the bad guys, or just lost his wife, or his best friend, or his dog or something, and the music that’s supposed to make you cry is going and the guy’s just barely holding it together. People loved that moment, Jimmy thought, and they wanted it in real life too.
The real reason to come down from the apartment was because sometimes Grace Lei would step out and take her break, smoke a cigarette and stare out at the traffic. Jimmy liked to watch her, try to catch her eye, try to make her laugh.
“So what’s the difference between sesame chicken and General Tso’s?” he asked her, wishing she’d turn and look at him.
“The seeds.” Grace Lei watched the street. She was tall, and he stood straighter. Her hair hung down to her shoulders. He pictured running his finger along the ends of her hair and wondered if it would be soft, or maybe stiff, like bristles. Nothing would surprise him. He wanted to take the nail polish out and pass it to her, and watched her hands move as she smoked, trying to see if there was color at the tips of her fingers.
“The seeds, huh. That’s it? They should call it General Tso Plus Seeds.”
Jimmy watched through the glass as a Latino kid came out of the back of the restaurant and dropped a plastic bag on the table nearest the door.
Grace turned to Jimmy. “Where do you live? You’re always here.”
“Upstairs.”
A car pulled up, an old Chevy he’d seen before. A kid got out, an Asian kid with a red ball cap on backward and baggy jeans. Gold chains on his wrists and around his neck. He said something to Grace, but she just looked at the street, or at the firemen washing the trucks, or at nothing at all. The kid went into the Imperial and came back out again holding his order up to his face and miming hunger for his friends in the car.
She said to Jimmy, “Yeah, what’s it like up there?”
He turned to Grace, who he thought had never really looked at him before. He kept his body angled away and stole glances at her, as if she was something he was going to put in his pocket. He kicked at a yogurt cup crushed at the curb, its spilled contents a lurid, clotted pink.
“It’s okay. You can see the river, which you can’t really from down here. Sometimes you can.” He was aware that he was high, that he smelled like weed, and took a step farther away along the curb. He didn’t know how she’d feel about that, him being high. She might be cool, but the black-and-white work uniform and the way she held herself made her look somebody who was strict. You never knew about girls.
The kid with the bag got in the car and the guy behind the wheel stomped on the accelerator, almost clipping a van making the turn from Midvale. The Chevy was an old convertible with green metallic paint that glittered, a comet disappearing down Ridge toward Manayunk in a ribbon of green. Jimmy smiled, suddenly conscious of the neighborhood coiled on the hills above them, getting that way you could get under a head full of dope. Everything seemed connected; dark forces were at work moving cars and people around like pieces on a game board.
He turned back to Grace, but she was walking back inside, throwing away a cigarette. Her fingernails looked the same pale color as her fingers, some color that wasn’t yellow and wasn’t brown. There was a thin red stain on the white shirt at her hip. She wore tight black jeans and he let himself picture her stepping into them, her long legs that pale cream shade that he didn’t know what to call. He was suddenly too lonely to head back upstairs and walked around the corner to Buckets for a drink.
He stood at a window at Buckets, trying to see inside, to see who was behind the bar. A few weeks before he had swiped some change from off the counter and thought the girl bartender might have seen him do it, so now he only went in when she wasn’t there. While he was standing there, squinting through the dark glass, he saw Evan walking up toward the front door and stop. Evan waited for a short girl with hair dyed white-blond except for hard black roots and dark eye makeup. She was standing between two parked cars, rooting in her purse. He nodded at Jimmy, who smiled, his tongue out, and raised a hand.
“Hey, man. You getting a drink?”
“Oh, hey.” Evan looked at the bar, then doubtfully at Jimmy. “Ah, yeah. Well, no. Just getting something to eat.” The girl came over and hooked her arm around his. “Well, see you.”
“Man, you ever see Jesus and them?”
“Nah.” The blond girl moved a step toward the door, pulling Evan. “I got a job. At the Rite Aid.”
“Stacking boxes and shit?”
“Ah, I’m the manager. At night. You know.” Evan looked apologetic. “Anyway, Jesus went in the army.”
“No shit. Remember that time we took that grader and ran it in the creek? That was fucking retarded.”
“Yeah. Well.” He nodded his head. “I gotta go.”
Jimmy fished in his pockets and held out a bottle of blue nail polish to the girl. There was a long pause, then the girl fluttered her fingers to show him the rose tips.
“Sorry, not my color.” She turned to the door, her arm still hooked to Evan’s like they were chained together.
Evan lifted his shoulders, as if he wanted to stay and bullshit but he had to go. “Hey,” he said, looking at the bottle in Jimmy’s hand. “We carry that stuff.”
Jimmy got up the next afternoon and went to see his aunt to get more money. He walked up Stanton along the back of St. Bridget’s, feeling the heat coming up through his sneakers. The kids were in school, and he thought it was funny you could tell without seeing any sign of them, like the building gave off a kind of hum when it was full of people. He had dated a girl, Cheryll, who said he had a shaman aura, some kind of power to tell about things, a sense other people didn’t have. She had a tattoo of a tree and an owl and a pyramid with an eye in it. When he got pinched and sent to the Youth Study Center, he had been trying to steal a huge wheel of wire from the cable TV place where her brother worked. Jimmy thought she was in love with him. She was always saying what a dick her brother was, but she still wouldn’t talk to Jimmy after that, would hang up on him when he called from the center, the kids lined up behind him and tapping him on the shoulder so he’d give up the phone. So maybe she was wrong about his aura.
His aunt wasn’t really his aunt, she was his great aunt or his mother’s aunt or something. She lived near the tracks that ran in the gulley in front of Cresson, in a house so narrow he could almost reach out and touch both walls in the front room. He’d go over there once every couple of weeks and listen to her talk and leave with a couple hundred bucks. It paid for his rent, and he sold enough of the stuff he stole to stay in weed and the orange Drake’s cupcakes he liked.
The house was full of little green animals. Ceramic donkeys and horses and birds in a million different styles, but all of them green. There were also pictures cut out of the newspaper and put in crooked frames, including one that his aunt said was Princess Grace at a wedding at St. Bridget’s. Once when he came over his aunt was sitting in the dark watching movies of some kind of procession of kids dressed up in matching outfits, the colors faded into a muddled blue. The girls all had on the same uniform dress and veils, and he said, “Is this Muslims?” before he realized it was little kids at St. Bridget’s getting first Holy Communion. His aunt didn’t seem to hear him, shaking her head and saying something like, “There’s your uncle Pete,” or, “Oh, look at Mary, how young she is,” but he didn’t know any of the faces.
She made him drink blue skim milk and gave him cookies from a tin. He thought if he could get her to give him some extra money sometime, he could invest in a quarter-pound of weed. He told her he wanted to go into business.
“Doing what? You should be in school.”
“I don’t know. Selling things.”
“You’re a dreamer. You get that from your father.” She walked him to the door, stopping to look at the framed clippings. “I used to tell people we were related, me and Grace. Because of the Kelly name. I just wanted it to be true.”
Jimmy looked at a picture of Princess Grace in a green dress, her hair swept back and her body arched, like a bow.
His aunt held out a small wad of cash. “But we’re not the princess kind of Kelly, are we? We’re just the other kind.”
The next afternoon he wrote,
