Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,54
to Eva’s Goofus in their parents’ black professional circles—working for an investment bank, appearing regularly at AKA charity events in designer suits, her doctor fiancé at her side.
While all the others had turned into more self-possessed versions of themselves, Eva felt further than ever from her old self. Where once she’d taken her self-sufficiency for granted, somewhere in a dizzying string of morning afters she had started to feel her aloneness was a mark of incompletion, faintly spreading.
“I’m waiting for my father,” Eva said to the waiter, who seemed ready to snatch away the second menu. “He’ll be here. He’ll be late, but he turns up eventually.”
She pulled out her cell phone and feigned a search for a text message; the waiter wandered off and left her to her pretense of human interaction.
“Phil,” said William, “I lived in that apartment for twenty years. I grew up in the Bronx. If breathing debris hasn’t killed me yet, it won’t, ever. Explain to me why the city that still hasn’t gotten all the asbestos out of its own damn public housing and rents the Bronx out for landfill space is suddenly so concerned about my lungs.”
“I’m not the city,” said Phil. “Explaining is not my job. You really just want a few photographs?”
“That’s all,” said William.
Phil motioned him down the block, and they began the short walk from Phil’s place to the old building. They cut through the City College campus, and when they got to the other side, Phil stopped for a coffee at the corner store and, while stirring three sugars into it, said with his back to William, “Can I ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
“This irreplaceable stuff you need me to open the building so badly so you can get—why didn’t you take it with you when they told everybody to get what they were going to get and get out?”
William didn’t answer until they were halfway down the block. He considered pretending he hadn’t heard the question. Finally he let out a breath and said, “The truth is, I forgot it was there.”
William told himself that forgetting something didn’t mean you’d forgotten the person associated with it. His own mother, he reminded himself, never could keep up with photographs, wouldn’t have expected a drawing to last a week in a two-bedroom apartment with four kids in it, let alone tried to keep it for twenty years. But then, there were four of them, and she had two thirty-hour-a-week jobs, and still she checked in with them every night, still he remembered the cocoa-butter smell of her kissing him good night, and still he sensed that if something had been the only reminder of how things used to be, she never would have forgotten it—not even during all those trash-bag moves from place to place before they got settled. Yet, he couldn’t remember to take one box in a closet.
Phil cleared his throat; they were standing in front of the old apartment. Phil looked over his shoulder, as if any one of the kids on the steps across the street might be an undercover city housing operative, then released the chain and padlock from the door and stepped aside.
“I’m waiting for you for fifteen minutes,” he said. “Something falls on your head and knocks you out, I’m telling the cops you’re a fool and I don’t know you.”
William walked up the creaky staircase to the third floor, fast for the first two levels, then wondered if one shouldn’t walk gingerly in a building people kept threatening was going to fall. He went straight for the closet, left the blender in spite of himself, and pulled out the box in the back of the closet. Most of the things in the box used to be in his office, but when he’d moved up in the world—literally up—he’d brought the box home, instead of to the new place. In his new office, he had only two pictures of Eva, including the most recent picture she had given him: her in a park somewhere, smiling at he probably didn’t even want to know who, the streaks in her hair a shade of fluorescent red like the color of the lighted trim on an old jukebox.
But the old boxes, they were full of pictures of his daughter the way he remembered her. Debra had sent him one for every school year, plus one for every recital, plus an annual Christmas picture taken on the steps of the church Eva had refused to attend once she