he went to his job at the grocery, where he was a stocker, so he could pick her up after her shift at Burger King. Sometimes on Friday nights they went to the movies or to a club. Mostly they spent hours in his beat-up Chevy, parked on a quiet street where they wouldn’t be disturbed by gangs or cops, talking or listening to music or singing along with the radio-or groping. Evenings when she knew her mother wouldn’t be home, they went to her apartment. He fixed her grilled cheese sandwiches and listened to her sing; she initiated him into the mysteries of the female body. Tangled together in bed afterward, he felt an easefulness that was foreign to him. Usually, he had to be constantly doing something, pushing himself. But at these times he felt he could lie there forever.
Then, as the oleanders began to bloom and the orioles started flying back north and universities began sending acceptance letters, Cameron and Imani’s relationship grew strained. After graduation, Imani was going to increase her hours at Burger King (her mother said it was time she helped with the rent) while she took classes part-time at the local community college. She couldn’t understand why Cameron couldn’t do something similar. The manager at the grocery liked him. Her friend Latisha, who worked one of the cash registers there, had informed her that he’d offered Cameron a position as assistant manager-with benefits. “In a couple years,” Imani told Cameron, “we be saving up some. Get our own place. Get married.” She offered him a shy smile. When Cameron said that he would find that kind of life stifling, she flinched as though he’d slapped her in the face. On the increasingly rare occasions when she sang, the blues tunes he had loved earlier seemed loaded with reproach: “Crazy He Calls Me,” “Lonely Grief.”
They argued almost every time they met. Imani would cry and invoke sayings from her grandmother, a Jamaican obeah woman; Cameron would feel guilty and attempt to console her. If they were at her apartment, they would end up in bed. On the day he learned that a prestigious private college had offered him admission and a sports scholarship, she came into the grocery to say hello. Exhilarated into garrulity, he told her his news. She called him an Oreo, speaking loud enough for his coworkers to hear and snigger. It was the last straw for him-that she would want to ruin the moment of his greatest achievement. When he took her out to the parking lot to tell her this was the end, she informed him that she was pregnant. He could see she was scared, but beneath the fear was a kind of triumph: now he would have to stay with her and take responsibility for the baby.
Cameron was furious-and terrified. The ghetto seemed to be closing in on him. He told her that he refused to be manipulated. He was going to college. If she thought she could stand in his way, she was mistaken. He recommended an abortion. He would scrape together the money to pay for it. He couldn’t do any more than that.
At the mention of abortion, she stopped crying and grew very quiet. “You want to kill our baby?” she asked. “It so important for you to get away from your people?”
He started saying that the mess he saw every day around him was not his people, and he wasn’t alone in wanting to get away. All around him young men were enlisting in the army, being shipped to the jungles of Vietnam. But she was wringing her hands. No, she was making some kind of a complicated design in the air with her fingers. Was Imani putting some kind of voodoo on him? He shook off the ridiculous idea.
“It do you no good,” she said. “No matter where you run, you be ending with ashes in your mouth.” She walked across the parking lot. He considered hurrying after her, grabbing her by the hand, saying he was sorry. But that would reopen the coffin of their relationship, and he didn’t have the energy to go through the ups and downs of the last months again. She would probably come running to him soon enough-for the money, if nothing else.
Over the next weeks he waited-at first with trepidation, then with concern, then with a strange disappointment-for her to make contact. She didn’t. One day Latisha cornered him in the canned foods aisle and told him Imani had had an abortion the week before. He couldn’t bring himself to ask Latisha-whom he didn’t like-if Imani was okay. Instead he inquired if Imani needed money-could Latisha ask her? Latisha gave him a hard look and walked off. Cameron felt terrible, but the rush of getting ready for college didn’t allow him time to dwell on the whole complicated mess.
REMINISCING ON THE BUS STOP BENCH HAD MADE CAMERON late, and this annoyed him. He jogged the last few blocks (though jogging through this kind of exhaust-laden air sometimes brought on his asthma) and arrived at the hospice sweaty. The sweat wouldn’t matter too much since he worked in the garden.
When he had started volunteering, they had tried him with the inmates (that’s how he thought of the patients, prisoners with a life sentence). He sat with them, read to them, adjusted pillows. But watching the seemingly interminable process of dying made him nervous and snappy, and after a couple of incidents the management had asked if he could do something with the barren strip of land behind the building. Now the Pacifica Hospice Care boasted a garden, lush with lavender and daylilies, where patients could be wheeled in to watch the hummingbirds flit around brightly colored hanging feeders.
As he hurried down the passage to the back, where gardening supplies were kept, Cameron was surprised to see Jeff emerging from a patient’s room. Jeff tried to engage Cameron in conversation, but Cameron sidestepped him with a curt hello. When, a half hour later, he saw Jeff wander into his garden (that’s how Cameron thought of it), Cameron felt a frisson of annoyance. Was the man following him? Cameron turned his back on the intruder and went on planting sweet alyssum. But Jeff sat on a bench peaceably, ate a sandwich, and watched the clouds. When he finished eating, he sat very still with his eyes closed. After an hour, he left quietly. Cameron, intrigued by the stillness, made some inquiries and learned that Jeff was a lay Buddhist priest. The management had asked him to come in and minister to their Buddhist patients.
In the following weeks, Cameron saw Jeff every time he came into the hospice. Jeff ate his lunch in the garden and meditated there. He always gave Cameron a friendly nod but made no further attempts to talk. (Cameron was surprised to feel a twinge of disappointment at this.) One day, Jeff didn’t eat but sat rubbing his eyes tiredly until Cameron couldn’t stand the suspense and asked what was wrong.
“Louie died,” Jeff said.
Cameron suggested that maybe that was a good thing. Louie, a skeletal young man with AIDS, had been suffering for months.
“He was so afraid of death,” Jeff said. He punched the bench in frustration. “Nothing I said could comfort him.”
Cameron abandoned his weeding and sat beside Jeff on the bench. That was how their friendship began.
TO HIS BITTER ASTONISHMENT, CAMERON DID NOT DO WELL IN college. First, he developed severe allergies that deepened into asthma. It could have been from moving to a different part of the country, but he couldn’t help thinking of it as punishment. The Bricanyl cleared up his breathing at first, but soon he had to increase his dosage for it to work. It felt like he was moving underwater. He couldn’t perform as well as before. Imani’s words echoed in his bones:
CAMERON BEGAN TO SPEND A GREAT DEAL OF HIS FREE TIME with Jeff. Jeff had a small apartment in the Mission District and taught Comparative Religion at a local college. He also volunteered at a small Tibetan monastery, helping with everything from paperwork to fixing leaks to chauffeuring the monks, who had fled from Tibet to a small Himalayan village before arriving here. Some days, Jeff cooked, odd dishes with flat noodles and tofu and seaweed, or mushrooms that plumped up when you soaked them in water, dishes that Cameron was distrustful of at first but grew to like. Jeff was no saint; he tended to impatience and took it hard when things didn’t go the way he wanted them to. But Cameron admired the quickness with which he was able to return to cheerfulness.
Jeff had a way of listening without interruption or advice that Cameron appreciated. As they sat on the balcony of Jeff’s apartment with steaming mugs of coffee, he found himself telling Jeff things he hadn’t shared with
