Detective Cross

Chapter 9

I got home around seven to find Bree sitting on the front porch, looking as frazzled as I felt.

“Welcome home,” she said, raising a mug. “Want a beer?”

I sat down beside her and said, “Half a glass.”

She set the mug down, reached down by her side and came up with a second mug and a growler from Blue Jacket, a new brewery in a formerly industrial area in southwest DC.

“Goldfinch,” Bree said. “A Belgian blond ale. It’s good. Nana bought it.”

She poured me half a mug and I sipped it, loving the cold, almost lemony flavor. “Hey, that is good.”

We sat in silence for several minutes, listening to the street, and to the rattle of kitchen utensils from inside.

“Tough day all around,” Bree said.

“Especially for you,” I said, and reached out my hand.

She took it and smiled. “This is enough.”

I smiled and said, “It is, isn’t it?”

“All I could want.”

I focused on that. Not on the memories of how sick poor Chorey had gotten before I could get him admitted into the detox unit. How he’d refused to wear the hearing device or read my words after a while, retreating from the world and what it had done to him in the surest way he knew how.

“Dinner!” Nana Mama called.

Bree squeezed my hand, and we went inside. My ninety-something grandmother was making magic at the stove when we entered the kitchen.

“Whatever it is, it smells great,” I said, thinking there was curry involved.

“It always smells great when Nana Mama’s manning the stove,” said Jannie, my sixteen-year-old daughter, as she carried covered dishes from the counter to the table.

“Smells weird to me,” said Ali, my almost nine-year-old, who was already sitting at the table, studying an iPad. “Is it tofu? I hate tofu.”

“As you’ve told me every day since the last time we had it,” my grandmother said.

“Is it?”

“Not even close,” she said, pushing her glasses up her nose on the way to the table. “No electronic devices at the dinner table, young man.”

Ali groaned. “It’s not a game, Nana. It’s homework.”

“And this is dinnertime,” I said.

He sighed, closed the cover, and put the tablet on a shelf behind him.

“Good,” Nana Mama said, smiling. “A little drumroll, please?”

Jannie started tapping her fingers against the tabletop. I joined in, and so did Bree and Ali.

“Top Chef judges,” my grandmother said. “I give you fresh Alaskan halibut in a sauce of sweet onions, elephant garlic, Belgian blond beer, and dashes of cumin, cilantro, and curry.”

She popped off the lid. Sumptuous odors steamed out and swept my mind off my day. As we scooped jasmine rice and ladled the halibut onto our plates, I could tell Bree had managed to put her day aside as well.

The halibut was delicious, and Nana Mama’s delicate sauce made it all the better. I had seconds. So did everyone else.

The fuller I got, however, the more my thoughts drifted back to Chorey. Those thoughts must have shown on my face. My grandmother said, “Something not right with your meal, Alex?”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “I’d order that dish in a fancy restaurant.”

“Then what? Your trial?”

I refused to give that a second thought. I said, “No, there was this veteran Bree and I dealt with today. He suffered a head injury and lost most of his hearing in an explosion in Afghanistan. He lives in shelters and on the streets now.”

Ali said, “Dad, why does America treat its combat veterans so poorly?”

“We do not,” Jannie said.

“Yes, we do,” Ali said. “I read it on the Internet.”

“Don’t take everything on the Internet as gospel truth,” Nana Mama said.

“No,” he insisted. “There’s like a really high suicide rate when they come home.”

“That’s true,” Bree said.

Ali said, “And a lot of them live through getting blown up but they’re never right again. And their families have to take care of them, and they don’t know how.”

“I’ve heard that, too,” my grandmother said.

“There’s help for them, but not enough, given what they’ve been through,” I said. “We brought the guy today to the VA hospital. Took a while, but they got him in detox to get clean. The problem is what’s going to happen when he’s discharged.”

“He’ll probably be homeless again,” Ali said.

“Unless I can figure out a way to help him.”

My grandmother made a tsk noise. “Don’t you have enough on your plate already? Helping your attorneys prepare your defense? Seeing patients? Being a husband and father?”

Her tone surprised me. “Nana, you always taught us to help others in need.”

“Long as you see to your own needs first. You can’t do real good in the world if you don’t take care of yourself.”

“She’s right,” Bree said later in our bathroom, after we’d cleaned the kitchen and seen the rest of the family to bed. “You can’t be everything to everyone, Alex.”

“I know that,” I said. “I just...”

“What?”

“There’s something about Chorey, how lost he is, how abandoned he’s been, hearing nothing, seeing little. It just got to me, makes me want to do something.”

“My hopeless idealist,” Bree said, hugging me. “I love you for it.”

I hugged her back, kissed her and said, “You’re everything to me, you know.”