Tod Goldberg - The Reformed

When you’re a spy, the amount of time you spend in a church, a temple or a mosque depends on simple local custom: If the people trying to kill you have a healthy fear of their god, going to a church, a temple or a mosque is a great way to avoid a bullet in the head. Even the most cold-blooded killer will think twice about spraying gunfire inside of a holy place, because though the idea of sanctuary may sound like something from a genteel, antiquated past, so it would reason that even the most nonreligious person might give even more consideration to shooting a gun in a holy place when given time to contemplate his particular god’s wrath-even if he doesn’t particularly believe in that god.

All of which is why I always make sure to have my gun on me whenever I’m near a church. It’s just better to be the one guy who isn’t thinking twice about things, which is precisely why I didn’t want to stop at the Church of the Gleaming Spire’s youth-group car wash, despite my mother’s sudden desire to be a good citizen.

“Michael,” my mother, Madeline, said, “when you were a boy, you played basketball there every day after school.”

“No, I didn’t,” I said.

“Well, you could have,” she said. “And done arts and crafts, too.” We were stopped at a red light down the street from the church, and there were three teenage girls with a sign for the car wash, waving at us on the corner. I kept my eyes forward. You never want to engage the enemy if you don’t have to.

“Ma,” I said, “I prefer to wash my own car. It’s an issue of pride.”

My mother ran a finger over the Charger’s dashboard, leaving a trail in the dust. “Apparently not,” she said.

“I don’t like people touching my stuff,” I said.

“Your father kept this car so clean,” she said.

“No, he didn’t,” I said. Of course, he also didn’t use the car as the frequent base of operations for clandestine missions with his friends, so maybe I had a decent excuse for the Charger being periodically dusty. In the past few years, since I’d received my burn notice and been sent back to Miami, minus my life, Dad’s Charger had been set on fire, shot at, slept in and, occasionally, crashed into stationary objects.

“I’m just saying, Michael,” my mother said, “that it wouldn’t kill you to help those nice kids out by giving them a few dollars of your blood money.”

“Ma,” I said, “I have an AK-47 in the trunk.”

“So don’t have them clean out your trunk,” she said. “And, anyway, it’s a good cause. Maybe it will keep these kids from becoming gun-toting mercenaries like you and Sam.”

That my mother was not fazed by the fact that I had an assault rifle in my trunk should have been disconcerting, but since I’d been back in Miami, many of the secrets of my life had been demystified. To my mother, Sam was no longer just a friend of mine from the military with questionable taste in women; these days he was also, well, essentially, a gun-toting mercenary. And my ex-girlfriend Fiona wasn’t just a nice Irish girl without a discernible job (it’s hard to tell your mother that the girl you’re dating robs banks for the IRA), but, well, essentially, a gun-toting mercenary these days, too. That both Sam and Fiona were really just out to protect me was clear to my mother, too, but something told me she didn’t think I needed protecting most of the time.

And she’s right. Most of the time.

“Fine,” I said. I’d already spent the previous three hours with my mother, running a gauntlet of errands-the podiatrist, Target, the hair salon, back to Target, back again to Target-and now, finally we were heading back home, so I wasn’t in a mood to argue much. Sometimes it’s just easier to say “Fine” and chalk the day up as a total loss.

I reached across my mother, flipped open the glove box and pulled out the SIG SAUER I kept there and the bag of blasting caps I meant to give back to Fiona. There were also about fifteen cell phones in various stages of disrepair littered on the floor in the back, but I figured those could stay in one place since I didn’t see any vacuums around, anyway. I handed the gun and the blasting caps to my mother. “Could you put all of that in your purse?”

“What are these sticks?”

“They’re like fireworks,” I said.

“Are they legal?”

“Just as legal as the AK-47 is,” I said.

“If I wasn’t here, where would you put all of this stuff?”

“If you weren’t here,” I said, “I wouldn’t be stopping.”

“Oh, fine,” she said, and stuffed it all in her bag.

The light turned green, and I made my way through the intersection and then pulled into the church lot. There were about fifteen kids lingering, but only two cars getting washed. I pulled behind a yellow station wagon-the kind that was last sold in America when Carter was president-and then both my mother and I got out. My mother immediately lit up a cigarette, which clarified why she’d wanted to stop the car so desperately.

A teenage boy walked up to the car with a bucket and a towel and his hand out. “It’s five dollars,” he said. He had all the urgency of molasses.

“What does the money go toward?” I asked.

“We’re trying to earn enough money to go to Disney World.”

“Why?”

The kid shrugged. “We go every year,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “But why?”

“I dunno. It’s fun.”

“Is it?” I asked.

“Do you want a car wash or what?”

I reached into my wallet and pulled out a twenty. The kid reached for it and I yanked it back, ripping it in two. “Here’s the deal,” I said. “I’m going to be standing right here. If you go anywhere near the trunk of the car, I’m going to keep the other half of this bill. If you manage to stay away from the trunk, I’ll give you the other half, plus five bucks. Deal?”

“Why don’t you just wash your own car?”

“My mom won’t let me,” I said.

The kid seemed to understand this universal truth and started to get to work on the Charger without another word. I stood back and watched him work for a few minutes and tried to recall the last time I’d stood in this exact spot. It was only a few miles from my mother’s house, but wasn’t in a part of Miami I tended to visit all that often, since it also happened to be just a few streets from my old high school. It was bad enough when my mother bumped into my ex-classmates-or the families of my ex-classmates-and told them I was back in town.

She’d invariably tell them I was free to do odd jobs for them, or she’d just give them my number and encourage them to ask me for help. This sort of help typically involved me saving them from human traffickers, drug kingpins and particularly violent gangster rappers. Frankly, it was easier dealing with the various rogue governments and jilted assassins sent to kill me than it was with people who knew me when I was fifteen.

The kids working the car wash all looked liked kids in Florida always have-which is to say that they were all wearing flip-flops, shorts and T-shirts and had a slight sunburn on their cheeks. Their hair was slightly shaggy and they had the air of nonchalance people possess before they start paying taxes or taking palpable risk.

I can’t imagine I had ever looked anything like them.

“Why didn’t I ever take part in any charity car washes as a kid?” I asked my mother.

“I always wanted you to,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

“Well, you and your brother, Nate, were always so industrious. I just thought it would be wonderful if you were engaged in some of the philanthropic events I was interested in.”