Джоан Силбер - Improvement

“It’s going to take a minute,” Boyd said, which meant a while.

Not the best business model, but maybe that was always how people did these things. I could stay away from most of it. It didn’t have to concern me.

“When we drive down in April,” Maxwell said, “Virginia’s going to look so pretty.”

“Do you ever think of going back to Turkey?” I asked my aunt. “Don’t you want to see Osman? Don’t you wonder what he looks like now?”

“You and Oliver should go there. You could stay with my friend, Pat. You’d like it.”

How would Kiki look to her old husband? More than once, I’d imagined meetings with my ex-lovers at later points in life, sometimes on urgent last requests from their sickbeds. And I always appeared when summoned, no matter how shitty they’d once been to me. Why did I conjure this? Of course, I wanted them to beg for me, to be stunned and grateful at the sight of me; I’d show up in tribute to the substance of what we trashed. I always wanted the last triumph of behaving well.

The boys were so happy with their car. It had a few dents and some rust on the bottom and it was a nondescript silver-gray, just right. Claude drove it around the neighborhood (he really was a bad driver, he practically hit a kid), I zoomed up to the Bronx and showed off my fabulous parking skills, and then Maxwell came up with his annoying friend Wiley who was suddenly elected the man behind the wheel for the trip to Virginia. I wasn’t a huge fan of Wiley—he had a shifty, sullen act around women—but he’d have Maxwell and Claude with him. Boyd was the one who figured the costs and managed the cash.

They couldn’t just walk into some convenience store and buy six hundred cartons of cigarettes. Buying more than twenty-five at a time was illegal now anyway. “We need our very own supplier,” Maxwell the capitalist said. Did anyone know a soul in Virginia? Well, Wiley had someone he’d gone to elementary school with, who lived in Richmond now.

I wasn’t in on this part, which took a few weeks—lots of phone calls, negotiations I didn’t want to hear about. I read online that some officials claimed terrorists and gangs were running cigarettes to finance their evil enterprises. If this was true, then the boys were in for some very serious competition.

“Nobody cares, we’re too little an operation,” Boyd said.

I showed him on my phone a newspaper article I’d dredged up in my search—“Cigarette Smuggling Linked to Terrorism.” A few guys from Lebanon had gone to jail for “funneling” money to Hezbollah from the vast profits of very “lucrative” cigarette smuggling.

“Fuck, I guess you’re not making it up,” he said. “Not good. But, wait a second here, look at the dates. This was ten years ago! It’s an old story about an old case.”

I knew that. “Maybe new guys are on it.”

“You don’t want us to go,” he said. “Okay, say so, but don’t be sneaky.”

I hadn’t even known how much I didn’t want them to do it. “Just watching out for you,” I said.

How giddy they were about the first trip. Wiley and Maxwell and Claude loaded the car with Cheetos and Fritos and Pepsi and beer, with JAY-Z blasting from the dashboard, and they were ready for six hours of male partying on the road. And when they came home three days later, they had goofy stories about the supplier’s quirks; a trunk packed with Winstons, Camels, Marlboros, and Parliaments; and they were full of themselves.

Boyd was the one who did the selling in New York, who got the stuff into bodegas and newsstands. He had his own way of chatting with some manager about how people kept smoking, health or no health, working his way into the offer: let me know what you need. Just for favorite customers. And he supplied some of the guys who sold packs out of big black garbage bags on 125th Street. Until he moved them on out, those long boxes of cigarettes were stacked in my closets and filed under my bed. “Not against the law to possess tobacco,” he said.

Wiley was the one who worried about the car. “It’s a workhorse, but you got to baby it,” he said. He took it to be washed, he checked its oil, he inspected its insides like a doctor. His private goal in life was to one day own a Mercedes. He said the Germans made the best cars; everyone knew that. “Don’t laugh,” he said. “It could happen.”

The profits were rolling in much faster than I expected. Boyd bought us a really gigantic TV with the proceeds. Oliver was thrilled to pieces, and I didn’t mind either. Oliver had sneakers that lit up and a kiddie electric guitar, I had a new leather jacket for spring, and the refrigerator was full of leftovers in cartons from whatever food place we liked that week. I now lived in a household where stress about money was a thing of the past. A lighthearted zone.

The boys, of course, had to keep going back to Virginia. They seemed to like it, week by week. Boyd envied them. “It’ll get old,” I said. “All the time in the car. Like a family vacation that keeps starting over.” Wiley liked to brag about those Virginia girls, hotter than you’d think, and Claude had actually met someone named Darisse that he spoke about more and more.

“She’s not like girls here, they always complain, whatever you do,” he said. “Once she decides she likes you, she’s on your side all the way. That’s her, that’s the way she is.”

The others teased him about how he eager he always was to get to Virginia. Wiley said, “You do not want to get in the way of a man and where his dick is leading. Almost knocked me over once just getting out of the car when we finally got to Richmond.”

They liked Richmond. From repeated success, from tests passed and suspense endured, their personalities were all showing signs of change. Claude had stopped looking hangdog and was now a seemlier specimen, Maxwell took on the dignity of a general, and Wiley was getting closer to unbearable. Boyd simply had more hope in him.

They all had their agendas. Their projects. Claude gave Lynnette a chunk of money to visit their ex-junkie mother in Philadelphia and take her out, show her a good time. Wiley was always buying spectacular clothes for his several girlfriends. Boyd was saving up, sort of, to get a better apartment for us, one his probation board would approve.

Boyd was still at the diner, for his probation officer’s sake. He said when people gave him tips now, he thought, You think I want this chump change? But he was professional, slipping the pittance into his pocket. What a charade. For the trips to Virginia, Maxwell carried a briefcase filled with cash, and I helped Boyd count and pack the layers of different denominations.

And I was in my own disguise at the vet’s office, a princess performing humble tasks without complaint. Dogs and cats gave me their panicked gazes or looked away, and I thought, Be brave, sometimes things turn out much better than you can tell . All the technicians said I was very bubbly these days and liked to ask if I’d gotten into the acepromazine, used for anxious dogs.

They thought my mood was about a man, not about money. One of the receptionists told the other I was an “expert” in men. Obviously, I had talked too much, recounted too long a list. By that gauge, the years since puberty were peaks and valleys and stretches of incoherent landscape. There was Oliver’s father, Kelvin, who turned out to be much worse than I thought and whom I left when I was pregnant, and Tony, the one I’d first run off with, whom my father hated because he was a teenage drunk but whom I loved for a long time. And there was a bunch of perfectly nice hookups I couldn’t be expected to remember very well. Boyd was the best, even if I hadn’t always known it.

The runs to Virginia had developed a kind of order, through the professional intensities of Maxwell and Boyd. I was as thrilled as anyone by the sight of all that money, bills and bills, when I helped Boyd pack the briefcase. “Gorgeous, isn’t?” Boyd said. “Don’t get distracted.”