Diana Abu-Jaber - Birds of Paradise

Brian stares at the top of his windshield. “What about your wife?” His voice is stony with sarcasm. “Does she think it’s play? Is it all a glorious entertainment?”

Javier doesn’t say anything for a moment: abruptly his hands fall to his sides as he starts laughing. “ Ay, compay! You didn’t have a choice, did you? You’re one of these guys who had to become a lawyer. You just love your words.” He rolls his eyes. “Listen, chico, here’s the big difference between you and me — last month, my wife threw me out of the house. She found some girl’s number on a matchbook in my pocket. So I been living up the street, in the Intercon. They give you a nice breakfast there.”

Brian’s mouth opens.

“Things between me and Odalis…” His mouth twists as if he were trying to smile. “She says I don’t love her no more. Stupid. What does that even mean? So I get a little lonely. So sue me.” He gives Brian a cool glance. “Why you look so upset? You just let me walk thirty-four flights, man.”

Brian climbs down from the car. “You didn’t say anything.”

“It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud, even.” Javier sinks back against a garage pillar. “Even my papi doesn’t know. But I did it — I left. To make her happy. You see how that works? You keep leaving, like you say, to keep them happy. You go to work, you keep working, you run away until you’re all the way gone. Maybe even you shoot yourself. And the whole time you keep thinking — Are they happy yet?”

Brian picks up the sunglasses — the Ray-Bans. One of the lenses is scratched. He rubs them against the sleeve of his jacket, hands them back to his friend. Javier sighs and props the glasses on his head. He loosens his tie, then undoes it, lets it hang. “Who knows — the last kid just went up to Gainesville. Maybe Odalis and me will be back again by Thanksgiving?” His mouth twists again, approximating a smile, his brows lifted, a yellow sleepless cast to the bottoms of his eyes. Brian shuffles to Javier holding out his hands, then wraps his arms around his friend, clapping him on the back. Javier leans into him. It happens in a few scant moments, but in that time, Brian feels the scoured-out quality in both of them, the absence of tears, the shared, unspoken wish that at least one of them could remember how to weep.

HE SQUINTS THROUGH the dark core as he merges onto U.S. 1, the washed-away darkness at the center of his windshield ringed by taillights, traffic lights. The storm has begun in earnest — the thunder sounds like distant drums — but he cracks the moon roof to admit the moist, mild air. Javier used to tell him: Things begin and end with the wife. He imagines, as he sails under the sulfurous lights, through curtains of rain, how he will unlock the front door and go to her.

There’s another hard lash of rain and wind. The car shimmies with it and the row of taillights glows red. Someone two car lengths up puts on hazards; they strobe in the cascade. The car is quaking with the wind, wipers going at a frantic slash. The streetlights around him seem to wobble and his head fills with oxygen, a mind-expanding release. What appears to be a ten-foot-long striped store awning sails past his car; there is another red stream of taillights as a pond forms on the Dixie northbound. Southbound traffic is starting to dwindle — it’s all northbound now: the hegira, rushing off the Florida peninsula — if they aren’t blown off the road in the process. A long section of palm frond skates over his hood and flies off to the next car. His hands tighten as he navigates what appears to be a branch of bananas in the road. Brian watches a coconut bounce mid-highway, a few car lengths ahead. Traffic is paralytic, creeping, then stopping entirely. A few cars disperse into the Grove, Shenandoah, making big round turns around the blocks. And then it’s too quiet, the rain pooling over the highway, wipers unable to keep up, tires hydroplaning. It’s like taking a trip, he thinks, tension filling him with clear, still ideas. Going toward the other person, beckoning them back. Hopefully, the other person, your wife, will come back. You meet in the road.

The rain comes in an opaque sheet, it’s like peering into a wave. Lightning cracks horizontally down the length of the highway. He moves at a crawl, the car rocking, the palms belling like blown-out umbrellas. Seconds later, the wind goes slack and the rain hisses away. There’s a lucidity to the air. A blanketing calm settles over him as he considers how ironic it would be if he were to spin into the path of an onrushing car now, and never have the ability to see his wife again, to tell her that she is his one and only, that things will be fine. For some reason, his mind feels so light, an ether, as he imagines the house at the end of his block coming into view, its lights burning with a low sheen.

HE SITS WITH HIS CHAIR CLOSE TO THE REAR windows, watching them liquefy, then solidify in the rolling gusts of rain. The store is finally starting to settle down after they’d announced they were closing early. He feels glassy with exhaustion. Years of hard, daily, market labor — trucking bushels of produce, scrubbing the walk-in dairy storage, pressure-washing the entry — have given him the ability to rise early and work well into the evening, not thinking, his mind content with and diverted by doing . But today, the frantic preparations for the storm — one ear trained on the NOAA forecasts — have left him nearly inert, bones dissolved. Too many loose ends. This damn business. He’s been stewing: if his father doesn’t stake him the money, they won’t be able to cover the reassessed property taxes — much less make a down payment on the place. There are rumors that commercial property insurance premiums are set to double. Lord only knows what kind of wind damage or flood disaster he’ll wake up to tomorrow. They’ve been fairly lucky with tropical storm systems up till now, but he has no faith in the store’s elderly drainage system, their stormwater basin prone to overflowing.

The tarp tied over a pallet of rutabagas still on the loading dock looks as if it will flap free, and someone — probably Stanley — will have to run out in the rain and lash it back down. Rutabagas, he thinks irritably, watching the pale knobs gleam as the tarp flaps. The lights in his office have flickered a number of times, which means the backup generator may be kicking on soon — its roar loud enough to annoy neighbors ten blocks away. Although he’s not sure who’s left to annoy — the shops closest to him, over on Krome, are boarded up with plywood, windows Xed out with masking tape like the eyes of dead cartoon characters, the town shuttered and half abandoned.

Hurricane Andrew struck Homestead in 1992. Six years later, Stanley came hunting for a cheap storefront: he was eighteen years old and had a $10,000 start-up stake scraped together from working in orange groves, farmers’ markets, and nurseries, as well as shelving product and bagging and rolling at Winn Dixie and Publix. He’d dropped out — college was for dawdlers. Andrew had left a trail of devastation across Homestead, slashing it open before ripping up the rest of the state. The locals who remained (thousands fled north, north, north) bore a dazzled, sanctified light in their faces. Stanley could still see the residue of the hurricane everywhere — in torn-up fields, acres of downed trees, houses smashed to pieces. Humble as its name, set off at the lonely bottom of the peninsula, Homestead was home to farmers and Mexican migrant workers in straw cowboy hats, flooding the dance hall weekend nights. The little downtown had been trying to reconstruct itself, but back then property values were flat. A realtor whispered to Stanley that the owner of the building, a former bank, near the corner of Krome and Northwest Second, was frantic to move to North Carolina. So, at eighteen, Stanley had his space and a $50,000 small business loan.