In Broad Daylight

It doesn’t take long to call the police. Sally is disappointed. She had hoped to be on hold for a while, listening to instrumental versions of Broadway tunes. She is poised to wait with her elbows and belly pressed against the counter, the phone pressed between her ear and shoulder, an earring scratching against the plastic. This wasn’t such a big crime anyway. Didn’t they have murderers and wife beaters to attend to? She watches the clock on the wall—it is old and sticky with greasy dust, its ornate black hands and tarnished brass pendulums swinging stiffly below. It takes less than two minutes to tell the dispatcher the address and the crime. She shrugs and adjusts her apron, with “Ruben’s Delicatessen” emblazoned on the front in red letters. At only ten o’clock, it is already splattered and smeared with the juice and fat of corned beef, pastrami and roast turkey. She wipes her hands on it one more time, and listens for the first faint call of a police siren. Afraid they’d come more quickly than she hoped, she runs to the screen door and looks down the block. She half expects to see Roland standing there in black jeans, with a grin stretching beneath his eye patch.

“Roland!” Sally yells. There is silence, but she knows he hasn’t gotten far. Even when he was a kid, he was never very fast. He is still in earshot, and Sally knows it. “Listen, moron, I’ve called the police, just so you know. I don’t want you to get arrested—mostly—so just get the hell away. I’m gonna get fired for sure.” Her boss’s wife is a sharp-faced woman with watery eyes, who manages to find an excuse to fire any woman who happens to catch her husband’s attention. This is not hard to do. After four pinches on her rear and twice catching him smelling her hair, Sally has known that her days at the deli are numbered.

Still, she needs to pay the rent. Roland knows this as well, of course. “Stupid, one-eyed bastard,” she mutters, but her breath catches and she stares anxiously out of the window before forcing herself to turn away.

With the hot morning sun slanting into the empty, dusty deli, Sally opens the door of the refrigerated case and gently leans her body onto the rows of Dr. Brown’s sodas, curving her neck and lifting her heavy, red hair in an attempt to get as much of the cold metal onto her hot, damp throat. She does this often when no one is looking. Secretly, she thinks that it boosts sales. She still isn’t used to the summer heat, and often sneers bitterly at the broken air conditioner her boss is too cheap or too lazy to fix, which sits behind the counter. The dial is still pointing toward “coldest,” obscured now by dust. Sally quickly snaps the front of her bra, releasing the small pool of sweat that has collected between her breasts, and pulls the damp shirt away from the small of her back. Usually, the customers standing in line are red faced and cranky even before Sally greets them with a sunny smile that she perfected in front of the mirror. After the morning rush of dark-suited men and women getting their kosher meats and hot bread for the day, the place is empty until lunch. Sally doesn’t mind. The dry shelves filled with condiments and crackers imported from Russia, Poland, and Israel make her think of the small, tight, airless stores back home, before the Wal-Mart moved in, and half the town moved out.

Sally was one of them, one of the first wave of refugees fleeing town in old beaters, watching the legions of Ford Explorers and Jags filled with platinum-headed families heading up to the lake. She sold the leaky, grease-smelling trailer that was once her mother’s, and before that, belonged to some man named Hank who disappeared when he found out that he could go to jail for tax evasion. She liked that trailer. Every square inch of wall space was covered with photographs of her aunts, long dead, or her mother, buried out back, or Jorge, who was never coming back and she knew it. Or that’s what she told people, anyway.

The two windows facing the lake she always kept as clear as water. She could sit there for hours looking out. She used to sit at those windows with Jorge, taking turns resting their heads on each other’s hands, blowing smoke rings toward the lake and sky. When he disappeared, she missed him most when she sat at that table, staring at the bills piling up, nobody’s hands to hold her aching head.

The man and woman who bought the trailer were both glossy-haired and taut-bodied people from the city. Sally never saw them again, but heard that they made short work of the trailer and spent nearly a million dollars building a weekend lake home. Sally really didn’t have much of a choice. With the Wal-Mart there, no one bothered to go to her hardware store anymore, especially the exploding numbers of wealthy boat-owners who distrusted anything local. When Jorge was around, she at least had an extra paycheck coming in. Together they were able to cover the taxes—barely—that doubled every year. Jorge brought home food from the bar where he was a short order cook. Fried chicken usually. Sometimes fish sticks and jo-jo potatoes. Sally kept the cars working.

Roland was around a lot back then. He’d show up late at night with three High Life’s and a pack of Lucky Strikes and the three of them would laugh at the inept and painfully self-involved people from the city who invaded their town every summer. When Roland lost his daddy’s farm, they stopped laughing. Jorge and Sally gave him nearly all they had in savings to help him set up shop in St. Paul.

When Jorge disappeared, she sat in front of the window with her ledger and calculated exactly how much she would need to keep her doors open. Assuming that her calculator was broken, she tried it again. She started picking at the scab above her left eyebrow. A drop of blood began to languidly inch down the curve of her cheek. She did not notice it. In one last, desperate move, she retrieved every box with every order, receipt, tax return, inventory, and even wish lists. At last, with a sigh, she arranged every piece of paper into neat stacks, paper clipped each one, and walked to the fridge for a beer. There was only one left. Walking back to the table, she turned off the light and sat down in the 3:00 a.m. darkness. She didn’t want her mother’s eyes looking at her. Not anymore.

Five others from her old town now live in her same neighborhood in St. Paul. They congregate without making plans. All of a sudden five people arrive at Sally’s apartment and they sit on the bare floor drinking Miller High Life, silently rolling their damp eyes to the ceiling. Or, in Roland’s case, only one eye. Roland had lived in the city before, working in one of the meat packing plants in West St. Paul. He lost his eye and nearly lost his left hand. There is a purple scar that starts at his middle knuckle and swoops around to the front of his wrist. He eventually went back to help his daddy on the old farm right outside of Emily. Corn, mostly. Some potatoes. For the most part, though, they’d spend five months a year pulling stones out of the earth and hauling them into a pile at the center of the field. Roland got the first foreclosure warning a week after his daddy died. He found this comforting. He did manage to sell the farm before it was repossessed, and while Roland was glad to have money in the bank at last, he found out later that the man who bought the land sold the stones from the pile for nearly the price he’d paid for the land.

“If my daddy ever heard that,” Roland would say, “It would kill him again. Forty years he broke his back on those stones. And now those people are buying them for their damn fireplaces. You just never know, do you? If alls they wanted was a rock pile, hell, we could’ve given ’em that.”

Everyone’s story was like that. Margaret’s gas station couldn’t compete with the Holiday. Frank’s farm was repossessed and turned into an ATV course. A petition organized by new residents shut down Irene’s bar, determining it to be an eyesore. Every summer more and more stares told them that they no longer belonged, that their town now belonged to someone else. Now they would watch one another’s faces, noting the dark circles under the eyes, and imagine they were home.

“Remember that time,” Roland had said one evening as they sat listening to the radio. He flexed his toes and shifted his weight on his sore hipbones, “Irene swiped that box of liquor from the sales rep and it turned out to be champagne? First time that old battle-axe didn’t water down the drinks.”

“She even let Jorge go a little crazy in the kitchen,” Margaret said, kindly taking Sally’s hand and stroking it. “First time she let him cook up anything that wasn’t frozen and deep fried. That was some eating that night, wasn’t it? Lord, that man could cook.”

Sally couldn’t look up. Her grief was like that, whacking her over the head when she least expected it. Jorge had gone to visit some cousins who were working in the sugar beet fields over at the Dakota border. The farm workers’ residence caught fire on the Fourth of July while people were inside, drinking and dancing. No one survived. Some of the bodies were charred beyond recognition, but most were crushed by the collapsing building, leaving bone shards and ashes under a pile of brick and concrete. There was nothing for Sally to bury.

“He would have wanted you to move on, Sal,” she thought she heard Roland say as she rested her eyes on her knees. Had she looked up, she would have seen him staring at her, biting his lip, his one eye bright with tears.

Sally closes the door to the case and walks to the window. She half hopes to see Roland standing out there, demanding answers, his coal black eye patch flapping in the wind. She looks back at the counter. There is a perfect square of dust marking where the cash register had stood only twenty minutes before. She reaches out her hand and is about to press it to the middle of the square, but thinks better of it. This is, after all, a crime scene. Instead she uses her knuckles to draw a squiggly line through the entire dusty box.

The second Sally had seen Roland walking down the sidewalk toward the deli, she knew she was in trouble. This has been brewing for a while. Two days earlier, in Sally’s apartment, Roland had neglected to leave with the others, but stayed on the pretense of helping Sally clean up.

“Lord knows you need some help around here, Sal. You’re working too much,” he had said as he sat on her counter, slowly smoking a Chesterfield, watching Sally do the dishes. Her back ached as she leaned toward the too-low sink that was jammed into the corner of the sloped wall of her converted-attic apartment. She was already sleepy, and the smell of soap and the remains of fried chicken were making it difficult to keep her eyes open, like the faint strains of a lullaby, half forgotten.

It was true that she was working too much. Thirty hours a week as a deli clerk, thirty hours as a telemarketer, as well as house cleaning when she had time. She often made time.

“My mother said there was no such thing as working too much,” Sally told Roland. “Hell, a girl’s gotta eat. Besides, I worked more at the … um, I’ve worked harder, Roland. You should know that.” Sally squeezed warm, soapy water through her fists a few times and tilted her head back as far as it would go. Headache, she thought; I knew it. Sally rarely spoke of her hardware store.

“It just seems like you’d be a lot happier if you had someone helping you out a bit, you know, sharing expenses.”

“Roland, I’ve been on my own for quite some time now and haven’t starved yet. Are you trying to tell me that I can’t take care of myself?”

“No, Sal, it’s just that I—” He ran his hand through his hair, which needed a wash. “I just thought you … Jesus.” He took another drag. “Why should you be alone, Sal? Why shouldn’t you have someone to take care of you? I … ” He faltered again.

Sally wiped her hands off on the seat of her jeans. She couldn’t look at him. He coughed and laid his hand gently on her shoulder. She let it stay there for a moment heating through her blouse, until she heard him sigh, and felt the hand start to slide. Then she jerked away. Her bare feet seemed to echo in the empty apartment as she walked to the door. She turned and looked at him, examined his face, his eyebrows arched in anticipation. “Roland,” she began, but stopped. “Just go. I gotta get some sleep.” After he slumped away, she stood by the door for a long time, her breath coming in fierce gulps, feeling the imprint of his hand warm its way from her shoulder into her bones.

The morning of the crime, he had stood before her, hardly able to speak, his breath coming quickly and his good eye crying freely.

“I loved him too, Sal. We all did. But you know it would break his heart if he knew you were wasting your life like this.”

“I’m not wasting anything, Roland. I’m happy.” What a load of shit, she thought to herself. I don’t even believe that.

“You hate your jobs. You hate your apartment. Sal, we’ve known each other since the third grade, you think I can’t tell you’re miserable? Jorge was my best friend.” Roland took her hands. His left hand couldn’t grip as well as the right, but she didn’t bother to pull away. She stared at their hands, her nails bitten to the quick, his purple scar. This is the longest that we’ve ever touched, she thought to herself. She could not bring herself to look at his face.

“He’s not the issue, Roland. What, you think he would want me crying all day, just sitting at my old house and watching them tear it down? I moved on and I kept moving.” Her voice was catching in her sore throat.

“I love you, Sal. I’ve loved you for years.”

Sally knew she should say something, feel something. But her body was frozen and numb.

Roland dropped her hands. He took a step backward. “I need an answer,” he said. Sally still couldn’t speak. She couldn’t look at him, or anything else for that matter. Her chest and shoulders were heavy, and her vision was swimming. She put her hands on the counter to steady herself. She stared mutely at her swollen knuckles, her ragged nails. “Well, if you’re not going to answer me, maybe I’m just going to have to push the issue.” He grabbed the ancient cash register, hoisted it to his chest and headed for the door. “You want this back, you have to at least talk to me.” And then he was gone.

Sally’s skin starts to tingle when she hears the police siren sounding faintly through the hot streets. Panicking, she hurries over to the window to make sure Roland is gone. Pulled by a hope that he is far away and safe, and by a sudden and piercing desire to see him again, Sally has half a mind to give herself a swift kick in the shins. As the sirens grow nearer and pull to a halt in front of the deli, Sally hears the door open in the back and her boss and her boss’s wife walking in through the kitchen. Two police officers, a short, lively-looking blonde woman and a heavy man with olive skin, walk in the front door just as the boss’s wife lets out a shrill scream.

“Sally! What happened to the cash register? Did you—” But before she could finish, the lady cop spoke.

“I believe you were the one who called in the report.” She looked at Sally, who wondered briefly if she had perhaps once worked at the delicatessen herself. “The register was there, I assume.” She pointed to the dusty square on the counter. “Was it electric?”

“No,” said Sally, finally getting her voice back, “it’s really old.” She could hear her boss’s wife whispering frantically to her balding husband who looked at Sally with a combination of desire and pity. Sally was able to pick up words like “completely untrustworthy” and “tart.”

“Can you describe the person who took it?” the officer asked, shaking her head at the wife hissing into her slumping husband’s ear.

Sally met her boss’s eye and gave him half a smile. He licked his lips and stared at her with a combination of lust and despair. Sally nearly laughed out loud. Poor bastard, she thought, and for a moment, like a spark moving along a copper wire, she could feel his aching loneliness coursing from her shoes to her red hair. She looked around at the deli. Roland was right. She really hated her job. And in a split second, she felt herself open up, expand, as though her body had been nothing more than a concrete cast, waiting to fall away. She looked toward the window, her body newly made of light, and color and wings.

“Lady, can you describe the guy or not?”

“No,” Sally said, her eyes leaving the sad old man who dreamt of her body, and looking straight at her boss’s wife. “I never saw him. I was out back smoking a cigarette at the time.” The sharp-faced woman flashed a look at Sally, who smiled. Roland’s never going to believe this, she thought, and she calculated the seconds it would take her to run home.