George Pelecanos - Right as Rain

Strange went to the edge of the hospice at the end of a long hall and took the elevator up to the third floor. He walked through another hall painted drab beige, and as he approached the long-term wing where his mother resided he smelled the mixture of bland food, sickness, and incontinence that he had come to dread.

His mother was in her wheelchair, seated at one of three round tables in a television room where the residents could also take their meals. Next to her was another stroke victim, an Armenian man whose name Strange could never remember, and next to him was a skeletal woman in a kind of reclining wheelchair who never spoke or smiled, just stared up at the ceiling with red-rimmed, hollowed-out eyes. At the table beside them a woman fed her bib-wearing husband, and next to them a man sat sleeping before an untouched tray of food, his chin down on his chest. No one seemed to be watching the basketball contest playing on the television set, or listening to the announcer who was loudly calling the game. Strange patted the Armenian's shoulder, pulled a chair from the other side of the room, and drew it to his mother's side.

'Momma,' said Strange, kissing her on the cheek and taking her hand, light and fragile as paper.

She smiled crookedly at him and slowly blinked her eyes. There was a bead of applesauce hanging on the edge of her lip, and he wiped it clean with the napkin that had fallen into her lap.

'You want a little of this tea right here?'

She pointed with a shaking hand to two sugar packets. Strange ripped the packets open and poured sugar into the plastic cup that held the tea. He stirred it and put the cup in her hand.

'Hot,' she said, the t soft as a whisper.

'Yes, ma'am. You want some more of that meat?'

He called it 'that meat' because he wasn't exactly sure if it was fowl or beef, smothered as it was in a grayish, congealed gravy.

His mother shook her head.

Strange noticed that the table beside them wobbled whenever the wife leaned on it to give her husband another forkful of food. He got up and went to a small utility room, where he knew they kept paper towels, and he folded some towels in a square and wedged the square under the foot of the table that was not touching the floor. The wife thanked Strange.

'I fixed the table,' said Strange to a big attendant as he passed her on the way back to his mother. She nodded and returned to her conversation with another employee.

He knew this attendant – he knew them all, immigrants of color, by sight. This one was on the mean side, though she was always polite in his presence. His mother had told him that this one raised her voice to her and teased her in an unkind way when she had his mother alone. Most of the staff members were competent and many were kind, but there were two or three attendants here who mistreated his mother, he knew. One of them had even stolen a present he had given her, a small bottle of perfume, off the nightstand in her room.

He knew who these attendants were and he hated them for it, but what could he do? He had made the decision long ago not to report them. He couldn't be here all that often, and there was no telling what a vindictive attendant would do in his absence. What he tried to do was, he let them know he was onto them with his eyes. And he prayed to God that the looks he gave them would give them pause the next time they had the notion to disrespect his mother in this most cowardly of ways.

'Momma,' said Strange, 'I had a little excitement on the job today.' He told her the story of Sherman Coles and his brother, and of the young ex-police officer who had come along. He made it sound funny and unthreatening because he knew his mother worried about him and what he did for a living. Or maybe she was done worrying, thought Strange. Maybe she didn't think of him out there, could no longer picture him, or her city and its inhabitants, at all.

When he was done his mother smiled in that crooked way she had of smiling now, her lips pulled over toothless gums. Strange smiled back, not looking at the splotchy flesh or the stick arms or the atrophied legs or the flattened breasts that ended near her waist, but looking at her eyes. Because the eyes had not changed. They were deep brown and loving and beautiful, as they had always been, as they had been when he was a child, when Alethea Strange had been young and vibrant and strong.

'Room,' said his mother.

'Okay, Momma.'

He wheeled her back to her room, which overlooked the parking lot of a post office. He found her comb in the nightstand and drew it through her sparse white hair. She was nearly bald, and he could see raised moles and other age marks on her scalp.

'You look nice,' he said, when he was done.

'Son.' Those eyes of hers looked up at him, and she chuckled, her sharp shoulders moving up and down in amusement.

Alethea Strange pointed to her bedroom window. Strange went to the window and looked out to its ledge. His mother loved birds; she'd always loved to watch them build their nests.

'Ain't no birds out there building nests yet, Momma,' said Strange. 'You're gonna have to wait for the spring.'

Walking from her room, Strange stopped beside the big attendant and gave her a carnivorous smile that felt like a grimace.

'You take good care of my mother now, hear?'

Strange went toward the elevators, unclenching his jaw and breathing out slow. He began to think, as he tended to do when he left this place, of who he might call tonight. Being here, it always made him want a woman. Old age, sickness, loss, and pain… all of the suffering that was inevitable, you could deny its existence, for a little while anyway, when you were making love. Yeah, when you were lying with a woman, coming deep inside that sucking warmth, you could even deny death.

'You want a little more?'

'Sure.'

Terry Quinn reached across the table and poured wine into Juana Burkett's glass. Juana sipped at the Spanish red and sat back in her chair.

'It's really good.'

'I got it at Morris Miller's. The label on the bottle said it was bold, earthy, and satisfying.'

'Good thing you protected it on your little journey.'

'I was cradling it like a baby on the Metro on the way over here.'

'You really ought to get a car, Tuh-ree.'

'Didn't need one, up until recently. My job is close to my house, and I can take the subway downtown, I need to. But I was thinking, maybe I should get one now.'

'Why now?'

'Your house is kind of a far walk from the Catholic U station.'

'You're pretty sure of yourself.' Juana's eyes lit with amusement. 'You think I'm gonna ask you back?'

'I don't know. You keep making dinners like this one, I'm not going to wait for an invitation. I'll be whining like a dog to come in, scratching on the door out on your front porch. 'Cause you are one good cook.'

'I got lucky. This was the first time I made this dish. Baby artichokes and shrimp over linguini, it just looked so good when I saw the recipe in the Post.'

'Well, it was.' Quinn pushed his empty plate aside. 'Next time I take you to dinner. A little Italian place called Vicino's on Sligo Avenue, they got a red peppers and anchovies dish to make you cry.'

'That's on your street.'

'We can walk to it,' said Quinn. 'Stay in the neighborhood, until I get my car.'

Juana went to get coffee and brandy from the kitchen. Quinn got up and walked to the fireplace, where a pressed-paper log burned, colored flames rolling in a perfect arc. He picked up a CD case from a stack of them sitting on top of an amp: Luscious Jackson. Chick music, like all the rock and soul with female vocals she had been playing that night.

Juana's group house was nicer than most. Her roommates were grad students, a young married couple named James and Linda. He had met them when he'd arrived, and they were good-looking and nice and, as they had disappeared upstairs almost immediately, considerate as hell. Juana told him that James and Linda had the entire top floor of the house, and she had the finished basement for a quarter of the rent. The furnishings were secondhand but clean. Postcard-sized print reproductions of Edward Hopper, Degas, Cezanne, and Picasso paintings were framed and hung throughout the house.