My New American Life (4 page)

The third time they rang, she opened the door but kept the chain on. She looked at them hard, each in turn. Strangers. She would have remembered.

“
Miremengyes
,” they said. Good morning.

“
Miremengyes
,” said Lula.

“Lula,” the Cute One said. “Little Sister.”

How had these guys found her? How did they know her name? Maybe they knew Dunia. Had she sent Dunia her new address? Oh, Dunia, Dunia, where was she? Best not to think of that now.

“Whassup?” said Leather Jacket. On the street they might speak Albanian, their secret code, but on this American doorstep, they showed off for each other in the street slang of their new country.

“Remind me how we're related,” Lula said.

“All Albanians are related,” said Hoodie. “Brothers and sisters.” His eagle sweatshirt was half unzipped. Around his neck, on a silver chain, hung a double-headed silver eagle.

The Cute One gestured at the SUV. “We're good friends and customers of your Cousin George.” Then he curled his lips in a way that transformed his pretty mouth into Cousin George's fat liver lips. Lula laughed, partly because it was funny and partly because it was nice to meet someone who could imitate her cousin.

“Brothers and sisters,” said Hoodie.

“Okay,” said Lula. “Got it.”

Leather Jacket said, “Congratulations. Congratulations on your work visa.”

“How do you know about that? My cousin doesn't know yet.”

The Cute One's smile uncovered a gold tooth. “Don't worry how we know. My girlfriend works in immigration.”

Lula said, “I have a great lawyer. My boss—” The quick sharp looks the men exchanged made Lula sorry she'd boasted. Her Balkan survival instinct had been blunted by the spongy atmosphere at good-guy Mister Stanley's.

Lula undid the door chain. Please don't let them steal Mister Stanley's television and Zeke's computer. But who would want Mister Stanley's ancient Motorola, or Zeke's student laptop? Maybe that would make Mister Stanley finally buy a flat screen, which would make Zeke happier than the therapist he'd seen weekly when she'd first got here and then decided to stop seeing, a change that inspired Mister Stanley to give Lula a little raise. There would be no more little raises if Mister Stanley found she'd invited these guys into his house. And maybe no green card, no citizenship. Disaster. On the other hand, they were Albanian. They called her “Little Sister” and knew her Cousin George. The Cute One was cute. And nothing else remotely this interesting was going to happen today.

The men brushed past her, then turned and, one by one, shook her hand. Two of the handshakes were ceremonial. The Cute One's was a caress. How long had it been since anyone touched her, not counting the restaurant customers grabbing her ass? She could always tell which guy it would be, and after how many mojitos. The last time she'd had sex was with a waiter, Franco, who took her to his loft in Long Island City, which he shared with three roommates. He'd showed her the sculptures he made from mattress springs he'd found on the street. She'd said they looked like space aliens, apparently the right answer, and then he told her he called it his Bedbug Launching Pad series, very nice considering that they were about to get in his bed. Mostly she remembered her surprise that a guy that drunk could get it up at all. She'd drunk quite a bit herself, or she wouldn't have been there.

“I thought you guys were brothers,” said Lula. “Up close not so much.” The same way of muscling into space was the main resemblance.

“You think I look like this guy?” said Hoodie. “Are you kidding me, or what?”

“Brothers with different mothers and fathers. Blood brothers.” Leather Jacket slashed a finger across his upturned palm. “No joke.”

Hoodie said, “Every Albanian is related by DNA.”

“So we're family,” Lula said flatly. Then she waited to find out what her three long-lost brothers wanted.

The Cute One hung back, scanning the living room as if searching for a place to hide something or a place where something was hidden. Only when Lula looked through his eyes did she see what a dump it was. Heaven, compared to Albania. All the creature comforts. Still, it was sad to have come this far and to have wound up here.

She could have made the house more pleasant, or at least less musty and smelly, but Lula wasn't the type to redecorate someone else's space. Everything from Ginger Time remained as Ginger left it—the puffy grandmother furniture, the piano no one played. Lula had developed a wary and disapproving relationship with Ginger, based on her examination and appraisal (negative) of Ginger's stuff, and on what little she'd heard (more negative) from Mister Stanley and Zeke. One bleak morning, Lula had gone through Ginger's dresser, holding the baggy cargo pants and roomy dashikis up against her body. The stretched-out granny underwear explained a lot, though not the question of why Ginger had been the one to leave. How could a woman—a mother—walk out on two helpless babies like Zeke and Mister Stanley? Mental health issues. What did that mean? Mister Stanley hadn't said.

The Cute One looked around and sniffed. What was he comparing it to, his sumptuous walk-up in downtown Bayonne? Or maybe some shack in Durrës? Why should Lula feel protective of Mister Stanley's home?

“What's that smell?” said Leather Jacket.

“The grave, I think,” Hoodie said.

“It's my boss's house,” said Lula. “My job is watching his kid.”

“We know that,” said the Cute One.

Lula hoped he wouldn't go over to the fireplace. She hoped he wouldn't look at the family photos. If she couldn't change the lamps or move the end tables, what were the chances of her saying, Mister Stanley, Zeke, are you sure you want to keep a mantelpiece full of mementos of your life with a lunatic who left you for a glacier?

The family had traveled a lot. Many of the snapshots were posed against natural wonders, mountain peaks and canyons. Their smiles were frozen, and they always looked cold, even in the desert. Apparently, they weren't the type to ask strangers to snap their photos, which showed Mister Stanley and Ginger, Zeke and Ginger, but never Zeke and Mister Stanley. Ginger seemed not to take pictures, but the travel was her idea. Lula couldn't imagine Mister Stanley and Zeke going anywhere on their own.

The Cute One held a picture toward her. From across the room, Lula saw Ginger and Mister Stanley posed against rocks at a beach. For the first time she noticed that their arms were around each other's shoulders.

“My boss, Mister Stanley,” Lula said.

“Tarzan!” The Cute One curled his lip.

“And her?” the Cute One asked.

“Ginger. His wife. His former wife.”

“Ginger the person? Ginger the cookie!”

He handed the picture to Leather Jacket, who said, “Ginger the Spice Girl. Hah!”

In a soft voice, Hoodie started chanting Albanian names and their English translations. “Bora snow, Era wind, Fatmir lucky. Beautiful Albanian names, ugly words in English.” He took a deep breath and resumed, rapping himself into a trance. “Jehona echo, Lula flower—”

“Shut the fuck up, you fucking idiot,” said Leather Jacket.

“Guys,” the Cute One said warningly.

Hoodie emerged from his name-trance like a child waking up cranky. He said, “So you and the boss . . .  ?” He joined his left thumb and forefinger and poked his right index finger through. The Cute One shot him a look.

Leather Jacket said, “Sister, disregard this ignorant donkey bent over one too many times for the Greeks.”

The Cute One said, “Okay, guys. Cut it out. I'm Alvo.”

“Pleased to meet you, Alvo,” said Lula.

“This is Guri,” said Alvo, pointing at Hoodie. “And Genti.” He indicated Leather Jacket. “Better known as the G-Men.”

Lula said, “So . . . what do you guys do?”

“Listen to her,” said Hoodie. “Already asking her brothers the rude American question.”

“Contracting,” Alvo said.

“And you're here because . . .  ?”

Their expressions were like conversations reaching back to her childhood. She said, “Would you like some coffee?” If there was ever a moment to be Albanian, this was it. A shift in the pitch of their shoulders told her she'd done the right thing.

Hoodie—that is, Guri—and Leather Jacket Genti rearranged the furniture so the comfortable chair, Zeke's chair, was at the head of the table. Alvo sat in the soft chair, the others on either side. They reached into their pockets and pulled out cigarettes.

She said, “Please don't smoke. My boss—” Zeke wasn't supposed to smoke or drink. Tobacco was disgusting. Lula's father's machine-gun cough still interrupted her dreams, less so after her hair stopped smelling of smoke, as it had when she'd worked at La Changita. She didn't think Zeke's super-weak mojitos counted as drinking. Lula bought the rum with her salary, not with the food allowance Mister Stanley gave her.

“Please,” she repeated. “If I get fired . . . what then?”

Hoodie said, “One cigarette each. Trust me. No one will know.”

Lula plunked down a soup bowl for them to use as an ashtray and stomped off to the kitchen. She ground a lot of coffee. Mister Stanley wasn't picky about much, but he did like his whole Starbucks beans. This was not a job for the timid electric coffeepot. She boiled the coffee in a pan. She had to wash off a coating of grime, but Ginger's Zen tea set would do nicely. Lula decanted the tarry sludge into delicate Japanese cups.

She brought four cups on a tray. The men thanked her. She sat in her Sunday breakfast seat, next to Leather Jacket and across from Hoodie. Leather Jacket took a bottle of clear liquor from his pocket and splashed some into the men's cups. When he looked at Lula, she nodded. The alcohol burned deliciously. Spiked coffee at ten in the morning!

“Delicious,” Lula said.

“Raki,” said Leather Jacket. “From my grandfather's mulberry trees in Gjirokastra.”

“
G'zoor
,” they said. Enjoy. Good health. Long life. They drained their cups.

If Lula had hoped for a rush, she was unpleasantly surprised when the caffeine and alcohol melted her into a puddle of self-pity. How pathetic her life must be if she was ecstatic because three Albanians had home-invaded Mister Stanley's and dosed her coffee with lighter fluid.

“Thank you,” Alvo repeated. “Little Sister, the reason we're here is we need to ask you a teensy favor.”

Lula braced herself.
Teensy favor
could mean fly to Dubai and back, coach both ways, with a dozen condoms full of heroin up her ass.

“We need you to hold on to something for us. It's nothing.” As Alvo leaned toward her, his handsome smile emphasized that it was nothing.

Lula pictured columns of shrink-wrapped white bricks stacked in Mister Stanley's garage. Good-bye sweet library walks, good-bye innocent cocktail hours with Zeke. From now on, she would constantly be looking out the window.

Lula said, “You don't even know me—”

“My point exactly,” said Alvo. “There is no Reese's Pieces trail for ET to follow from us to you. Except for your Cousin George and my aunt in the immigration office.”

His aunt? Five minutes ago it was his girlfriend. But who was Lula to judge someone for not keeping his story straight? Better an aunt than a girlfriend. She was pleased to hear it.

“Hold on to what?” she said.

“A gun,” said Alvo. “A little gun.”

Lula sighed. She should have known. Maybe the white dust on their jeans was an illegal substance. Who drove SUVs like that except coke dealers and pimps? Contractors so rich and successful they had to go around armed?

Lula said, “What kind of little gun? I know about little guns. Also bigger guns.”

“Seriously?” said Guri. “No insult, you're a girl.”

“Seriously.” Lula ignored the girl remark. At twenty-six, she liked it.

“My dad was a gun nut,” she said, then decided to leave it at that. For weeks they lived on polenta, but Papa got his semiautomatic. She knew each gun's uses. Assassin guns, hunting guns, snake guns. Her father was a pussycat, but he could get reckless when he drank. Then her mother would lock up his guns, and they would yell about that. They'd wrestle over the car keys, and sometimes—this had turned out to be the fatal part—sometimes her father won.

He used to borrow her uncle's car and, not having a son, take Lula for target practice in a garbage dump or picnic spot, depending how hard you looked. This was after Communism, when you could get Italian movie magazines, from which he'd tear photos of Madonna and nail them onto a plank and teach Lula to aim for the heart. He had nothing against Madonna, he just had a strange sense of humor. He'd probably thought it was funny to aim his car at the NATO tank and stomp on the gas. He'd lost all their money and their house in the pyramid scheme and sneaked over the border to sell guns, as if all the Kosovo Liberation Army needed was a middle-aged guy hawking tribal muskets and broken Nazi pistols. Lula had grown close to her Aunt Mirela, with whom her family lived before, and with whom she moved in again after university. When Aunt Mirela died of a kidney ailment that could have been cured somewhere else, Lula spent her tiny inheritance on a ticket to New York.

Alvo said, “Small enough for a shoe box. Easy.”

“Easy,” Lula said. “Famous last words.”

Leather Jacket said, “Easy is one word.”

“Shut up, asshole,” said Hoodie.

“Easy,” Alvo repeated.

She wished she knew what the gun had done and why they needed to hide it. Why couldn't they just throw it down a storm drain? But why waste a good gun when they could find an Albanian girl to sit on it like a hen until it hatched baby guns? The Americans had laws for everything having to do with guns. Her father would hate it here. He would have been one of those who said all the wrong people had guns. If someone found the gun, Lula could get deported, visa or no visa.