Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

The moment he reached the sidewalk, Michael Boni heard the squawk of a walkie-talkie. Beside the pillar where he’d left Constance stood a bald, spectacled man carrying a clipboard. Constance was still squatting among her boxes, palming a head of lettuce in each of her outstretched hands.

“Ma’am,” the man with the clipboard was saying, “there are procedures.”

“Lettuce!” Constance’s head appeared between the man’s calves, shouting to everyone passing by. “Here’s some lettuce.”

“Ma’am,” the bald man said, tapping the clipboard. “You have to go.”

“Just let her be,” Michael Boni said.

“I wish I could—” The man with the clipboard took a step back as Michael Boni appeared beside him.

“You can,” Michael Boni said, coming the same half-step forward. “You can turn around and walk away.”

“I can’t do that.” The bald man turned to look for something. Someone , as it turned out. There was a cop offering directions to the driver of a car idling in the street. “All these people have permits,” the bald man said. “All of them have paid.”

Michael Boni reached for his wallet. “How much is it?”

“There are forms,” the man said. “There’s a process.”

Michael Boni realized his pockets were empty. He’d left the house without having any idea where he’d end up. He reached for the clipboard instead. “Are those the forms?”

The man jerked away. “No, this is … something else.”

“Go get the forms,” Michael Boni said. “I’ll fill them out. I’ll pay the fee.”

“That’s not how it works,” the man said. The color was rising in his cheeks.

The car in the street pulled away, and as the cop turned back toward the sidewalk, it occurred to Michael Boni to wonder if their truck had already been towed. He looked down at Constance. The crumbling boxes were exactly as full as when he’d carried them here, except for the lettuce in each of Constance’s hands.

Michael Boni was on unfamiliar ground. But the one thing he knew for sure was that he wouldn’t be bringing the boxes back home. The stuff could be taken or eaten, by man or by rat, rained on, stepped on, or rotted into mush. He didn’t care. He wouldn’t be taking the stuff anywhere. Let clipboard man throw the boxes into the Dumpster if he wanted.

“Come on,” Michael Boni said, reaching down for Constance’s hand. She took his fingers without argument, dropping the lettuce at his feet. One of the heads tried to roll away, and Michael Boni stopped it with the toe of his boot. The lettuce had such a pleasing roundness, about the size of a bowling ball, but with just the right amount of give. He struck it with the top of his laces, just as his old soccer coaches had always instructed. The lettuce made the most wonderful sound as it exploded against the bald man’s shin.

Only now, almost a year later, at the start of his second spring in his grandmother’s house — the second season of Constance’s garden — was Michael Boni able to see the true importance of that lettuce.

“Do you understand?” he said to Darius. “Do you get what it means?” It was hard to put such a thing — a symbol — into words.

They were sitting on a blown-out truck tire in a playground not far from Michael Boni’s old apartment. It was their new meeting place, now that the plaza downtown had become too dangerous, too exposed. Here there was even a crooked lean-to near the monkey bars in case it happened to rain.

“I get it,” Darius said. “I get it.”

Michael Boni might have believed him, if Darius hadn’t said it twice.

The chains were missing from the swing set. The seats were gone from the teeter-totter. The sandbox had been dug down to dirt. A woman had been found dead in the bushes here not long ago. Michael Boni knew better than to come around at night. But during the day it was safe enough.

“My grandmother,” Michael Boni said, “she wasted away here. And I didn’t do anything to help.” Darius didn’t need to know what a wretched soul she’d been. Anyone deserved better than what she got.

“I need to know you understand,” Michael Boni said. “This lettuce …”

Darius nodded unconvincingly.

“All you need,” Michael Boni said, “is a clean slate.”

Constance had shown them what was possible. Something new could grow.

The lettuce was an opening salvo, a declaration of war.

Winded from the short walk down the corridor from the conference room, Mrs. Freeman blustered past the upraised glance of her administrative assistant and charged on through to her office. As she let the heavy oak door shush behind her, she heard a familiar voice call her name. But rather than stop, she let momentum carry her forward, all the way to the window. Having spent the last two hours sitting like a stuffed owl at the end of a conference table, Ruth Freeman decided she would rather remain there, looking out upon the city, than have to experience, so soon after the first, yet another annoyance.

The sight outside was not pretty. Indeed, the landscape was as depressing as the foreign films of which her husband was so fond. And yet Mrs. Freeman felt she might have stayed that way for the rest of the day, peacefully staring off into the horizon, through the rain and the fog, had her administrative assistant not finally, intrusively, appeared at her side.

“What is it?” Mrs. Freeman said.

“I’ve been going over the presentation,” Tiphany said. “Your notes — I’ve been trying to put them together. But I notice there’s nothing in here — that is, you make no mention—”

“Yes,” Mrs. Freeman said, “yes,” drawing out the s as if it were a slow leak through which her administrative assistant might escape.

“But you promised the board … They’re waiting for your — have you gone through the reports?”

“Reports,” said Mrs. Freeman, turning once again toward the window.

“Did you read Arthur’s memo, Ruth?” Tiphany said, trying to move into Mrs. Freeman’s line of vision. “I put it on your desk. People have been asking questions. Eldenrod at the paper. And with these demonstrations, Arthur’s afraid—”

“Arthur is always afraid.”

“I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty …” Tiphany paused and handed Mrs. Freeman a sheet of paper.

In a glance she saw him, spread across the page: Arthur, panicking over trifles, creating pandemonium, which, in an office full of people utterly incapable of thinking for themselves, was as easy as setting fire to gasoline. And then there was her administrative assistant, who saw chaos as career advancement. Mrs. Freeman could imagine Tiphany hunched over the report, inserting her self-serving notes, and she felt herself a bit like some unfortunate king whose good nature and honesty put him at the mercy of earls and lords overendowed with hubris. Although part of her, the part that had once thought of itself as an intellectual, would have liked to be able to remember some specific king and the actual plot that had done him in, the more practical side of Mrs. Freeman was content to have remembered the gist of it.

“I mentioned we’re hiring a consultant,” Tiphany began again, “that we’re going to discredit—”

“You’d have me deny it all,” Mrs. Freeman said, waving the paper at her assistant and then dropping it back on top of the folder before turning once again to the window.

Mrs. Freeman was conscious of noises behind her, whiny ones that brushed up against her neck and made her shiver, but she found that if she concentrated her attention elsewhere, down into the alley below, for instance, the sound grew less and less irritating until finally it went away.