Diana Abu-Jaber - Birds of Paradise

His BlackBerry starts to buzz, vibrating an obscene spin on his desk.

“Let me let you…” She’s pushing out of her chair. “Somebody really wants you.”

He stands also as he grabs the phone. “Give me two seconds. It’s just — Agathe knows I’m not answering.” He keeps one hand in midair, as if holding Fernanda in place, presses the speaker phone on with his other. “This is Muir.” In his peripheral vision, he sees Fernanda give a wave and back out of the office. Brian opens his hand— Stay! He lets go a sigh then, rakes one hand through his hair, settling back in the chair, watching through the glass as a city worker installs a new billboard: Can you say Beer-veza? Se habla CHILL? Image of a bottle of beer and an edge of lime.

“Dad?” Laughter. “That your Donald Rumsfeld impersonation?”

Brian sits up. “You got me,” he says, withered. “Want to hear Karl Rove?”

“Got your calls — what’s up? I’ve got a hundred cases of plantains I’ve got to cope with here.” Stanley has managed, once again, to flip their positions, so he is the harried overseer and Brian’s the needy old dad.

“No, no, nothing — it’s just—” Now he feels uncertain — is it even worth mentioning that strange girl? “Have you heard this singer on the radio? I think her name is Nelly? I noticed this. Is it that there are two Nellys and one is a rapper and one is a regular singer?”

“Dad—” Stanley breaks off; there’s some scuffling and a thin stream of voices in the background.

“Are they singing? Is that considered singing ?” Suddenly he wants to know. Stanley is the authority on all such matters by virtue of being young: musicians give steel drum demonstrations in his parking lot; he has a sale bin at the front of the store, Music of Indigenous Uprising .

“I don’t know, Dad.” Another pause in which Stanley might be muttering instructions to someone. “Sure, yeah, it’s singing, why not?”

“Oh.” Brian falls silent. Even though Brian’s son is often remote and very busy, he’s also dutiful: the child they could count on. Brian presses, angling to keep his son on a little longer: “It just sounds like a mess.”

“It’s protest — like reggae,” Stanley says peevishly. “They’re angry. It’s a sign of sanity.”

“Yeah. Probably.” Brian sighs.

“Dad, is — are you okay?” More voices blur in the background, a small shuffling crash and distant laughter. Always this mesh of noise at the market.

“No, no, yeah. I’m fine,” Brian waves one hand in his empty office. “Um. Your mother was — she was going to meet with Felice today.”

“Oh.”

Brian rubs at the underside of his jaw for a moment: mistake .

Stan asks, “Why does she bother?”

“I’m sorry?” Brian massages his knuckles into an aching spot between his ribs. At four, Stanley was smitten, practically in tears at the sight of his newborn sister. Even in those first hours, before Felice’s beauty was apparent — her iridescent eyes, the numina of her skin — Stanley was devoted. He held his sister in his lap, her tiny hands fused into fists, her face purplish with crying. He kissed her head and murmured into her damp hair.

“No, nothing.”

“Yeah. Well, hey son, I got this call…” Staring out the window, he sees a rope of lightning flash over the skyline.

“You got what?”

“This girl —” Brian chuckles, embarrassed. “She called my cell and said she’s your girlfriend?” He chuckles again, wishing he could stop. “She told me not to worry.”

“Shit.”

“Stan?” Brian presses the phone to his right ear. “What’s the deal?”

“Gimme a minute here. Fuck.” He hears his son’s voice muffled, away from the phone, shouting something like Nevis! Then, “Fuck.”

“Stanley, what the hell is going on?”

“It’s just — she’s my goddamn girlfriend.”

Brian lifts an eyebrow — the last girl Stanley was seeing was not someone that a person would apply the word “goddamn” to in a million years. “What happened to—”

“Nieves!” Stanley is shouting, away from the phone again. He returns. “I’m sorry about that, Dad. I can’t control her.”

“So you know her?”

A long hot sigh. “Yeah. She must’ve gotten your number from my cell phone. She does stuff like that.”

“Stan. This is someone — you’re seeing? You’re involved with?”

Pause. “Dad, listen. Can you just sort of — can you pretend like you never got that call?”

“Stan — really. What’s up?”

“Nothing. Just. We’ve had some money issues.”

“Money issues.”

“Nothing really. Goddamn Citizen’s finally denied our claim for the refrigerated cases.”

“Oh, jeez.” Last summer, Hurricane Charley took out the electricity — both mainframe and backup generator — at Freshly Grown, and three of their industrial freezers were ruined, along with extensive wind damage to the exterior of the building. The case investigator, a crimson-faced woman, kept dropping in at the store, writing reports and gazing at Stan. Brian knew his son had encouraged her — inviting her to wine and cheese tastings and baking sessions at the store; he’d given her an “appreciation basket” filled with organic pears and apples and chocolates from Vermont. Stanley can be a bit obtuse that way, Brian thinks — so focused on business that he never realizes there are other motives at work. She’d strung the investigation out for months, continually remembering some new piece of “evidence” she needed to collect or some bit of damage that needed to be photographed. She’d been encouraging about their chances, but then Stan demurred from her invitation to a home-cooked dinner.

“I had a bad feeling about that one.” Brian tips the remote at the office climate controls.

“Yeah, so did we all,” Stanley says morosely. He’d refused to let his father intercede in the case: Brian swallows the impulse to point that out. “And then there was all that water damage. And we’ve been dealing with the shoplifting thing.”

“It’s the local kids, isn’t it?” Brian thinks but does not say, Those Mexicans.

“Actually, it seems to be in-house. One — or more — of my trusty staff — someone with access to the books, inventory sheets.”

“Oh, Stan.” Brian rubs his temples, then lifts his head. “Does that girl — that — Neeva? She have access?”

“Dad, no. It’s not Nieves.”

“How do you know? You said she was crazy. She sounded —”

“Dad, trust me.”

“Why was she calling me in the first place? She made it sound like there’s something—”

“What?” Stanley’s tone is abrupt — tinged with the anger Brian remembers from Stanley’s high school years.

Brian inhales, considers pushing back, asserting his paternal rights. “Well.”

“Nieves just has some issues right now,” Stanley says. “It’s nothing for you to worry about. Really.”

“Hey — whatever you say.” He feels an ache at the back of his throat. The desire to set things right. The inability to do so. He can’t get his mind to clear: the old bits of memory are there: a fog of late days at work, entire months where he didn’t cross paths with his son, saw his wife only when she lay across the bed, released into a long twist of sleep. They were living in a state of hibernation — that’s what it’d felt like at the time. Outside of work, every encounter and every conversation felt like a swipe of sandpaper. Now Brian suspects that what he did was worse than neglect — it was abandonment — precisely when his son needed him most. He’d thought he was gently leaving him alone — that it was what he assumed adolescence required. Brian’s hand lingers a moment after he’s hung up; he sits very still, his body humming with the frequency of far-off traffic.