Doubles (23 page)

“Yeah. Seven in a row.”

“I don’t understand how the lottery works. Don’t you pick the numbers?”

“The machine generates them.”

“What machine?”

“The one at that BP near University Mall.”

“Near the recycling bins?”

“Yeah.”

“So that doesn’t mean anything. That was some blip in the machine or something.”

“All I’m saying is four has always meant bad things for me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When I was four, I got meningitis.” It was why she was deaf.

“I spent the last two decades dealing with this craziness from Kaz, and look, what did you just tell me? That that stuff didn’t even matter. If we could beat the Simon brothers without magic, you can buy a lottery ticket without dying.”

I put my arm around her and my face back into her neck. Without her long hair tickling my face, it was more comfortable than it had ever been. No matter how familiar the furniture was, I’d never seen it from this angle before. All the pieces of my previous life were here, scarred, tattooed, and new. I fell asleep. When I awoke, the dust was still just barely lit with the last of the daylight, and one bird still sung in the pines outside. Anne was asleep on the floor beside me, and I let her stay there, pristine and naked and new.

I found Manny asleep in the driver’s seat, his head leaned back against the headrest, the sun full on his face. I couldn’t imagine ever being relaxed enough to sleep in direct sunlight on the side of a road
while my friend had sex with his divorced wife a lawn away. I coughed. He opened one eye. “You single?”

I held up the papers.

“How’d it go?”

I nodded, nonchalant and slow.

“Single man ain’t nothing but a big ole donkey dick waiting to lick the lamb!” Manny said. He started the Fiat and pulled into the road, then looked over at me and slammed on the brakes. “Look at me,” he said. “
Look
.”

I looked at him.

He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and said, “You sneaky motherfucker.”

“What?”

“You just had divorce sex, didn’t you?”

 

That night, while Manny slept on the floor in a sleeping bag that I had bought in high school, I walked back through the dark streets and stood by the fence at the edge of Anne’s yard. Her windows were dark. I let the mosquitoes suck my blood while the benevolent insects stayed hidden, grinding the air into soft shredded bits with their frantic, pulsing song. Then the windows burst into a flash of light. Three blue rectangles hovered in my vision like lost ghosts across the lawn.

I had a note in my pocket written on unlined paper, folded eight times. Its thick, clumsy corners were already grubby. It said, WE CAN START OVER. It said, I KNOW THIS IS STUPID. It said, I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU DID. It said, I LOVE YOU! I couldn’t remember the last time I’d written a note to anyone that said more than I’LL BE BACK IN TEN MINUTES. I approached the entrance of the fence and laid my finger atop the corner of one wooden picket. Just past the threshold the windows flashed again. I stopped, one foot past the gate. I envisioned Anne in her old nightgown, so thin you could see her breasts through its sheer
fabric, lovely and smiling by herself, holding the camera’s remote control at the end of the hallway. The neighbors stepped onto the stoop of their house, accompanied by a small black poodle on a leash. The dog bounced on its back legs and yapped in a torrent of alarm. I waved. Once we returned from Dubai, I would be living permanently within a half mile of Anne. We had our whole lives now, just blocks apart. I backed into the street. I didn’t need to give her this note. I could tell her in person when it was right. The windows filled with the flash of another photo.
A note
, I thought. She would have laughed. I fingered one grubby corner in my pocket as I walked back home, through the thick, pulsing night, to my coach in a sleeping bag on my floor. I was hopeful. The future was a familiar landscape, just waiting to be revisited.

MRS. JACKSON WAS
a large black woman who had looked forty years old for twenty-five years. She lived next door to Kaz in Midway and had been a cashier at the Kroger on Smith Level since I could remember. Throughout all of it she had smelled like coconut lotion.

“Slow,” she said, lifting a banana to the red laser. “How come I didn’t see you at the funeral?”

“For who?”

“These on sale?”

“Just regular.”

“You kidding me?” The banana would not read.

“I’ve been out of town. Who?”

“Son.” She held the banana against her large stomach. “You for real?”

“No. I mean, yeah.”

“I hate to be the one to tell you. I sure do.”

“What?”

“Miss Sue got up in a car wreck.”

“Got up in one?”

“Sure did.”

“Is she alright?”

“I said she ain’t.”

“What?”

“I said Sue passed away two Wednesdays back.”

“Glover?”

“Don’t you play with her boy?”

“Sort of.”

“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you.”

“I.”

“He’s a good son. He’s been running that place all on his own.”

“What place?”

“His mother China place.”

“Sue-nami?”

“Yes sir. With his dad, but he ain’t good for nothing.” She put the banana into my bag without scanning it. “You go on and see him.”

 

Two cats scurried away from Manny’s Fiat as he flew down Rogerson Drive. He shot through a stop sign. He rumbled over a speed bump. Once, in the hospital during Anne’s coma, a very tan nurse with multiple tattoos of roses and barbed wire had said, “Fuck cars. That’s everything that comes in here is car wrecks. I’m serious. See that, that right there? So I’m like, fuck cars.” But I didn’t say anything to Manny. I felt like action was beyond consequence. When I drove, I drove like an old woman, yet I still almost killed my wife. Manny’s recklessness seemed to run just as much risk. And then there was Sue. She had probably never gone over 55 in her life. And now she was dead.

I wanted to call Anne and tell her, but I was sure she already knew. Since our afternoon together on the floor of her cottage three days before, we had emailed twice, nothing more. It made me jealous that she hadn’t told me about Sue. Part of me was confident Manny had heard and had kept the knowledge from me on purpose. We were leaving for Australia in days. He didn’t want anything else on my mind.

We screeched into the lot at Sue-nami. Inside, the photos of me and Kaz still hung on the walls in the same spots on the same dusty nails.

“They need to take this shit down,” Manny said. “They got like, what, your old chewing gum up here?”

A beautiful young Korean woman came to meet us at the entrance. If she recognized me from the photos on the wall she didn’t say so. Manny clasped his hands together, bowed, and said, “
Hai
.”

“Kaz working?” I said.

“Who?” she said.

“Kaz?”

“Mr. Glover?”

“Yeah.”

She gave a small bow and, before gesturing to our table, receded into the kitchen. Manny and I sat at one of the tables centered with a large range, the ones from which Sue’s chefs would flip shrimp tails up and into their hats, where they would dramatically knock salt shakers together as they juggled, and upon which they would light pools of cooking oil that would plume into the air in tongues of flame. The dining room was empty now, the other range-centered tables dark and cold.

Kaz stepped out of the kitchen. He wore a white apron over a white polyester shirt and pants. He had a towel over his shoulder and wore a drooping white pipe of a hat. I had seen him in whites thousands of times before, but this was different. With the yellowed forest wallpaper behind him, he looked like a Japanese butcher lost in the woods.

“
Konichiwa
, bitches,” Manny said.

Kaz slowly approached.

“Check you out, brother,” Manny said. “You’re keeping it real.”

“Hey,” Kaz said. He took the hat off and let it dangle at his waist.

“We heard about your mom,” I said.

“How you hanging?” Manny said.

“I’m alright,” Kaz said.

“Loved that girl,” Manny said. “Midway ain’t never gonna see anyone like Sue Glover again. Ever.”

Kaz nodded.

“How’s your dad?” I said.

Kaz shook his head. “Had to get his other foot amputated.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Ooof,” Manny said.

“Diabetes.”

“Where is he?”

“In the kitchen.”

“Here?”

“Yeah, he’s helping me out,” Kaz said.

“What? He mixing up some oodles of noodles back there, sushi style?” Manny said.

Kaz laughed.

“We just came by to see how you were,” I said.

“The fuck,” Manny said. “We want some
menus
. We’re going to eat all the rotten fish you got in this place.”

I looked at him. Our plan was to pay our condolences and go. But that grin on his face said we weren’t going anywhere.

When Kaz returned to the kitchen, Manny said, “That dude is keeping it
real
. He told me once when we were talking about Midway that doubles was his ticket out, but doubles ain’t a way out of anywhere. What’s fucked up is that this”—he held his hand out towards the empty dining room and the faded woods on the wall—“this is his ticket out.”

An old black man in a white sweat suit rolled out of the kitchen in a wheelchair. He looked like a balled-up piece of leather. The prosthetic was gone. Both legs ended in stumps held in by sweatpants tied off at the ankles. He wheeled what was left of himself towards us. I was seized by nervousness. This was the man who had set me on my career path as a professional athlete. Nothing could have seemed less likely.

“Boys,” he said, his voice a whisper through the residue of Kools.

“Mr. Glover,” Manny said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Sue loved you boys.”

A lump rose in my throat. I breathed deeply.

“How’d you get that one, Mr. Glover?” Manny said. “How’d you fool her into coming back with you?”

Mr. Glover laughed. “She didn’t have nowhere else to go.”

“You did alright,” Manny said.

Mr. Glover laughed again. He looked around. “She did alright. You boys eating?”

“Kaz’s bringing out some menus,” I said.

“Menus?” Mr. Glover said and waved a pink-palmed claw in the air. I was filled with relief. I’d never even seen a Sue-nami menu. I would have had no idea what to order. “It’s good of you boys to come here. Where you been?”

“Casablanca.”

“Woooo,” Mr. Glover said, eyes opening wide. “That is the
life
.”

In Casablanca it seemed like every wall was crumbling. In one building, paint fell off in chunks before my very eyes. The hotel I stayed in had broken windowpanes that let mosquitoes pour in all night. The civic infrastructure made getting to the courts a daily impossibility. If you did get through traffic, the cabs ripped you off. The organizers arranged for food that gave half the players immediate diarrhea. But there was no way I was going to tell all that to Mr. Glover.

“Of all the gin joints in all the world,” Manny said, and Mr. Glover wheezed a breathy laugh.

“It is good to see you boys. Sure is.”

He rolled past the woods back into the kitchen and left the late afternoon dining room to me and Manny. The young lady who had seated us turned on the range and set a large ceramic carafe of hot sake on it. Then soup. Then seaweed salad. That was the last of what
I could identify. Small plates with skewers of meat arrived. Dumplings filled with ground meat and spices. Spring rolls that looked like internal organs. Then the boat, filled with sushi in whites, oranges, blacks, reds, greens. Shrimp tails stood at attention. We ate it all. They sent a second boat. Manny’s giant lips enveloped anything that came before them. I ate almost as much. At one point Manny mixed soy sauce with his sake and held it into the air. “It’s all made of the same stuff,” he said, then drank it.

Kaz emerged from the kitchen and said, “That
unagi
still as good?”

I didn’t know what
unagi
was. But I nodded.

“Hell yeah,” Manny said.

“Want more?”

“Yeah, but I can’t fit it,” Manny said. “Your mom was here, man, she’d walk this stuff out.”

Kaz chuckled.

“Hey,” Manny said. “You can do it. Walk on us.” He lay on his stomach on the old dark carpet. “Slow, come here. Get down here.”

I looked at Kaz.

“Slow!”

I lay on the floor beside my coach.

“Come on,” Manny said. “Our food don’t know what to do. Walk on us.”

Kaz took off his shoes and tentatively stepped onto Manny, who unleashed a roar. Then he stepped on me. Each step felt dangerous. I had plans to go to Australia within the week. I couldn’t throw out my back. But as Kaz made his way up and down our spines, both of us moaning and gasping, I started to relax. I opened my eyes and saw, through a hedge of carpet, Kaz’s father in the light of the open kitchen door. He moved a cigarette in and out of his mouth.

At the door, Manny said, “We should do something sometime.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Kaz nodded vigorously.

“I’ll call you,” he said. “Yeah.”

Manny and I drove through the crickets and the frogs and the wind without talking. We didn’t need to. We had a trip to Australia to plan, hours in planes together and a few weeks in a hotel before it ended and we started over again back at the UNC tennis center. It hadn’t been discussed, but I knew Kaz had heard we’d gotten the job.

That night, after Manny fell asleep, I walked into the cold January streets and watched my breath appear when I neared a streetlight, then fade from sight as I passed. I walked across Anne’s lawn and knocked on her door. The neighbors stepped outside with their dog, and I waved. They stared at me like I was a stranger, because I was. I knocked again. No one answered.