14

I asked him what he knew, who Anita’s new boyfriend was, and his eyes just got smaller than they already were. Kyle looks like a handsome enough guy who has lived his whole life in a tunnel underground. I knew what Anita saw in him, a project, someone to make strong and healthy. She believed in animal rights, and Kyle was a kind of animal.

“I can’t help you,” said Kyle.

Maybe if your dad is a silent, mean person you never learn to use sentences. Kyle took calculus and had a watch with a beeper that was always going off at odd times, to remind him of duties he never explained. He talked like someone with his jaw wired.

“Anita has a lot of energy,” I said. I meant: sexual energy as well as all the other kinds.

Kyle nodded, once, a quick up-down of the chin.

“There had to be some other guy,” I said. I wanted to point out that Anita was a young woman with plans. Kyle, with his heroin-addict looks, was hardly going to please Anita when she found out how smart she really was.

That was the key to her: how much she could do with her mind, and how the rest of us must have seemed so slow to her, a family of sleepy, halting bears. I could see it sometimes, how much effort it took for her to be patient when I didn’t understand how the famous gene scientist Mendel got white sweet pea blossoms to flutter on the vine next to the red ones.

And I’m not stupid. Spanish slows me down to a crawl, but I manage to take all university prep classes and avoid disaster. But I could see Kyle not really understanding what had happened, gazing around out of his tactless head, looking like a little boy grown tall overnight.

Maybe Kyle was a little afraid of me. He looked at me sideways. “I don’t think there was anyone else, Cray. That’s my honest opinion.” He wanted to shut up, having trouble judging my mood. But he added, “I would tell you. Even if it hurt my pride.”

I just couldn’t work up any anger over him. I felt sorry for him. I could see that he didn’t know anything. I had been hoping—depending on it. Now I felt dry all the way through.

“If you think of anything?…” I said, not finishing the thought, feeling for the first time in my life an awkward companionship with Kyle.

I was glad to get on the bus heading down Fruitvale. The day looked garishly normal, people driving, people standing patiently, waiting for the AC Transit bus to roll to a complete stop before they took a move toward it. Even the high-crime areas, windows behind black grills, were sunny, mail being delivered, people carrying groceries.

I was useless around the house, Dad on the phone, and Mom circling him like a major planet, feeding him phone numbers, hints. The police came and went, and I had Detective Waterman’s card in my wallet. Every second I spent away from the house was a moment in which there could be good news.

If I stayed away, things could happen. Anita could come home, tell her story, and life could go on. It was like waiting for something wonderful, Christmas, that trip to Yellowstone when I was nine. If you think about it, the hoped-for joy stays away, and never comes any closer.

But I thought Barbara might brighten and give me good news as I rushed through the door into the office. She peered at me, a pile of invoices in front of her. She gave me a shake of her head: no news.

Jesse is as tall as I am. But he is broader chested, heavier all over. I found him in the cabinet room. Workers wielded staplers, hissing, banging. As usual, it was too loud to talk.

“Any news?” Jesse asked. He had to shout.

Jesse shows a feeling in his face as soon as he has it, amusement, irritation. I saw him fire someone for coming ten minutes late and the man didn’t even argue, just turned right around and went home. “Not yet,” I said.

Jesse winced.

“You want me packing drawer pulls?” I asked, shouting over the shriek of one of the wood-shaping lathes behind me. The machines take posts of wood, knotted and rough-cut, and shape them into bedposts or table legs.

“We’re way behind,” said Jesse, like this was what I wanted to hear.

Maybe it was. I love to catch up, pushing myself. Packing drawer pulls was fun without being something you would pay to do, and it was something that had to get done.

Each nightstand was shipped with a plastic bag in the drawer. Inside the plastic bag was a brass drawer pull and enough screws to put the handle in place. I stood beside a hill of slithery plastic bags and a box of screws. Behind me was a huge, bulging carton of drawer pulls, manufactured in Korea.

I counted out four screws carefully at first, popped them into a bag, dropped a brass handle in on top, and plunked the little package onto a conveyor belt. I couldn’t see what happened beyond the pile of stacked, flattened cartons, but I knew that workers in the shipping room were putting the plastic bags of hardware into nightstand drawers and taping them to the bottom of the drawer so they wouldn’t rattle around.

There were larger questions I could ask about all of this. I wanted to know why we couldn’t ship the stands with the hardware already attached. I wanted to know how far behind the factory was running, and if we would make the deadline. I wanted to know if the fire inspector had arrived that morning, and what we were going to do to keep another fire from starting.

But I let myself not think. After a while I didn’t have to count out the screws—I could pinch out four every time, without looking. The conveyor belt was a worn rubberized length with a seam that showed up periodically, a white scar in the dark gray, humming surface. Seeing it come around every fifty-five seconds was satisfying, hypnotic. It was one more thing that almost made me forget.

When my father bought the factory from Mr. Ziff, he said he would keep the name Ziff Furniture because it was so well known. Plus, he said, it didn’t sound like a real name, but a name someone might make up, like the names for laundry soap—Bold, Dash. Ziff, Anita agreed, sounded like a sound effect in a comic strip, an arrow hitting its target.

Within a few weeks of owning the factory there was a very troubling accident. Dad would talk about it sometimes, but only when he was in the right mood.

Dad was in the office, trying to help Barbara boot up a new computer program, when Henry Wills ran up to the counter. He was breathing hard, his hand wrapped up in one of the pink shop towels. This shop towel wasn’t pink anymore; it was red. Henry said he cut himself, and Dad asked him how bad it was. Dad doesn’t like to describe what happened next unless he is sure the story won’t upset his listeners.

Dad had trouble finding it. And when he did locate it at last, on a dune of sawdust, it didn’t look like a thumb, already too white, too withered to be a human body part.

Dad hurried the thumb out to Jesse’s waiting car, and Mr. Wills and the thumb arrived at the clinic. The thumb was reattached by Dr. Pollock, the surgeon, and when Mr. Wills retired the following year, he was walking around with five fingers just like everybody else.

As I worked on the bags of drawer pulls, I kept expecting a tug at my sleeve. I kept expecting Dad to be there, telling me in a tone of relief what had happened to Anita. He would be talking nonstop, why she couldn’t get to a phone, telling me our lives could go on.