IN the mornings I was early and then they were late. I sat on the front step and watched the women hanging out near the building across the street. Once in a while a man would call down to them from a window and they would go inside, or a car would pull over and take one of them away. I watched and one of them saw me and licked the air but she was skeletal and sexless and I dropped my eyes, my looking-for-something look.
She yelled something to the effect that she was a lesbian first and a whore second. “Got my girlfriend to suck my pussy,” she yelled.
Yusuf came and unlocked the security gate. He apologized. Wanda should have been there, he said, but he didn’t say anything about Ibrahim. He’d been on a service call. Service was available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and Yusuf and Ibrahim took turns sleeping with the pager on. They took turns not sleeping at all. When Wanda arrived he left. She didn’t explain and I didn’t ask.
People started coming in right away but not all of them were customers. The man with the newspaper came and sat on his stool and hid his face behind his paper. “Now somebody messed around and slowed a beam of light down to thirty-eight miles an hour,” he said. Turned the page. Later he was joined by the man whose son was a genius, and then they were replaced by the barefoot girl from the projects. She didn’t have far to walk and she brought three kids who were so dark-skinned they couldn’t have been hers by anything but association. She tried to sound like one of them and it came out so ugly you wished she would step on a nail in the middle of a sentence.
“I’ll tell her to start wearing shoes,” Wanda said. They seemed to know each other but she didn’t say how.
A man wanted me to copy a key for a vending machine. It was round like a small tube with notches on the end and I couldn’t find the blank. I asked if he could wait. He said he couldn’t but I couldn’t find the blank and when Wanda came out of the bathroom he’d already gone. She sighed.
“Small children won’t die,” she said, “but Ibrahim would. He’d rather eat pork than let one get away.” Then a man came in and asked for Rikki’s mail. He was big and he wore a sweat suit, a baseball cap turned around on his head. He said Ibrahim knew about it.
I told him nobody had told me.
“Well, I’m telling you,” he said.
Wanda came up front. She had a stack of envelopes rubber-banded together, and she handed it to him without looking at him. He watched her walk back to the office. He looked at her the same way I had the first time I’d been in the shop. He looked at me another way. I took a whisk broom and went at the key dust on the machines and counter. He left muttering, everything under his breath except the word asshole.
She said his name was Angel. I knew who he was.
Some of the people who came and didn’t buy anything were named Bashir, Tariq, Fuad, Ayman. They filled the shop with the sound of “Salaam,” their common aftershave, their dark eyes and hair. Their business cards. I figured they were friends but Ibrahim never used that word. Wanda said he didn’t have the time. One of them dropped off the Arabic newsletter, one had designed his Yellow Pages ad. Another was a tall man with a pockmarked face who was friendly and polite but moved around like he owned the place. Then I found out that he did, that Ibrahim leased the space for the shop from him.
One of them was a woman and all you could see were her eyes. She came in and sat down by the counter. I asked her if I could help her and she didn’t answer or look at me. Wanda came up front and told her we expected Yusuf back within half an hour. She nodded and sat there behind a veil, wearing a sort of mantle that covered her head and shoulders but with colors in a pattern, like something from a designer catalog. Slacks, sandals, thick white socks. She waited a while and then she drove away in a brand-new Toyota. Wanda told me who she was. I could still see her eyes but even when I thought of them they wouldn’t look at me. I was the one across the street.
THERE was a problem.
“I told you,” Wanda said. “Didn’t I tell you?”
“Believe me,” Ibrahim said, “we not trying to run a game. You get what you earned.”
“Ibrahim would never do that,” Wanda said. “You have to trust him.”
“She has a court order. I am lock out of my own home.”
“She’s there right now with her two . . . family. Whatshisface, too, I’ll bet—and she has a house of her own for God’s sake! Ibrahim had to spend the night in the van.”
“She puts hold on all the accounts,” he said. “All I have is what’s in the drawer and what’s in the safe.”
“I don’t think there’s anything in the safe.”
I said I understood but they didn’t seem to believe me.
“You have to understand,” Wanda said, “she won’t get away with this. She was only able to pull this off because Ibrahim was late for the hearing. They let her write her own ticket.”
“I was on a job,” Ibrahim said. He said Haleel would straighten everything out, but Haleel couldn’t do anything before Monday.
“There wasn’t even a judge—they had a referee.”
“Then you get paid. Cash, check, you tell me.”
I told him that part was fine. The problem, I told him, was that I had to pay my rent.
“He stays at the Avenue,” Wanda reminded him.
Ibrahim looked at me. “I talk to Miss Ivy about this,” he said. “Get you some time.”
I didn’t say anything at first. I didn’t have much choice but I was wary of people doing me favors, especially when pulling strings was involved. It took the little that was in your hands out of them.
“Alright,” I said then. I said thanks, for lack of a better word.
“You need something to get through the weekend? What we have in the drawer?”
“I’ll be okay. I can wait till next week.”
“You have enough to eat? You have food on the table?”
I’d forgotten about that. I remembered there was a blood bank next door but it was closed for the day.
“We straighten you up,” Ibrahim said. “Wanda, where are my keys?” She’d gone in the back. “Wadiya!”
The van was in the parking lot next to the shop, a small fenced enclosure. The gate was padlocked after hours, there was barbed wire on top. No one had managed to steal the van since the barbed wire.
Ibrahim gestured at the van and it chirped, the lights flashed. I’d never had one of those. There was a laptop computer in front of the dashboard between the seats, and I’d never had one of those, either. It swung on a movable arm but I wasn’t sure what Ibrahim did with it. I’d used one the last time I’d had a job, but it sat on a desk and I only knew what I’d needed to know about it.
We pulled out.
“Is not far,” Ibrahim said. “I appreciate this.”
“You’re taking care of business.”
“But some people,” he said, “when it comes to the money—”
“I know,” I said.
“I want this to be like family. Family has