Thirty-Nine Days After Wabash: I Crossed the Street to the Okafors'

Thirty-nine days. I crossed the street.

I have been telling you for weeks about a letter. I started it on the back of six guest checks and then I wrote it out long, to Mrs. Okafor, whose husband ran the cleaners two doors down and did not come home from the Tuesday they fought over Wabash. I told you I kept folding it smaller and tucking it in my apron with the count instead of carrying it over. I told you the street is only forty feet wide and I could not make my feet cross it.

This week my feet crossed it. I want to tell you how, because it did not happen the way I pictured, and around here the real things never do.

There was a paper in the cleaners' window. Not the city's gray plywood, a real sheet of paper, taped inside the glass. I read it from my own doorway three times before I let myself understand it. Lease available. Somebody had already been in and measured Daniel Okafor's nine years and decided they were finished. That is what moved my feet. Not courage. A landlord's sign. I have had a lease question hanging over this oven since the first week I wrote to you, so maybe I know that particular cold in the stomach, the one that comes free with the grief, the one that says the block is not done taking after the fight is over.

Maria saw me untie my apron. She didn't say anything. She wrapped a slice in foil, she always wraps them in foil, like the shine is part of the recipe, and she put it in my hand and turned back to the register. That is how she tells me to go do a hard thing. She hands me food to carry. I still had eleven stitches' worth of a scar to thank her for and here she was making me useful again.

Mrs. Okafor was inside, boxing up the front counter. Shirts nobody came back for, still in their paper, still pinned with the little numbered tags. She was folding a man's church shirt into a box very slowly, the way you do a thing you don't want to finish because finishing it is the end of something. I stood in a doorway that still smelled like starch and warm steam, Daniel's whole trade still hanging in the air of the place, and I understood all at once that I could not give her the letter.

The letter has the count in it. The letter has the number the man in the clean jacket read off the card, and the fact that Daniel is not in that number, found a day late, filed under some other Tuesday than the one that killed him. The letter is true and it is mine to carry and it is far too heavy to hand across to a woman folding her husband's work into a box. You do not put your whole count into somebody else's hands. I have told you the rule without knowing it was the rule. You say the small version.

So I said the small version. I said, Mrs. Okafor, your husband came in every Friday for two slices and a grape pop, and he called me Johnny, and I called him Mister the whole nine years and never once got it turned around. I said, I had him written down from the first day and I have never crossed him off. I did not say crossed him off of what. I set the foil on the counter and I said put your money away, there's no money in this, it's a slice, and I went back across my forty feet.

She didn't cry and I didn't, and I want to be careful here the way I am always careful, because that is not the same as nobody hurting. She said, thank you, Johnny. She got my name right the first time. Daniel taught it to her, is what I think. Nine years of Fridays and my name made it across the street in his mouth before I ever did on my own two feet.

The letter is still in my apron tonight. Folded smaller than a matchbook now. I did not give it to her. I gave her the one true thing a person can carry out a door in a box, and I kept the rest, because the rest is the count and the count is my job, not hers to bear. Marcus's green bike is still standing inside by the oven where the heat can reach it, on the safe side of the tape, in case you were wondering whether I keep the things I say I'll keep.

The kid came in after and asked me again when the ones who fly are coming back. I gave him a slice. I still don't answer him. Some nights I think the whole trick of this work, the pizza and the rest of it both, is knowing which one true thing a person can carry, and handing them only that, and keeping the weight of the others yourself. The oven does the same. It only ever gives you back what your two hands can hold.

Eat your slice.