I’m crouching outside one of my basement windows, trying to affix a steel bar as a sort of low-profile burglar deterrent. What I’d really like to do is go down the street to the abandoned house with the boarded-up windows and liberate its basement window bars. I wouldn’t really do that, of course. Besides, I have plans for that house that don’t involve letting it be broken into and trashed. Josie, my elderly next door neighbor and good friend, is sitting in her driveway on a lawn chair, keeping me company. Our houses are close together, so she’s only a few feet away.
“You should just put in glass block, like I’ve got,” she says, but without much conviction; we’ve been over this before. “Hard to break glass block and it doesn’t look like crap. That’s going to look like crap.”
My leg threatens to cramp and I shift my position, sighing as I do. Josie saying “crap” is my fault. Josie is a retired teacher—she never used to say “crap.”
“I’ll plant irises in front of it so you can’t see the bar,” I tell her. She already knows that I’m not using glass block because I want to be able to open the window and vent the basement, plus it gives me a little more light and I’m afraid of dark basements. She probably knows that too, although I have never told her. People who are afraid of dark basements have no business living in houses with basements. But here I am. I was afraid of this particular basement when I was six years old and I was still a little bit afraid of it when I left to go to college in 1972, and I was a lot afraid of it when I bought the house two and a half years ago after I moved back to Kansas City. There is more to be afraid of now, given that a burglar came in through a basement window on the other side, right after I moved in. He lives next door now, also on the other side. It’s complicated.
“Too shady on this side, iris won’t ever bloom,” Josie points out.
“Lily of the valley then—they grew here forty years ago.” Before she can point out that they are too short to hide the bar and will disappear in winter anyway, I turn on the drill and leave it on for a long time. It takes a while to drill into the foundation stone. I’m serious about this bar. I’m not installing it in the wooden window frame, which is probably older than I am and could be kicked in. The whole window should be replaced, but that would be a lot more trouble and expense than this strip of steel, which I found in the free section at Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore. The borrowed hammer drill is heavy, though, and I’m second guessing my cheapskate solution.
I finally let the drill spin to a stop and test fit the screw. It’s a burglar-proof screw, hard to get out, so I’m being careful. As my ears stop ringing from the drilling, I hear Josie talking. “Won’t listen to me,” is what I hear, and I realize she’s talking to someone else. I spin around, hard to do in my cramped position, and push back the hair that has escaped my braid and is sticking to my sweaty face.
“Officer Carl,” I say when I see who it is. “What’s up?” Carl is the cop who responded when my house was burgled, and he supervised the apology that opened the door, so to speak, to the burglar renting the house on the other side of mine. Josie has been telling me that he wants to ask me out. I’m not sure I want to go out with anyone, though. I still think of myself as recently widowed, although it’s now been almost three years. Two years and a lifetime since our house in California burned down and I moved back here to regroup mentally and financially.
“Just checking the neighborhood,” Carl says. It looked like someone was trying to break in through that window.”
I narrow my eyes and fake a scowl. “With Josie sitting there, is she blind and deaf now?”
“I could have been spotting for you.” Josie says primly. She watches too many cop shows.
“Well, any excuse to take a break,” I say. “It’s hot out here.” But I look back at the window. I want to get the last screw in and be done with this job. I want to take a shower and sit in front of a fan. It’s the last week of August and I start a new job next week, which means I’ll be away all day after years of telecommuting. I’ve gotten it in my head that I need to secure this window before I leave my house unguarded, even though my dog will be here and Josie will be right next door. I look back at Carl and then at Josie. They are both looking at me. My German Shepherd Boris, who hates the loud drill and has been chilling in Josie’s back yard, is now sitting next to Carl and is looking at me too.
“What?” I say to the three of them.
Carl glances at Josie and turns back at me. Josie turns to look at Carl. Boris yawns extravagantly.
“Oh, I was ah. . . just going to ah . . . check back about that paperwork,” Carl says. He looks down at Boris and scratches behind his ears. “You know, about Boris. But maybe a little later.” He looks at Josie again.
“Now’s good, right?” Josie says to me. Whatever is going on, she wants to hear it.
“Now’s not good,” I say to Josie, partly because I’m getting a little irritated with both of them, but mostly because I’m hot and sweaty and filthy. I hear the rudeness in my voice though, and relent a little. “Would you mind calling in an hour or so? I just want to finish this up. Unless you just need to tell me something?”
Now we all look at Carl, and he glances at Josie and then puts both hands on Boris’s ears and gives his head a good rub. “Later’s fine.”
“Okay, talk to you then.” I pick up the screw gun and fit in the screw and focus my attention on the window again, fully aware that I’m in an extremely awkward position in addition to being filthy and probably smelly. The screw shoots off under a prickly cedar bush and I go in after it and by the time I get the screw in place to try again, I hear Josie again. She’s talking to me this time.
“He was going to ask you out,” she says confidently. “And you sent him away.”
“He was not, it’s something about Boris’s evaluation.” Boris and I were recently involved in a mugging attempt and Boris bit one of the perps and I had to have him evaluated for aggression.
“Humph,” Josie says. She and I both know that Boris passed the evaluation with flying colors and the perps went off to a juvenile camp and the whole episode is over and done with, except for an occasional nightmare on my part, which she doesn’t know about. I ignore her and apply myself to the steel bar and fifteen minutes later I’m picking up my tools.
“All done,” I say, feeling better already. “I’m going to go get a cold drink. You want one? I’ll bring it out here.”
“Nope, you get showered and fix yourself up for once,” she says, getting up and folding her chair. “You’re going out tonight. You can send Boris over here.”
“He’s fine at home.” And I’ll feel better coming into a dark house if it’s got a dog inside, not that I’m going out with anyone.
“It’s cooler over here, and he likes watching TV.”
She’s right about it being cooler—Josie has central air. I’m not sure about TV, but Boris does sit on the sofa with her, something that he has never done anywhere else. Or even at her house once I walk in the door. I suspect treats are involved.
“Anyway, I’m not going anywhere.”
“Well, if you do.” She disappears inside and I wonder if Carl told her something. Or more likely, she told Carl something. I also wonder if she’s going to insist that Boris spend the days with her when I’m at work.
I carry the heavy drill around to my front porch and then gather up everything else and carry it all down to the workbench in the basement, where I leave it to sort out later. Since I’m in the basement already, I pull off my filthy clothes, toss them on top of the washer, and stand in the shower sluicing off dirt and sweat. I don’t use this shower very often anymore, now that I’ve got one upstairs, but it’s cooler down here and I won’t have to clean the grit from the tub after. Unfortunately, I haven’t left any towels down here, so I have to hope no one in the house next door happens to be looking out the window and into my kitchen as I breeze through on the way to my bedroom. I pause and listen, and I hear little Felicity’s voice drift out of her bedroom and across the driveway into my open kitchen window. So I squat down and duckwalk through the kitchen, which thrills Boris, who licks my face the whole way. By the time I get to my bedroom I feel like I need another shower. Maybe I should teach him to fetch towels. I wash my face again, spin my wet hair into a knot at the back of my head, and put on clean shorts and t-shirt, and by then my phone is ringing. Has it been an hour already?
Being a cop, Carl has two personas, at least around me: the official cop persona, all calm and businesslike and serious, and the community relations persona, still calm and businesslike but more casual. The difference is evident in his body language, his tone, the words he uses, the way his eyes crinkle when he smiles. Sometimes it’s even evident in the vehicle he’s driving and the uniform he’s wearing. But mostly it’s the voice. The voice on the phone now isn’t either of those. It’s almost hesitant.
He opens with “Is this a better time?”
“Yes, much better.” I can’t come up with anything to add to that, and I’m busy blaming Josie for putting the whole “ask you out” idea in my head.
“Good, good,” he says and stops there. He’s not doing much better.
“Something about Boris?” I prompt him. If it really is about Boris, we’ll be on familiar ground, whether it’s good news or bad. And then I decide what the hell, this is awkward and I hate it. “Look, tell me something about Boris because I’m going to have to report back to Josie. And then you can say whatever you wanted to say.” I pause for a moment and then soldier on. “Or look, I’m taking Boris to Tower Park in a little while, as soon as it’s a little cooler. You can meet us there and talk to both of us.”
“Perfect,” he says, voice back to normal. “Six o’clock? By the tower?”
“Sure—meet you on the east side, in the shade.”
This is hardly a date, no matter what Josie thinks, so I’m not going to change clothes. But I do, because it might get a little chilly later and I don’t usually wear this particular t-shirt for anything other than gardening and dog walking. And white pants would really look better with the nicer t-shirt. And sandals are better with the pants, but I was planning to walk to Tower Park—it’s only two miles. On the other hand, it’s better if I drive because I can’t get there without walking on Gregory, and it will be dusk by the time I get back, and that’s when and where I got mugged earlier this summer. Also, it’s not a date, so there’s no food involved, but I’m already hungry, so maybe I should eat something first? Crap.
I get my keys and zip a credit card and my driver’s license into a pocket. When I pick up the leash, Boris starts panting, and when I open the car door he is in and seated in a nanosecond. I drive uphill, away from Josie’s house, and don’t glance in her direction. When we get to the park I have to speak sternly to get Boris calm enough to get him out and lock the door before heading across the grass toward the tower. It’s all wide open here, not a particularly beautiful park, but in the evenings it feels safe because the picnic shelters and the ball diamonds are always in use. The late-day shadows angle across the grass and make it much more attractive than it is at noon. By 10 p.m., it will be a completely different scene, all teenagers drinking and smoking and daring each other to climb the fence around the tower and repeating the story, much embellished, about the kid found dead at the bottom of the tower eons ago, long before they or even their parents were born. Or maybe that’s not what happens now, but that’s what “Tower Park” still means to me all this time after my own teen years.
Carl is there already, waving, which is making Boris bounce up and down, so I give up and drop the leash and let the dog streak off toward Carl. Illegal, but who’s going to object when a cop is rubbing noses with what looks like a police dog? As I catch up, though, I realize that Carl is not in cop clothes, and I snap the leash back on. “Nice evening,” I say by way of greeting, big smile, both hands on the leash. And then I feel awkward again. Maybe this was a stupid idea. Carl and I have spent plenty of time together, but it’s always been police business, so we’ve always had an agenda and he’s always been in charge. Well, I’ve done my part, I got us here, so I give him an open, questioning look and will myself to be cool, enjoy being outside on a beautiful evening with a dog and a cop, no need to worry about muggers tonight.
“I think this is the first time I’ve been out in the evening and felt safe in weeks,” I say to no one in particular. “Since . . . you know. It feels good.”
Carl stops nuzzling Boris. “Look, are you hungry? We could pick up something and eat it here.” He looks around. The park is pretty full. “Or maybe Loose Park would be better—off my patch, you know?” He finally looks me full in the face. “I guess I didn’t plan this very well, huh?”
Something about that is endearing. “I think that’s a great idea,” I tell him. “What’s close by?”
He narrows his eyes and gives me a cop look, sizing me up. “You ever been to Grit N Gravy? On Troost?”
“Uhhh.”
“Yeah, I guess not.” Disappointment.
“But hey,” I say, “It was a gritty kind of day. I’m up for it.”
“You do know about grits, right?”
“I do, and I like them. I probably even like them with gravy, although I’ve never had that. And they probably have something else on the menu?”
“Of course, although they change it up a lot.”
“Well, I’ll trust you. I’ll eat almost anything except for anchovies, and they probably don’t have that anyway. Sooo . . . why don’t you just pick something and I’ll go to Loose Park and run Boris around a little.” I realize I’m forcing him to pay for my food when this isn’t a date, but it will take the awkwardness out of dealing with the check. He seems relieved that we’ve got a plan and says he’ll text me when he gets there.
Loose Park is much bigger, much prettier, and in a safer part of town, well west of Troost, Kansas City’s historical black-white divide. I associate this park with the sixties: Sunday afternoon happenings, all music and sunshine. Several of my friends had weddings there, all of which I remember as casual, easy-going affairs. They probably weren’t as simple as I think they were, but nevertheless they give the whole park a nice glow in my memory. I park and head for the duck pond, my favorite place, but Boris is too interested in the ducks and geese, so we divert to the rose garden. No weddings this late in the day, so it’s easy to find a park bench, but then I think about the white pants and lapful of grits and keep going. No one has reserved the giant picnic shelter, so I stake out one of the many open tables just as Carl’s text comes in.
“I wasn’t sure what you’d like,” he says when he finds us, and starts unpacking containers.
“So you got one of everything?” There are a lot of containers.
“Not quite.” He starts pulling lids off green beans, corn, cooked apples, chicken, mashed potatoes, and of course grits and gravy.
“Oh my God, this smells like my grandmother’s kitchen.” I start shoveling food onto a plate. “I could eat this every day.”
I look up. He’s giving me a cop look again, although it’s more of a fake cop look. “You mean you’d give up avocados and braised fennel and sushi?”
“I’m not really a fan of sushi. I look at it and think of bait.”
“You fish?” Carl stops dishing food and looks at me with his eyebrows up. I’m not sure if he’s shocked or hopeful.
“Used to fish every chance I got,” I say, forking up beans cooked with bits of ham. “These are great, by the way. I had a bamboo pole, no kidding, and a cork bobber.” I nod enthusiastically and his eyebrows come down.
“And then when I was ten, my grandmother moved to town so I couldn’t fish in her pond anymore.” I sigh deeply. “But I did love it until then. I caught one fish, one time. I think it was a sunfish. My grandmother cleaned it and coated it in cornmeal and fried it in bacon fat and I had it for supper. My brother says I’m the only one who ever caught anything in that pond. It was just a stock pond, the kind you see all over the place, you know—to water cows.” I realize I’m blathering and I stop talking and concentrate on a piece of fried chicken.
The eyebrows are back up. “No, I guess I don’t know. You fished in a cow pond? Where are we talking about?”
“Dimmas County, this side of Springfield, other side of the lake.” I try the cornbread. Too sweet, too much flour, but I’m in the minority on that, so I’m not disappointed. “Bigalo is the county seat and even it is pretty small. We kind of stuck out when we went there because we were Catholic, my dad and my brother and me. I think my grandmother was embarrassed that she couldn’t show us off at her Baptist church.”
“Can’t say I’ve been there,” Carl says lightly, but I sense a coolness that wasn’t there before, and the awkwardness is back. “Sounds like a sundown town.”
I look up at him and feel my face turn red. I hear an echo, my grandmother or more likely the uncle who had a gas station on the edge of town: “told them they better be out of town by sundown,” only his statement added a noun after “them” and the noun was a word I wasn’t allowed to use.
“You have noticed that I’m Black, haven’t you?” Half joking and full serious, as the Irish would say.
“Yeeesss.” I look into his eyes and realize how much I like this man and how much is stacked against anything coming of that, even this far into the 21st century. I also realize that I have to say something else, and that most of the things my monkey mind is parsing through are not the right thing. Not very black, for example, describes his skin, but not very black is like not very pregnant. I realize, with a sudden clarity, that I do sort of want this to be a date and that I’m probably going to wreck it as soon as I open my mouth. I swallow and wish Boris would start howling or something, and then hope he doesn’t because we have to get through this moment right now.
“Yes, I do,” I say, full serious but very softly. “You okay with that?” I don’t know why I added the second part, I didn’t intend to, but he smiles a little and Boris sticks his nose under Carl’s wrist, angling for either a scratch or some chicken. “No mooching,” I say to Boris, hoping we can move on, but Carl’s face has gone serious again. Wistful even.
“What?” I say, but quietly, no sarcasm for once. The moment isn’t over and we need to work through something here and now, not just get past it.
“My mom couldn’t help where she was born,” I go on, maybe too intensely, “and she got out of there as fast as she could.” I want to add that I did love fishing in that pond, to get us back to the food and out of this murky place, but I don’t. I don’t say anything, and neither does he, and neither of us is eating. He’s a cop, so he’s good at long silences, but I’m a reformed corporate wonk who knows the value of waiting, so I can do that too. This, however, is not the place for cops or corporate wonks.
“Your turn with the talking stick,” I say as lightly as I can, and I pick up my fork and eat one bean.
That gets a whisper of a laugh, which is really all it takes. This isn’t a real date, after all. But it is the first time we’ve been together alone without cop business to discuss and also, I suddenly realize, the first time I’ve seen him in mufti. I start to say that he looks good in regular clothes but remember I’m waiting it out for him to talk.
What he says is: “Did Josie tell you I was going to ask you out?”
So maybe this is a date. “More than once. I attributed it to wishful thinking on her part.” He raises an eyebrow. “Maybe she thinks I'm lonely, or maybe she thinks you are. She’s your sort-of aunt, isn’t she?”
“Sort of, yeah. I think she was expecting me to do better than this.” He gestures toward the food and the park in general. “This place, not you, I mean.”
“Oh but it’ll be fun telling her we went to the park and had grits and gravy, with Boris along to chaperone. She doesn’t get to have everything her own way, even if she is the best next-door neighbor on earth.”
“So this counts as a date?”
Suddenly all the awkwardness is gone, at least for me. “Who cares, let’s just enjoy the food and the weather and we can decide next week what it was. I’m good either way.”
He looks relieved and asks me what we would talk about if this were an actual date, and I draw a blank and tell him that I have no idea, not having dated since forever. And then I tell him that he’s pretty well shredded my recent history to bits in the course of investigating both the burglary and the mugging, so I’m going to grill him a little if that’s acceptable.
“Or you can just give me the highlights and I’ll enjoy my food.” I pick up my fork and attack the corn.
“Fair enough.” But he forks up some sweet potatoes and then eats a chicken leg and we listen to the birds and the insects and kids playing.
“Just to finish up that other thing,” he says at last, “I’ve spent my whole life in Kansas City and never been in the rest of Missouri, even overnight. I’ve driven to Jeff City a few times, back the same day though. I have been other places—Chicago and New York and D.C.—but I flew there. So your pond on that farm is a foreign country to me.” He pauses to sip his drink and I keep quiet while he looks off in the distance, assembling his next thought. “See, my grandmother grew up in St. Genevieve. Something happened one day when she was little, and ‘all the colored people,’ as she called them, left that night and never went back. No one ever told me what happened, exactly, and I never really thought much about that thing in particular. What she actually talked about was that the small towns were dangerous and we had no need to leave Kansas City. So we didn’t. She came here and married and they bought a house in the Leeds area and she lived there until she died. She made sure my mother went to college—she went to Lincoln University—and then my mom got married and here I am. I went to UMKC, by the way. Biology.” He concludes by taking a huge bite of cornbread, indicating that I can have the talking stick back.
I think he handed me the ‘biology’ so I could go off in that direction, but I decide to stick with the grandmother story, because it just doesn’t seem like we’re finished with this, and whatever kind of friends we’re going to be, we’ll have to deal with the race thing sooner or later.
“I’d like to say that it’s better now, in places like Dimmas County. It probably is better, but not much better.” I think about some of the things some of my not-distant-enough cousins have reposted on Facebook. I heave a sigh, maybe put too much into it. The sigh hangs in the air while we eat.
“This isn’t working, is it?” Carl says when we’ve eaten most of the food.
I shrug and make a noncommittal sound, then open my mouth to say some sort of blather, I’m not sure what yet, and his phone rings. He pulls it out, looks at it, stands up, walks a few yards away. Half a minute later, he’s back, all business, pulling the empty dishes together.
“I’m going to have to go take care of something, he says in his cop voice. I’m sorry about all this.”
I’m not sure if he means the remains of the meal or the interrupted conversation or the fact that he’s exiting the scene.
“You go on, I’ve got this.”
“Thanks,” is all he says, and he’s off, talking into his phone and taking great long strides across the grass.
I wonder if the call was real or if he had arranged for someone to call him in case he wanted an out. No way to know, and I guess I’m not above that sort of thing myself. I dump our trash, pack up the last pieces of chicken, and walk Boris around until it’s nearly dark and the park is nearly empty. When we get home, Josie’s curtains are open but she’s not looking out, as far as I can tell, and I take Boris in by the back door and don’t turn on any lights on Josie’s side except the one in the back that turns itself on. I feel childish about that and about the whole evening and then I wonder yet again what the heck I’m doing here and why a took a job that will tie me tighter than ever to this dodgy neighborhood where I’m always worried about the next attack, the next burglary. And then I feed Boris, who is thrilled with his bowl of dry kibble and lies down afterward and sighs the sigh of a thoroughly contented being. I look at him and say crap crap crap very loudly.
