“You don’t work for him.”
“No, but he’s been good to some fellas I know. At least, he tried to be.”
“So you gonna, what, show your appreciation to this man by eating his burgers and potato salad?”
“I’ll prob’ly ask him for some more favors, too.” Ali put his hand in Juanita’s bowl of things, set beside his, and looked at her sheepishly. “Can I get your car?”
“If you say you’re not gonna drink.”
“You know I don’t even like it.”
Ali took the keys and kissed his mother on the cheek. She was a small woman of forty-two with big brown eyes and a pretty smile. It was from her that he had acquired his modest height and handsome features.
In the past, they had experienced conflicts, but as adults, they made a good team. They had cosigned for the loan on the house and together they had made it work. She was an attendant at a dialysis center on 8th Street on Capitol Hill, and had learned to budget herself, watch her purchases, and still walk down the street in relative style. He stayed with her to pay her back, in some way, for the trouble he’d caused her as a youth. Both knew he’d be gone when he found someone special and started having kids of his own. She seemed to want it more than he did.
“Any girls gonna be at this barbecue?”
“Nah, Mama. We’re all members of the He-Men Women Hater’s Club.”
“I wonder sometimes.”
“Huh,” said Ali. He had his eye on this one girl he’d met at church, but his mother didn’t need to know that yet.
“Don’t drink tonight,” said Juanita, as her son headed out the door, her car keys in hand.
“I won’t,” said Ali.
She watched him go, thinking, I’m not trying to get on you or nag. I don’t want anything to happen to you. That’s all it is.
You’ve come so far.
EIGHTEEN
Chris came down into Rock Creek Park on the winding Sherrill Drive, took Beach for a piece, and came up out of the park on Bingham, the east-west cut-through his father had showed him as a child. He drove the van up the long hill of Nebraska Avenue and headed west on McKinley. Katherine was beside him in the shotgun bucket, and Ben was on the collapsible second-row bench. As he tended to do when he reentered his old neighborhood, Chris grew quiet.
They stopped at the red light at McKinley and Connecticut Avenue. To their right were the fenced-in courts of the Chevy Chase Rec Center, where Chris had played under the lights and stars in various summer leagues. Across the avenue, to the north, was the Avalon, the theater where he had smoked weed in the men’s room with his friends before movies, now an independent operation showing art films.
“See those blocks of concrete?” said Ben, pointing a long finger between Chris and Katherine at the planters on the sidewalk past the bus shelter, lined along the sloping drive-way entrance to the drugstore at the southwest corner of Connecticut.
“Yes?” said Katherine, suspecting what was coming, having heard the story of Chris’s night of crime.
“Those are, like, monuments to Chris,” said Ben. “They put ’em up there after he drove his truck ’cross the sidewalk.”
“That wasn’t me. That was some other dude.”
Chris accelerated through the intersection on the green and glanced at the concrete barriers as he drove past.
“My legacy,” said Chris, and Katherine reached over and squeezed his hand.
Driving west on McKinley, Chris pulled to the right as far as he could to allow a late-model Audi to pass. The coupe came alongside him, and Chris looked to the driver for the courtesy nod. Their eyes met. The driver, a good- looking man around Chris’s age with a salon haircut and a clean open-necked white shirt, smiled nervously in recognition.
“Hey,” said the driver, with a finger wave.
“How’s it goin, man?” said Chris, returning the smile.
Neither of them stopped. Chris’s heavy foot gave the van a bit too much gas.
“Who was that?” said Katherine.
“A kid I ran with from the neighborhood,” said Chris.
“Looks like he prosperin, whoever he is,” said Ben.
“He got out of law school last year,” said Chris. “My father says he’s with a downtown firm now.”
“You never mentioned him to me,” said Katherine.
“Yes, I did,” said Chris.
“I guess I don’t remember.”
“No big deal,” said Chris. “He’s just a guy I used to know.”
The cookout was in the backyard of the Flynns’ clapboard colonial on Livingston. Depending on the level of business, Thomas Flynn employed six to eight men, but they came to this annual event with children, wives, girlfriends, and one or two uninvited friends. The yard was not large to begin with, and it was full.
Amanda Flynn had laid out a food spread on a table set on their screened-in porch, which led to an uncovered deck, where Flynn was busy barbecuing burgers, chorizo sausages, half-smokes, and chicken breasts on his commercial-grade gas grill. Amanda and Isaac’s wife, Maria, were moving back and forth from the kitchen to the porch, putting out sides, paper plates, napkins, and utensils, catching up with conversation as they worked. Flynn had a spatula in one hand and a bottle of Bud in the other. Within reach, on the rail of the deck, was a party ball of Jim Beam and shot glasses for anyone who cared to join him. Nearby were two iced-down coolers, one stocked with beer and white wine, the other holding sodas and water.
Music was coming from outdoor speakers mounted on the ceiling of the screened-in porch. It was a mix of Spanish-language pop with dramatic vocals, which everyone enjoyed to some degree but would become a bone of contention and discussion as the night wore on. Ben had brought his Rare Essence and Backyard Band tapes, Maze’s greatest hits, and the new Wale to drop in later, when folks got loose. One of Amanda’s jobs was to keep her husband away from the stereo, especially after he’d had a few drinks. This was not the crowd for Thin Lizzy or Lynyrd Skynyrd, and no one here, with the exception of Thomas Flynn, was into Bruce.
Renee, Ben’s girlfriend, had joined them late, after she came off work at the nail salon. In her evening clothes and heels, she was overdressed for a cookout, but she looked good. Katherine, in a sundress, her hair down, was in conversation with Renee, as Ben was spending much of his time playing with Django, the Flynns’ dog.
Also in attendance was Lonnie Wilson. Though he had not worked for Flynn’s Floors for several years, and his employment had been short-lived, Lonnie liked a party and could not pass up free food and drink. He had brought along his wife, Yolanda, and their two children. Pussy-crazy Lonnie, who had talked incessantly about all the women he was going to slay when he left Pine Ridge, had married Yolanda, the first girl he got with when he came out. Despite the fact that Lonnie had been unable to hold a job and their money problems were deep, Lonnie and his family were a tight unit.
Darkness had settled on the yard. Chris, Ali, Ben, and Lonnie stood around an outdoor fire pit, drinking beer from bottles, talking, and looking into the fire that Chris had lit using wood stacked beside the alley garage. Thomas Flynn had built the pit years ago. Flynn had leveled the dirt, constructed the base and walls with cinder block and mortar, covered it with decorative stone veneer, grouted it, and capped it with concrete he cut and mitered himself.
Chris could not have constructed such a fine piece of work. He was not a natural handyman like his father. He was not even a particularly good carpet man, though he had learned enough to do satisfactory installations. Truth was, he wasn’t suited to his current job, but it had been made available to him and was what he had.
“Look at this dog, man,” said a gleeful Ben, holding a rubber toy by its U-shaped handle, the other end death-clenched in Django’s powerful jaws, the dog pulling furiously, his rear legs dug in, his eyes rolled back in his
