Taylor and Aria ate without talking. A warm meal had been so hard to come by that it was a pleasure worth the silence. Having become accustomed to one meal a day and some days none, Aria struggled to finish the chili. By the time she fished the last bean from the bowl, her stomach was sore. Taylor, who finished before she did, announced he was going to take a short nap and to wake him up whenever she was ready to go. He lay down in the grass and covered his face with his jacket.
Aria leaned back on her elbows to try to relieve the ache of being too full. She watched Imani serving the other people in the line. A young man had made himself at home on a cardboard box beside her. He was slumped over his bowl of chili, spooning it into his mouth boorishly and laughing. From the familiarity of the body language and talk between them, Aria guessed that they must know each other personally. His head was covered in a purple do-rag. He wore an oversized puffy blue coat and oversized jeans that rode so low they didn’t quite cover his boxers. The knock-off gold watch he was wearing on his left wrist made the brown skin, under the jungle of black tattoos on his arm, look copper. He had thick lips and wide-set dark eyes. Even from a distance, Aria could see that his eyes caught so much light, the reflection in them made his pupils look white instead of black. In fact, the reflection made his eyes look like he was crying even when he was smiling. Underneath his carefully constructed image of bravado, Aria could see the child still alive in him inside his eyes. A five-year-old boy looking at the world as if he was still watching his father leave him. He seemed to be forever crying without crying at a loss still unresolved within him.
Aria switched her attention to the cook. Imani seemed to her to be the epitome of a big black woman. Her skin was the color of hickory. The entire length of her coarse hair was regulated into box braids, two of which she had tied together in the back, as if in a last-minute attempt to keep them out of her face and to tame the rest. She spoke with a twangy paralanguage common to the African-Americans who had spent their youth on the South Central side of the city. The way she moved her body was both slow and loose. This mannerism of casual familiarity made people feel at ease. She wore a pair of black-rimmed prescription glasses and a loose-fitting blouse with stretch pants over her heavy curves.
After a time, the young man got up and gave Imani a sideways hug. “You be good now, don’t you be gettin’ into any trouble!” she yelled after him when he turned away. He afforded her a sideways smile and a wave before bounding across the street. He held the belt of his pants up as he jogged.
Aria watched him check and recheck his watch on the side of the street until an iridescent black low-rider car drove up behind him. She watched him get into the car and drive away without ever knowing whether they had anything in common with each other. Without ever saying hello or waving goodbye.
She poked at Taylor’s side and said, “What do you want to do?”
Taylor pulled the coat down from his face, squinting against the sunlight. “I don’t know,” he said, realizing that neither of them had thought past trying to seek out a meal. “There’s a temp office like ten blocks away. They might have gotten something new in for me.” He said it like a question more than a statement.
“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” Aria said. “I can stay here and wait for you to get back if you’d like.”
Taylor was taken aback, having assumed that she would go with him and wait outside the office instead. “Don’t you want to come with?” he asked.
“No, I don’t want to just stand around outside. Besides, I can talk to her about whatever she was talking about before,” she said, pointing to Imani.
Taylor suddenly seemed insecure about the idea of wandering the city alone. But he didn’t want to risk being pushed away by pressing her to accompany him. “OK,” he said. “It’ll only take me like two hours. I’ll meet you back here and we can go back home.”
He pulled his backpack up onto his back and, before navigating his way to the sidewalk, he said, “Cross your fingers for me.” She smiled and gave him a thumbs up. The way he walked was so obviously gay that she caught herself worrying about his safety, strutting down the road in this part of town unaccompanied. She felt compelled to join him to avoid the guilt she would feel if anything happened to him because she wasn’t there. But Aria wanted to talk to Imani away from Taylor’s tendency to blindly trust people and accept their assistance, no matter the hidden consequence. She wanted to see if Imani’s offer was legitimate or truly full of shit.
Aria watched Imani, waiting for what looked like a good time to cut in. That time never came. By the time she was about to make a move to go over and talk to her, the woman had disappeared inside the building, leaving a younger girl in charge of the table, and didn’t come back out for so long that Aria decided the opportunity had closed. She walked briskly in the same direction as Taylor had gone, hoping that if she walked fast enough, she would be able to catch up with him. Soon she found herself standing at an intersection two blocks away from the church, not knowing which way he had gone. She stopped to lean against an inhospitable brick wall for long enough to decide whether
