both sides of the game, like some of those cops who'd come onto the force during that sloppy hiring binge in the late '80s. Hell, he had just been helping out a girl he knew. All right, she was a whore. But still.

'Vodka rocks,' said Holiday to Charles, the night tender. Leo was gone or in the back counting out the day.

'Any flavor, Doc?'

'Rail's good.' This deep into it, the shelf juice was a waste.

Charles served Holiday his drink. The juke was playing a cover of 'Jet Airliner,' done in a truly smoking soul-rock fashion. The two gentlemen to the right of Holiday were arguing about the song.

'I know this is Paul Pena,' said the first man. 'He did it first. I'm askin you, who was the white boy who took it and made it into a big hit?'

'Johnny Winters or sumshit like him,' said the second man. 'I don't know.'

'It was one of them Almond Brothers,' said the first man.

'Say it was the Osmand Brothers?'

'Almond, and five says it's true.'

'Steve Miller Band,' said Holiday.

'Say what?' said the first man, turning to Holiday.

'This song's a killer, man.'

'Damn sure is. But can you tell my boy who made it a hit?'

'No clue,' said Holiday. Pride had made him blurt out the answer, but now that he had, he didn't want to get further involved.

Holiday beat the last-call lights with one more drink. He fired it down and walked from the bar unsatisfied. Thinking about his old life and how he'd left it had blackened his thoughts.

He drove east. He lived in a garden apartment out by Prince George's Plaza, off East-West Highway, and the way to get there from Leo's was south to Missouri and then over to Riggs Road. But he got confused down near Kansas Avenue, trying to cut time on the back streets, and going along Blair he realized he needed to turn back. He made a left onto Oglethorpe Street, thinking he could take it through to Riggs.

He knew as soon as he got onto Oglethorpe that he'd fucked up. He remembered too late from his cop days that this stretch of Oglethorpe dead-ended at the Metro and B &O railroad tracks. He recognized the Washington Animal Rescue League on his left and the printing company below it down by the tracks. And on the right, one of those community gardens, which were fairly common around D.C. This one covered several acres of land.

His cell, mounted in a kind of holster set below the dash, went off. It was Jerome Belton, calling to tell him about his night. Holiday pulled over to the right shoulder of the road, on sand and gravel, and cut the engine. Belton told him a story about a wannabe player he had taken to the Tyson-McBride fight at the MCI Center a few months back, and something about the man's phony gators, which had been flaking off in the backseat of the car.

It was a funny if too familiar story. Holiday had a laugh with Belton and ended the call. Then, on the quiet dead-end street, parked beside the community garden, Holiday leaned his head back and rested his eyes. He wasn't drunk. He was tired.