Day Five

April 4

THE SEVEN O’CLOCK ROOFTOP CHEERING WAS ESPECIALLY ENTHUSIASTIC this evening. It sounded like the whole Lower East Side had erupted, not just with the usual banging and whistles, but with cheering and firecrackers and bottle rockets shooting into the night, like a Fourth of July celebration. The day, of course, had been nothing to cheer about: 113,704 people in New York State have tested positive for Covid-19, the death toll rising to 3,565, with 4,126 patients struggling for their lives in the ICU. Cuomo warned the peak number of cases could come in four to eight days. “It’s like a fire spreading,” he said. New York had ordered and paid for 17,000 ventilators, he said, but the order fell through and the state is screwed. The mayor said that the city alone would need another 15,000 ventilators, 45,000 medical professionals, and 85,000 more hospital beds just to get through the next two months. These numbers are wild, crazy, insane. Thank God no one in our building seemed to be going anywhere. Maybe we’ll be able to keep old Fernsby safe until it’s over and we can all emerge from our little cocoons. Cuomo talks a lot about “flattening the curve,” but what’s really being flattened is the city itself. It’s hard to imagine what would be happening without the lockdown. Would it be like a dystopian movie out there, everyone dying in the streets? Or did it even make a difference? Were we even helping, being locked down in our building all this time? Is this what everyone else was doing? It didn’t seem like anyone was out on the streets besides police and medics.

As we were assembling, I motioned to Maine and asked her if she might help me contact my dad. She looked so sad when I told her about the nursing home and shared my fears about what might be going on up there.

“I’m on a temporary leave from the ER,” she said. “I’ll do my best to call around and see what I can find out—give me his name and the number and the name of the home.”

I ripped a page from my notebook, wrote it all down, and tossed it over at her—but it missed her and fluttered to the rooftop in between us. Crazy six-foot distancing. She picked it up and gave me a thumbs-up and smile that crinkled her eyes and filled me with hope.

“Well, well,” said Vinegar after we assembled, “have you all noticed the new art?”

Someone had painted an ice-cream cone below the poop emoji. Near it, someone had brushed some lines of calligraphy.

“What’s this? Japanese?” the Lady with the Rings asked.

“What does it say?” A few people were curious.

Finally, the tenant in 4B—the Poet, according to Wilbur’s bible—cleared his throat rather conspicuously. “It’s a Japanese death poem, written by Minamoto-no-Shitago¯ in the tenth century, translated by myself.”

“What does it say?”

“I’ll read it in Japanese, and then translate to English.” He paused and spoke slowly in Japanese.

Yononaka o

nani ni tatoemu

aki no ta o

honoka ni terasu

yoi no inazuma

After a pause, he switched into English.

This world—to what may I liken it?

To autumn fields darkening at dusk,

dimly lit by lightning flashes.

Maybe the Poet wrote that down after hearing all the stories about death last night—the ghosts, the father in the hospital, the nun who could smell death. I was having a hard time sleeping, and I had to say, looking around, that most everyone was looking sunken and haggard, as if they, too, had been marinating in the death all around us.

Finally, Darrow broke the mood: “On a more earthy subject—who transformed the pile of shit into a Mister Softee?”

We laughed in relief.

“That was me,” said Eurovision proudly.

“Clever,” said Vinegar. “Thank you.”

“Let’s begin then, shall we?” Eurovision grinned. “I hope to see more art and fine literature on our Covid wall—there’s lots more space. Thank you! Now: Who has a story? Don’t be shy.”

“Let’s have a story about love and beauty,” said the Lady with the Rings. “There’ve been too many stories about death.”

Vinegar cast a glance at the Lady with the Rings, suspicion crinkling her face. “Love and beauty?”

“Something uplifting.”

“Stories about love,” said Florida, “are uplifting only if they’re phony. Real ones are always heartbreaking.”

“Not true,” said the Lady with the Rings. “The world is full of simple love stories that don’t end badly.”

“They’re the ones you don’t hear about,” said Vinegar, “because people like her”—she looked at Florida—“would rather hear about disaster, misfortune, and heartbreak.”

Florida pursed her lips and said nothing. Eurovision was about to speak when Wurly’s voice interrupted.

“I can tell you a story about love that’s uplifting and real,” he said, leaning forward on his piano bench. “I grew up around many strong, fascinating Black women in North Carolina. One of them, a great lady by the name of Bertha Sawyer, passed away when I was ten years old.”

“Oh, I hope it involves music?” asked Eurovision, brightening.

“Everything involves music.” Wurly released a deep chuckle. “Like a lot of us musicians, I got my start in church, messing around with the organ. We walked by Bertha’s house on the way to church, so I always associate her with the awakenings of my music. Sometimes when I’m playing a slow riff with massive augmented seven-nine-thirteenth chords, I’ll think of Bertha sitting on her porch. I don’t know why—maybe because, like those chords, she was also big and complicated and dissonant. She’s there, in the background of my music, along with so many other people in my past.”

“I think of weird things and long-gone people when I’m singing sometimes,” said Eurovision, “when I’m lost in it.”

“And when your singing voice is coming through my wall late at night,” said Vinegar icily, “I also feel lost. In a different kind of way.”

“I’m sure I’m sorry,” Eurovision shot back.

“So am I.”

Wurly bowed his head, passed a giant hand over it before looking up again, and began.

* * *

“Bertha had been a part of my family long before I was even born. She was the longtime girlfriend of my great-uncle Leo. It was many years later when I came to understand that she wasn’t his wife. Bertha’s presence at most of our family gatherings, and the photos, suggest that she was more than just welcomed. The intimacy with which she and some of my family members are positioned show that she was respected, like a matriarch. In practice, she was.

“I have three very vivid memories of Bertha—each showing a different side of her. But all three memories remind me of her strength, her love for others, and how much people loved her.

“My mother was once a member of the usher board at Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in South Mills. Many generations of my family had been raised up in that church, as was I. The usher board almost always held their monthly meetings early on Saturday afternoons, and I often went along with my mother. I went for the organ. The usher board meetings were the only time I got to experiment with the church’s organ without having to share it with other children; they wanted to play with the organ (as they would a toy).

“I wanted to play the organ.

“One Saturday, on our way to the church, Ma and I saw Bertha sitting on the porch of the house Ma and her siblings had been raised in. Bertha lived there, off and on, with my great-uncle. And whenever they had a couple’s spat, she’d go to her old bus, which was parked behind the house. Bertha spent a lot of time sitting on that porch, waving at passersby and entertaining neighbors who’d come over for conversation or to share a drink.

“Ma and I stopped to talk to Bertha that day, and when it was time to head to the church, I asked Ma if I could stay with Bertha instead. I can’t remember why I would pass up an hour on the organ, but Bertha didn’t seem to mind my company. (If she did, she pretended not to.) So Ma agreed as long as I promised to behave for Bertha. Bertha said she’d pop my tail if I didn’t behave, which, in those days, and in my community, was completely acceptable. In fact, it was expected.

“The best part of my time with Bertha that day was getting to see the inside of her bus. All the seats had been removed, and there was a twin bed and a loveseat. There were rugs on the floor. The windows were covered with heavy blankets, and there was a kerosene heater in the center of the bus. Where the driver’s seat would have been stood a small table covered with an abundance of canned foods, cookies, crackers, and the like. Among those cans were sardines—something I’d never eaten. I asked Bertha what they tasted like, and she explained that sardines were similar to tuna.

“Bertha made me a sardine sandwich. I watched as she spread mustard on both slices of white bread. As soon as I took my first bite I knew it was too fishy. I didn’t want to finish the sandwich, but I’d been taught not to waste food—especially not at other people’s houses.

“Bertha must have been able to tell I suffered from every bite. She laughed. And with her raspy voice—I don’t think she was a smoker—she said something like, ‘I knew damn well you won’t gon’ like sardines. Brang it here.’ And she finished the sandwich for me with no complaints. I could be wrong, but I believe Bertha liked that I was going to tough it out. She rescued me from sardines and mustard.

“The second vivid memory I have of Bertha is from about a year or two after the sardine-and-mustard incident. Bertha and my great-uncle Leo were both under the influence of whatever ‘spirit’ they’d been imbibing all day. They were half fighting. As soon as Ma and I arrived on the scene, Ma had to jump out of the car and pull the two of them apart. They were trading hits and curses. Leo and Bertha were roughly the same size—both drunk out of their minds. I’m not sure who had the greatest advantage over whom.

“Sadly, domestic disputes between men and women weren’t entirely foreign to me by that age, but I wasn’t accustomed to those disputes being out in public. As long as I live, I’ll never forget that Bertha didn’t shed nary a tear during that fight. My great-uncle did, though. Ma told him to go inside the house and get himself together, which meant ‘go inside and pass out.’ And Bertha was instructed to get in the back seat of Ma’s car. As drunk as Bertha was, she was concerned with diverting my attention. She began asking me about school, my ‘lessons,’ and so forth. But she did not cry. Of that, I am certain. One doesn’t forget that kind of strength and resolve.

“Even with her T-shirt stretched and torn, her hair sticking every which way on top of her head, Bertha wanted things to appear to be normal to me—the child.

“The third striking memory I have of Bertha is incredibly special. It was June of 1989, shortly after my tenth birthday. Bertha was in an intensive care unit, and Ma and I went to visit her. Children weren’t permitted in those rooms, so I sat in the lobby for a short while, flipping through magazines. Eventually, Ma came and hurriedly pulled me past the nurses’ station and into Bertha’s room. My great-uncle was there, as were a couple other people I knew from the community. They were watching TV and talking amongst themselves.

“Bertha was awake and buried deep under sheets and blankets, with only her head poking out. Her hair had been brushed into a loose bun that sat at the top of her head. Perhaps my mother had done that for her before sneaking me into the room.

“By that age, I had a better understanding of death. I’d gone with my mother to visit other people in hospitals, and not long after, I would end up either attending their funerals with her, or watching her leave to attend their funerals. I was attuned and pessimistic enough, even at that age, to gather that I might never see Bertha out and about again.

“Bertha lifted one of her arms from under the covers, and she motioned for me to approach her. My answers to whatever questions she asked were ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘No, ma’am.’ She held my hand for a few minutes, and it was awkward. Bertha once again seemed to be making sure that everyone around her was okay, even when she was the one in pain.

“Bertha died two or three days later.

“My mother had gone to the funeral home to see Bertha, and she told me that they’d made her up to look very nice. I attended Bertha’s funeral, which was right after our regular Sunday service. Bertha drew a big crowd. There were more people at her funeral than there were at the eleven thirty worship service. In fact, there were so many people in attendance, Ma and the other ushers had to search the church closet for extra folding chairs.

“In the coffin, Bertha looked like she belonged in a soap opera. She had been transformed, but she was recognizable. Her hair had been curled tight. And there was makeup. I could no longer see where years of drinking had damaged her lips.

“She was not a schoolteacher; she was not an avid reader; she wasn’t even a mother. But I believe she had the capacity to be all three.

“Ma was right. Bertha looked beautiful. Bertha was beautiful. To me, my family, and many others in South Mills, North Carolina, Bertha Sawyer was a star.”

* * *

Merenguero’s Daughter sighed in satisfaction as Wurly stopped speaking. “I heard you playing last night,” she said. “What was the name of that song? It was so beautiful.”

“Let me remember,” said Wurly. “I was messing around with a Jimmy Rowles tune. ‘The Peacocks.’”

Merenguero’s Daughter turned to Eurovision. “Hey, Music Man, you got that on your system?”

“I’ve got everything.” Eurovision smiled at her, tapped on his phone, and in a moment, big dreamy piano chords came drifting over the rooftop, below a weeping sax line. “Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock.”

The sound of the sax floated out over the city.

“There are those pain-filled augmented thirteenth chords I’m talking about,” said Wurly, nodding.

The song came to an end. In that moment, a rich, earthy scent of something damp drifted across the rooftop: Rain was coming.

Wurly said, “Jazzmeia Horn did a fantastic version of that.” He hummed and began to sing, “‘Hold the memory forever . . . A mirage is all it’s ever been.’”

“As long as we’re on stories about love and pain,” a voice from the darker end of the rooftop said, “I’ll tell one. About being a child well loved, even by flawed people. Because flawed people are the most reckless and generous in their love. There’s music in my story, too.”

She stepped into the light: it was Pardi, the beautiful, fierce-eyed mother who lived in 6E with her daughter. Her voice was extraordinary—low and powerful.

“How can we resist?” said Eurovision. “We’re all ears.”

Settling into an empty chair, she began.

* * *

“I was my father’s only adored child. He had other children, boys, by women other than my mother—raised well but at a distance. He raised me his ‘motherless little brown baby with sparkling eyes’ by his side and called me Pardner.

“In the early sixties, a Texas week didn’t pass without Daddy announcing I was his ‘pardner in crime’ as we sat in the dining room of our house that overlooked Galveston Bay. It was a rare day that passed without Daddy pronouncing me his ‘best dance pardner’ as we shimmied around our front parlor in house shoes, mine larger and larger sizes of fuzzy and bright orange-pink, his size-twelve silk-smooth oxblood-red Moroccan leather. When Leadbelly sang ‘man,’ we yelled ‘pardner!’

“Daddy’s enunciation of ‘partner’ as ‘pardner’ was a legacy pronunciation. The word, as honored title bestowed on beloved child, had been handed down from Daddy’s daddy to Daddy, who gifted the word—and all the rest of the words in the only poem my father or his father knew by heart, ‘Lil Brown Baby’ by Paul Laurence Dunbar—to me as a most treasured heirloom.

“When it was time for me to go to school, though, Bell Britton stopped calling me Pardner in public and started calling me Pardi, because he thought that sounded more appropriately feminine.

“Daddy had unique ideas about what was appropriately feminine and masculine. They boiled down to: He thought women should do more shooting and men should do more cooking and everybody needed to do a little of both—but not with everybody.

“He didn’t believe, for example, in interracial marriages. This subject came up as frequently as the name Jack Johnson, which is to say, not infrequently, in our Black and masculine Galveston.

“Daddy lavished me with superlatives, and his friends did, too. His old friends from South Texas and West Texas and his army buddies would heap me with extravagant and colorful praise that said more about the poetry in their souls and their love of brown babies than my virtue.

“Daddy’s army buddies typically visited for at least a week. They loved to take their time walking the brown sand of the beaches near Galveston. These visits were a tonic for Daddy.

“The buddies might come any time of year, but most often it was Juneteenth, June 19, the day when all of Black Texas celebrated both the end of slavery and the pleasure of getting good news at long last.

“Daddy’s best army buddy friend was a man named Lafayette, who would come down for a week at Juneteenth, then come back for another week at Thanksgiving. I loved it when Lafayette came to town. He always brought Daddy and me the best new albums; and me, a pretty purse no one else in Galveston had.

“Daddy liked to tell me what he had told me so many times before, that once upon a time, a long time ago, before I was born, Lafayette had saved his life and his sanity in a Korean town called No Gun Ri.

“Juneteenth was important in our house, and celebrating it big was the main way my father was like the other daddies in Galveston.

“In almost every other way, my father was an anomaly in my hometown. He had attended college, Prairie View, where he met my mother, but when he got out, he was drafted and shipped off to Korea before they could tie the knot. When Daddy got back from Korea, he married Mama, but he didn’t become a reverend as has been planned, or attend Yale Divinity School, where he had been accepted. He started working in gas stations, and my mother started crying.

“When Mama wasn’t crying, she was pleading. But Daddy said the only thing he wanted to do in a church after he came back from Korea was sing in the choir and barbecue at the summer church socials.

“This was the period when Daddy slipped away from crying-Mama and made my half brothers who lived in Houston, who I never really got to know because their mothers wanted nothing more to do with Daddy. This was when he lived not in a two-story house overlooking the bay but in an old clapboard cottage walking distance to the sea wall with two tall palms in the yard.

“That was the house Daddy came back to with infant me in his arms but no Mama holding his hand. Mama died in the hospital shortly after my birth.

“I suspect Daddy thought it was a judgment on him. I know this: Daddy didn’t hold the fact Mama died against me. He had promised Mama on her deathbed that he would be my mama and daddy, and he did everything he could imagine to keep that promise, starting with keeping me close and ending with not taking another wife.

“Daddy understood Mama’s death as an invitation to do something new with his life, something that wasn’t the church or the gas station.

“He hoped it might be something to do with the sea. He grew up riding and shooting and fishing but also sailing and swimming, and I grew up that way, too.

“Daddy loved water more than earth. Daddy was so proud of his adopted hometown, Galveston. Pride was an act of liberation for Daddy. It was never selfish—it was always communal. He was prouder of Galveston than he was proud of me, and that’s saying something.

“He loved to say, and ardently believed, though it is not an established fact, that the first Africans to step foot on the land we call Galveston were pirates. He was proud of the fourteen old Black churches in Galveston, and he was proud of the fact Galveston had a high school for Black students before Birmingham, Alabama; before Houston, before Dallas, before Fort Worth. And there was a Black library, too. He claimed Jack Johnson for Galveston, and he would talk about the real Charlie Brown, who was so much more than the Charlie Brown in the funny papers, the Black man who arrived in West Columbia, Texas, in 1865, so poor he didn’t own himself—arrived enslaved, but before the century was out, owned land on the Brazos River, and made a fortune selling cedarwood while audaciously claiming, ‘Lumber on the root was better than beef on the hoof.’

“When Daddy hit what he called his ‘first big lick,’ he bought us a house on the water and had a table made out of cedar and commissioned portraits of Charlie Brown and his wife, Isabelle, that he hung in our parlor. He didn’t hang Mama’s portrait because that would have made us cry.

“He was proud of Norris Wright Cuney, who was the first Grand Master of the Prince Hall Masons in Texas and the reason Daddy became a Mason. Cuney had founded a stevedore company that trained, equipped, and employed five hundred Black men when the Lily-Whites, the Republican powers that be, didn’t want any Black, skilled dockworkers, didn’t even want Blacks in the Republican Party.

“Daddy was proud of the fact that his mother’s father had had a bank account at the very first Black-owned bank in Texas—Fraternal Bank and Trust—founded by William Madison McDonald.

“Daddy was proud of his pop-pop, his mama’s daddy, a man he described as having the same profession as Jesus’s stepfather, Joseph. Pop-Pop was a carpenter and a Mason, and Daddy’s mother remembered walking between her father and mother through the streets of Fort Worth to Fraternal Bank and Trust to open their account the year the bank opened in 1906.

“Daddy’s family were strongly influenced by William Madison McDonald, and part of that influence was manifest in the discipline with which they voted a straight Republican ticket—because the Republicans were the party of Lincoln and the party of McDonald. And the party of Cuney.

“Cuney died in 1898. McDonald died in 1950. Daddy’s family broke with the Republicans before that. In 1948, Hobart Taylor Sr., who had gone off to Atlanta to make money selling insurance, was back in Texas making more money, building up a cab company while working for civil rights and generally riling up things in Houston in ways that would be good for Black people. So in 1948, Hobart got Daddy’s daddy to vote for LBJ for the senate, and we Brittons have been Democrats ever since.

“It was because of Hobart and Charlie Brown and Cuney all being so entrepreneurial, and Pop-Pop always putting their lives in my daddy’s face, that Daddy decided, upon return from Korea, that he would pump gas until he figured out how to make a fortune.

“He had some strange idea that the act of acquiring might cure the pain that plagued him after his stint in Southeast Asia. He wanted to make money for him and for me, but even more, he wanted to make money to give away. He had witnessed firsthand in three different countries—America, Korea, and Mexico—how poverty could explode a soul true as a bomb.

“As he had no interest whatsoever in driving a cab or owning a fleet of them, or opening a funeral parlor, or hauling goods like Britt Johnson or Matey Stewart, he didn’t know how to start getting rich without working too hard. He pumped a lot of gas and pain and wiped a lot of dust and bugs off a lot of windows before it occurred to him what he should be doing. Or rather, it occurred to one of his friends, and the idea caught fire until it was burning up Daddy’s ears.

“I was there, in a stroller nibbling on a soft roll, when it happened. I’ve seen the Polaroid, so I know it’s true. It was a Juneteenth. Bronze men were gathered in the lawn by that cottage with the two palm trees, eating ribs, when Lafayette said, ‘Man, you really should bottle this; it’s better than Scatter’s.’

“Then one of the other buddies—a fellow from Cleveland, Ohio, who had played football at Alabama State and always wore an Alabama State Magic City Classic sweatshirt to remind folks of his heroic gridiron exploits—started in on talking about how Texas barbecue was ‘all right,’ was ‘good,’ was ‘mighty fine,’ but classic Cleveland barbecue was ‘the alpha and omega.’

“In Daddy’s world, calling something the alpha and omega was giving it a ‘Sweet Jesus, best of the best’ anointing that could not be challenged—without doing serious injury to either the one who had bestowed the anointing or the one who challenged it. The only ways forward were: to agree, to rip away all of the other fellow’s authority, or to have him rip away all of yours.

“The crowd was not divided. Everyone, including Daddy, was eager to agree. Soon all present were swept away on a wave of accord into a sea of Ohio ’cue nostalgia.

“But just because you’ve silenced a man doesn’t mean you’ve converted him. I heard that a lot around my house growing up. Daddy stayed up all night, cooking, dry rubbing, simmering, fire tending, and slab turning with his sacred long-tined fork nobody could touch but Daddy. Next afternoon, a new Galveston barbecue was served.

“Mr. Magic City Classic was prepared to enjoy his meat, as Daddy had properly genuflected to Ohio ’cue. He was prepared to enjoy his meat, but he was not prepared for what he tasted. He shook his head like his jaw was heavy. The first words out of his mouth after the bite: ‘You giving me the mumps!’ Then he gnawed on the rib bone in his fingers until it was clean as something sacred. By then, they all realized he meant the meat was so good he was going to get fat in the face.

“Intrigued, Lafayette reached for a bone off Daddy’s grill. Lafayette took a big chomp, then cocked his head toward Daddy as he chewed, swallowed, finally pronouncing, ‘You are about to be a very rich man. You need an investor?’

“Daddy liked to say that our money came from a lost Black pirate hoard that he’d found through careful research at the library. And some people insisted on wanting to believe that Daddy did something nefarious. But his ribs were just that good. I was soon a sop sauce princess.

“It didn’t take long before Daddy could take pride in knowing anything money could buy in Galveston could be mine. It did not trouble him that there were things in the world beyond Galveston we couldn’t afford. We weren’t ambling far from Galveston County.

“We had a house on the bay, friends, and food, and finally Daddy was paying rent when rent was overdue for folks we didn’t know, and water bills, and gambling debts, and sometimes even the occasional pusherman.

“He bought so much rice and beans and grits, we never had to pay to have his shirts or my dresses ironed, or our yard swept clean. There was always somebody wanting to do something sweet to thank Daddy. And he always let them do it.

“Daddy lived the difference between charity and helping the other fellow out. All our Galveston called me Pardi, and each year, more and more of our Galveston started calling Daddy Pardner because I called Daddy Pardner. The way the town pronounced ‘Pardner,’ there was an inflection I didn’t put in it. That difference rang loud enough in Lafayette’s ears that he called it up out loud at Thanksgiving dinner in 1967.

“I was eight, Lucky Eight, as Daddy and Lafayette put it. We were going around the table saying what we were grateful for, and I had said I was grateful for my ‘Soul Man’ Sam and Dave single, and Lafayette looked at me and said he was grateful for the fact that ‘you put your foot in this sweet potato pie, Pardi!’ Then he took a big swig of brown liquor from a heavy crystal old-fashioned glass, pointed a mahogany finger at my daddy, and said what he was almost as grateful for as the pie was what all ‘the most cursed bronze citizens of Galveston are thankful for, that you, sweet son, pardoned them for their sins, like you sho’ ’nuff pardon me for mine!’

“Daddy shot back, ‘I will till . . . I won’t,’ and Lafayette smiled at the lie. I got goose bumps. Daddy didn’t lie. Or maybe he did. He certainly changed the subject.

“On Daddy’s turn he said he was grateful for me. I said I was grateful for barbecue sauce—because I knew it would make Daddy laugh.

“Daddy sold all kinds of sauce. Mainly, Daddy sold the recipe and variations on the recipe to a conglomerate while negotiating a royalty. Daddy knew all about oil and gas royalties, and Daddy believed oil and gas were not fundamentally different from sauce. Soon he was in a position that meant he didn’t have to lift a finger.

“Only he kept lifting fingers, and I assisted him as he continued manufacturing and shipping under a private label, a gourmet, more expensive version of his sop sauce, while making big profit on the everyday jars, while claiming not to be working.

“That perplexed me. Daddy didn’t lie. I called him out on it like he taught me to call out lies. I thought maybe Daddy was testing me to see if I would call him out. ‘But you do work, Pardner. I see you. Shipping. Selling. Hiring. Overseeing.’ Daddy tapped me on the nose gently. ‘Find something you love to do, Pardi, and you will never work a day in your life.’

“The year Armstrong walked on the moon, 1969, we were having the big Juneteenth barbecue. There was red drink. There was all kinds of meat, not just spare ribs, but chicken, pulled pork, and beef brisket. I had made, with the help of church ladies from our old neighborhood, little fig pastries for all my friends, hand pies, and fingerprint cookies. The boys in the neighborhood were wild about my hand pies. The girls seemed to prefer the fingerprint cookies.

“I was giving the neighbor boy who I was sweet on the prettiest, brownest of my hand pies because he had the sweetest, prettiest brown eyes, when Daddy said, ‘If you ever bring home a white boy, I promise I will shoot you both. The only question will be if I shoot you or him first.’

“Given that I didn’t know any white boys and wasn’t intrigued with the ones I saw on television, and given that I had just gifted Lamont Hill my prettiest hand pie, and earlier that day he had given me a flower, and given that Daddy was smiling when he made that strange promise, I wasn’t afraid. I was informed. I would never bring home a white boy. It would kill Daddy to kill me. And I would never kill Daddy. That’s what I knew.

“Between Juneteenth and my tenth birthday, in the summer of 1969, Apollo 11 launched into space, circled the moon, and sent back pictures to earth, which flashed across the television in our parlor. Daddy was off and on glued to the television and agitated from liftoff to splashdown. I was not interested. My nose poked in a book, I was moving with Gandalf and the Hobbits through Middle-earth. But Daddy insisted I look up from my book to see Neil Armstrong walk on the lunar surface. Shortly after that, I climbed the stairs to my bedroom, climbed into my canopy bed, and read myself to sleep, expecting to see Daddy in the morning.

“That was not to be. Shortly after midnight, there was a glow in the dark clock on my night table. Daddy shook me awake, pulled me out of bed, grabbed his rifle, and walked us out on the pier.

“As we settled into a familiar sitting position with our butts on the pier and our feet dangling in air just above the water, tranquility returned as my father seized the occasion of the moon walk not to celebrate Armstrong but to remind me that it was a Russian who had first orbited earth.

“This observation calmed Bell Britton. Realizing that he hadn’t yet told me all about Alexander Pushkin, he dived into the story, telling me about how Pushkin’s grandfather—or great-grandfather, Daddy wasn’t sure which—had been a Negro slave owned by Peter the Great. That the first Pushkin had been born a slave and raised to the Russian nobility, and how Pushkin, ‘a brilliant Black man like Cuney and Brown and Taylor,’ said my daddy, was ‘a man who wrote with a pen that he dipped in an inkwell that looked like cotton bales supported by dark-blue-black enslaved Africans, a Black Russian might have been more than Cuney, Brown, and Taylor.’ Daddy admitted it hurt him to say this about his Galveston heroes, but that it had to be said, ‘because Pushkin had added more words to the Russian language than Shakespeare added to English.’

“He told me all of this in words like oil gushing out of a derrick. His words were pressured and precious and swift, and I was rich because they were splashing on me. I felt good on the pier smiling at my daddy with my eyes and my mouth as he smiled back at me and talked like gushing oil. We were good on the pier. Daddy walked us back to the house and I slept good, knowing he was good again, finally, like before the Apollo 11 launch.

“But in the morning, just like that, over our breakfast of tortillas and scrambled eggs and bacon, I knew Neil Armstrong walking on the moon had taken something significant from my father.

“That year my birthday, July 29, fell on the full moon. We had a barbecue in the yard, and every brown, Black, and beige child in Galveston and La Marque was invited, and all the whip-smart brown girls from Houston and Fort Worth—they came, too, because their mamas wanted to dance with my daddy and their daddies wanted to eat my daddy’s barbecue and drink up some of his free-to-them liquor. When my party guests had left, Daddy and I walked down the pier, gazing up at the sky.

“Daddy declared that bright full moon a gift from God just for me. Then Daddy said, ‘White men have the moon, white men have the Supreme Court, they have the Senate, they have the Congress. You are more than the moon, the Supreme Court, the Senate, and the Congress. They have all that, but I have you, so I have more.’

“When I was grown and told Jericho my double-digit birthday story, he asked what seemed a foolish question: ‘Did he take his gun out to the pier when he told you that?’ ‘Of course not. He took his rifle.’ Daddy always took his rifle out to the pier when there was something to celebrate. Double digits was something to celebrate. He answered with silence. (We moved on. I was really good at moving on and so was he. It was a thing we liked about each other and found lacking in most other people.)

“My double-digit birthday was celebrated for almost a month and included a trip to Mexico City; then birthday time was over and school got started good—they were jumping me from fourth to sixth grade. Everything was true good; then Jimi Hendrix died. A month after that, Janis Joplin died. You wouldn’t think that would make a difference in our little house on the bay, but it did.

“In the immediate aftermath of Jimi Hendrix’s death, Daddy told me that ‘snow’ was a word that could mean heroin or cocaine. By the time Janis Joplin died—a loss mourned in our house because Janis Joplin and Stevie Nicks were the only two white women singers my father appreciated—I came to understand that Daddy’s buddy Lafayette was a heroin dealer.

“Lafayette arrived for Thanksgiving dreaming of a supper of smoked turkey and turnip greens and sweet potato pie, not the feast of choice, sharp words that can only be prepared by an angry and indulged child. When Lafayette left the Saturday morning after Thanksgiving, I didn’t hug him bye. Daddy did.

“My father had compassion for Lafayette. When we drank our coffee at the kitchen table that Saturday morning, a table still set with a plate and cup and cutlery for Lafayette, who was already gone, Daddy explained that to understand why he loved Lafayette, you would have had to know Lafayette as Daddy first knew him when he arrived in Korea; know how he was before he witnessed the bodies of slaughtered civilians fermenting in the sun, little children’s bodies getting eaten up with heat, insects, and feral animals; how, before being taken prisoner, he had tried to save any child he came across, North or South Korean; how he ran straight into gunfire to pull a little girl out of the line of fire; how more than once he refused to fire on civilians when ordered; and how when Lafayette came back from the war, all he could say was, ‘One two three jump! One two three jump!’ When I didn’t understand what he was saying, Daddy pivoted to a simple sermon.

“‘Forgive those who trespass against you as you wish to be forgiven.’ Then he reminded me of all the sweet afternoons we had spent together, with Lafayette and Daddy telling what Daddy now explained were not ‘war stories’ but ‘love-in-the-middle-of-war stories,’ as they took turns dancing around the living room with me to T-Bone Walker and Billie Holiday and Big Mabel, to Big Mama Thornton and Aretha Franklin, to Sam and Dave and Jackie Wilson.

“Lafayette brought the Billie and the two Bigs, and Aretha. I would miss that; I was prepared to miss that. I was a hard little girl when I had to be.

“The next Juneteenth, Lafayette didn’t come to Galveston, and he didn’t come the next Thanksgiving. Mr. Magic City Classic and a growing circle of others would still come, but not Lafayette. Sometimes Daddy would visit Lafayette in Detroit. When I would hear Big Mabel or Big Mama, I would miss him. But then I would see some skinny, skanky brown person on the news or on a television show who was ‘hooked on heroin,’ and I would get mad at him again.

“I first learned of Lafayette’s death by reading it in the Michigan Chronicle. Daddy had known about it for days, but it wasn’t a thing he had wanted to tell me. Daddy loved Lafayette. And he didn’t want to speak ill of the dead—but he never did lie to me—so when fifteen-year-old Pardi Britton asked Daddy, asked Bell Britton, how a man like Lafayette come to be killed in broad daylight by a young woman with ‘no previous record,’ Daddy told me a simple sad story.

“The girl, she was sixteen or seventeen, too young for Lafayette, according to Daddy, to be messing with ‘any kind of way.’ She had a brother who was addicted to smack and owed Lafayette a small amount of money—Daddy thought it was something strange like sixty-seven dollars, the remainder of a larger bill. The girl had paid Lafayette some of what the brother owed but not all, and Lafayette was pressuring the girl to pay the rest of what was owed—if not with money, with sex. The girl needed time to raise more money, or the courage to caress Lafayette. Lafayette gave her the time because one of his boys got shot and was laid up in the hospital and he had other related urgent matters to attend to, as it appeared somebody was making a move on his throne. This last fear was part of the reason he was trying to distract himself with this girl he shouldn’t have been messing with.

“So he gives the girl a week, to get up the cash or give up the love. Two days later, he has gone to visit his fallen comrade in the hospital. The convalescent is recovering, Lafayette’s leadership no longer being challenged. A wary truce has been brokered. Lafayette is walking down the hospital steps flanked by stalwart and loyal men, each with a gun in their heavy coat pockets, ready to die for him. It was shaping up to be an all-is-right-with-my-world kind of day for Lafayette.

“There’s a gun in her hand, and the girl shoots Lafayette dead. On the front steps of the hospital, in front of his bodyguards. Those bodyguards assumed that girl was no threat. Lafayette assumed that girl was pleasure without danger. They had underestimated her, and she used it to her advantage.”

A gasp went around the rooftop at this. I suppose none of us was expecting it any more than Lafayette himself must have been.

Pardi smiled. “That story was Daddy’s fifteenth birthday present to me.

“Daddy had forgiven Lafayette a lot of things, but he was the father of a teenage daughter, and he would not forgive a man for forcing himself on a child—or even for wanting her. Daddy said that girl didn’t even kill Lafayette; to do what that man did, Lafayette had to be already gone.”

* * *

The story had cast a spell over us all. When Pardi didn’t continue, after this final line, I could feel us all kind of shaking ourselves back into the present.

“You call that a love story?” Eurovision said, eventually.

“Hey, there’s plenty of love in there,” said Merenguero’s Daughter. “Sounds to me like it’s a love-in-the-middle-of-war story, like Pardi said. I guess you could also say it’s a hate story. And an everything-in-between story. Real life is so mixed up.”

“You said there was music,” Wurly said.

“That’s coming,” said Pardi, “in the rest of the story.”

“Well, let’s hear it!” said the Lady with the Rings.

“Nah. I’m tired tonight. I’m sure there will be a time to tell a story about music—and lies.” She winked.

“You want a story about lies?”

It was the tenant in 4E, La Reina, who hadn’t said much yet.

“Well, of course. I adore lies,” said Eurovision. “As Oscar Wilde said, ‘Lying is the telling of beautiful untrue things—the proper aim of Art.’”

La Reina laughed. “I’d say this is less a story about beautiful untrue things than it is about ugly true things.”

“That sounds like fun!” said Eurovision.

* * *

“My former husband used to force me to come along on these ridiculous bro-centered vacations with him and his friends, always around the Fourth of July. Every summer we’d take a week and explore some city within driving distance, but mostly these trips centered around him and his boys drinking and retelling every story from high school, with us wives also drinking and pretending to listen. Sort of like what we’re doing up here, but with more history between us and without the raging pandemic. I’m guessing it won’t happen this summer unless everything is back to normal by then, though that’s assuming the boys are taking Covid and this quarantine seriously—and for a few of them, my former husband included, that’s a big assumption—but I wouldn’t know, considering I’ve been free of that obligation for three years now, thank God, ever since the summer we all went up to Maine.

“We were at the Second Annual Lobster Roll World Championship, the first stop of that year’s reunion trip, up in Portland, and we had each paid a hundred bucks to serve as judges, which meant sampling ten lobster rolls apiece. It sounds like fun if you don’t think about it too much. In the parking lot, after we’d paid another ten bucks to park, my then-husband turned to me after cutting the engine and said, ‘I have a feeling Laura’s not gonna be here,’ then rushing out of his seat and slamming the car door before I could ask what the hell he meant.

“Laura was Marco’s wife, and they’d been married the longest of all of us couples. They’d been together basically since their first week of college, is how she told the story. She was from New England—New Hampshire or something—whereas the boys all had gone to high school together in Miami. She was the one who got me calling them that: the boys. For the four years I knew her, since becoming one of the wives myself, whenever we were down in Miami for the holidays or together on these summer trips, there always came a moment when Laura sat back in her chair after too much Scotch and stared at the group of them—playing dominoes, all of them smoking the cigars my husband brought but that I’d paid for—and she’d say, her eyes a little closed so that the scene looked sufficiently blurry, ‘Look at our boys, Mari—don’t you just love seeing them together like this?’ I usually gulped down whatever was left in my glass and mumbled ‘mmm-hmm’ around an ice cube. All our boys were Cuban like me, and Laura was a white Americana, so I could see why, having not grown up around boys like them, she could feel nostalgic for something she’d never had to protect herself against.

“Through the windshield—I was still sitting in the car, preparing myself for the ways the boys amplified each other—I saw my husband slap Marco’s back. Marco looked tanner than ever, thinner than I’d ever seen him, wearing the kinds of clothes—as if about to board a yacht—that Laura had always tried but never succeeded in getting this Miami boy to wear. The other boys closed in, and the five of them took turns lifting each other off the ground while the other wives—who I should say were also Americanas, who I didn’t know so well, because unlike them I grew up in the same city as our boys, in Miami, and the other wives were all from places that seemed calmer, like central Pennsylvania and Connecticut, places the boys eventually moved to with these wives, leaving their mothers behind for me to hear from, when they’d call to ask if I’ve heard from their sons—stood back, kissing each other on the cheek. I got out to join them after seeing that it was true: Laura wasn’t there.

“Right then, a woman hopped out of the passenger side of Marco’s Land Rover and stood vaguely by his side. Honestly, the thing I remember most about her—another Americana, Marco had a type—were her legs, which looked super long and skinny and completely bruise free in these tiny shorts with frayed edges—shorts that gave away that she was way younger than the rest of us. He introduced her to the group as a colleague at his law firm and said nothing else, not even her name.

“The other wives took a look at this new woman and didn’t even flinch. I could see them quickly processing the implications and deciding their best strategy was to just go with it, to believe Marco that she was just someone from work, and that it would be stupid to waste the ticket, because their husbands seemed to believe him. What choice did we have, their quick faces seemed to signal to me, their arms slinging a little tighter against their husbands: Didn’t we all see this coming? Weren’t we all relieved it was Laura and not us?

“This new woman had a ticket in her hand—it had my name on it because they all did, all ten of them. It had been my job to buy the tickets, the easiest of the jobs we’d divided among the couples, the job assigned to me because I’d proven over the years I couldn’t be trusted to pick hotels or rental cars or anything else that gave you the option to go cheap. I can’t help how I was raised. What I could help was asking Marco why this woman—who finally told us herself, as we entered the venue, that her name was Ashley, the name lost on half of us as someone in a volunteer shirt affixed our ‘Judge’ wristbands to our left wrists—was holding the ticket I’d bought for Laura. I’d learned to hold my tongue since becoming my husband’s wife.

“The ten competitors in the Second Annual Lobster Roll World Championship ringed the warehouse walls, banners behind them tacked up to rustic-looking wood panels. I have no idea how it was narrowed down to just ten, as every place for miles on the drive up there advertised having a lobster roll. Only five of the competitors were local; the other five—from places like Atlanta, Venice Beach, and Paris—seemed immediately out of place, their branding too slick, clearly outsourced. At the front of the venue there was, inexplicably, a bluegrass band.

“‘So wait, bluegrass is a Maine thing?’ I said, just to say something. No one had said a word since getting our wristbands. I laughed when no one responded and said, ‘Just kidding, I know it’s not.’

“I subtly steered us to the booth for the team from Paris—two brothers who claimed they’d fallen in love with lobster rolls as kids while on a family trip to Maine. They were rumored to have the best lobster roll there by a long shot, and I was all but certain they wouldn’t win: While buying the tickets, I’d read that the year before—at the First Annual Lobster Roll Championship—the winner had been a roll from Boise, a place called Salty’s, and though Salty’s owner was born and raised in Maine, the folks who still called the state home were eager to bring the title back. I let my husband think he was leading us toward the Frenchmen.

“My hope was that the show the Parisians seemed to be putting on—they’d hired a documentary film crew and were making liberal use of lime zest, for the love of God—would be enough to distract us from Ashley’s unexplained presence for long enough for us to regroup, though for some reason I was the only one with a kind of frantic question on my face about who she was, what she was doing there. Why did none of the boys seem as confused or as unnerved by her presence as I was? Why had none of them asked outright what on earth Marco was thinking, foisting this girl on us? Where the hell was Laura?

“I was trying to pull my husband far enough aside to find a way to ask him at least some of these questions. But once we were up close to the booth and trapped there by the growing crowd, Ashley squeezed in next to me, as if someone had given her a heads-up that the other wives followed my lead. This was wrong: It’s the boys who did that (but only to a point) because I reminded them of their mothers. Because they knew their mothers would call me at the end of the week and ask, So how was the trip to Maine? The other wives never thought of me this way, as any kind of leader. They thought that by having gotten their boy to move away in the first place from the city that made us, they’d already won. They weren’t wrong.

“‘So Marco tells me you’re from Miami as well?’

“As well? Really? What else did Marco deem essential for you to know? I said in my head. Out loud, I just said yes.

“She nodded heavily a couple times, waiting for more from me. She had blue eyes, lashes shellacked with mascara, eyelids black with faint glitter. Her hair was blond, with even blonder streaks, fried in a way that aged her. I noticed now that her top was a button-down shirt—a man’s or just meant to look like a man’s—and I looked down at her cutoff shorts, the pocket liners like upside down sails visible against her thin thighs. This was a lawyer? What else did Marco expect us to believe? Had he even told her where he was taking her?

“‘Cool, cool,’ she said, nodding and nodding and nodding.

“And then, watching her nod, I felt something I’d never felt around the other wives: power. More and more of it with every second I refused the polite conversation Ashley was trying to start. I looked toward the other wives and their boys. Each couple was loosely holding hands and facing away from each other, away from me and Ashley, chins tilted up at the other stalls. I could almost hear Ashley’s mind scrambling for her next question.

“She seemed to not need to blink. She was wearing so much bronzer that I wondered if she was trying to mock or match me and my coloring.

“‘So how did you find out about this event?’ she finally churned out.

“The boys had been joking about coming to this since the summer before, after hearing about what a disaster the First Annual Lobster Roll World Championship—then an outdoor event—was; how some crazy storm had materialized out of nowhere, destroyed all the booths amid Zeus-esque flashes of lightning, and then rolled away over the ocean just as quickly. One of the boys had sent around a link to a YouTube video of a Maine-based lobster roll vendor who hadn’t even made it to the final ten complaining about the whole event in general and, more specifically, about how a lobster roll made in Idaho won the whole rain-drenched show—the intent of the sharing being to laugh at how his agitation played against his thick Maine accent. And then, in the way the boys have always had, the video became a thing they quoted, sampled, remixed—until it was fully integrated into their bro repertoire, the same phrases flying across my in-laws’ domino table months later when we were all down in Miami for the holidays. Early spring comes along, all of them suffering a New England winter only slightly worse than our New York one, and my husband finds a web page advertising the second annual event—these fuckers are going to try this again!—and before he could morph the news into the next iteration of the months-old joke over their group chat, I said, ‘What if we actually went? What if we drive up this summer, and then we all meet up there?’

“I just looked at Ashley, waited until I saw her blink, then said, ‘The internet.’

“She nodded some more, gave another round of, ‘Oh, that’s so cool.’ Smiled with these pageant-ready teeth. I’d never in my life had another woman want me to like her so much. The feeling was usually the other way around; that’s how I knew what it was.

“Which meant, if I was going to play this right, that it was time to turn my attention to a man.

“My husband was on his toes, his phone in his hand, trying to snap a perfect photo that captured the entirety of the line leading to the Parisians’ booth. I knew better than to ask for his attention then, so I turned toward Willy—we’d grown up calling him Guille, short for Guillermo, but he was Willy to his wife and, therefore, to us now—and tried to think up the most insidery question I could manage.

“‘Has your brother found a new job yet?’ I said, though I already knew the answer, thanks to my weekly call with his mother.

“Ashley surprised me with a hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Oh yeah, your brother, Lazaro—Laz, right? He got let go from Best Buy, what, a month ago now?’

“Her, showing off those straight teeth through all of this.

“Willy looked at me like it was somehow my fault that she knew about Laz, that he even existed. My husband was still pretending to be very committed to taking the perfect photo of the line, and I got so angry so fast that I barely stopped myself from reaching for his cap’s brim to knock it off his head, who cared what trouble it caused. I took Willy’s cocked look to mean what it had back when we were kids—he was not going to answer, and I was supposed to say something mean. Like: What, did Marco brief you on all of us, that what you lawyers do? Or perhaps: I’m sorry but why the fuck is my friend’s name even in your mouth? Or more simply: Excuse me, but was anyone even talking to you?

“Willy took a step back, ready for any of these. Every single one of these boys: They were always ready to let women do their dirty work, to cover up their own garbage. He’d sensed what I’d sensed about the power shifting, thinking it was my job—because I was the only wife from back home—to say something right then, to signal who did or didn’t belong, but Willy was reading the shift all wrong. I wondered if he’d already known that Laura wouldn’t be there, if he already knew all about whatever went down between her and Marco, and what it meant.

“‘Your teeth are really white,’ I said.

“She showed us even more of them, patted down the side of her hair though there was no need, and said, ‘Oh, yeah, thank you,’ as if my description were a for-real compliment.

“She relaxed and squinted at me. She was pretty in the way Miami Cuban boys predictably found alluring precisely because it was so foreign to their home turf: fair-skinned and straight-haired and thin-limbed in ways not physiologically possible for women like me. They even found it sexy until the novelty wore off, when they realized they recognized this body type—the absence of hips and breasts—from their own boyhoods. But her being new to them, along with the way her shorts showed off what the magazines call thigh space, was enough to melt Willy into niceness once he’d mistaken my response as me deciding we were all on the same team. Ashley wandered next to my husband in line, phone in her hands and over her head, everyone suddenly interchangeable in a way that made me want to leave. She lowered her arms and showed him her screen, and he laughed at something she said.

“Here’s what I mean about the power: No one ended up saying anything that day about Ashley’s sudden arrival, and even though I watched her and Marco through every bite of those ten mini lobster rolls, I never once caught them holding hands. Marco was, if anything, kind of ignoring her. Kind of ignoring everyone. It made Ashley keep trying. She spent the afternoon floating from wife to wife, as if she were hosting the Lobster Roll Championship herself, making sure we all had enough water and enough napkins, holding out little plastic tubs of melted butter to us for dipping our last bites of bread, forcing that intimacy. She apologized for how loud that bluegrass band was playing, like she’d been the one to hire them. She asked us our thoughts about who we’d vote for after eating the roll from each booth, running us through the various categories—best presentation, best taste, mayo versus no mayo—as if it actually mattered what people who’d paid to be judges thought, as if the whole event were anything other than an expensive way to pass an afternoon. Her trying so hard like that distracted me that whole trip from remembering to ask my husband how he’d known Laura wouldn’t be there. When was it that he’d talked to Marco about them splitting up. Why he’d decided to keep that conversation—a bunch of conversations, it turned out—a secret from me.

“I’d remember wanting to ask all this only after he’d fallen asleep, or after he’d pretended to have fallen asleep, or when we were with everyone else. And I was seeing how I wasn’t really myself anymore, how I was now instinctively afraid to shake him awake and insist we talk, afraid to speak up in any way that threatened to potentially embarrass him. I started to wonder when that fear had started, how long it had taken me to even understand that hesitancy around him as fear. How he’d managed to keep me from seeing it for as long as he had.

“I ended up leaving him before the next summer (and whatever trip came with it) rolled around, but not before another set of Miami holidays, where Ashley was apparently in town with Marco but not trapped around my former in-laws’ domino table like the rest of us. And somehow Marco didn’t seem pissed about it, and he told anyone who asked where she was to shut the fuck up, that it wasn’t their business. And from the way my husband cut his glance at me through the cloud of cigar smoke, I knew better than to press, even with a joke: We’d had one of our bigger blowouts before any of them had shown up that night, and so I’d spent the hour leading up to them arriving cleaning up the aftermath of that in time for everything to look fine. That night, I didn’t feel like sitting around them anyway, and that was one of the first nights I let it show. I smoked my cigar away from the other wives, letting it ash all over his parents’ patio, and I planned out how I could get my husband to stay down there with his parents for a while, find some excuse that would make him feel needed back home so I could have our place up here to myself for a little while, figure out my next steps. Marco made some joke he makes every year, and I watched smoke tumble heavy and thick from my husband’s open mouth, a ready volcano. I wondered how Laura was spending her Christmas.

“Last I heard, my former husband is still down there, living in Miami with his parents. The kind of Cubans they are, I’m sure they’re happy to have him there for the pandemic. He’s a strong guy, and that might end up being useful for them. I could see him knocking someone out to get his parents toilet paper, no question. He doesn’t know I live here now, that I moved out of our apartment as soon as the divorce went through. I want him to think I still live in our old place. It’s safer for everyone that way.

“Can I tell you about those lobster rolls, though? Those French guys were robbed. The lime zest was—well, shit—chef’s kiss, people. Taste-wise, presentation-wise, obviously no mayo needed because what was there to try and hide: The locals didn’t even come close. But in the end, I was right. One of the locals—I forget which one out of the five, because let’s be real, they were all interchangeable—won the title, brought it back to the great state of Maine like I figured they would. Ask me if I even care what loving that French team’s roll says about me. It was the most delicious thing I’d eaten in a long, long time.”

* * *

The tolling of Old St. Pat’s, with the dead stroke at the end, sounded just as La Reina finished her story. With the taste of those imagined French lobster rolls still sitting sweetly on our tongues, we bid each other goodnight—and I returned here to my peeling desk and the soft footfalls above.