DC Noir

East of the sun by Jennifer Howard

Hill East, S.E.

In that neighborhood, they said, you learned fast where trouble came from. All you had to do was keep your sense of direction and walk the other way. Hill East was still a little rough around the edges but most of the people wanted to be friendly. Stay away from the hot spots and say hello to everybody: That was the rule.

A month after we moved to Potomac Avenue we knew the places to avoid — mostly north and east, like the intersection of 17th and Independence, where the crackheads hung out, and the New Dragon, an all-night takeout joint over at 13th and C that sold liquor to go. You didn’t want to mess with the kind of people who patronized that joint. They didn’t go there for the food.

The Dragon was where the local pusher known as the Wheelchair Bandit did business. Having a disability didn’t make a person any more law-abiding than anybody else, apparently. Instead of a motorized chair, the Bandit had an old pit bull — I know it’s a cliché but it’s the truth — who used to pull him around when he wasn’t staked out for customers just outside the restaurant. Some people on the neighborhood listserv said you could hear the jangle of his keys — he carried at least fifty of them on a belt chain — and the panting of his dog before you saw the man himself. If you heard those sounds, they said, you’d better get yourself clear.

Nobody knew whether the food was any good at the New Dragon or whether in actual fact they even served any. Nobody moved to Hill East for the food anyway. Good pizza, decent Mexican, KFC — that pretty much covered the range. Thai takeout, if you were an office type with a little more disposable cash than the longtime residents, the federal workers and postmen and steady jobbers who’d bought their places forty years ago and couldn’t believe what those old houses — nothing fancy, just solid 1920s brick numbers with modest front porches and envelopes of land front and back — went for these days. Couldn’t believe their property taxes, either. They cashed in or they stayed put until they couldn’t afford to stay put any longer. I used to wonder, once in a while, where they went when they left.

Drugs and real estate: two good lines of work to be in on the Hill if you weren’t a Republican or a lobbyist, or maybe even if you were. We didn’t care for the Republicans or the dealers, but none of that made trouble, not for us. It was just life in a town lousy with people who had too much money — the folks looking to buy up anything they could get their hands on — and even lousier with people who didn’t have enough to do anything at all. Not everybody could be a winner.

Overall I couldn’t complain about how things were going. Baseball had come back to town after thirty-five years — the Nationals were even on a streak, the winning kind — and after years paying good dough to bad landlords, we had a house of our own.

We felt lucky, finding that house. Lucky to have a front porch and a little bit of land to call our own, lucky to have a bedroom for each kid — Dani, who was almost four, and her baby brother Jack — when a lot of people we knew had theirs double-bunking. Especially if they lived in the older row houses to the west, over in the lockdown zone around the Capitol and the Supreme Court where the Homeland Security folks concentrated their loving attention. For the most part they left Hill East alone. There was nobody fancy here to protect, no essential governmental personnel, unless you counted the famous residents of Congressional Cemetery two blocks over. John Philip Sousa and J. Edgar Hoover were good neighbors.

I couldn’t say that of everybody. In the mornings, on my way to the Metro, I got in the habit of picking up the Styrofoam containers and soda cans thrown out of car windows by the people who blew down Potomac Avenue. You could find all kinds of things in the bushes along that strip — condoms (used), CDs (unplayable), every type of wrapping known to the fast-food industry.

The weirdest thing I found was a baby doll the color of an old copper penny. I say I found it but in fact it was Dani who did, on one of the aimless stroller expeditions she and the baby and I used to take down the alley behind the house when we had time to kill before dinner. The backyards of our block were as diverse as the residents. A couple had been shrubbed and landscaped until they looked like pages out of House and Garden. Others, like ours, were crammed full of kiddie gear, plastic slides, and sandboxes shaped like enormous frogs and ladybugs. A few, including William and Ida’s next door, had evolved over decades from outdoor storage to junkyards where unwanted objects went to die: broken-down jalopies, odd pieces of wood from home-renovation projects abandoned halfway through, steel meat smokers that looked like mini-submarines.

Next to William and Ida’s on the other side was a group house for the mentally disturbed, muttering sad cases who boarded a van each weekday morning and were taken off to some useful occupation and brought back each night to Potomac Avenue. At home, if the weather was nice and even if it wasn’t, they drifted along the sidewalk like so much human litter. That’s not a very nice way of putting it. But whenever I saw Louis and Juanita and the other residents, whose names we didn’t know, they looked emptied out like the discards I picked up along the margins of the avenue. If they were sad, though, they didn’t know it. They used to try to bum cigarettes off us. They never could remember that we didn’t smoke.

The backyard of the group house was a wasteland where even grass was too depressed to grow. One scraggly tree managed to stay alive there and shelter, under its few remaining branches, a row of those cheap molded-plastic chairs you could pick up for a song at Kmart or Wal-mart. Early in the morning and late in the afternoon, the inmates of the group house would park themselves in those chairs like so many city birds — what my mother would call “trash birds,” grackles and starlings and the like — and smoke themselves closer to an early grave. I could have done without the smoke that sometimes carried across William and Ida’s backyard and into our kitchen windows.

The alley doglegged across the block, connecting the streets — 16th and Kentucky — that angled into Potomac on either end. Two lines of garage-style, brick-walled storage units faced each other across a narrow strip of concrete, sealed off from the alley by a chain-link fence that didn’t look like it would keep the rats out, must less any would-be burglars. That eyesore filled the lot right across from us, although it was interesting to speculate what might be hidden in those units. William said he’d seen a Rolls Royce in one of them, but that might just have been wishful thinking.

The day we found the doll, Dani was investigating a section of wall on the storage unit that bordered the alley. Three or four bricks had come out and created a gap. Right on the edge of it sat the doll, naked as the day it came off the Chinese assembly line. Other than that it looked right at home.

Over Dani’s strenuous objections I took it inside, put it in a place where she wouldn’t see it — who knew where that thing had been? — and forgot about it. I put a note in the alcove where we’d found it — We have your doll, come ring the bell at… — and then I forgot about that too. You forget a lot of things when you’re looking after a couple of kids.

Dani asked me if it belonged to William and Ida. I told her I didn’t think so. They had been there as long as I’d been alive, long enough for him to be called Mister William by most of the young people in the vicinity, while Ida stayed just plain Ida. They’d raised their kids and now they liked things quiet.

As for the young people, well, I didn’t much care for the teenagers who liked to hang out and yell at each other in the little park across the street, one of those orphan triangles of public space you find in D.C. where three or four streets come together at crazy angles. The teenagers scared me the first few nights we were in the house, but they weren’t real trouble. They just acted like they were. They liked to shout it up after hours when the rest of the neighborhood had locked itself behind doors for the night, but I never heard that they did anything but make noise. They weren’t part of the New Dragon posse. If you really wanted to freak them out, all you had to do was drive by slowly, roll down a window, and say hello in a big cheerful voice.

Weirdly enough, it was Juanita, not the teenagers, who freaked out. Like most of the group house inmates she looked older than she probably was — hair gone gray years before its time, half her teeth gone too, skin the color and texture of dried apricots. What really got to me was how she liked to wear latex gloves, the kind doctors put on for intimate exams. Lord knows where she got them, but they didn’t conjure up good associations.

One morning I came out and found one inside out on the sidewalk in front of our house. The fingers were still half-folded in on themselves, as though it had been pulled off in a hurry. Juanita stood about ten feet away watching me.

It was April, barely. March had come in colder than usual and stormed out again without leaving much in the way of spring behind it, and the first days of April struggled to catch up. I felt sorry for the flowers who’d pushed their way up expecting sunshine and mellow air and instead gotten the dismal leftovers of a winter that wouldn’t shake itself loose.

I was in a hurry that morning, trying to get my daughter in the car. Ida had stopped by to watch the baby for a few minutes; Dani was late for school already, and it wasn’t a day to linger out of doors. Juanita was out there having the first smoke of the day, bundled up and shapeless in the ratty down parka that had found its way to her through some dubious act of hand-me-down charity. I gave her a good morning that was as cheerful as I could make it under the circumstances.

“Man keys. Godababeedahl?” She cleared a wad of phlegm out of her throat — did she have to hawk it onto the sidewalk? — and looked at her shoes, Chuck Taylor All Stars a size too small and almost worn through at the toes. Without a full set of teeth she might as well have been speaking Chinese. On a good day I caught every third or fourth word. She was gesturing now; her arms windmilled furiously. “Fur man. Keys.”

“No cigs, Juanita.” I shrugged as I got Dani buckled into her car seat. I didn’t like her getting too close to any of the group house residents. I had no reason to think they were dangerous, but with people like that you might not know until it was too late. “We don’t smoke.” I nodded in Dani’s direction as if that explained everything Juanita needed to know.

Her hands dropped to her sides all of a sudden, as if her battery had run out. Then she groped in her pocket for something that turned out to be a piece of paper. It looked familiar. When she handed it to me I saw why. It was the note I’d left in the alley in case the lost doll’s owner came looking for it.

Juanita handed me my own note and wrapped her arms around herself, the gesture of someone cold or in need of comfort, and shook her head back and forth so hard it looked very likely she was doing her damaged brain more harm. “Babee. Doll. Man keys. Man keys!”

“We didn’t know it was your baby.”

“I’m a big girl!” Dani shouted from the backseat of our

“Not you, honey.” I hated myself a little every time I used the word “honey” with one of my children, especially when I was in the kind of mood I was in this morning. “She’s talking about her baby.”

“Baby DOLL.” The Ls of the last word hung in the cold air. Juanita gave me a big gummy smile that looked more anxious than happy. I saw now why she kept her arms wrapped around herself — she was shaking. “You get it back.” Her head bobbled forward and back, forward and back. “Keys. He need it.”

“All right,” I said. She was more nuts than I’d thought. I made a mental note to tell Dave to keep an extra-close eye on the kids when she was around. “Sure.”

“You get it, okay? Okay?” The arms were flailing again.

Dani made a noise that might have been a giggle and might have been something closer to fear. Kids always know when someone isn’t right.

“I’ll try.” I gave Dani’s car seat straps one more tug, even though I knew they were tight enough. She let out a howl of protest. “Sorry, honey. Mommy’s finished.” Juanita watched us pull away from the curb, her mouth forming the same words over and over.

That weekend I dug out the doll Dani had found. It was in even worse shape than Juanita. It had been loved hard, if you could call that kind of treatment love. Some people did. The doll’s head hung at an angle that would have killed a human baby, and if there were a Doll Social Services they’d want to know who’d tried to open up Baby’s belly with a screwdriver and where her missing leg had gotten to. I flipped the switch on her back — she was supposed to cry, probably, or say — but nothing happened. A piece of crap like that wasn’t worth wasting a couple of good batteries on. I had enough baby noise in my life already.

If Juanita wanted a baby, I thought, she could at least have one in decent shape. When Dave took the kids to the park for the usual Sunday afternoon run — “I’m going to run ’em like dogs,” he told me, “tire ’em out good” — I rummaged through the plastic bins of discarded toys in the basement. Sure enough, there was a baby doll in one of them, a chubby thing in a onesie with stains all down the front from Dani’s attempts to feed it pureed peas. Dani had moved on to other things — horses, Barbies, getting her little brother into trouble. The doll’s blue eyes looked a little crazy now, and it was a couple shades lighter than Juanita’s, but at least it had all its appendages.

I took it over to the group house — I’d never had cause to venture up those steps — and knocked hard enough to be heard over the TV that was always on. The day caregiver, one of a rotating 24/7 crew whose names I never learned, answered the door. He was a beat-up-looking guy in his fifties who wore the same shapeless clothes as his charges. If you spent enough time around people like that you couldn’t help picking up a few of their habits.

He looked ticked off when I told him what I wanted, but he shouted Juanita’s name into the dim interior of the house anyway. From one of the upstairs rooms I heard a radio playing salsa and wondered if it was WHFS, the indie radio station I’d listened to growing up. It had gone Latin a few months ago. I didn’t listen to the radio much anymore, but I missed that station. It was the soundtrack of my youth.

Juanita came down the stairs like a ghost. She grabbed the doll from my arms, held it out a little distance from her, and gazed into its crazy eyes as if she saw the very truth of heaven there.

“Nut job,” the caretaker said under his breath.

I thanked him anyway and left Juanita alone with Baby.

I had a bad dream that night, the kind that makes you wake yourself up just to stop it. But when I was fully awake I couldn’t remember what had scared me. I sat up in bed and listened — no noise at all from the children’s rooms. I listened for the teenagers but they had all gone home. It was almost 5 o’clock. A mockingbird sang his morning warm-ups in the park across the street. Dave breathed next to me, the intake and outtake of his breath regular as waves along a quiet beach. The only noise from the street was a bus that groaned its way to a halt at the four-way stop on our corner, then heaved itself into motion again and was gone.

The noise reminded me — trash day. The trucks would be coming through before it got much lighter, and as usual Dave had forgotten to put the can out the night before. I shrugged on my bathrobe and felt my way down the stairs to the back door.

I’d just pulled the can out from its spot next to the garage when I saw her. She lay face down in the little walkway that cut between the rental storage units across the alley. Someone had dragged her behind the chain-link fence to die.

She had on that ratty parka, the green of it dark where it had absorbed some of the blood. I couldn’t see where it all came from, just that there was a lot of it spread out around the body, dark and congealed into wrinkles like the skin on a cup of chocolate pudding.

“Mommy?” All of a sudden Dani was standing next to me, eyes full of sleep. I didn’t have time to stop her from seeing what lay there — I hadn’t heard her follow me out the door. She was pointing at an object half-covered by Juanita’s body. “Mommy, is that my doll’s leg?”

“Don’t tell them you gave it to her.” Dave sat at the kitchen table with a cup of black coffee between his large hands. He never drank his coffee black. That’s how I knew it was serious — as if a body in the alley hadn’t told me that already. “You’re asking for trouble.”

“Trouble is finding a woman shot dead in the alley behind my house.”

“They don’t have to know it came from you.” Family life had brought out the conservative, don’t-make-waves side of Dave. It wasn’t my favorite thing about him. “What possessed you, anyway? You hate those people.”

“I don’t hate them. I just worry about the kids.”

The cops were still out back doing whatever cops do when they have a murder scene on their hands. It only looked like they were standing around shooting the shit with cups of coffee in their hands. They’d sat me down at my own kitchen table and taken a statement, then gone over it again to make sure I had my story straight. There wasn’t much to tell, after all.

“Haven’t had a bag lady in a while,” one of them, a fat little guy whose belly kept trying to bust out of his uniform, said to his partner. I liked the partner — he’d kept himself trim and he had nice manners for a cop. “Little long in the tooth to be playing with dolls.”

“She wasn’t a bag lady,” I said. “She lived down the block.”

The fat one laughed in a way that really soured me on him. “Different kind of bag lady, lady.” He pushed his hat back on his head. His hair could have stood a couple of good latherings with industrial shampoo. “Know what a mule is?”

The Thin Man saved me the trouble. “She ran drugs for a cripple who works the territory east of here.”

“East of the sun,” I said. I didn’t mean anything by it. Just some old story I used to read as a kid, a story about a girl who has to find her one true love east of the sun and west of the moon. “Over at the New Dragon. The Wheelchair Bandit — that’s what the neighborhood listserv calls him.”

“Nice neighbors you have.” Fatty picked a dark speck out of his teeth.

“Sometimes they try to cut a deal on the side and make a little extra cash,” Thin Man said. “They’re not real smart, these people.”

When they finished with me, they went out in the alley and walked up and down, making notes in those pads they carry around. I watched them for a while and that’s when I realized I hadn’t said anything about the doll. They’d found most of its parts spread through the alley. If I hadn’t mentioned it to Dave first, I probably would have gone straight out and told Thin Man, who had parked himself against the patrol car that blocked the alley. He was making more notes. Notes about splatter patterns and exit wounds and time of death. Notes about the grisly end of a woman whose worst crime, as far as I’d ever known, had been to try and bum cigarettes off people who didn’t have them. What was she doing with scum like the Bandit? She was probably too crazy to know what she’d gotten mixed up in. All she’d wanted was a baby of her own.

“Think of the kids,” Dave said. We’d been sitting there while. His coffee must have gotten cold by then, but he didn’t even complain like he usually would. “You want them to get dragged into this? You want Dani on the stand telling a courtroom full of people how her mother gave her toys away to the drug dealer down the block? The cops have all the information they need.”

I couldn’t see how any lawyer in his right mind would put a four-year-old on the stand to tell a story about a doll, but I let Dave talk me out of what I knew I ought to do. He had a way of making certain things seem unnecessary, like you’d be a damn fool to hassle yourself.

It wasn’t a dream that woke me up that night. As I passed the doors to Dani and Jack’s rooms I heard the baby give out a creaking little sigh and settle himself back to sleep. I went down to the basement and got out Juanita’s first doll, the one she’d never see again. I held it in my hands and tried to get the head to stay straight, but it couldn’t. When something gets that broken, you can’t fix it.

I got a flathead screwdriver out of Dave’s toolbox. I turned the doll over and looked at the screws that held the doll’s battery compartment shut. They were almost stripped, but if I pressed hard enough into the metal groove I could catch just enough traction to get them turning. You had to want it bad, though, to get that job done. After I dug the last one out of its hole, I used the tip of the flathead to jimmy the cover off. It popped out more easily than I was expecting and the tip of the screwdriver slammed into what should have been a battery — but whatever it was gave under the point.

In the space where Baby’s batteries should have been — and crammed inside her torso and up into her poor dangling head — were plastic bags about the size of the half-sand-wich-sized Ziplocs I used to pack up snacks in to take to the playground. I didn’t need to know the name of what was in these.

I sat on the floor in the laundry room in my nightgown and stared at that doll and it stared back at me and its eyes weren’t crazy at all, not one bit. It knew the score. It knew that one of these nights I’d hear the noise of the Wheelchair Bandit’s keys and hear the panting breath of that pit bull and my family would never get clear, ever.

Unless.

I put every screw back in as tight as I could get it. I worked the flathead until my knuckles ached. A little bit of residue had settled into the gap where the doll’s head had separated from its neck; I blew every last speck of it out. Then I collected the doll and myself and found the back door key and let myself out onto the deck. I didn’t bother to get my slippers. I had to get that thing out of the house.

The lonely streetlight by the storage units shed an orange glow that just reached the spot where I’d found her. I could see the dark circle on the ground where Juanita had bled her life out with only an empty doll for company. I could see the gap in the bricks where Dani had found the thing I held in my hands.

I set that hateful thing back in the darkness where my daughter had found it and told myself I didn’t hear the jangle of keys, the dog panting right behind me. I told trouble I didn’t want any part of it. Nobody does, when you think hard about it. Isn’t that the truth?

Solomon’s alley by Robert Andrews

Georgetown, N.W.

Solomon’s alley parallels M Street, Georgetown’s main drag. Running behind Johnny Rockets, Ben & Jerry’s, Old Glory Barbecue, and the Riggs Bank, the alley connects Wisconsin Avenue on the west to 31st Street one block east.

Battered blue dumpsters line the alley. Solomon had puzzled over the dumpsters for several years. Finally, he’d decided that their BFI logo stood for big fucking incinerators. That job done, he’d taken on thinking out the likely origins of the five ancient magnolia trees that shaded the stretch of alley where he parked his two Safeway carts.

On this Tuesday morning in September, he sat in his folding canvas deck chair, part of him pondering the magnolias while another part got ready for his day job, watching the Nigerian. At 10:00, like clockwork, the white Dodge van pulled up across Wisconsin at the corner of Prospect, by Restoration Hardware.

“Hello, Nigerian,” Solomon whispered. He settled back to watch the sidewalk come alive. Each morning’s setup was a ballet, a precisely choreographed routine, and Solomon was a discriminating critic.

Most mornings the performance went well: every move efficient, rhythmic, smooth. Some mornings it didn’t: some mornings everything fell apart in a cranky series of busted plays.

The driver eased the van forward so its front bumper toed the white marks on the pavement. He switched off the ignition and got out to go round to the back.

Waverly Ngame was a big man. Two-fifty, six feet and a couple of inches, Solomon figured. His skin blue-black… shin… like the barrel of a .38.

First out, a long rectangular folding table, the kind you see in church basements. Ngame locked the legs open. With his toe and wood shims, he worked around the table until it rested solid on the uneven brick sidewalk.

He disappeared into the van and came out with racks of white plastic-coated wire-grid shelving under both arms and a grease-stained canvas bag in his left hand.

In swift, practiced motions, he picked the largest of the shelves and braced it upright on the side of the table facing the street. With one hand he held the shelf, with the other he reached into the canvas bag and came out with a large C-clamp. Twirling it with sharp snaps of his wrist, he opened the jaws just enough to slip over the shelf and the table edge. He tightened the clamp, and moved to repeat the process on the other side of the table.

More shelving and more C-clamps produced a display stand.

Now the van disgorged Ngame’s merchandise in large nylon bags and sturdy blue plastic storage boxes. Soon, Gucci and Kate Spade handbags hung alluringly from the vertical shelving while Rolex watches and Serengeti sunglasses marched in neat ranks across the top of the church-basement folding table.

He slow today, said Voice.

“He did good,” Solomon contradicted. He didn’t want to give Voice shit. He did that, give Voice any slack, Voice start up. Voice need his pills? Solomon tried to remember the last time he trucked to the clinic, then gave it up. Long as it was only one Voice, he could handle it. It only got bad when he had to put up with the whole goddamn family yelling and screaming, scrambling things inside his head.

Ngame climbed into his van. That was Solomon’s cue. He got out of his chair and walked to where the alley ran into Wisconsin. There, he could keep a closer eye on Ngame’s stand.

Ngame eased the van across Wisconsin and into the alley, waving to Solomon as he passed by. He pulled the van into a slot by the florist shop on 31st Street where he had a deal with the manager. Locking the van, he walked back up the alley toward Solomon.

“Nobody bother the stand, Waverly.”

Ngame palmed Solomon a folded five.

“A good day, Solomon.”

As a boy in Lagos, Ngame had learned his English listening to BBC. He sounded like a Brit announcer except that he had a Nigerian’s way of softly rounding his vowels and stressing the final syllables of his sentences.

Solomon shook his head. “Watch yourself today.”

Ngame gripped Solomon’s shoulder.

“Voice tell you that?” he asked. He searched Solomon’s face with clinical curiosity.

Ngame’s concern irritated Solomon. “Hunh! Voice don’t know shit,” he said crossly. “Solomon telling you.”

Something passed behind Ngame’s eyes. He looked serious. “You hear anything?”

“Just feel,” Solomon whispered to keep Voice from hearing, “just feel.”

Ngame smiled. “You are a belt-and-suspenders man, Solomon.”

Solomon pouted and tucked the five away. “You don’t have belt and suspenders, Waverly, you lose your ass.”

Ngame took that in with a laugh. He squeezed Solomon’s shoulder, then turned and made his way across Wisconsin.

In the street by Ngame’s stand, a crow worried at the flattened remains of a road-killed rat.

And down the block from the stand, Solomon saw two men get out of a maroon Crown Vic. One black, one white. Both big. Both cops.

With a little finger, Ngame made a microscopic adjustment, poking a pair of sunglasses to line them up just so with its neighbors. He didn’t look up from putting fine touches to his display.

“Detectives Phelps and Kearney. Good morning, sirs.”

“How’s business, Waverly?” José Phelps asked.

Ngame gave the sunglasses a last critical look, then turned to face José and Frank. He smiled a mouthful of perfectly straight glistening teeth.

“This is America!” Ngame exploded with exuberance. A-mare-uh-CUH! “Business is always splendid!” A wave of his large hand took in the sidewalk. “One is free to sell and free to buy… buy and sell.” He caressed a handbag. “This purse, for example—”

José pulled Ngame’s string. “Mr. Gucci gets his cut?”

Ngame got the tired look of a long-suffering teacher with a slow student. “Detective Phelps! Do you suppose this is a real Gucci purse?” He swept a hand over the watches. “Or that these are real Rolexes?”

José’s eyes widened. “They aren’t?”

“And do you suppose that any of these good people who come to my stand believe they are buying real Guccis or real

Rolexes?”

José opened his eyes wider.

Ngame spun up more. “And do you suppose that my customers could buy a real Rolex?”

“Oh?” José said, egging him on.

“So who is hurt?” Ngame was deep into it now, eyes wide in enthusiasm, hands held out shoulder-high, palms up. “Not Mister Gucci! Nor Mister Rolex! As a matter of fact, Mister Gucci and Mister Rolex ought to be pleased with me! Yes, pleased! My customers have learnt good taste here at my stand.” Ngame’s chin tilted up. “When they get wealthy, they’ll buy the real Gucci and the real Rolex.”

“Like Skeeter Hodges,” Frank Kearney said.

Ngame gave Frank a heavy-lidded somber look. “He didn’t buy here. He kept the real Mister Rolex in business.”

“What’s the talk?” José asked.

Ngame scanned the sidewalk. He did it casually, but he did it.

“Conjecture?” Con-jec-TURE?

Another glance, this time across the street. “The Puerto Ricans say it was the Jamaicans. The Jamaicans tell me it was the Puerto Ricans. And the American blacks” — Ngame shrugged — “they all point their fingers at one another.”

“No names?” Frank asked.

Ngame shook his head. “No pretender to the throne. But then again, Detective Kearney, it was only last night.”

Ngame paused a beat, then came up with a watch in his hand, gold-gleaming in the morning sun.

“A Rolex President? I will give a discount.”

Solomon watched the two cops get in their car and leave. In the street the crow continued working on the dead rat.

“You watch yourself today, Waverly,” he whispered, and swung his gaze along the alley, past Ngame’s van, toward 31st Street.

Motherfucker’s runnin’ late. Voice came up inside Solomon’s head, peevish, accusing.

“He be along,” Solomon told Voice, “he be along.”

When?

As though on cue, tires squealed. A white Navigator roared in off 31st. Sprays of gravel ricocheted off dumpsters. Partway down the alley the Navigator turned right and disappeared into the Hamilton Court garage.

“See?” Solomon whispered to Voice.

Moments later, Asad the Somali appeared, coming up the ramp carrying a large brief case. A tall, thin man, he had a snaky, boneless way of moving. His tight-fitting yellow suit had a long jacket with five buttons and his skin was a light cocoa and his black hair lay slicked in thinning waves against his skull.

As usual, Asad’s two goons flanked him. Gehdi and Nadif. Solomon had decided they were brothers. Maybe twins, whose orangutan mother had fallen out of an ugly ree.

Two weeks ago, Asad had come to Georgetown and leased a dingy storefront, paying cash. Solomon knew that storefront. A single window displayed garish men’s clothes. The display had never changed. For years, players came and went. But he’d never seen any of them wearing those clothes. That shit only fools or Somalis would wear. Place never had sold anything legal. The Somali wasn’t going to start now.

Asad didn’t waste time setting up his network. He and his goons started with the street vendors. The vendors signed on to buy watches, sunglasses, and handbags from Asad. Asad gave his new partners discounts on the junk. C-phones came with the deal. In return, Asad got a cut on the profits and he would know what was going on the streets. All the vendors had bought in except the Nigerian.

That first day, one of Solomon’s carts had been sticking partway out into the alley. Gehdi misjudged his clearance and scraped the Navigator’s fender.

Asad had stood there and watched with his hard black marble eyes while Gehdi and Nadif punched Solomon to the ground then kicked the shit out of him. They threw his carts out into the middle of Wisconsin Avenue. Things he’d collected, his precious things. The Nigerian had saved some, but the rest, his clippings, his notebooks, they’d been swept away with the street trash.

He’d been beaten before. But never in his alley. That they had done those things to him there shamed him. The alley had provided for him, and when danger came, he had been unable to defend the alley in return.

He gonna make the call?

“Sure he is.” Voice didn’t know its ass from apple butter sometimes.

Looking past Solomon and toward Ngame’s stand, Asad reached into the briefcase and pulled out a fat c-phone/walkie-talkie. Flipping it open, he held it in front of his face.

Solomon saw Asad’s lips move. A second or two passed and Solomon heard one crackling reply, then another.

“One more,” he said to Voice.

Asad waited, holding the c-phone out from his face. Gehdi and Nadif swiveled their heads back and forth, searching the alley.

They expectin’ Santy Claus?

A third crackle. Asad replied and stowed the c-phone away in the briefcase. He said something to the two goons and the three began walking toward Solomon.

They gonna hit you? Hurt you today?

Solomon got a tightness in his chest. How it had been came back to him like it had every day since.

Curled up on the alley bricks. Crying and slobbering and puking. Waiting for the goons to swing another steel-capped toe.

They had grunted with the effort and they had cursed Solomon because beating a man while he was down was hard work and it made them sweat and they blamed him for that.

He lowered his head and pretended to doze. Through slitted eyelids, he saw the shoes approach, then pass.

“Not today,” he whispered to Voice. “Not today.”

As soon as he thought it safe, he lifted his eyes and followed the three Somalis approaching Ngame’s stand.

And along Wisconsin, the other vendors watched.

Ngame saw them cross Wisconsin. He turned and busied himself tightening a C-clamp. He started counting silently. At nine, he heard the sliding scuffle of shoe leather on the sidewalk behind him.

“I need a decision,” he heard Asad say.

He didn’t turn, but continued fiddling with the clamp.

“You got mine,” he said, “I don’t need a partner.”

“Every businessman needs a partner. Suppose you get sick?”

“I am healthy.”

A twisting, tearing at his shoulders, and his elbows were pinned behind him as he was spun around to face Asad.

Gehdi stood to Asad’s right, and Nadif held him tight, the goon’s sour breath on his neck.

“You may be healthy,” Asad whispered, smiling, “but men have accidents.”

Gehdi dropped his hand into his jacket pocket.

Ngame flexed his knees and sagged, loosening Nadif’s grip. Then with a violent burst, he straightened up. He raised his heavy boot and brought it down with all his strength on the top of Nadif’s foot. He felt bones grind as Nadif’s arch collapsed.

Nadif was still screaming as Ngame swung his foot forward. His toe caught Gehdi in the crotch, lifting him off the pavement. Gehdi gasped. His hand flew out of his pocket. A switchblade clattered to the sidewalk.

Almost casually, Ngame clenched Asad’s collar with one hand, twisting it tight around his neck. Stooping slightly, he scooped up Gehdi’s switchblade. He held it up before Asad’s bulging eyes. He pressed the release. Asad stared hypnotically as the silver blade flicked open. Ngame slammed Asad up against a lamppost and brought the blade against the Somali’s throat just below the Adam’s apple.

Gehdi lay curled on the sidewalk clutching his balls, and Nadif, sobbing, stood on his undamaged foot, hanging on to a parking meter.

In a swift motion, he pulled the blade away from Asad’s throat, cocked his arm, and brought the knife forward in a stabbing motion.

Asad let out a high-pitched scream. The crotch of his trousers darkened.

A fraction of an inch from Asad’s ear, Ngame drove the knife into the lamppost, snapping its blade.

“You’re right,” Ngame said to Asad in his best BBC voice, “men have accidents.”

The rest of the morning, Solomon watched Ngame at his stand. The Nigerian went about his business as though nothing had happened. Asad and his goons had disappeared into the storefront. The other vendors in sight of Ngame’s corner were careful not to be seen paying attention, but it seemed to Solomon they moved like men tiptoeing around a sleeping beast.

Around 3:00, Solomon, eyes half-closed, was drowsing in his canvas deck chair. For seconds, he paid no attention to the car that pulled up to the curb by Ngame’s stand, until the driver-side door opened and the black cop got out.

Oh shit, Voice said.

Solomon ignored Voice and sat up to get a better view of the cop and Ngame.

“You already find out who killed Skeeter?” Ngame asked.

José Phelps picked up a pair of Ray Ban knockoffs and examined them. “Not yet.”

“Those are ten dollars.”

José put the shades back, taking care to line them up just

“Little while ago, we were over at Eastern Market,” he said. “Buzz was, you had a run-in with Asad.”

“News travels fast.”

José didn’t say anything but left the question on his face.

Ngame shrugged. “A discussion. A business proposition.”

“You know,” José threw in, “DEA’s interested in him.” Ngame nudged the shades José had held. “That’s good. I’m not.”

“You ever thought to moving somewhere else?”

Ngame gave José a hard look. “I have been here almost ten years. I am somebody here.”

José picked up the Ray Ban knockoffs again. This time he tried them on. He leaned forward to check himself out in a small mirror hooked to the stand. He angled his face one way, then the other.

“Absolutely Hollywood,” Ngame said.

José did another 180 in the mirror and handed over a ten. “You need anything…”

Toward evening the alley was getting dark. Solomon didn’t need a watch to know Ngame would be closing up in an hour unless business was good. And today business hadn’t been good. Not bad, but not good either. He saw Gehdi come out of Asad the Somali’s store, stand in the doorway, and look down the block toward Ngame. Gehdi had a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He stood there for a moment as though listening to a reply, then turned and said something to someone in the store. He shut the door and made his way across Wisconsin toward the alley. Solomon slouched in his canvas chair, pulled the American flag he used for a blanket up under his chin, and pretended to sleep.

Gehdi passed within a few feet of Solomon, and Solomon watched him disappear in the darkening alley toward the parking garage. Across the street, Ngame started disassembling his stand. Solomon began his night critique, judging how Ngame stowed the bulky handbags into the nylon sacks, taking care to dust each one carefully before putting it away

Where Gehdi?

Voice surprised him. Feeling a flush of irritation and guilt, Solomon realized he hadn’t been paying attention to his alley. If Gehdi was going to bring the Navigator around, why wasn’t he out by now?

Minutes passed. Ngame was working on the last of the handbags. Solomon squinted down the alley, trying to pierce the deepening darkness.

What’s that? Voice asked.

“What’s what?

That!

“You seeing shit,” Solomon scolded, but even as he said it something moved, the slightest shift of black against the deeper black in the shadow of Ngame’s van. And then nothing.

For a moment, stillness returned to the alley, then a figure crossed the sliver of light coming from between Old Glory and Johnny Rockets.

Paying no attention to Solomon, Gehdi walked by and returned to the store.

Solomon waited a moment or two, then slipped down the alley toward Ngame’s van and the parking garage.

When he got back, Ngame was breaking down his stand, stacking the wire grate shelving, and bagging the C-clamps. His merchandise was packed away in the nylon sacks and the blue plastic storage boxes.

Up the street, Asad came out, followed by Nadif. Nadif walked with a heavy limp. In one hand, an umbrella he used for a cane. His other cluched Gehdi’s shoulder. Asad locked up, keyed the alarm, and the three made their way toward him.

Solomon smiled. One gimpy Somali. Man gonna remember this day, long as he live.

The three passed by him and soon headlights swept the alley as the Navigator came up the garage ramp. It stopped where the alley intersected 31st, then took a right toward M Street and disappeared from view.

“Goodbye, Somalis,” Solomon whispered. He got up, folded his flag carefully, and hung it over one of his Safeway carts. He crossed Wisconsin to stand guard over Ngame’s goods while the Nigerian fetched his van.

It was 9:30 when Ngame slammed the doors of his van. He palmed Solomon their customary closing-of-the-day bill.

“This a twenty,” Solomon said, offering it up.

Ngame waved it away. “We had a good day today.”

“Business wasn’t that good.”

Ngame got into his van and started the engine. He leaned out the window and patted Solomon on the shoulder. “Business isn’t all that makes a good day.”

Canal Road runs northwest out of Georgetown along the Potomac River. Round a bend, the bright lights fade and it becomes a country road. After a mile, Waverly Ngame noticed headlights coming up behind him, speeding at first, then taking a position fifty yards or so behind and hanging in there. He checked his rearview. The lights behind him belonged to Asad’s white Navigator.

And somebody in the passenger seat had an arm out the window, pointing something at him.

“Don’t get so close,” Asad said. “Drop back some.”

Gehdi eased off the gas. He gave Asad a leer. “Fried Nigerian.”

Asad laughed and pressed the button of the garage door opener. He imagined the sequence: the electronic command sent to the door opener’s receiver, the receiver that would shoot thirty-six volts into the blasting cap, the blasting cap embedded in the quarter pound of C-4 plastic explosive that the magnet held to the gas tank of the Nigerian’s van.

An hour later, José Phelps ducked under the police line tape.

Floodlights washed out color and turned the carnage two-dimensional: an axle with one wheel attached, its tire still smoldering, grotesque twists of metal strewn across the roadway and into the trees, a man’s shoe obscenely lined up on the asphalt’s center-stripe, a portion of the owner’s foot still in it.

Renfro Calkins huddled with two of his forensics techs at the far side of the road, looking into the drainage ditch.

José walked over. “ID?”

Calkins shook his head. “Gonna have to be DNA. All we gots is hamburger.” He pointed into the ditch. “That’s the largest.”

José walked over and looked. It took him several seconds to make out the thing that had been an arm. “What’s that in the hand?”

“Looks like a switch for a garage door. Best guess, these guys set off a bomb in their own vehicle.”

“How’d they manage that?”

Calkins shrugged. “They not gonna tell you, José.”

Gonna be a quiet day today.

Solomon looked down his alley, then across Wisconsin to where the Nigerian was setting up his stand.

“For once,” he said to Voice, “you got your shit together.”

The light and the dark by Robert Wisdom

Petworth, N.W.

They called him Bay Ronnie but I don’t know why. People in the neighborhood said he used to live around here but him and his people moved a long time ago. They said he was mean. Crazy-mean, like he’d rather take a switchblade to you than talk. He wore shades, a black dobb, Dak slacks or Sansabelts, silk socks, and Romeo Ballys. Black as tar, with pure white around the eyes. He would always come down singing from up Sherman Circle way. On Saturday morning, the 22nd of August, you could hear that ugly, husky voice: “…It’s a thin liiiine between love and hate/It’s a thin line between love and hate…”

Sunday, the 23rd of August, was a muggy and humid morning. It also marked the last sermon Reverend Yancey would preach at the old Gethsemane Baptist Church. Gethsemane had been on that hilltop at Georgia Avenue and Upshur Street for twentysome years. The church was set to be “tore down,” as all the adults were saying around me. “It gon’ be tore down by Monday mornin’.” Torn down to make room for a Safeway. The church was so small I couldn’t see how a big old grocery store was gonna fit, but I didn’t know nuthin’ about buildings. I was eight years old at the time. The youth and senior choirs would sing in a big service that day. My sister was in the youth choir and my mother taught Sunday school.

We moved into this two-story house on Crittenden Street between Georgia Avenue and 9th Street in the ’50s. There were a couple of white families when we came in, and everybody was friendly, but they had all left the neighborhood maybe a year after we moved in. Just as we started to play together, the white kids had to move someplace else. There were other friends too — Jon, Brian, Mark, and Lisa Rammelford — who lived around the corner on 9th Street before we arrived, along with Darryl Watson, a cousin of my sister’s friend Joyce, who was around most of the time.

At some point, like most of the other people on the block, my mother and father started renting out rooms in our house. Some were family, like cousins Ivy, June, and Neville, and all of us Jamaicans and Trinidadians ate together. There was always loud laughter and somebody telling you what to do. When we first moved in, my parents took in some black Americans and a Chinese man, who were all real different from the West Indians — Miss Ruby, Mr. Palmer, Miss Lucy, and Mr. Price. Mr. Kinney and his come-and-go wife were Americans. They stayed in the room that looked over the backyard and were pretty nice and quiet. There was Tommy and Doris (or Clay and Liston, as my father called them), who were also American. All the Americans and Mr. Lee, the Chinese man, kinda kept to themselves and ate different foods, like grits, which Mr. Kinney taught me to make with butter for breakfast.

Mr. Lee was a mystery. He always locked the door to his room, even when he was home or just going to the bathroom. He was real polite. When he came home, he’d stand in the living room and look at everybody and bow and say something under his breath with a big grin, like, “…Harerow…” Sometimes his strange speaking went on for many minutes. Then he’d go upstairs for the night. My father loved it, he’d stand up and bow and smile. Then he’d have a big laugh when Mr. Lee left and tell us, “That man got good manners.” It got to the point that when I heard Mr. Lee’s key in the front door, I’d go to the kitchen so I wouldn’t have to do the greeting.

All three bedrooms in the house were rented out, which left the living room and dining room. My parents slept on a bed in the dining room and my sisters and I shared a foldout sofa-bed in the living room. This felt normal to us. My moth was always saying this setup was just for a little while and it helped them make ends meet.

There were a lot of times that I didn’t like the folks who stayed at our house. I didn’t appreciate my mom cooking for everybody, and I thought they were stupid when they asked where Jamaica was or turned up their noses at ackee and saltfish or boiled green bananas and mackerel. But everybody knew food was always cooking at our house or at the home of one of our aunts or numerous cousins who lived nearby, so there were always people around and we always felt safe.

Still, there was a lot I wanted to understand about black Americans. Sometimes I would sneak into their rooms when they weren’t home. Not that I was looking for anything, but I was curious to know who they were — their smells, how they were different from us. Mr. Kinney’s magic shave smelled like rotten eggs; he said he used it so he wouldn’t get razor bumps, but it stank. Snooping in his room one day, I opened the can to see what it looked like and spilled it all over the floor. I swept it up and put it back in the can and cleaned the floor, but then it started smelling like rotten eggs, so I left and prayed that the scent would disappear. If he ever knew what happened, he never said. In the other rooms I would find clothes that didn’t get hung up, leftover fried fish sandwiches brought home from takeout, suitcases that never got unpacked, framed pictures and snapshots of smiling kids with missing teeth and shorts and barrettes. In some of the pictures taken long before I was born, the young men and women wore tweed suits and hats, their kids in front of placid monotone backdrops of trestled bridges over duck-filled English ponds, with Queen Elizabeth always somewhere in the background. But never any smiles. No Jamaican joy — only stern faces. All kinds of people were coming and going; why my parents chose them over other people was another mystery to me.

Everything became clear to me when I woke up that Saturday morning, August 22. The smells of cakes and pies being baked, greens being cooked, and chickens being fried settled like a cloud over the whole neighborhood. The Petworth Parents’ Club, headed by Mrs. Florence Billops, was holding one of its four-times-per-year dinners and bake sales. The money raised from these events paid for annual community trips for parents and kids to places like the New York World’s Fair, Hershey Park in Pennsylvania, and stuff like that.

So every mother in the neighborhood had started early in the morning, making her specialty. This meant me and my friends would have to hang around all day in case our mothers needed something from one of the corner stores, which they always did. Then we’d get the money and take off running through the alleys, pop over fences, shout at the friends who got to play kickball, and run in sweating to Mr. G’s or Chuck & Danny’s midnight delicatessen. Mr. G was this old — I don’t know, eighty years old maybe — heavyset bald-headed Jewish man, his fingers thick and curled up. He spoke with an accent I never figured out, maybe German, and all he ever did was grunt when we slid the money on the counter or if we told him, “My mother said she’ll pay you on Monday…” Then we’d take off again, racing three blocks to see who’d make it back to the front porch first.

Mom made peas and rice, cornbread, potato salad, greens, curry chicken, and fried chicken. We’d start taking the food to Mrs. Billops’s by 10 o’clock, and people would be coming into the neighborhood and double-parking all afternoon. In the evening, all my father’s buddies would start arriving for their weekly dominos games. Every week it was at a different house — this week it was ours. My father and his friends also worked “serving parties” in rich white households or embassies; you could tell when they had one of those jobs cause when they came over, everyone’s arms would be filled with trays of hors d’oeuvres and bottles of scotch, rum, ginger ale, beer, and all kinds of expensive-looking stuff.

Mr. Christian, Mr. O’Connor, Mr. Palmer, Daddy Shaw, and my father would go to the basement to play “cards,” as they called dominos. Upstairs in the kitchen, my sisters, cousins Ivy and June, my mom, and whoever else dropped by would heat up hot combs and turn the radio to WOL while they pressed each others’ hair. The air in the house filled with the smells of “My Knight” hair pomade and curry chicken, and with laughter from the kitchen, the booming voices from downstairs, and Martha Reeves singing “Jimmy Mack.”

I was in the living room watching Saturday night movies on TV when the screen door to the house swung open. It was Doris, who lived in the front room upstairs with her common-law husband Tommy, and you could tell she was drunk. Everybody in the kitchen went quiet.

“Hello, Miz Wizzdom, I’ma, I’ma… You fixin’ Valda’s hair? You shoulda waited for me, I’ll do it. Hey, suga…” She was getting ready to squeeze my little sister’s cheeks.

“Doris, gwan upstairs and sleep,” my mother coaxed.

“Ah, Miz Wizzdom, y’all think I’m drunk, but I ain’t been drinkin’. Where Tommy? He come back in yet?” She was slurring and thoughts were running from her mind to her mouth, getting her in deeper shit with the women in the kitchen. I was peeking out from my chair in the living room.

“Come here, Bobby, take this upstairs for me, will ya, hon?”

“No.” Mom didn’t allow any of the tenants to tell us what to do. “No, you take your things upstairs yourself. Bobby, gwan back to your TV.”

“Shit. Y’all bein’ like that, thinkin’ y’all something special. Y’all ain’t nuthin’ but some black nigger Jamaicans.”

Mom’s hand was on cousin Ivy’s arm. She was ready to jump.

“That’s enough, Doris.” The name was spoken in a way that said this was the last bit of politeness coming. “You don’t cuss me in front of me children. If you want food, there’s food—”

“I ain’t hungry.” She was trailing a shirt or something on the floor behind her.

Doris was a big-boned woman, maybe in her thirties, from South Carolina. Black-skinned and thick. She wore red lipstick and nail polish and loved to party. She already had false teeth and sometimes pushed the bridge out when she talked. She was always smoothing her beehive — “I got good hair,” she would say.

But tonight you could feel everybody was tight-jawed. From downstairs came the rumble of men’s voices; they couldn’t hear what was going on since the door to the basement was closed. Mom had always felt sorry for Doris and tried to help pull her life together. Mom had to put her out once already, then Doris came back and promised that she on a good track. But this was the second weekend she had come in drunk. By now, everybody knew that when she had been drinking, it meant she and Tommy were gonna fight.

“Tommy, you up there…?!” she shouted to nobody.

I walked around to the dining room and saw my mother staring at Doris with that red-hot comb in her hands. “Don’t you dare talk fresh in my house!”

That was it. Even drunk Doris knew better than to push this woman.

“You tek yourself upsteers and don’t bother comin’ back down ’ere” — each word slow and quiet, with no fear. Doris went upstairs and we heard her door slam.

“She gon’ have to go, Miss Inie, cause she nuttin’ but trouble. You can’t keep feelin’ sorry for sumtin’ like dat…”

Doris stayed up in her room, but the mood in the kitchen changed. Everybody spoke in hushes. “Lawd have mercy,” was my mother. “I know, I know,” was cousin Ivy. “You should tell Daddy…” from my sisters. “No…” from both older women.

This went on for half an hour until Ivy took June home. The game was breaking up downstairs, and we were pulling out the bed to get ready for sleep, then Slam!

Booming footsteps rolled across the ceiling above us, furniture was pushed, a body shoved… voices muffled, a man and a woman… My sisters and I looked wide-eyed at the ceiling and the swinging chandelier. The glass pieces were tinkling, catching some light from the streetlamps outside and making strange dancing patterns across the ceiling and walls.

BOOM Two bodies fell together, like Bruno San Martino and Bobo Brazil, and it was as if we were watching from underwater.

Then the door upstairs opened and sound came rushing out.

“I’MA KILL YOU, MUTHAFUCKA!!” Doris banshee-screamed.

My father was up from the basement and in the hallway shouting. Tommy pushed past him, muttering, “She crazy, Mr. Wisdom, crazy and drunk. I’m through—”

Doris was running down the steps. “I’ma get you! You ain’t no good, I know you been seein’ that bitch!”

Tommy was out the door.

“Doris—” my father started to say.

“I ain’t talkin’ to you, you on his side. Where he at?!” Doris screamed.

My mother huddled us into a corner. “Unna just stay pon the floor… Elly, come back in, let that fool ’oman go.”

Blam!

“Omigodalmighty!” My mother was on top of us. I was on the bottom, holding my little sister but wanting to look out of the window that we were now under.

Blam! Blam!

I could hear Tommy far off, shouting, “Woman, you crazy, you done shot that man!”

For a tornado of minutes there was more shouting, crying. I was straining to look out the window. My mother was yelling at me to get down, then yanked me away.

“What’d I do?” I demanded. “I didn’t do nuthin’… Doris shot him!!”

“Don’t say nuthin’! Just shut you mouth…” She was crying.

I could see that Miss Lucy, the other American tenant, had made it to the middle of the stairs and was humming and mumbling to herself: “…You let me see, hmmhuhp, those people are trouble, you know…”

My father was out front. “Ya nah come back in my ’ouse.”

My mother: “Elly, don’t let har back in.”

By now, all the neighbors were out and we could hear police sirens coming down Georgia Avenue and around 9th Street. Doris was out front crying, “I’m sorry, I’msosorry, I’msorry… Tell Tommy don’t leave me…”

My mother and older sister moved out to the door.

“Miz Wizdom, don’t let the police take me. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it.”

To get my little sister to stop crying, we started jumping up and down on the bed, trying to reach the chandelier. Trying to make it start swinging again.

A little while later, I was falling asleep while the police stood in the hall talking to my mother and father. Miss Lucy was sitting on the steps picking at her feet and minding everybody’s business. My sisters and I were in a heap on the bed. I heard Tommy come in to get some things. “Say goodbye to the kids for me.”

A fresh breeze blew across my face. I opened my eyes to find that the sun was up. My mother came in to wake us at 7:30 a.m. on Sunday, August 23.

“Mom, is Doris in jail?” was the first thing I thought to say. I wanted to know if that room would be empty. If I could finally move up there and have my own room. It was the dead-center of the mid-Atlantic summer. Already the air was wet and heavy. The cool night breeze was all but gone and we would slowly drown the rest of the day in the sweltering summer heat. My older sister went upstairs to the bathroom. My little sister rolled up in her pillow for the last few minutes she could steal. I sat in the window. The street was quiet. I saw Reverend Gilmore come onto his front porch with his Bible under his arm and head to his car with his wife.

“Is everything all right over there, Mr. Wisdom?”

“Every ting is juss fine.”

My father said good morning to someone else on the street. He must have been sitting out there on the porch all through the night. I just sat looking out, hearing the quiet, thinking how I wanted to go on up to Rock Creek Park and get lost in the woods. I glanced over and my mom was standing there silently. She eased my little sister’s head off the pillow and sat her up. Then went into the kitchen to fix breakfast. I could hear her crying.

By 9 o’clock we were in the morning service. My mother, who taught Sunday school, always brought us early. My father only came to church for weddings, baptisms, and funerals. We were sitting in the middle section and the wooden chairs threatened to tip over with the big bodies. The junior choir had everybody on their feet and a fan cooled the sweating bodies. I was in my iridescent blue suit, white shirt, and tie. I just looked around at everyone and the smooth wooden floors and the feet walking by, carrying this one big woman after she got the spirit. The choir master was leaning back, mouth open, and the people were singing and clapping, but I couldn’t hear a sound. I ran the toe of my shoe through a smooth groove in the floor-board. Blam! Blam! the only sound in my head. Everything else around me was a blizzard of empty details. Details that would be packed away inside me without being looked at, without letting them touch me. Blam! My hands were sweating into my little sister’s — the only touch I let myself feel.

Fast forward: My stories don’t really come all crafted into a nice tale. There are a whole bunch of things that come up as I tell this, and these are part of the story now. These little memories like bees in my mind’s eye, threatening, buzzing around my head. Dangling threads that invariably lead to something deeper and darker… the innocence of learning to slow-drag with a girl on the dance floor and how the next day she was attacked and raped by a much older man. But nobody ever really talked about it. My friend was way different after that and nobody ever danced with her again. These are now just memories from the comfort zone of my current life, away from police sirens, getting jumped after school, and having to fight regularly just to get home. Long bus rides across D.C. to Spring Valley, to a world where there were no gangs, knives, anger, violence, roaches, and threats — at least, not in the streets where you had to look at it all the time.

You see, the cats I grew up with didn’t hold on to our stories, we kept pure emotion hidden, cause we were the kids of the city. You had to be a quick study to survive. If you showed any feelings, much less reflection, you got your ass kicked over and over. Those kids who moved up from North Carolina and came into our neighborhood with their accents and their openness were laughed at till they conformed. If your parents cared, they fought to create some conditions so that you could value your life, your experiences — but on the street your story didn’t have any value. Top dog/dirty dog. Only material things were valued on the street… One day I’ma get me a [insert Cadillac, $50 shoes, etc].

When I started going to an exclusive private school, I became convinced my stories didn’t have value. So it was better to appropriate their stories — be like them, at least on the outside — because what could my stories contribute to the lives of these princes.

In college, there was an unspoken message to let go of the past, of my story, to move forward. When I came home for holidays and caught up with Green Jeans, Brock, or Black Joe, they told me stories, all the stories of who got locked up, broke down, shot, or OD’d. These stories were snuffed out and then forgotten, never to be recounted. College brought me pan-Africanism, the Nation of Islam, and other progressive movements meant to shape the black identity, to give us “real” stories. As these movements required new names, clothes, identity, I started feeling a strong pull back toward my own stories, though I still didn’t have the will to tell them.

An anchor dropped in high school kept me connected with the life stories I owned. My track coach, Brooks Johnson, drilled into me the importance of character and pride. His mantra took root in my life and became magnified through the men and women around me: my father and mother, my father’s best friend Mr. Christian, other coaches, and my Episcopalian headmaster Canon Martin. These were fiery and gentle people whose lives seemed guided by their stories. The light and the dark.

I had to find ways to avoid being consumed by the myriad of dark impulses that came into my life. I had to figure how o live before I could recount, before I could truly own my story. It is very long and it continues. The stories I began but couldn’t finish can now be looked at and coaxed back… I can take the gloves off, stop fighting life and instead hold it.

I left my neighborhood in the 1970s. Even though the razor-sharp edge of living in Petworth has dulled, I now hoard the memories. I find myself looking back, repeatedly — at street corners, empty stretches of Kansas Avenue, Sherman Circle — and these quiet scenes are arranged in my mind into strange, chaotic stacks, as if waiting for the day they will reveal themselves as the hidden alphabet that somehow spells out my life’s meaning.

The potency is in the stacking. Laying them down in a brushed-steel coffin was too cold, I needed to heat them up with my experiences since that time and bring the life back to them. They needed to be honored. The characters and events struggled for a place in my soul. This is the richness I’m now willing to talk about.

A.R.M. And the woman by Laura Lippman

Chevy Chase, N.W.

Sally Holt was seldom the prettiest woman in the room, but for three decades now she had consistently been one of the most sought-after for one simple fact: She was a wonderful listener. Whether it was her eight-year-old son or her eighty-year-old neighbor or some male in-between, Sally rested her chin in her palm and leaned forward, expression rapt, soft laugh at the ready — but not o ready, which gave the speaker a feeling of power when the shy, sweet sound finally bubbled forth, almost in spite of itself. In the Northwest quadrant of Washington, where overtly decorative women were seen as suspect if not out-and-out tacky, a charm like Sally’s was much prized. It had served her well, too, helping her glide into the perfect marriage to her college sweetheart, a dermatologist, then allowing her to become one of Northwest Washington’s best hostesses, albeit in the amateur division. Sally and her husband, Peter, did not move in and did not aspire to the more rarefied social whirl, the one dominated by embassy parties and pink-faced journalists who competed to shout pithy things over one another on cable television shows. They lived in a quieter, in some ways more exclusive world, a charming, old-fashioned neighborhood comprising middle-class houses that now required upper-class incomes to own and maintain.

And if, on occasion, in a dark corner at one of the endless parties Sally and Peter hosted and attended, her unwavering attention was mistaken for affection, she managed to deflect the ensuing pass with a graceful shake of her auburn curls. “You wouldn’t want me,” she told the briefly smitten men. “I’m just another soccer mom.” The husbands backed away, sheepish and relieved, confiding in each other what a lucky son of a bitch Peter Holt was. Sally Holt had kept her figure, hadn’t allowed herself to thicken into that androgynous khaki-trousered — let’s be honest, downright dykish — mom so common in the area, which did have a lot of former field hockey players gone to seed. Plus, she was so great to talk to, interested in the world, not forever prattling about her children and their school.

Sally’s secret was that she didn’t actually hear a word that her admirers said, just nodded and laughed at the right moments, cued by their inflections as to how to react. Meanwhile, deep inside her head, she was mapping out the logistics of her next day. Just a soccer mom, indeed. To be a stay-at-home mother in Northwest D.C. was to be nothing less than a general, the Patton of the car pool, the Eisenhower of the HOV lane. Sally spent most of her afternoons behind the wheel of a Porsche SUV, moving her children and other people’s children from school to lessons, from lessons to games, from games to home. She was ruthlessly efficient with her time and motion, her radio always tuned to WTOP to catch the traffic on the eights, her brain filled with alternative routes and illegal shortcuts, her gaze at the ready to thaw the nastiest traffic cop. She could envision her section of the city in a three-dimensional grid in her head, her house on Morrison and the Dutton School off Nebraska the two fixed stars in her universe. Given all she had to do, you really couldn’t blame her for not listening to the men who bent her ear, a figure of speech that struck her as particularly apt. If she allowed all those words into her head, her ears would be bent — as crimped, tattered, and chewed-up looking as the old tom cat she had owned as a child, a cat who could not avoid brawls even after he was neutered.

But when Peter came to her in the seventeenth year of their marriage and said he wanted out, she heard him loud and clear. And when his lawyer said their house, mortgaged for a mere $400,000, was now worth $1.8 million, which meant she needed $700,000 to buy Peter’s equity stake, she heard that, too. For as much time as she spent behind the wheel of her car, Sally was her house, her house was Sally. The 1920s stucco two-story was tasteful and individual, with a kind of perfection that a decorator could never have achieved. She was determined to keep the house at all costs and when her lawyer proposed a way it could be done, without sacrificing anything in child support or her share of Peter’s retirement funds, she had approved it instantly and then, as was her habit, glazed over as the details were explained.

“What do you mean, I owe a million dollars on the house?” she asked her accountant, Kenny, three years later.

“You refinanced your house with an interest-only balloon mortgage in order to have the cash to buy Peter out of his share. Now it’s come due.”

“But I don’t have a million dollars,” Sally said, as if Kenny didn’t know this fact better than anyone. It was April, he had her tax return in front of him.

“No biggie. You get a new mortgage. Unfortunately, your timing sucks. Interest rates are up. Your monthly payment is going to be a lot bigger — just as the alimony is ending. Another bit of bad timing.”

Kenny relayed all this information with zero emotion. After all, it didn’t affect his bottom line. It occurred to Sally that an accountant should have a much more serious name. What was she doing, trusting someone named Kenny with her money?

“What about the equity I’ve built up in the past three years?”

“It was an interest-only loan, Sally. There is no additional equity.” Kenny, a square-jawed man who bore a regrettable resemblance to Frankenstein, sighed. “Your lawyer did you no favors, steering you into this deal. Did you know the mortgage broker he referred you to was his brother-in-law? And that your lawyer is a partner in the title company? He even stuck you with P.M.I.”

Sally was beginning to feel as if they were discussing sexually transmitted diseases instead of basic financial transactions

“I thought I got an adjustable-rate mortgage. A.R.M.’s have conversion rates, don’t they? And caps? What does any of this have to do with P.M.I.?”

“A.R.M.’s do. But you got a balloon, and balloons come due. All at once, in a big lump. Hence the name. You had a three-year grace period, in which you had an artificially low rate of less than three percent, with Peter’s four thousand in rehabilitative alimony giving you a big cushion. Now it’s over. In today’s market, I recommend a thirty-year fixed, but even that’s not the deal it was two years ago. According to today’s rates, the best you can do is—”

Frankennystein used an old-fashioned adding machine, the kind with a paper roll, an affectation Sally had once found charming. He punched the keys and the paper churned out, delivering its noisy verdict.

“A million financed at a thirty-year fixed rate — you’re looking at almost $6,000 a month and that’s just the loan. No taxes, no insurance.”

It was an increase of almost $2,000 a month over what she had been paying for the last three years, not taking into account the alimony she was about to lose, which came to $4,000 a month. A net loss of $6,000.

“I can’t cover that, not with just $5,000 a month in child support.” Did Kenny raise a caterpillar eyebrow at the “just.” Sally knew that Peter paid well, but then — he earned well. “I can’t make a mortgage payment of that size and pay my share of the private school tuition, which we split fifty-fifty.”

“You could sell. But after closing costs and paying the real estate agent’s fee, you’d walk away with a lot less cash than you might think. Maybe eight hundred thousand.”

Eight hundred thousand dollars. She couldn’t buy a decent three-bedroom for that amount, not in this neighborhood, not even in the suburbs. There, the schools would be free, at least, but the Dutton School probably mattered more to Sally than it did to the children. It had become the center of her social life since Peter left, a place where she was made to feel essential. Essential and adored, one of the parents who helped out without becoming a fearsome buttinsky or know-it-all.

“How long do I have to figure this out?” she asked Frankenny.

“The balloon comes due in four months. But the way things are going, you’ll be better off locking in sooner rather than later. Greenspan looked funny the last time the Fed met.”

“Funny?”

“Constipated, like. As if his sphincter was the only thing keeping the rates down.”

“Kenny,” she said with mock reproach, her instinctive reaction to a man’s crude joke, no matter how dull and silly. Already, her mind was miles away, flying through the streets of her neighborhood, trying to think who might help her. There was a father who came to Sam’s baseball games, often straight from work, only to end up on his cell, rattling off percentages. He must be in real estate.

“I own a title company,” Alan Mason said. “Which, I have to say, is like owning a mint these days. The money just keeps coming. Even with the housing supply tight as it is, people always want to refinance. Rates go down, they want in. Rates squeak up, they panic.”

“If only I had thought to talk to you three years ago,” Sally said, twisting the stalk of a gone-to-seed dandelion in her hand. They were standing along the first base line, the better to see both their sons — Sam, adorable if inept in right field, and Alan’s Duncan, a wiry first baseman who pounded his glove with great authority, although he had yet to catch a single throw.

“The thing is—” Alan stopped as the batter made contact with the ball, driving it toward the second baseman, who tossed it to Duncan for the out. There was a moment of suspense as Duncan bobbled it a bit, but he held on.

“Good play, son!” Alan said and clapped, then looked around. “I didn’t violate the vocalization rule, did I?”

“You were perfect,” Sally assured him. The league in which their sons played did, in fact, have strict rules about parents’ behavior, including guidelines on how to cheer properly — with enthusiasm, but without aggression. It was a fine line.

“Where was I? Oh, your dilemma. The thing is, I can hook you up with someone who can help you find the best deal, but you might want to consider taking action against your lawyer. He could be disbarred for what he did, or at least reprimanded. Clearly a conflict of interest.”

“True, but that won’t help me in the long run.” She sighed, then exhaled on the dandelion head, blowing away the fluff.

“Did you make a wish?” Alan asked. He wasn’t handsome, not even close. He looked like Ichabod Crane, tall and thin, with a pointy nose and no chin.

“I did,” Sally said with mock solemnity.

“For what?”

“Ah, if you tell, they don’t come true.” She met his eyes, just for a moment, let Alan Mason think that he was her heart’s desire.

Later that night, her children asleep, a glass of white wine at her side, she plugged figures into various mortgage calculators on the Internet, as if a different site might come up with a different answer. She charted her budget on Quicken — if she traded the Porsche for a Prius, if she stopped buying organic produce at Whole Foods, if she persuaded Molly to drop ballet, if Sam didn’t go to camp. But there were not enough sacrifices in the world to cover the looming shortfall in their monthly bills. They would have to give up everything to keep the house — eating, driving, heat and electricity.

And even if she did find the money, found a way to make it work, her world was still shrinking around her. When Peter first left, it had been almost a relief to be free of him, grouchy and cruel as he had become in midlife. She had been glad for an excuse to avoid parties as well. Now that she was divorced, the husbands steered clear of her; a suddenly single woman was the most unstable molecule of all in their social set. But Alan Mason’s gaze, beady as it was, had reminded her how nice it was to be admired, how she had enjoyed being everyone’s favorite confidante once upon a time, how she had liked the hands pressed to her bare spine, the friendly pinch on her ass.

She should marry again. It was simple as that. She left the Internet’s mortgage calculators for its even more numerous matchmakers, but the world she glimpsed was terrifying, worse than the porn she had once found cached on Peter’s laptop, the first telltale sign of the trouble that was to come. She was so old by the standards enumerated in these online wish lists. Worse, she had children, and ad after ad specified that would just not do. She looked at the balding, pudgy men, read their demands — no kids, no fatties, no over-forties — and realized they held the power to dictate the terms. No, she would not subject herself to such humiliation. Besides, Internet matches required writing, not listening. In a forum where she could not nod and laugh and gaze sympathetically, Sally was at a disadvantage. Typing “LOL” in a chat room simply didn’t have the same impact.

Now, a man with his own children, that would be ideal. A widower or a divorcé who happened to have custody, rare as that was. She mentally ran through the Dutton School directory, then pulled it from the shelf and skimmed it. No, no, no — all the families she knew were disgustingly intact, the divorced and reblended ones even tighter than those who had stayed with their original mates. Didn’t anyone die anymore? Couldn’t the killers and drug dealers who kept the rest of Washington in the upper tier of homicide rates come up to Northwest every now and then, take out a housewife or two?

Why not?

In a school renown for dowdy mothers, Lynette Mason was one of the dowdiest, gone to seed in the way only a truly preppy woman can. She had leathery skin and a Prince Valiant haircut, which she sheared back from her face with a grosgrain ribbon headband. Her laugh was a loud, annoying bray and if someone failed to join in her merriment, she clapped the person on the back as if trying to dislodge a lump of food. On this particular Thursday afternoon, Lynette stood on the sidewalk, speaking animatedly to one of the teachers, punching the poor woman at intervals. Sally, waiting her turn in the car pool lane, thought how easily a foot could slip, how an accelerator could jam. The SUV would surge forward, Lynette would be pinned against the column by the school’s front door. So sad, but no one’s fault, right?

No, Sally loved the school too much to do that. Besides, an accident would take out Ms. Grayson as well, and she was an irreplaceable resource when it came to getting Dutton’s graduates into the best colleges. Sally would need her when Molly and Sam were older.

Four months, according to her accountant. She had four months. Maybe Peter would die; he carried enough life insurance to pay off the mortgage, with plenty left over for the children’s education. No, she would never get that lucky. Stymied, she continued to make small talk with Alan Mason at baseball games, but began to befriend Lynette as well, lavishing even more attention on her in order to deflect any suspicions about Sally’s kindness to Alan. Lynette was almost pathetically grateful for Sally’s attention, adopting her with the fervor that adolescent girls bring to new friendships. Women appreciate good listeners, too, and Sally nodded and smiled — over lunch, over tea, and, once 5 o’clock came around, glasses of wine. Lynette had quite a bit to say, the usual litany of complaints. Alan worked all the time. There was zero romance in their marriage. She might as well be a single mom — “Not that a single mom is a bad thing to be,” she squealed, clapping a palm over her large, unlipsticked mouth.

“You’re a single mom without any of the advantages,” Sally said, pouring her another glass of wine. Drive home drunk. What do I care?

“There are advantages, aren’t there?” Lynette leaned forward and lowered her voice, although Molly was at a friend’s and Sam was up in his room with Lynette’s Duncan, playing the SIMS. “No one ever says that, but it’s true.”

“Sure. As long as you have the money to sustain the standard of living you had, being single is great.”

“How do you do that?” Asked with specificity, as if Lynette believed that Sally had managed just that trick. Sally, who had long ago learned the value of the non-reply, raised her eyebrows and smiled serenely, secretly.

“I think Alan cheats on me,” Lynette blurted out.

“I would leave a man who did that to me.”

Lynette shook her head. “Not until the kids are grown and gone. Maybe then. But I’ll be so old. Who would want me then?”

Who would want you now?

“Do what you have to do.” Another meaningless response, perfected over the years. Yet no one ever seemed to notice how empty Sally’s sentiments were, how vapid. She had thought it was just men who were fooled so easily, but it was turning out that women were equally foolish.

“Alan and I never have sex anymore.”

“That’s not uncommon,” Sally said. “All marriages have their ups and downs.”

“I love your house.” Logical sequences of thought had never been Lynette’s strength, but this conversation was abrupt and odd even by her standards. “I love you.”

Lynette put a short stubby hand over Sally’s, who fought the instinctive impulse to yank her own away. Instead, it was Lynette who pulled back in misery and confusion.

“I don’t mean that way,” she said, staring into her wine glass, already half empty.

Sally took a deep breath. If this were a man, at a party, she would have laughed lightly and accused him of being a terrible tease. To Lynette, she said: “Why not?”

Lynette put her hand back over Sally’s. “You mean—?”

Sally thought quickly. No matter how far Sam and Duncan disappeared into their computer world, she could not risk taking Lynette to the master bedroom. She had a hunch that Lynette would be loud. But she also believed that this was her only opportunity. In fact, Lynette would shun her after today. She would cut Sally off completely, ruining any chance she had of luring Alan away from her. She would have to see this through, or start over with another couple.

“There’s a room, over our garage. It used to be Peter’s study. He took most of the things, but there’s still a sofa there.”

She grabbed the bottle of wine and her glass. She was going to need to be a little drunk, too, to get through this. Then again, who was less attractive in the large scheme of things, Alan or Lynette? Who would be more grateful, more giving? Who would be more easily controlled? She was about to find out.

Lynette may not have been in love when she blurted out that sentiment in Sally’s kitchen, but she was within a week. Lynette being Lynette, it was a loud, unsubtle love, both behind closed doors and out in public, and Sally had to chide her about the latter, school her in the basics of covert behavior, remind her not to stare with those cowlike eyes, or try to monopolize Sally at public events, especially when Alan was present. They dropped their children at school at 8:30 and Lynette showed up at Sally’s house promptly at 8:45, bearing skim milk lattes and scones. Lynette’s idea of the perfect day, as it turned out, was to share a quick latte upon arriving, then bury her head between Sally’s legs until 11 a.m., when she surfaced for the Hot Topics segment on The View. Then it was back to devouring Sally, with time-outs for back rubs and baths. Lynette’s large, eager mouth turned out to have its uses. Plus, she asked for only the most token attention in return, which Sally provided largely through a hand-held massage tool from The Sharper Image.

Best of all, Lynette insisted that, as much as she loved Sally, she could never, ever leave Alan, not until the children were grown and out of the home. She warned Sally of this repeatedly, and Sally would nod sadly, resignedly. “I’ll settle for the little bit I can have,” she said, stroking Lynette’s Prince Valiant bob.

“If Alan ever finds out—” Lynette said glumly.

“He won’t,” Sally assured her. “Not if we’re careful. There. No — there.” Just as her attention drifted away in conversation, she found it drifting now, floating toward an idea, only to be distracted by Lynette’s insistent touch. Later. She would figure everything out later.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Sally told Lynette at the beginning of their third week together, during one of the commercial breaks on The View. “Peter found out about us.”

“Ohmigod!” Lynette said. “How?”

“I’m not sure. But he knows. He knows everything. He’s threatening to take the children away from me.”

“Ohmigod.”

“And—” she turned her face to the side, not trusting herself to tell this part. “And he’s threatening to go to Alan.”

“Shit.” In her panic, Lynette got up and began putting on her clothes, as if Peter and Alan were outside the door at this very moment.

“He hasn’t yet,” Sally said quickly. “But he will, if I fight the change in the custody order. He’s given me a week to decide. I give up the children or he goes to Alan.”

“You can’t tell. You can’t.”

“I don’t want to, but — how can I give up my children?” Lynette understood, as only another mother could. The truth would destroy her; the secret would tear apart Sally’s life. And even if Peter agreed not to tell for now, the danger was still there.

“Would he really do this?”

“He would. Peter — he’s not the nice man everyone thinks he is. Why do you think we got divorced? And the thing is, if he gets the kids — well, it was one thing for him to do the things he did to me. But if he ever treated Molly or Sam that way…”

“What way?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. But if it should happen — I’d have to kill him.”

“The pervert.” Lynette was at once repelled and fascinated. The dark side of Sally’s life was proving as seductive as Sally’s quiet companionship.

“I know. If he had done what he did to a stranger, he’d be in prison for life. But in a marriage, such things are legal. I’m stuck, Lynette. I won’t ruin your life for anything. You told me from the first that this had to be a secret. I just hope Peter will be satisfied with destroying me.”

“There has to be a way…”

“There isn’t. Not as long as Peter is a free man.”

“Not as long as he’s alive.”

“You can’t mean—”

Lynette put a finger to Sally’s lips. These had been the hardest moments to fake, the face-to-face encounters. Kissing was the worst. But it was essential not to flinch, not to let her distaste show. She was so close to getting what she wanted.

“Trust me,” Lynette said.

Sally wanted to. But she had to be sure of one thing. “Don’t try to hire someone. It seems like every time someone like us tries to find someone, it’s always an undercover cop. Remember Ruth Ann Aron.” A politician from the Maryland suburbs, Aron had, in fact, tried to hire a state trooper to off her husband. But he had forgiven her, even testified on her behalf during the trial.

“Trust me,” Lynette repeated.

“I do, sweetheart. I absolutely do.”

Dr. Peter Holt was hit by a Jeep Cherokee, an Eddie Bauer limited edition, as he crossed Connecticut Avenue on his way to the Thai restaurant where he ate lobster pad thai every Thursday evening. The remorseful driver told police that her children had been bickering in the backseat over what to watch on the DVD player and she had turned her head, just for a moment, to scold them. Still distracted by the children’s fight when she turned around, she had seen Holt and tried to stop, but hit the accelerator instead. Then, as her children screamed for real, she had driven another 100 yards in panic and hysteria. If the dermatologist wasn’t killed on impact, he was definitely dead when the SUV finally stopped. But the only substance in the driver’s blood was caffeine, and while it was a tragic, regrettable accident, it was clearly an accident. Really, investigators told Holt’s stunned survivors, his ex-wife and two children, it was surprising that such things didn’t happen more often, given the congestion in D.C., the unwieldy SUVs, the mothers’ frayed nerves, the nature of dusk with its tricky gray-green light. It was a macabre coincidence, their children being classmates and all, the parents being superficial friends. But this part of D.C. was like a village unto itself, and the accident had happened only a mile from the Dutton School. In fact, Peter Holt had just left the same soccer practice that the driver was coming from. He had been seen talking to his ex-wife, with whom he was still quite friendly, asking her if she and the children wanted to meet him for dinner at his favorite restaurant.

At Peter’s memorial service, Lynette Mason sought a private moment with Sally Holt, and those who watched from a distance marveled at the bereaved woman’s composure and poise, the way she comforted her ex-husband’s killer. No one was close enough to hear what they said.

“I’m sorry,” Lynette said. “It didn’t occur to me that after — well, I guess we can’t see each other anymore.”

“It didn’t occur to me, either,” Sally lied. “You’ve sacrificed so much for me. For Molly and Sam, really. I’m in your debt, forever.”

And she patted Lynette gently on the arm, which marked the last time the two ever touched. Sometimes, when Alan was working late, Lynette would call, a little high and a lot tearful, and Sally would remind her that they shouldn’t tie up the phone too long, lest the records of these conversations come back to haunt them or the children overhear anything. They had done what mothers should do. They had put their children first.

Peter’s estate went to Molly and Sam — but in trust to Sally, of course. She determined that it would be in the children’s best interest to pay off the balloon mortgage in cash, and Peter’s brother, the executor, agreed. Peter would have wanted the children to have the safety and sanctity of home, given the emotional trauma they had endured. He wouldn’t want them forced out in the housing market, cruel and unforgiving as it was.

No longer needy, armored with a widow’s prerogatives, Sally found herself invited to parties again, where solicitous friends attempted to fix her up with the rare single men in their circles. Now that she didn’t care about men, they flocked around her and Sally did what she had always done. She listened and she laughed, she laughed and she listened, but she never really heard anything — unless the subject was money. Then she paid close attention, even writing down the advice she was given. The stock market was so turgid, everyone complained. The smart money was in real estate.

Sally nodded.