Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

She rolled onto her side, and her hand disappeared from under his. “They’re always small.”

“I know what’ll make you feel better.” Myles pulled himself upright.

McGee flopped facedown onto her pillow. “Not that video again.”

“Just once,” he said. “I made it for you.”

McGee rolled over and pulled the covers up to her chin. “Would you turn out the light?”

“It’ll just take a minute,” he said. “It’ll make you feel better.”

“I don’t want to feel better.”

He crossed the floor as slowly as he could. But it was pointless to wait for her to change her mind. And anyway, looking around the room now, he couldn’t seem to find the disk he’d made. He could’ve sworn he’d left it on the desk, but it seemed to have disappeared.

In the dark, the substation lights above their heads shuddered like empty frames through a movie projector.

She moved over as he settled down on the mattress.

“What do you want?” he said.

“Your video,” she said. “It would just make me cry.”

He could feel her shivering, and he wanted to wrap his arms around her. “It’s hopeful,” he said, “not sad.”

In the dark, McGee inched closer. It had been so long since they’d allowed themselves to have a quiet moment like this, just the two of them, like they’d used to have, back in the beginning. Myles wanted to tell her how much warmer it would be without all these layers between them.

“Just once,” she said, “I want to win.”

“Who says we’re not?”

He wished he could see her face; he wished she could see his. There were simple ways to communicate understanding. The distance between them lately — it was all unnecessary.

“We’ve been aiming too low,” she said. “Picket signs — what’s the point?”

Myles propped himself up on his elbow, letting his hand come to a rest on her hip.

A strand of hair was caught on a link of the silver chain draped across her throat.

He reached around and found the thick, cold zipper of her coat. He gave it a tentative tug.

She didn’t resist.

He said, “Just tell me what you want to do.”

The house had been his grandmother’s. When she died, he didn’t know what else to do with it. There were already dozens of empty houses in the neighborhood that nobody wanted. Her place was small, a stuffy bungalow with a cracked foundation and paint peeling off the sides in spotted-cow-like patches. But it was free, so Michael Boni moved in. He loaded his tools into his truck, his table saw and miter saw and router table. Everything in his workshop. The few other things he owned fit into the gaps left over. Priscilla rode beside him in the passenger’s seat.

The best thing about the house was the garage. It was big and airy, with plenty of space for working. The only thing in it was his grandmother’s dead Mercury, which Michael Boni rolled into the yard, mowing a path through the weeds.

He left the rest of the house almost exactly as it was. His grandmother’s furniture, her drapes, her cups and plates and tasseled lamps. He cleared the bottom drawer in the dresser for his pants and socks and underwear. He pushed her dresses in the closet a few inches to the side to make room for his shirts.

His grandmother’s stuff was nicer than his anyway. She had an old walnut bedroom set and a dining room table of solid maple. The buffet was beautifully lathed. Looking at the neighborhood now, it was hard to believe people had once lived here who could afford pieces like these.

Michael Boni had never bothered to make anything decent for himself. It was all thrift-store crap — particleboard pasted with half-assed laminate, grains not found anywhere in nature. Priscilla couldn’t tell the difference, and there was no one else Michael Boni felt any need to impress.

For the move to his grandmother’s, he left all the junk behind for his landlord. George was an asshole anyway. He had no appreciation for Priscilla, claimed he could hear her squawking from two floors down. Two floors of brick and cement. Not to mention Priscilla was a caique, not a macaw. She’d never squawked in her life. The only time she made any noise at all was when the cops raced by. She answered their sirens with one of her own, an uncanny impression. Laced, Michael Boni liked to think, with more than a touch of mockery. But George was too dumb to appreciate the subtlety of birds. He had one of those shitty little dogs whose bark was like a finger in the eye. All night, all morning, all day, his yaps sounding to Michael Boni like a challenge. Break break break my neck break break break break my neck .

Let that asshole throw the shitty furniture away.

Michael Boni got by on his grandmother’s food, too. Her pantry looked like a munitions depot. There were stockpiles of beans and tomatoes and corn and everything and anything that could be found en escabeche . But most of all there was pozole . Case after case after case of the stuff. Until he found her supply, he’d had no idea pozole even came by the can. He was no purist, but he couldn’t picture his abuela pouring anything into a bowl and calling it dinner, the gurgle and suck and greasy splash. His grandfather had brought her here from Michoacán. Michoacán to Michigan. Maybe the name had persuaded her it wouldn’t be so different from home. Grandpa had heard there was good money to be made up north assembling chassis and stamping fenders. He was right about the money, but he’d underestimated the cold. Abuela never forgave him for that. Shortly before Michael Boni’s mother died, she admitted Grandma had been a bitter old lady by the time she was twenty. His grandmother had spent the long Michigan winters stirring endless pots of hominy and pork shoulder, keeping warm by the stove. But eventually she must have modernized, like the factories. It made no difference to Michael Boni. The stuff in the can tasted almost exactly like what he remembered from when he was a kid. It seemed all Abuela had added was a garnish of cilantro and a squeeze of lime.

By the time she died, she couldn’t have made pozole from scratch even if she’d wanted to. The Mercury’s tires had been flat for years, and the neighborhood had become a wasteland. The only available food hung in cellophane wrappers from gas station pegboards. The neighborhood was biding its time until the wrecking ball came.

Only now that it was too late did Michael Boni realize he’d done nothing to help her. He’d been a horrible grandson. But then again, she’d never seemed to care much for being a grandmother. The cold had ruined her. When he was a kid, there’d been a dairy less than a block away, and she’d often sent him there for milk and butter, always with exact change. She believed ice cream caused nightmares, or at least that’s what she said. She was the kind of person no one grew overly attached to. Everyone else in the family but Michael Boni had moved away, many of them following their parents’ old jobs south. But even the ones who’d gone only as far as Dearborn never thought to come back for a visit.

Michael Boni had barely known his grandfather, who’d bought this house when he’d started working at Dodge Main, just before the war. He’d timed it perfectly. He’d joined at the boom, and he’d left just before the bust. The year after he retired, pension in hand, the auto plant was razed. The year after that, when Michael Boni was eight, his grandfather died of a heart attack. Or as his father put it once, Grandpa retired once and for all from Grandma.

Grandma had outlived them all. His parents, his sister. She’d outlived the neighborhood, too. The dairy was now an empty cube of cinderblock. The barbershop she’d been too cheap to send Michael Boni to had burned down to the crossbeams. What remained looked like the exoskeleton of a giant insect.