Sunny found his daughters by following the echoes downstairs into the kitchen. He turned the corner in time to be thrown back by a blast of guffaws. Sgt. Gallaher quickly unwound her tall, trousered legs, scraped back her chair, and stood, tucking the last gasp of a laugh into her chin.
“Am I the punch line?” asked Sunny.
Sunny thought the sergeant's face simmered again. Eldad stood and extended his hand.
“Good morning, alderman,” he said, and inclined his head toward the sergeant. “She's a pistol.”
“Yes. Bang-bang,” said Sunny.
Rula and Rita stayed seated, while Matina poured out a cup of coffee for Sunny on the counter next to the grill.
“Diego says we should consider Columbia Business School,” said Rita. She had put her long black hair back into braids that she had taken care to place across the front of her shoulders along the line of a pearly gray sweater that had belonged to her mother. “He says that with our backgrounds, we could do deals all over the subcontinent and Middle East. It's a fertile crescent of opportunity.”
“That's why we were a little late last night,” Rula added. She wore a high-necked burgundy sweater that Elana had worn to school meetings because she thought its slim form suggested youth, while the high collar reassured teachers of seriousness.
Sunny paused while Matina added a thimble of skim milk to his coffee, nodded thanks, and took a sip.
“With your fertile knowledge of Hindi and Punjabi,” he told them, “you should be able to tell any cabdriver anywhere in the world, ‘Starbucks, please, chop-chop.’”
Sgt. Gallaher broke into a soft smile while Rula floundered in her seat from side to side, and Rita flailed with her hands for Sunny's attention.
“India is the largest English-speaking country in the world, Pap-paji,” she said. “You've always told us.”
“Well you might try studying a little English, too,” he said, and then his voice softened.
“I'm sorry,” he said. “Just a little tired and being an ass. You can be anything you want to be. Your mother and I always said that. Any homework I can pretend to understand? Or were you too busy doing deals?”
His daughters exchanged squishy rueful looks that Sunny began to notice included Sgt. Gallaher.
“Not exactly,” said Rita.
“No,” said Rula. “We thought—Sgt. Gallaher suggested it actually—that we'd go into City Hall with you.”
“To see your day as mayor,” said Rita.
“I'll write the note,” Sgt. Gallaher came in from the counter behind Sunny. “For school. A field trip, a civics lesson. ‘Rula and Rita Roopini were absent so they could watch their father be mayor until noon.’”
Sunny frowned. He put his knuckles to his chin and scrunched his forehead before saying, “Three ballots, I'd guess. That should keep me on the throne until nearly one. Let's stay down for lunch in Greek-town.”
His daughters pushed back their chairs and sprang to their feet, snapping their fingers, chanting and cheering, “Opah! Opah!”
“We really want to go, Pappaji,” said Rula, while Rita tossed her braids behind her shoulders—the gesture was distressingly flirtatious and startled Sunny—and said, “Since Sheldon can't.”
Sunny decided to make dosas. “Tiene gusto?” he asked Wilmer, and “Tiene gusto?” he asked Matina. She was Greek, but they spoke kitchen Spanish together.
“Naddd-ah,” she trilled.
“Potatoes, onions, and chilis,” Rita called out.
“Add cheese for me,” said Rula, who then turned around to the counter. “But make one for Sgt. Gallaher!” she said. “Sgt. Gallaher should get the first.”
The sergeant shook her large, dark head. A sable spray of hair fell against her neck like a fat feather.
“I'm on duty,” she demurred. She'd worn a red and black scarf that day, knotted just below the neck with a small silver band, which her fingers seemed to run up and down, like changing messages on a signal flag.
“No dosas on duty?” said Sunny. “I'd never heard …” and as Sunny strode toward the scalding grill, Sgt. Gallaher pulled the ring down to just above her belt.
“Okay, sir. One.”
“One done right is all you'll need,” said Sunny.
Matina stepped up with a green apron she pulled around his white shirt and silver tie. The apron bore a flaking yellow seal of Local 81 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. Sunny held his hands, abracadabra style, over the small tubs of chopped ingredients that Wilmer and Nelson had prepared.
“Cheese, carrots, chilis, peanut butter, whatever,” said Sgt. Gallaher. “Nothing special, no trouble.”
Sunny ran a splash of water on his fingers and dribbled it onto the griddle. The water went whoosh then splat and quickly steamed into bubbles, which danced and disappeared.
“No trouble at all, sergeant,” he announced over his shoulder above a new commotion of bubbles as he squirted a slick of corn oil over the hot silver surface.
“The key is touch and timing. I made my first dosa—oh mercy in my father's place on Brick Lane, just before we came here. Young boys in the Amazon, I suppose, slay a jaguar.”
Sunny dipped a tin ladle into the large white tub of rice and lentil batter, which had been churned and fermented overnight. He swirled a line of the batter onto the grill, holding it, his daughters noticed, just a little higher than usual for Sgt. Gallaher.
“When I was a teenager, we counted one Sunday,” he said. “I think I made one hundred and two in an afternoon.”
“A lot of hot work,” Sgt. Gallaher called out above the escalating sizzle. Sunny smoothed the batter with the butt end of the ladle over and over, into an oval about the size of a football.
“You know the worst part of making so many dosas?” Sunny asked as he worked the ladle slowly up, down, and around. “Seeing so many bits and pieces come back, with the nice brown edges that I strived to get. You want to send them back out and say, ‘You left the best stuff, don't you know?’ Maybe it was my first lesson in politics. You can never tell what sticks with people. You can figure out how to bring peace to Jerusalem, but if you ever voted for a bus fare increase … Okay now, you can't lift the edges to check the browning,” Sunny announced. “Or it will be lighter on that side. You stare into the batter and watch the bubbles. See? One, two. Now it's six, eight, then they begin to sprout all over. The smell should just be opening in your nose. You sprinkle the potatoes and onions over the inner two-thirds of the oval. The bubbles come quick now. You add the chilis last, so they don't get soggy. You hold off for a moment. You think, ‘Got to flip it now,’ but you hang back for the count of one … two!”
At the beat of three, Sunny slipped a slender spatula under the left side of the oval and turned it over, once, twice, then a third time before lifting a browned dosa, successfully crisped at the edges, onto a thick ivory plate. Sgt. Gallaher clapped her hands.
“Voila. As we say in Tamil,” Sunny declared. Matina took the plate and plopped a dollop of pale raita alongside the dosa and pinched small twigs of chopped cilantro over the top. Sunny had turned back to prepare the grill for more when Matina caught his arm and pointed to the screen above the kitchen counter.
Arty Agras had just appeared. Sunny turned around. Wordlessly, Wilmer moved over to the grill to make dosas for Sunny's daughters while he watched Arty Agras wipe the back of his hand across his mouth and give off a wobbly smile, like a man trying to hold his balance on a shaky ladder.
“God bless Arty,” Sunny said, and then wondered, “Whatever will he say?”
He recognized a scuffed white wall of Arty's 1st Ward office on Ash-land Avenue.
“TV crews must have put him there,” said Eldad.
Arty had been stood up against the wall. He wore a brown-bag-colored suit and an orange tie and stood in front of a ragged row of snapshots, citations, and declarations that listed as if they had been hung just last night by a man who had come home drunk. Sunny thought he could see a shot of Arty standing on his toes to pose alongside Jennifer Aniston. He recognized the only pictures he had ever seen on a politician's wall of an office holder shaking hands with Spiro Agnew and Michael Dukakis.
“Arty needs a good Eldad,” Sunny said.
“Someone should at least drag a flag behind him,” Eldad suggested. “That flat wall—like a firing squad.”
Arty licked his lips, darted his pale pink tongue over the back of his hand, smiled shakily, and stopped for a moment to reach deep into a pocket for a handkerchief, which he drew across his mouth and pressed against his nose. Microphones bristled in front of his face.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I know it's a busy day. I'll do my best to be subcinct.”
Eldad groaned. But Sunny called up to the screen, “Take your time, Arty,” and onscreen Arty Agras paused and looked out with astonishment.
“Am I dead?” he asked. “It's the first time so many people have been interested in anything I say.” The reporters stayed so silent, Sunny could hear someone's gum popping; someone's pen scratching paper.
“Well: it's true,” Arty Agras announced in a slow, husky voice.
“They got some details wrong. I'm sixty-three, not sixty-four. Get to be my age, you're in no rush.
“But me and those two boys? I guess that's true. What can I say? My family knows. My kids, my wonderful kids, my wonderful wife. We spent some time talking about it. They … they say they still love me,” said Arty, his voice falling to a sigh. “They say we're still a family. I didn't want to drag them up here with me. They've been through … so much already. They didn't do anything. They have nothing to answer for. That's me. Only me.
“I don't know if I can explain this,” he said. As he looked out, his blue eyes bubbled. “What are most of you folks—twenty-five, thirty? Are a couple of you forty? How many of you are married? I've been married thirty-five years. It's been good. Sofia—a lot of you know her—is a wonderful woman. Loving and kind. A wonderful mother. Tough, when she had to be. I … I can't live without her. I don't want to. But a marriage that long, I don't know if you're old enough to understand. You love each other. But love goes through seasons. Sometimes it's wonderful. Sometimes, it's not bad, it just gets a little cold to the touch. But you love each other and stay together because you know it's just a season. That's why you make a promise to each other. And to God.”
Arty raised a quavering hand next to his face. His cupped palm was red and wrinkled, as if he had been pulling a rough rope through his fingers.
“You don't quit on each other just because you're going through a cold snap,” he said, his voice rising slightly with defiance. “But sometimes, you get a little chilly. Ten years ago, it never would have happened. Ten weeks from now, maybe nothing. But something happened now.
“Am I gay? I don't know. I wouldn't mind. I wouldn't care. All I know is I hurt my family, and that makes me ashamed. But nobody forced anybody. I don't know why this is supposed to have anything to do with being mayor. I guess some people must feel that way or you wouldn't be here.”
Arty seemed to shiver in the scalding light. His mouth snapped open for an instant, as if he were gulping a hook. Then his hands tightened along the silvery neck of the microphone stand, his lower lip came back into his chin, and he pulled back his shoulders, which threw his voice into the horde of gnat-black microphones.
“I'm going home to my family,” he said. “There are a couple of hours before the session begins. I've got my job. If somebody wants to take this to a grand jury, I'll walk the plank, take a plea. But today, I still represent my ward. I'll do the job I'm sworn to do. If you have questions, I may have a lot of time later—soon. But right now, I just want to go home to my family,” said Arty Agras.
Sunny could hear a chorus of chihuahuas bark and cry, “Arty? Alderman? Arty? Arty!” as Arty Agras ducked his head, thrust his hands in his coat pockets, and walked away. Just as quickly, the shouts were shushed.
“Not now,” someone snapped, and then another voice added more softly, “Not now.”