Джоан Силбер - Improvement

Maybe he would have; I couldn’t begin to say. I thought the dead were forever separate from us—that was what it meant to be dead. Lost to the living, not sending word. My father once told me that after his mother died when he was twelve, he always got angry if his father announced what she would’ve wanted him to do. “You don’t know!” he’d say, when they both knew his father was making good guesses. My dad hated his father speaking for her, as if she were a puppet, as if he couldn’t even honor the silence of the dead.

I hated thinking of Lynnette giving all the money to some cemetery. I hadn’t sacrificed my aunt’s great carpet for that . That wasn’t what I meant at all. I knew I didn’t get to choose; that was the whole point of sacrifice. But couldn’t anyone stop her?

Boyd stopped her. Maxwell had just moved back into his old apartment, with Boyd in residence and taking care of Maxwell while he hobbled around on a crutch. Angie said the big scar on his face didn’t look as bad as it might’ve, Maxwell could carry it off. Boyd and Maxwell together had paid a little trip to Lynnette’s current place of work, Brow Central or whatever the fuck it was. They barely got as far as the receptionist, who wasn’t so nice either, but they were politely leaving a note when Lynnette came out right at that moment. “Hello, beautiful,” Boyd said.

“Bless your hearts,” she said.

She was taking her lunch break, and, sure, she’d have a bite with them. So over tacos Boyd talked about life and death. What happened when a person died was that it turned you toward what was serious. When someone in the neighborhood (they’d grown up with this) poured out a Colt 45 on the ground for a dead friend, that was a serious moment. Claude had only been twenty-four, not a complete life, he died at the start of it, doing his work. The best way to remember Claude was for Lynnette to go on with her work. She was so good at it, everybody said that. Claude always bragged about her, he hoped to finance her someday. If you asked him, he would say she was a natural businesswoman too. And Claude really wouldn’t have wanted any fucking rock.

What could she do but start crying and agree with them? Maxwell added that he’d help her with all the money calculations for her salon if she wanted help. Maxwell the mastermind.

I didn’t trust her to stick with it, but Angie said that Maxwell was going to Philly with her to look at storefront rentals. He was hopping right on the bus, crutch and all, and close to four hours on a cheap-o-ride with no shocks wasn’t going to be any picnic for him. No, Boyd wasn’t going, Angie said. He couldn’t leave the state, which I’d forgotten.

When I went to work that afternoon, I thought of Maxwell. He’d been in the hospital for three weeks, drugged, damaged, broken, all banged up, and then at his sister’s, healing slowly. Everybody said he was a good sport about his crutch and claimed to be coming up with new dance moves. I imagined him directing Boyd from the sofa, telling him what kind of beer to bring him, what kind of chips to go out and buy, and Boyd saying, “Yeah, boss,” handling it in his own way.

I hadn’t even thought about Maxwell, because I could just about stand to think whatever I did. Where I sat at my desk at the veterinary clinic, we sometimes heard an animal yelping or crying—not often but sometimes—and these were terrible sounds, and the appalling part was having to sit there without getting up to rush to the animal. The vets were back there, nobody needed me, but the sounds didn’t just slip by.

Maxwell had been the one with the idea to move cigarettes up from Virginia and he was probably working already on another idea. Angie said, “He’s been trying to get more from the trucker’s insurance company. Who knows? Maybe that’ll pay off.” I’d had secret fantasies of popping by the apartment to see Boyd, just showing up, but I wasn’t paying any surprise visits if Maxwell was there. Nobody else was ranting like Lynnette, but I didn’t see Maxwell jumping with joy at the sight of me. If he could jump at all.

My comfort (if you could call it that) was to imagine Maxwell advising Lynnette on the right storefront to rent. She could decorate any hole-in-the-wall to make it look good, but she had to pick a youthful neighborhood. Old people didn’t give a fuck about their eyebrows. Kiki’s were all grown out; even my mother didn’t do much with hers. People in their twenties, myself included, thought they carried their lives in their looks. Even now, though I wasn’t ready, I hoped for all the men on the block to love me when I walked out the door.

I wondered if Lynnette had beauty advice for Maxwell and his scar. Rub this on your face or that. Maxwell wouldn’t want any conversation about it at all, I’d think. He’d want it ignored—his business, his to take as it was. His own skin.

In the reception area where I sat, the veterinarians had a bulletin board, photos of cats needing homes and ads from dog walkers and trainers. One of the cards from a trainer said, New Puppy? Love Is Not Enough . This was about dogs needing to be taught how to live with humans, but I always thought of it as a more universal warning, a reminder of the limits, a bit of truth from the roughest frontier.

My aunt said, “How is your friend doing? I hope she’s better.”

“Much better,” I said. “She’s starting her own business.”

Aunt Kiki probably didn’t think capitalism was a happy ending, but she made allowances for other people. She’d been a maid once herself.

“Were you still cleaning houses,” I said, “when you were with Hernando?” I did remember Hernando, who’d been nice to me.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I was out of that before you were born. I had another boyfriend then.”

How busy my aunt had been.

“Do you miss your old lovers?”

Where did that come from? I knew where.

“Well, I always say I still love Osman.” She did always say it, as if it were an ordinary fact easily absorbed into ongoing life. “Why would I stop?”

How logical my aunt could sound. What she meant, I thought, was that she didn’t have to stop, because she was Kiki. She could manage both sides without too much trouble, the old love, fading fast but never gone, and the rest of her life that went on without it just fine.

“Of course,” Kiki said, “you always remember the bad parts. He didn’t think much about what I wanted. He assumed I’d go wherever he went. He refused to even visit New York. But I try to be fair to him in my head.”

Nobody talked as much as Kiki did about the possibility of fairness. Of course, she had time and distance, years and miles, she wasn’t in the thick of things. But all that fairness made her calmer, even I knew that.

Oliver had run into a little trouble at the daycare center when he balked about naptime, refused to lie down. “I’d love a chance to take a nap,” I told him. He was complaining about stupid rules on our walk home, stupid stupid, when he stopped all of a sudden and shrieked, “There’s Boyd! It’s Boyd, hey!”

It was Boyd all right. He was in a black T-shirt and low-slung jeans, ambling along 125th Street, looking good. Oliver ran up and tackled him around the knees. “Whoa,” Boyd said. “How you doing, my man?”

“We’re fine,” I said. Not that he’d asked about me. He and I weren’t hugging each other either, nothing like that. “How are things?” I said. “Tell me how Maxwell is.”

“Doing pretty good. He might walk okay sometime but they’re not saying definitely.”

“Everybody else okay?”

“Wiley’s getting married,” he said. “I know, I know, who’d guess? To the woman he was holed up with someplace for days while we were waiting for him to show up to drive the car. He says it’s true love. Really, he says that.”