Diana Abu-Jaber - Birds of Paradise

His lucky break came with another price tag, which was that he would have to spend a portion of each late summer and early autumn in a state of free-floating anxiety — watching the sky, listening to the radio — haunting the store like a captain preparing to die with his ship.

Now, as the latest system approaches — hovering somewhere over the ocean — he hears the rocket explosion of a transformer blowing a few blocks away, and the lights go out for nearly a minute. He’s certain they’ll stay out this time; but then they’re back. His chest is aching, his lungs compressed. They can’t really afford to run the generator — a ghastly, anti-eco, energy suck — for very long, but they can’t afford not to. He has Bosch-like visions of rotting eggplant, broccoli; swarms of fruit flies attacking the bananas; he imagines the expensive, hormone-free, dry-aged beef, the unpasteurized goat’s milk, the yogurt from Greece, cartons of organic ice cream flavored with rosewater or cardamom… all sweating, decaying carnage. It would take days — weeks — to shovel out from under. Not to mention the pressure-washing, disinfecting, and hunting for molds, fungi, and spores. Past hurricane seasons, they’ve suffered partial (yet substantial) losses, but never a total collapse. Not yet. He is entertaining such visions of disaster when Nieves barges into the office, not quite six months along, already carrying herself sideways, the top two buttons of her jeans undone, twenty-three years old and unconcerned. “Stanley — what the hell? Get out of here. There’s rain coming in the north windows and Gloria’s trying to help me mop.”

This is what’s really different about this summer — Nieves — her difficult, bossy, magnetic nature his counterweight. Stanley squints through the door into the market. “Gloria’s still here? Everyone needs to get home now.”

“Oh my God, you’re telling me.” Nieves pushes aside a stack of orders and billing statements from local purveyors and sits heavily on his desktop, scowling. “Make another announcement — there’re still people out there. They’re buying out the store — the canned and dry goods stuff is, like, gone. Bottled water — gone; bulk foods — gone. Now they’re working on the perishables.”

A little over a year ago, Freshly Grown was expanding and advertised for someone to manage cheeses, chocolates, and coffees. Nieves banged on his office door. She painted cat’s-eye wings at the corners of her eyes back then; there was a gold stud at her eyebrow, a diamond chip tucked above one nostril. She didn’t want to talk about prior work experience — she wanted to talk about wine varietals, the dry little bubbles in a bottle of Krug, the best cheese to pair with a good chardonnay. She half smiled, smoothed her hair behind one ear, and told him about the bands she’d sang and played guitar in; she stretched out her long legs and toted the ethnicities she’d uncovered in her family background: “Oneida, Mohawk, some kind of African — maybe Senegal — French, oh, Moroccan, um, oh, Costa Rican, Dutch — or wait — Danish? There’s more. Those are just the main ones.” She smelled bready, like a kid who’d spent the day outside playing. Stanley’s office was filled with stacked cartons of organic crackers, macaroni and cheese, couscous — mainly a storage room with a desk and chair in it. She’d eyed the half-crushed cartons and said, “You need to deal with that.”

Stanley loves the smell of the back of her head, loves putting his nose to her scalp, inside the wavy dark curtains of her hair. He stands and leans against the desk, pulling her in so she reclines back against him — she no longer resists his embrace the way she did before pregnancy. His hands move over her shoulders, the inner curves of her arms, then wander over her breasts, which, he’s noticed, have assumed a fuller, teardrop shape, like the new lobe of her belly. His arms cross over her chest, entwining her. Mine, he thinks. He’d never say it out loud.

When they’d first started seeing each other, Stanley wasn’t sure it would last: Nieves’s personality could be cold and steady as a flashlight. And she always seemed to him to be poised in doorways, always about to leave him, leave town, and assume a new existence — like all the other employees and volunteers brimming with stories about house-building trips to Honduras and cross-country bike rides. (Last week he’d reluctantly agreed to a showing of Eduardo’s experimental video: an insufferable diatribe on the evils of Big Sugar, spliced with photographs of electric-green Caribbean mountains.) Now he’s no longer sure why he’d felt that way. Unlike other employees, Nieves never spent her days rambling on about traveling to Prague or the Galápagos or applying to graduate programs in film studies. Stanley, on the other hand, could be intrigued, seduced by the stories — the home videos of diving the Great Barrier Reef or of hiking Antarctica.

Unlike Nieves, he is tired and battle-weary: after Hurricane Charley ruined their drainage field last year, the Internet and papers were full of reports that the bump in hurricanes was connected to global warming, rising water tables and the ocean temperatures — that things could only get worse as the ice caps melted away. It was hard to fathom how quickly the world could change: when Stanley first opened shop, there was nothing around but acres of agricultural land, orchards of sweeping palms and everglades, tidal and primordial, filled with swooping egrets, ibises, the creeks nosed up with alligators. Now, barely six years later, every time he drives out of town, he sees new housing developments growing in concentric circles around Homestead — townhouses uniform as barracks, a hospital like a penitentiary, and billboards advertising this construction at exorbitant prices.

Whenever he mutters about selling the market to GNC, taking time off and learning to surf, or taking the train across Europe, or, for that matter, just starting over in a new place — Asheville, New Orleans — where they get small-local-organic, Nieves smirks, her eyes narrow to a black line. She says, “These are your people, Stan.”

She took to the market as if she’d found her missing home. Nieves worked the longest hours of anyone, often opening the store before Stanley himself arrived. She worked tirelessly — even at hard physical labor — pushing trucks, stocking, and swabbing. He admires her, afraid of the way she makes him feel. She’d claimed him at their first meeting, and the intensity of this claim seemed the direct opposite of the way he’d grown up — nudged to one side, overshadowed by his sister’s beauty, then her absence. Standing now, pressing her warm back into his chest, his arms capturing her, Stanley gazes into his store and thinks about how oddly specific love is, how it must always seem to every person that he or she was the one who invented it, and that no one else’s love could ever be as strong. Stanley feels this way. It would have been nice, he thinks, to have had more time to be just a couple. But her pregnancy finally gave him a bit of calm: the luxury of their mutual ownership.

“Oh for—” Nieves’s arms fall flat at her sides as she stares into the store. “Don’t these people have homes?”

Stanley spots the silhouetted form of a couple walking up Ethnic/Prepared/Mixes. They seem to be hazily looking around, not shopping exactly, and he shifts his hands back to Nieves’s shoulders. He’s about to call out, in some exasperation, Hey, we’re closed — get yourselves home! when he hears a young, quiet, familiar voice say, “Stan?”

HE ALWAYS MEANT to tell the girls he’d dated about Felice, how her disappearance had left such a mark on his life, but it turned out that she was something he couldn’t talk about at all — as if someone had rubbed out those years of waiting and anxiety with a pencil eraser and now it was difficult even to perceive faint lines left in the paper. Only recently had he revealed to Nieves that he’d had a sister, that she’d “left home,” that he “rarely” heard from her. At the time, Nieves had scrutinized his face, listening quietly in the shadow of their tiny apartment. She touched his hand and stroked the back of his fingers with uncharacteristic tenderness.