RETRIEVING DOCUMENT
Mrs. Okafor —
I have started this letter on the back of six guest checks now, and I keep folding them into my apron with the other count instead of bringing them over. So I am writing it long this time and we will see if it ever crosses the street.
We opened back up Monday. Eighteen days. The window is still that gray plywood the city calls a repair, but I got the oven relit and the gas held, and by noon the place smelled like a pizza joint again instead of like wet plaster. People came. That is the thing I did not expect — they came. Stood right where the glass was, ordered a slice, ate it standing up because half the stools are gone. I did not charge the first day. A man tried to pay and I told him put your money away, this one's mine. Feeding people is the only thing I know how to do in a week like this. I cannot rebuild a block. I can get a pie out of the oven. So I do that.
I want to tell you about your husband, because the number they read off the card did not.
I called him Mr. Okafor for nine years. Nine years he pressed my shirts, and I never once used his first name. Daniel. I had to say it out loud at the counter Monday to a fella asking after the cleaners, and it stuck in my throat like I had no right to it. Daniel pressed my shirts. He kept a radio going low and he never once shorted me a button. He went into the Wabash thing the same as anybody, and they found him a day late, and a day late is a day after they closed the count. So he is not in the number. I have him in mine. He is on the back of a check in my apron, between Maria's line and a name I still cannot put to a face.
You should know the official total is lower than the one I keep. I am not a numbers man, I make pizza, but counting is most of what I do all day — slices out, dollars in, the regulars who come and the ones who stopped. The man in the clean jacket read his number and somebody printed it and now it is the number. Mine does not close like a register. Mine is one higher. It is one higher because of Daniel, and I think it might be two higher, and that is the part I have to tell you because nobody official will.
There is a bike still chained to the rail outside your husband's shop. One of the delivery riders, the kind that folds flat. It has been there since the day after. No rider. Nobody has come for it. I keep meaning to cut the lock and I keep not doing it, because as long as it is chained there it is somebody's, and I do not know whose, and I am afraid that is a name I am supposed to be carrying too. The clipboards came through twice with their lists and their flashlights, looking for something specific that was not us, and not one of them asked about the bike. The ones who fly only come back to fight. The ones with clipboards only come back to count, and they count their thing, not ours.
The kid still comes in. Asks me every day when they are coming back, the ones who fly. I give him a slice and I do not answer, because I do not have an answer that is fair to him. They do not come back to see a block after. They come back when there is another fight.
One more thing, and then I will stop. The city patched the curb out front, smoothed it over nice, but the floor of my place is not sitting right. I can feel it through my shoes when I work the oven, a kind of give that was not there in May. Somebody put a clean face on the ground without checking what was under it. I have lived long enough to know that the part you cover up fastest is usually the part that was never fixed. I am not going to be surprised when something gives. I am only going to be sorry for whoever is standing on it.
I do not know if I will send this. I think I am going to fold it in with the count, where I keep Daniel. But if you ever want a hot meal and a place to sit down, the stool by the oven is yours, and you will not see a check.
— Johnny