“How can I do more to make things better, Mrs. Jones?”
She sits back and folds her arms. It is Charles, from the doorway, who speaks:
“You don’t want to catch who did it.”
“Sir?” Irv says.
“Don’t ‘sir’ me. The reverend said you have no suspects. He said you have no ideas. He said you are nowhere on this, and that it is now our job to shoulder the weight of your incompetence and laziness and apathy—your sins—and carry them like Jesus carried our sins. He says that God is once again placing the weight of our community on our shoulders, and that it is only our fortitude as a family that is keeping this city from turning into Watts, or Detroit, or L.A. And I have to wonder, Sheriff: Why is the calm of this country always the result of black people deciding not to get angry? To turn the other cheek? James said to us that to be a Negro in America and to be relatively conscious is to be in a constant state of rage. And yet America is not enraged because we are not enraging it. We are calming it down. Every church meeting. Every town meeting. Quoting Jesus and Martin. Mothers wiping away their own tears. You studied the mind of God, Sheriff. Tell me. Tell why it is that black people’s faith always needs to be tested on both sides? Why does God take away from us, and later tell us to do nothing about it? Why doesn’t he do that to white people? Deep down, does he hate us as much as America does?”
Abigail Jones does not turn to her husband. She does not rein him in or try to control the situation.
“Why are you here?” Abigail asks them. “You haven’t made an arrest. You have no news for us. You’re here wanting something. What is it?”
Irv places his hands on the table and locks his fingers together. He does not speak immediately.
“I’m trying to understand,” Irv says softly, “what Lydia was doing halfway up an unfinished building. I can’t figure it out.”
Charles Jones is a broad-chested man in his midsixties. Physically, he has not crossed the line into old age. He carries his weight proportionately and could shift it forward if he chose to lean into his words.
Instead, he settles into them with the weight of iron: “You want us to think our Lydia was weak. I know what you’re thinking. What you’re insinuating. But she was not weak. She was a strong, courageous black woman. Something you can’t understand. So you put her in the only box you have for her. But even in death she fights against it. Look at her. Look at her,” he says, finger pointed to the picture. “She was a professor. A scholar. A woman who could look at words on a page and conjure up a universe. She stood on ideas the way people stand on the ground beneath their feet.”
Charles Jones walks into the room and places his hands on the shoulders of his wife.
“Whether she took herself into that building or whether she was pulled into it against her will, all you need to know is that my daughter was as strong in character as any person I have ever known. She was full of life. And now, as sure as we sit here, she is in heaven because the Lord God knew that Jeffrey could not be there alone and he needed looking after. So Jesus took our daughter from us to comfort that poor boy in the least harmful way he knew how, knowing that Jeffrey’s own blessed mother could not follow to look after him with two other children to raise back here in the dirt.”
Charles Jones walks them to the door. His face is fixed and is holding back whatever he might have said next. When Abigail takes hold of the handle, he turns away and retires to the living room television, leaving his wife to see them out.
The volume is turned up. There is an attack ad against Obama, calling him an affirmative action case and a false messiah.
At the door, Abigail Jones takes Irving’s hand in her own. She whispers to Irv: “You are a Christian, Sheriff? Under all that? Under the uniform and the politics and the skin? Is that the man you are?”
“Yes, ma’am. I am.”
“My children are in heaven, Sheriff. You understand that, right? Both my babies are in heaven.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Irving says. “They most surely are.”
“You leave them there. You leave them together. You leave them with the Lord. You understand me?”
“I do, ma’am. I assure you that I do.”
No children parade after the police car as it leaves the neighborhood. The radio crackles without words or news. Melinda watches the city’s skyline emerge from behind the sagging rooftops as the cars all speed up and Irv merges them onto the highway.
“Sheriff?” she says.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t understand why Mrs. Jones was talking to you about heaven.”
“Because,” says Irv, “if her daughter committed suicide by throwing herself off the building, doctrine says that right now she is burning in hell.”
A Good Burger
Sigrid is starving, so Irv turns off the main road toward a shopping mall and pulls the patrol car up to a freestanding restaurant called the Cheesecake Factory. The building looks as new as a child’s toy, with design influences from Greece, Sumeria, art deco, and Hasbro. It’s as natural as Las Vegas and as welcoming as an airport. The franchise does not exist in Norway.
“Cheesecake is a dessert,” Sigrid says. “I need something more savory.”
“That’s just the name,” Melinda says as they lock the car and walk across slabs of sandstone to the glass doors.
As they open the door, an arctic wind blasts through
