WHEN I TURNED sixteen, I got a job at a frozen-yogurt place owned by a big white man with a curly white beard. His name was Pekko Roberts. The first week I thought he was old, but then I studied him and realized that he was only about fifty. “The staff here has always been diverse,” he said when he hired me, which turned out to mean that a Korean girl had worked there the summer before, and that he was glad I’m black. “I want the black community to feel welcome here,” he said, and I pictured a marching block of black people led by ladies in church hats, maybe twenty rows, twenty across, arms linked, all coming at once to buy frozen yogurt. “My dad is white,” I said, but he had turned toward a customer and didn’t hear me. The first time my father picked me up after work, I saw a string of feelings cross Pekko’s face, though not much of it shows above the beard. He was disappointed that I wasn’t quite as diverse as he had in mind—but then pleased, I thought, because my father, who also has a beard, looked something like him. “Are you adopted?” he said the next time I came to work.
“My mom is black,” I said. I was annoyed. I look like my dad except for color.
When I’d been working in the store a few weeks, I was alone there one afternoon when a man in his twenties came in and ordered a cup of Dutch Chocolate Low Fat and sat down at a table to eat it. He had brown hair like a flat cap and it came down in spikes on his forehead. He had a sharp nose, and the nose sticking out from under the hair made him look a little like a dog. “What’s your name?” he said after a while, speaking to me from the table, which happens when there’s only one customer in the store.
“Tabitha.”
“Do me a favor, Tabitha,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Keep some money for me until tomorrow or the next day.”
“Why?” I thought of bank robbers with marked money.
“So I don’t spend it.”
“How do you know I’ll give it back?” I said.
“Oh, you’ll give it back.”
“How much money?”
“Ten.”
“Ten dollars?”
“Right—what did you think, ten thousand?” We both laughed and I liked the way he laughed. Before I could decide what to do about him, he took a ten-dollar bill out of his pocket. Then he took a napkin and wrote something on it with a pen. Then he put the bill and the napkin on the counter and walked out. I looked at the napkin. It said, “UOMe $10 Denny.”
I thought of telling my parents. I was afraid they’d laugh: “You fell for that scam?” Though I couldn’t figure out how it was going to turn out to be a scam. All the scams I’d heard about—the person who tells you his car has been towed, the person stranded in New Haven who needs bus fare—involved being asked for money, not being given it.
When I put my jeans into the laundry, I transferred the money and the napkin to the left pocket of the clean pair. The next day Pekko and I were working together. We had lulls and then crowds, lulls and then crowds all day. It was a Saturday. Pekko said I could take the next Saturday off because the man who worked weekdays while I was at school wanted to work Saturday the following week. He had to miss a day and he wanted to make it up.
“Of course, I see that I’m depriving you of a day,” he said.
“I don’t mind.” I wasn’t sure if I minded. Saturday was my only full day, so I’d lose a lot of money—but it would be good to have a Saturday off.
“Well, if you do mind,” Pekko said, “I need someone to paint my boat and clean my garage. It would take just a few hours. Would your parents object?”
“What kind of boat?” I said.
“Just a motorboat.”
“Where do you live that you have a boat?”
“Guilford—a summer place, but I rent it year-round. It’s supposedly winterized.”
“On the water?”
“Right on the water.”
Just then Denny came in. I was startled to see him. He ordered Dutch Chocolate again and said, “Thanks, Tabitha,” and Pekko looked up from where he was making a pot of coffee, but lots of the customers had learned my name.
Denny sat down and gave me a funny, friendly look, as if we were playing a practical joke on Pekko. The look made me feel better about him. I’d been picturing him sullen. I took a cloth and wiped the tables. “Didn’t you just do that, Tabby?” said Pekko over his shoulder. Another customer had come in.
As I passed Denny’s table I gave him the bill and the napkin, which had been folded together in my pocket. He nodded and took them. I wiped the last table and went back to serve the customer, a black woman with heels and a briefcase who reminded me of my mother. She ordered a cone and left, carrying it with her. “Spring,” said Pekko. “Warm enough to eat it in the street—but cool enough that it doesn’t drip on her dress-for-success suit.” I thought he’d say something about economic opportunities for blacks, but he didn’t.
I decided not to work at Pekko’s house on Saturday, but when I told my parents he’d asked me about it, my father said, “He doesn’t try anything funny with you, does he?” and I said of course not.
“He sings Weavers songs,” I said, as if that took care of everything. “You probably went on peace marches with him.” Pekko was a just man, I was saying.
“He does look familiar,” said my dad. Pekko had said the same thing. “What’s your father’s name?” he’d asked me.
“Parker Stillman.”
“He’s a lawyer?”
“An architect.”
“Same difference—one of those people who came here for Yale and stayed on.”
I nodded.
“I know him,” he said. “I know all of them.”
After that, if my father picked me up, he and Pekko would stand around for a while trying to decide how they knew each other. “Ever been to Quaker meeting?” Pekko would ask. Et cetera.
A WEEK LATER Denny came in again when I was alone, and again asked me to keep his money. “You’re weird,” I said.
“What’s weird about me?” He wasn’t weird. He seemed like someone who’d taken courses in auto mechanics in high school and who might work in a garage now, except that he didn’t wear a uniform with “Denny” embroidered on the pocket. I wished he did. I kept thinking maybe his name wasn’t really Denny.
“It’s weird to ask someone to keep money for you,” I said.
“But everyone does that,” said Denny. “They ask banks.”
I laughed. “Why don’t you go to a bank, then?”
“No way,” he said. This time he didn’t bother with the napkin, and he stood at the counter until I put the money into my left pants pocket again. “What school do you go to?” he said then, but nodded and left as soon as I told him.
When he came back for the money the next day, I was alone, but he still didn’t stay and talk. “What are you going to buy with it?” I said.
“Groceries.”
The third time, he asked me to keep a twenty. It was a couple of weeks later, and spring was really coming. I took the twenty and then I didn’t see him for a week. Now that it was spring I sometimes wore a skirt instead of pants. The skirt had no pockets, so when I wore it I put the money in my bag, not in my wallet but in an envelope at the bottom labeled “Denny.” I was meticulous about it.
One day I got out of school early because of a teachers’ meeting, and when my father heard that was going to happen, he said he’d take me out to lunch. He picked me up at school and we went to an Indian restaurant. My father and mother love Indian food and my brother and I grew up with it. My brother eats only one dish, chicken biryani, but I like everything. This time I had matar paneer, which is peas and Indian cheese. I don’t eat much meat.
“I really want to make paneer,” Dad said. He cooks Indian food. “It’s essentially just boiled milk. You put in lemon juice to make it curdle.” Then when the bill came, after he’d talked recipes with the waiters and everything, he didn’t have enough money to pay it, and he thought they took credit cards but they didn’t, and he didn’t have his checkbook. “Do you have any money, Tab?” he said to me with the light in his eyes that he gets when he’s done something foolish. I think he likes it: screwing up, being forgiven.
“I have a twenty,” I finally said, “but it isn’t mine.”
“Whose is it?”
“A friend of mine.”
I thought he might ask questions but I guess he was too nervous about the check. “Oh, that’s all right,” he said. “We’ll stop at the money machine and I’ll give you another twenty.”
“I think it might matter that it’s this particular twenty,” I said, although I didn’t know why that should be so.
“What—Jackson’s picture is upside down?” my father said quickly. He sounded impatient.
So I gave him Denny’s twenty, and then the automatic teller wasn’t working and I was already late for work. I figured Denny wouldn’t come in, but of course he did. Again I was alone, and it occurred to me that he waited around outside, peeking in, until he could see that I was alone. As soon as he came in, I looked right at him and said, “Listen, I don’t have it.” I told him what had happened. “I’ll have it tomorrow,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“Does this mean you can’t buy your groceries?” I said. I thought maybe I ought to invite him to dinner. What if he had no food?
“Oh, no,” he said. Then, after a silence, he said, “Would you come for a walk with me when you get off work?”
“All right.” I felt sorry for him. “I’ll be done at five.” The days were getting warmer and it was light into the evening, so I always walked home now.
Denny went away and came back at five. He was waiting for me at a little distance from the store when I came out. I thought I should introduce him to Pekko, but I didn’t. Pekko would say I shouldn’t go for a walk with him, I knew—that I didn’t have to, just because of the twenty. He’d hand me a twenty.
We walked miles—all the way to the grassy park at the harbor. “So, do you consider yourself black?” he asked, first thing.
“Of course,” I said.
“Well, logically you could be either one, with one black parent and one white parent,” he said.
“What do you know about my parents?” I said, but he just shrugged. We talked about school. He asked me questions about my classes and teachers, and was interested in figuring out their hang-ups and why some of them annoyed me. When the wind got colder at the harbor, he pulled me close like a sweater or a blanket, and then he gave me a short kiss on the lips.
“Do you mind that?” he said. I didn’t mind. I was excited that he was older, with a different feel and smell from the boys my age I’d kissed, and more interesting than he had seemed. I decided he hadn’t just taken auto mechanics. “Do you have a job?” I said.
“I take courses at Gateway Community College,” said Denny, “and I work for a cleaning service.”
“Cleaning houses?”
“Right. Three of us at a time. We go in and blitz a place.”
“Is it fun?” I said.
“Sometimes.”
“When isn’t it?”
“Bathrooms. And when the owners are assholes.”
He was taking an English course for which he had to write his autobiography. “Maybe I’ll show it to you,” he said.
“You don’t seem old enough to have an autobiography to write,” I said.
“Plenty old enough,” he said. “Did you ever do drugs?”
“No. Did you?”
“I used to.”
“Not anymore?”
“Not anymore.”
“So you’re not dealing drugs or anything? I mean, the money.”
“If I were dealing drugs,” said Denny, “I’d have a lot more money than that.”
“Well, I know,” I said, not wanting to seem naive.
He knew about the gulls we saw fly over the water: how old they were, whether they were males or females. He pointed out one-year-old gulls and three-year-old gulls. I had no idea whether he was making it up or not. He moved toward me again, and this time when he kissed me I could feel his erection. “I like you,” I said, but I backed away.
“I really like you,” he said quietly, pushing the hair off his forehead so his eyes suddenly looked bigger and very clear. They were blue, I saw. Indoors, I’d thought they might be brown. We were in a lonely place, but the highway was nearby. I wondered if we could be seen from the highway.
“Are you thinking I’m going to rape you?” he said.
“It crossed my mind,” I said.
“I’m not,” said Denny, “but I’d like to talk you into it.”
I didn’t say anything because I wanted to have sex with him, but I knew I wasn’t going to, even though officially I hadn’t decided yet.
“I’ve got condoms,” he said.
“It isn’t very private here,” I said.
“You don’t have to,” he said.
“Of course not!” I said, my voice sharp.
“Oh, that’s not what I mean, Tabby,” he said. He sounded sad now, and he steered me around and we started walking back toward my neighborhood. I felt bad. I didn’t know what he could mean, if he wasn’t talking about the twenty.
“What did you mean?” I said after a long time.
“Never mind,” he said.
“That makes me furious,” I said, stopping. “I don’t put up with people saying ‘never mind.’”
He said then, after a pause, “I mean, just because I’m a house cleaner and you feel sorry for me.”
“Oh,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking about that.” We kept walking without touching. Now that it was no longer possible, while we walked through the streets, I was sure I wanted to have sex with him. “Tell me about cleaning,” I said.
“Fumes,” he said. “Yuck. And vacuuming up dog hair. But I turn off here.” He turned left and walked away from me. We were near the yogurt place and I walked home alone from there.
WHEN I GOT home my father was making Indian stuffed bread—aloo paratha, bread stuffed with potatoes. My mother was taking off her panty hose at the kitchen table—her money-makers, she calls them, because she wears them only to work. She wiggled her toes and sat back at the kitchen table watching my father. Her shoes were under the table. “The Indian lunch whetted my appetite,” my father said. He was rolling out circles of dough all over the kitchen. “I have a twenty-dollar bill for your friend.”
“He showed up,” I said.
“Oh, I’m sorry!” said my father, and stopped what he was doing—enclosing a blob of potatoes in one of his dough circles. “Was it embarrassing?”
“He was cool.”
But my father forgot to give me the twenty-dollar bill, and I forgot to ask for it, and I didn’t think of it until halfway through the next day. Then, of course, Denny came into the store again. This time someone else was there, a woman drinking coffee at a table in the corner. Pekko had gone to the bank. I thought maybe Denny had looked in the window but didn’t see the woman and thought we’d be alone. I looked up at him. I hadn’t been embarrassed the day before, but this time I was. I was afraid he’d think I’d done it on purpose so we could take another walk, and I had been thinking about him. But that day it was raining.
I looked at Denny and said, “Hi,” and acted as if he was just a customer, and he ordered a cup of frozen yogurt. When he paid I opened the cash register, took out a twenty-dollar bill, and gave it to him along with the coins he was getting for change. “Thanks,” he said. He took his yogurt and left. I wanted him to stay, but I didn’t know what to say and so I just said, “You’re welcome.” I knew he’d seen me take the money from the register, not from my pocket.
Pekko didn’t say anything to me the next day, and I wondered what he was thinking. I thought he might go out of his way not to accuse me. The day I took the money, my father finally gave me the twenty-dollar bill, and the next day I put it into the till. But every time Pekko spoke to me, I was sure he knew, and that he was thinking of a way to bring it up. He’d be shocked that I’d done it. He might talk first about it to his old friend my father. They had never figured out how they knew each other, but they were still sure they did.
“That fellow Denny…” said Pekko one afternoon.
“How do you know Denny?” I said.
“He comes in here all the time,” he said. “You know him.”
“I didn’t know you knew him.”
“I wanted to ask him to do some work around my place,” he said. “He hasn’t been in today, has he?”
“No.” I thought he was trying to get me to say something specific about Denny. Maybe he wanted to see if I’d confess. But it was true about his house—a few days later when I came in, Denny was there, and Pekko was telling him about painting the boat. But the next thing I knew, Denny had been fired. Pekko was angry with him—he’d left paint cans open and one had spilled; he hadn’t cleaned up properly. Pekko grumbled all afternoon.
That night my father got a phone call, and from the way he looked at me, his eyes playing lightly with the image of me, I knew that the person on the other end of the line was talking about me. I left the room, but when I came back, my father said that Pekko wanted to hire me to work around his house. My father had said it was all right with him, and that if I wanted to do it, he’d drop me off there on Sunday.
Sure enough, Pekko asked me about it the next day. “I just need someone who’s neat,” he said. He said he’d pay me what I earned in the store. He wanted me to help him clean the garage and finish painting the boat.
The next Sunday, my father dropped me off at Pekko’s house in Guilford. He lived right near the water. There wasn’t a swimming beach but a long, swampy piece of land behind his house, with a muddy trail going through it, and at the end of it, water. A green rowboat was on the shore near the water. It was a chilly spring day, but I took off my shoes to walk to the boat through the cold mud. The boat was already painted. Denny had finished it and I thought he’d done a fine job. Pekko and I examined it, but there was nothing more to do, so we went to work in the garage, which wasn’t an impossible mess but was daunting. I started winding spools of rope and sweeping and sorting out trash. Pekko found a can of gasoline and the motor for the boat and took them down to the water. “Is the boat yours or the owner’s?” I said when he came back.
“Mine,” he said. “Maybe I’ll take it out this afternoon.”
“It’s a nice way to live,” I said. We had gone into the house when I arrived, and it was simple, like a summer cabin. I liked the thought of living like that.
“Nice for a kid,” he said. “I never grew up.” He was squatting to arrange things on the shelves while I swept. His thighs were big in his tan pants.
“I think you’re pretty grown up,” I said. He turned around and looked at me, and then he straightened up and stretched his arms out while doing knee bends—getting the kinks out, I guess. With his white beard and his arms spread wide, he looked like someone in a play, a priest or a king who might say something weighty in poetry. I swept the dirt from the corners and picked up the broom to sweep the cobwebs from the walls.
After a while Pekko and I had a huge pile of trash outside the garage, and Pekko said he’d drive it to the dump. I kept working. I went back to the rope, which I couldn’t resist. There were five or six kinds of rope and they were completely tangled up. I happen to be the sort of person who can’t help untying knots. Pekko had said maybe we should give up and throw the rope out, but I didn’t think he meant it. It was good rope. I loved working out the knots. These were thick ropes—clothesline, bright yellow nylon rope, a very thick, rough, braided tan rope, and so on. I sat down on the floor of the garage with an enormous knot in my lap. Pekko drove away and I worked alone for a long time. It was quiet. Then I felt someone behind me. I turned and it was Denny, coming toward me across the weedy area near the road.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“I’ve worked for Pekko before,” he said.
“I didn’t hear a car.”
“I hitched.”
“Why did you come here?”
“I left something.”
“Did you know I’d be here?”
“Of course not,” he said. “What do you think, I’m shadowing you?”
I thought I’d like that. He could have followed us out there. He could be shadowing my house. It would have been easy to find out where I lived. He could have followed me home from the yogurt place one night.
“I thought nobody was here,” he said. “I didn’t see a car.”
“Pekko’s gone to the dump,” I said.
He said, “Is the house locked?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Why? Do you need to go to the john?”
“I just wondered,” said Denny.
He leaned back against the garage wall and watched me reaching my hands into the tangle and loosening it. I’d find an end and try to work it out. Some of the ropes had been cut, and sometimes when I worked and worked at a length of rope, it would turn out that the whole piece was just a yard or two long. But I had disentangled the bright yellow rope and rolled it into a coil, and the knot in my lap was smaller.
“I haven’t seen you in the yogurt place lately,” I said. I had thought about Denny every day. I kept waiting for him to come in.
“I’ve been there,” he said.
“Not when I was there.”
“I guess not.” Then he said, “What do your parents think about me?”
“My parents?” I said. “They don’t know anything.”
“They know about the money, don’t they?”
“Only sort of,” I said.
“Look,” said Denny. “He knows you took it.”
“My father?”
“Pekko.”
“How do you know?” I said. He had gestured in the direction a car would come, if Pekko came back, and I had the strange idea that Denny had told him, that this was a trap, that Pekko hadn’t gone to the dump at all but was waiting somewhere, listening, while Denny got me to confess.
Denny shook his head. “Let’s take the boat out,” he said then.
“I don’t think we’d better.”
“Come on,” he said, and he pulled at my hand. “I have something to tell you.”
He pulled me down the path to the water. Pekko had set the motor in place, and before I could get my shoes and socks off again, Denny had pushed the boat into the water, getting his pants wet, and climbed into it. He’d kicked off his shoes and he wasn’t wearing socks. There was an oar in the bottom of the boat, and Denny used it to push away from the shore. When my feet were bare, I walked into the cold water and climbed into the bow of the boat. Denny yanked on the cord several times, and the motor caught. He headed the boat straight out into the sound. The water was gray, but the sun was trying to break through clouds, and it made the water glint. We bumped on the top of the water—each wave was a light blow underneath us—out toward the open sound. Denny was steering the boat straight away from the land, as if he planned to carry me directly across the sound to Long Island to start a new life. Then I looked back and saw a figure with a white beard running on the shore and waving its arms.
“We better go back,” I said.
“I want to talk to you,” said Denny. He shouted something over the sound of the motor and the wind. I couldn’t hear him and he had to say it again. “I’m on Home Release,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“I’m in jail.”
He leaned toward me, looking very slim and young, his hair over his eyes, and I moved closer, to the middle seat of the boat. “What do you mean, jail?” For a second I thought he meant something that would happen in a game.
“They let me out of jail.”
“What were you in jail for?”
“Robbery,” said Denny. “I figured you knew.”
“No,” I said. Pekko was getting smaller, and now I could hardly see him. “I’m cold,” I said. It was much colder out on the water.
“Me, too,” said Denny. He touched my arm with one finger, then his own. “I held up a store like Pekko’s. He knows.”
“He does?” I said.
“He knows everything about everyone,” said Denny. “You don’t want to go back there—you want to go where nobody knows you.” He smiled so intelligently, leaning toward me and touching my arm again, that it seemed easy. It seemed that he could stop the boat where we were, or a little farther along, that we could be quiet, and think what to do next, and maybe even stay there, but soon Denny turned the boat in a wide curve and pointed it toward shore. As we slowed down, near the beach, it was easier to hear him. When I could see the ground under us, Denny jumped out and then I did. We dragged the boat out of the cold water while Pekko screamed at us, and then we all drove back to New Haven. In the back seat of Pekko’s car, I was chilled and my face felt tight, as if we’d spent a long time, not just a few minutes, on that gray, bumpy Long Island Sound. The sun was almost out, but not quite, so the sky and the water glittered and it hurt to look around.
“I never said you kids could take that boat out,” said Pekko, after a mile of silence.
“Denny’s twenty-three,” I said. I rubbed my bare arms to warm them.
After Pekko dropped Denny off, he took me to Clark’s for a sandwich. I wanted just the right thing and I couldn’t decide what to order. It was as if I were going to prison, as if it were the last time I’d be allowed to choose what I wanted. I kept thinking of something Denny had said in the boat, the last thing he said. “Would you tell lies for me, young black woman?” he said. “Would you do that if I wanted?”