Tim Murphy - Christodora

“I’m great,” she whispered. She was!

He shrugged with his eyes, as if to say, Well, okay, if you say so. She caught Hector peering at them. Nosy Hector! She winked at him. He half smiled, looked away, exquisitely young and awkward. The meeting ended and she took him down to Chinatown for lunch since she had to check in on a restaurant-hygiene drive down there anyway. They made the round of a few restaurants on Mott and Canal. At the ancient Wo Hop, she noticed the lack of DOH hygiene-rule signs on the wall. She strode toward the woman absently nibbling on wontons at a back table, a stack of purchase orders by her side. Hector followed her.

“Faye! Why no signs? I brought you signs last time. You’re violating health rules.”

Faye looked up, grimaced. “Kai—” She made a kind of methodical smoothing gesture, then mimed tacking something up.

“What? Faye, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Kai—” Faye began again.

Ava turned to Hector. “Kai’s her husband,” she said. “The owner. He speaks good English.” Hector nodded.

“So to wipe. To wipe!” Faye continued. “To keep clean.”

“What?” She felt a bit more aggressive and impatient today toward Faye, and she wasn’t sure why, because she considered Faye almost a friend, and Kai, too.

Faye looked at Hector, shrugged helplessly.

“Oh!” Hector said. “You mean to laminate the signs? To wipe them clean?”

Faye broke into a relieved smile. “Yes! Laminate! To wipe them.”

Hector turned to her. “He took the signs down to laminate them,” he said.

She frowned at Faye. “They go right back up?”

“Of course.” Faye said it as though she were an idiot. “They go back up tonight.”

Ava felt strangely disappointed that she had to let the whole thing go. She’d come down here today weirdly looking for some sort of crusade, perhaps so Hector could see her in action. “Well, okay,” she said. They made a quick round through the kitchen. It looked okay except for some shrimp tails she saw scattered on the floor and an empty soap dispenser over the utility sink. “Pick those up,” she told Faye, who knelt and picked up the shrimp tails with her bare hands. “Fill that.” Faye turned and barked in Cantonese at one of the workers, who walked toward the back, returning with a plastic tub of bubble-gum-pink soap. “Looks good otherwise, Faye.”

“Thank you, Ava,” Faye singsonged back to her.

Hector inadvertently laughed. Faye giggled, too. So the minorities were having a laugh at her, eh? Anger stabbed her, then she laughed herself, just as unbidden. “We need to feed this boy, Faye! Two egg-drop soups.”

“Special for you,” Faye said, leading them out of the kitchen.

She and Hector sat up front. “Did you see that poor guy in the back?” she asked him. “I wonder how much they’re paying him. Did you know they’re trying to unionize at the Silver Palace dim sum parlor? Good for them. It’s slave labor over there.”

“They’re scared, though, ’cause they’re immigrants,” Hector said.

She looked up from her soup at him. “Would you do me a favor?”

His eyes widened, frightened.

“Would you take off your glasses for a minute?”

“Take off my glasses?”

“Yeah. Just for a minute.”

He obliged her, removing the squarish plastic frames. Now that was better. “Have you ever thought of getting contact lenses so we can see how handsome you actually are?”

He smiled and blushed, exquisitely embarrassed. “I have them, but they hurt my eyes.”

“When did you come here from Puerto Rico?”

“When I was thirteen.”

“Oh, so you went to high school here?”

“Bronx Science.”

She beamed. “My brother went to Bronx Science! I went to Cardozo. Did you have Mr. Levy with the cauliflower growth on his neck for chemistry?”

“I did!” He smiled broadly. “I loved that guy. How do you know about him?”

“My brother!”

“Oh, right.”

They were both quiet for a second. She felt an incredible surge of identification with and affection for him. “So — tropical, huh?”

He nodded soberly. “Tropical.”

Tropical was not really her bailiwick. “You’ve read about the dengue outbreaks in Cuba?” she ventured.

“Yeah, and Castro trying to blame the U.S.” He laughed.

But she couldn’t really focus on a talk about tropical. She was still wired up from the meeting that morning, and even from the brief volley with Faye. “Health is a shark pit,” she said.

His eyes widened, confused. “Health?”

“Health. Health. The DOH.”

“Oh!”

“Lauren St. Hilaire hates my guts. Did you see the way she was looking at me in that meeting?”

Hector grinned slightly. “Well, you kind of hijacked her presentation.”

Her mouth fell open. She was shocked and a touch offended, then suddenly amused. “You really think so?” she asked.

“Well, it’s — it’s—” He was flustered now. “You had a good idea, but she was getting to the same idea, I think.”

“I hate how slow people are with their ideas,” she nearly barked at him. He popped back in his seat. “Spit it out! Spit it out! Let’s save time. The more time we save, the more we can do.”

He laughed uncomfortably. “I know, but—”

But. She suddenly felt affectionate, playful toward him again. “You have a girlfriend?” she asked.

“A what?”

“A girlfriend. A girl. Friend.”

“Uh. Not right now.”

“You like girls?”

He was squirming, and she liked it! How far could she take him? She had no interest in her food. If anything, she wanted a drink. Also, she had to go back to the office and make sense of that flowchart she’d been diagramming during the meeting and bring it in to Renny. Should she call Renny right now, from the payphone, tell him to set some time aside for her this afternoon? Oh, wait, shit, but Emmy! Serendipity at three o’clock! How much work could she get done between now and three?

“I—” Still squirming. “I’m too busy for that right now,” he said. “I wanna publish.”

“You wanna publish?” she cried. “You’re too young to publish.”

“I’m ambitious!”

“I can see that! Okay, fine, you wanna publish, I’ll help you publish. Don’t worry about it, Bronx Science guy.”

Now he finally smiled. “Thank you,” he said. She let the fish off the hook. Their food came. He ate with gusto, but she barely picked at hers. She felt like she was losing hold of her thoughts; they were running ahead of her now just a bit too fast, and she didn’t like the feeling it gave her. A few times, she felt an urge to cry, but she pushed it back.

Hector looked up at her. “You’re not eating.”

“I’m not hungry at all,” she said. “I’m thinking about my daughter, Emmy. I don’t do enough for her.”

They left the restaurant. On Canal Street, they passed a vendor selling Hello Kitty dolls. “I’m buying one for Emmy,” she said. But she ended up buying five of them, each in a different color, and hauling them away in a black plastic garbage bag, the only bag the vendor had. She slung the bag over her shoulder like Santa Claus.

“You want me to carry those?” Hector asked.

“No, I’m fine,” she said, barreling through the sidewalk crowd. Back at the office, she dumped the bag, picked up the flowchart from the meeting, stalked into Renny’s office. He was sitting there going over something with Lauren.

She pulled up a seat. “Can you just give me five minutes?”

Renny and Lauren looked at her, stunned. And a little scared. “Ava, we’re in the middle of a meeting,” Renny said.

“I want five minutes of your time.” She stabbed her pad with her pen. “I have a way we can get three times as much out of that meeting in probably half the time. It’s just a process issue.”