A. Homes - May We Be Forgiven

In the evening, while I’m repainting the upstairs bathroom, I talk with Nate on speakerphone.

“Any further thoughts about the bar mitzvah?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Let’s cancel it.”

“No bar mitzvah?” I ask.

“Yeah, I can’t go into the temple,” he says.

“What about doing it somewhere else?” I dip the brush into the can of Benjamin Moore semi-gloss and sweep it across the wall.

“Like where?”

“Here at home?” I suggest. “I’ve been sprucing it up.”

“She was killed at home,” he says flatly.

“At a country club? Or hotel?” I dip the brush again.

“Over-the-top awkward,” Nate says, “and besides, I think the rabbi is a jerk.”

“Well, we should do something special. How about taking a trip?”

“Like to Disney World?” Nate asks, and I remember that I am talking to a twelve-year-old.

“I’m thinking something more substantive — a game changer.”

“I don’t know,” Nate says. “The one place I’d like to go … is back to Nateville. I’m not sure I’ll ever get there.”

“You’re twelve years old and worried you’ll never go there again.”

“Don’t mock me,” he says.

“So — you’d like to go to South Africa?”

“I think so.”

“Just to Nateville, or on a more expanded trip, like on a safari?”

“A safari would be cool. We’d take Ashley?”

“Of course.”

“And Ricardo?”

“If you like.”

“Cool,” Nate says, seeming genuinely pleased.

“Okay,” I say, standing back to look at my work so far. “I’ll see what I can find out.” The call waiting beeps; I say good night to Nate and take the call.

“Your mother called my mother,” Jason says.

“What happened to ‘hello’?” I say, stepping off the ladder.

“It was all very pleasant until she invited my mother to her wedding and got upset when my mother said, ‘I already went to your wedding. Don’t you remember?’ And your mother said, ‘Of course I remember — I’m talking about now, I’m getting married again.’ Long story short, my mother thinks your mother is out of her mind.”

My brush slips out of my hand and bounces across multiple surfaces before landing in the toilet. “She’s actually doing well; she met someone at the home,” I tell Jason as I fish the brush out of the bowl and shake it off.

“Are you going to let her get married?”

“I’m not sure that it’s entirely up to me.” I pause — it occurs to me that Lillian might know the fiancé. “Hey, could you ask your mother if she knows Bob Goldman? They all went to the same junior high, so it might ring a bell.”

“You mean Bobby Goldman, Yetta Goldman’s baby brother?”

“Maybe.”

“He’s the one who was so bad as a kid; he flushed a rug down the toilet at the temple.”

“I think he used to be into sports,” I say, as though somehow rug flushing could be considered sporty.

“Goldman played professional ball for a season or two and then was a radio announcer under the name of Bob Gold, so no one would know he was Jewish.”

“How do you know all that?”

“Because when our parents were sitting around talking I actually listened. You and your brother were always too busy trying to kill each other.”

I stop — cold.

“We were trying to kill each other?”

“You were always fighting.”

“Really? I don’t remember that.”

Ricardo has come for a week, gone home for two days, and then returned with a larger bag of clothes. My new life has an unrelenting schedule: 6 a.m., wake up; 6:15, wake Ashley; 6:30, wake Ricardo, feed and walk animals and children; 7:45, drop Ricardo at his school; 8:45, drop Ashley at the puppet theater, where she’s working on their upcoming production of Romeo and Juliet. And then, if it’s not a workday in the city, back to the house, clean, groceries, work, and get ready for Ricardo’s return at 4:30. Tessie seems to have quickly learned the routine and anticipates the yellow school bus’s arrival by about forty-five seconds, barking to tell me it’s time. The bus stops, the narrow door peels open; Ricardo hops out and cuts across the grass, his enormous backpack kind of like a second person on top of him. We have a snack and catch up, and a little while later, the car service slides into the driveway and out comes Ashley, suddenly looking like a young woman, texting as she walks up the driveway. On the days I’m in the city, Ricardo stays late at school, or Christina or a friend of hers picks him up and then we collect him by 6:30 and go out for pizza.

The kitchen is filled with homework charts, an incentive-based program that I’ve started for both children. Ricardo is also now on a swim team and part of a soccer club. I buy a used Ping-Pong table at a yard sale and set it up in the living room. We play round-robins and mixed doubles. The speed and the eye-hand coordination are good for all of our mental acuity.

At the law firm, the infamous boxes are kept in a vault. Because the material has not been acknowledged or otherwise publicly recorded, they’re vigilant about keeping it under lock and key. Each day we work, the enormous vault is opened and the vault minder takes the boxes off a shelf — puts them and our work computer and assorted printouts on a metal cart, which I push to my office along with a locked rolling file cabinet.

Ching Lan sits in my office and reads the rough drafts out loud. I mark them while she is reading. Her pronunciation is awkward, but that prompts me to listen carefully, to edit judiciously. She transcribes my corrections and prints the pages, and we go around again. I enjoy the sound of her voice; it makes me work hard to find the meaning in the story. Ching Lan has enrolled in a copyediting course, which she enjoys. “The marks are almost like writing in Chinese — almost.” We have thirteen stories and twenty-eight fragments of varying lengths, from three hundred fifty words to an eighteen-thousand-word ramble that I find brilliant but quasi-psychotic, or certainly under the influence of something. The subjects range from the pastoral (sniffing of the butt of a melon to tell if it’s ripe, and almost romantically lush descriptions of lightning storms sweeping across fields on summer nights) to elaborations on the value of a man’s having a life of his own, apart from whatever life he has with his family, a private life that no one knows anything about, “a place he can be himself without concern of disappointment or rejection.”

Every day, Ching Lan eats lunch with her parents in the deli. All morning they wait for her to come and restock the shelves beyond reach — she is the ladder. Not wanting to intrude, I stop going to the deli and start getting lunch from a place two blocks away, but I feel like a traitor and go back to the deli.

“We are good, clean place, we have letter ‘A’ from Board of Health,” Ching Lan’s mother says. “You get parasite if you eat somewhere else.”

“I didn’t want to intrude on your family time.”

“You are part of our family,” she says, ushering me behind the counter to sit where the family sits, on their pickle barrels, eating food brought from home in colorful Tupperware containers. “Pok ball?” she asks, lifting up a small round meatball with chopsticks.

“My sister works at dumpling house, she brings home leftovers,” Ching Lan says.

I eat the pok ball, translating only after swallowing: pork ball.

“Good boy. You eat turtle?” the mother asks.

“No,” I say.

“Not yet you don’t. It is very good, like strong chicken. What about congee?”