Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,194

and short black braids. Rob stopped her, and picked the remainder of my tuna sandwich from the plate.

“Growing boy,” he explained with a wink, then he ordered coffee and cake for us.

The door opened and three guys walked in. Rob looked over his shoulder and shifted instinctively to block me. Lots of people say, Over my dead body, but with Rob, it was true. And unlike with Denny when we were dancing, Rob was my opposite. I couldn’t help but wonder if my perfume distracted him as much as the way he chewed his ice distracted me.

He set his elbows on the counter. “You believe in God?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure.”

“When we were in college in L.A., we heard shit like, I don’t believe in God, I believe in an all-powerful, all-loving being. All-powerful, all-loving being? What is that? Same as God, only no rules!”

The waitress returned with dessert and coffee. The cake was circle-shaped and flat like a soggy disc.

Rob threw up his hands. “What happened?”

“Pineapple cheesecake,” she said. “It gets wilty.”

“It looks like you dropped it onto the saucer from midair.”

“It happens to be very popular. You guys got the last two pieces. I can take them back and resell them.”

“Nah. I’m just giving you a hard time because I like those braids.” But as soon as she turned, he stopped me from taking a bite. “Watch it with creams,” he warned under his breath, “They go rancid very easy.” He tested the cake and gave it his reluctant approval. “You remember my brother Joey?”

“The firefighter.”

“Yeah, right. The firefighter. He recently dragged a couple kids out of a fire. Dead.” Rob sucked back a sip of coffee and gestured to the side of his skull like he was screwing in something invisible. “He’s all fucked up now,” he said. “My father thinks he needs counseling. Counseling—I mean, you gotta know my father. Not exactly the therapy type. But Joey can’t sleep, can’t eat; he sits up all night staring at his sons. So tonight I’m listening to this lunatic on the radio, thinking of my brother running into a burning building. Where was God for those kids? Or for their parents? Or my brother? And—”

Rob glanced up and noticed the clock. It was almost 4:30 in the morning. “Shit!” He half-stood and polished off his coffee, going, “Shit, shit, shit.” He looked at the check, threw down some cash, and waved. “C’mon, c’mon. Gotta go see Uncle Tudi.”

Rob had a tight bouncy walk. He leaned forward as if his torso were connected in a line to his legs, and he walked with purpose, though it was rare that he had one. He pulled me by the wrist down Tenth Avenue into the meat district, past the hookers and queens and the stalled and steamed Impalas. Girls in sheer baby doll dresses and boys like girls in zipper-back shorts and vinyl boots riding up brawny thighs. At the loading dock for Falco’s Meats, Rob pulled something folded from his back pocket, opened it up, and checked it over.

I took another look at the prostitutes. They were like lost sentinels, flecking the concrete horizon with bioluminescence, leaning to solicit the occasional passing car just like they do on Starsky and Hutch. At first you are not sure they’re there, they go so slow, but if you wait, they appear, like decorative fish caught in a choke of algae, bobbing out with omnidirectional eyes.

Rob crammed the paper back into his jeans pocket, and we entered the building. Remembering himself, he stopped to hold the door for me.

“How ya doin’, Tommy?” he said to the guy at the counter.

Tommy flipped a wilted page of yesterday’s news. “Hey, Robbie, que pasa?”

“My uncle leave yet?”

“Nah, he’s still in the back.”

Rob parted a row of foggy plastic strips, then turned and stopped me. “You’re not gonna get sick, are you?”

“Not in front of Uncle Tudi,” I said.

Rob said, “That’s all I wanted to hear.”

Curtains of animals lined two sides of the sawdust aisle, and I held my breath as we walked toward a room in back of the warehouse. I noticed that the pigs had no conspicuous necks. Pig necks are not so noticeable when pigs are standing in a barn or at a state fair, but when they are pendant and dead, you can see how their backs slope directly up into quadrangular heads, which are kind of boxy, like dice.

At the end of the bright run was a