All of Us. A. F. Carter

throws at her. Like us.

      I finally head off in the opposite direction. We’re into August now, with the temperature at ten o’clock already above eighty degrees. I’m sweating before I reach the end of the block. But I don’t mind. With no air conditioner, we’re used to sweating out the summer months. Still, it’s a relief when I step into the air-conditioned Pathmark on Atlantic Avenue. I stop near the entrance for a moment as the sweat evaporates. To my left, I see Crespo, the manager. Crespo sometimes flirts with me, but he’s wasting his time. If I have eyes for anyone, it’s Violetta, who works a cash register.

      Today I have eyes only for the chuck roast, which is on sale, $3.25 a pound. With just a few cheap ingredients, you can turn a chuck roast into a pot roast good for a lunch and four dinners. I buy two, four pounds each, $25 in total, a quarter of my stamps. As a general rule, I don’t measure my shopping by time, thirty days until new stamps come through. I measure the month in meals, ninety-three meals in July to be exact. I know I can’t make a hundred dollars produce ninety-three meals, but I can turn a whole chicken into three dinners and four lunches by making chicken stock from the carcass and adding a little rice. Brown rice is a Grand household staple. I buy it in twenty-five-pound bags at a wholesale grocery for about $20. In an emergency, a cup of rice fried up with some onion, peppers, and garlic will pass for lunch. Add an egg, you’ve got dinner.

      I take a certain satisfaction from my skill at making do. Even though I have no idea who will eat the dinner.

      I wander into the produce section. In truth, except for basics like onions and carrots and celery, we can’t afford fresh fruit or vegetables on the first go-round. Instead, I try to set a few dollars aside from our disability check to buy produce from the city’s many sidewalk vendors, a bag of cherries, a head of cabbage or broccoli, a few peaches. The produce is cheaper and fresher.

      I’m completely absorbed, turning over bags of carrots, looking for any sign of rot, when I happen to glance up and see my father at the other end of the produce aisle. Instantly, the lie we’ve been telling each other all these years—the one about only Tina having to relive the past—falls away. My bowels contract, every organ quivering, and I feel an enormous pressure on my chest. For a very long moment, my lungs are completely paralyzed. Nothing has been lost, nothing. The memories, the images swirl around me, circling faster and faster as the words repeat.

      To a child, to a child, to a child …

CHAPTER TWELVE

       ELENI

      The body is in full panic mode when I come aboard. Serena, Victoria, and Martha have fled and Kirk is nowhere to be found. That leaves me or Tina to face the emergency and it ain’t gonna be Tina. Still, they’ve picked the right sibling. Although terrible images continue to shred what little mind I possess, I force my brain to calm. I’ve been in tough situations before. That’s what I tell myself. I’ve been in tough situations and I’m still around and you can kiss my ass.

      Besides, who’s to say it’s Hank Grand? Like Kirk, I’ve seen the mug shot taken when our father was arrested. He was forty at the time. Now he’s sixty-seven.

      I study the man on the other side of the store. He’s standing before a display of refrigerated jars, probably salad dressing. I can see the resemblance, but I also find differences. In the mug shot, Hank Grand had a full head of hair, but this man’s nearly white hair is receding front to back. He’s sporting a gut, too, whereas the Hank Grand on those movies was trim. The nose is softer as well, and the jowls entirely new.

      I watch him take a jar from the shelf, watch him spin it in his hand as he examines it. The gesture is so casual that I’m unprepared when he looks up, his head slowly turning until his dead eyes meet mine. I’m expecting to find pure malevolence but instead discover calculation, the look of a man weighing his options. I reach into Martha’s purse and wrap my fingers around a canister of mace given to me by a cop who didn’t say no. The canister reassures me to an extent, but it doesn’t tell me what to do.

      From somewhere off in the distance, I hear Tina whisper, “Daddy’s come to get me. Daddy always comes to get me.”

      I’ve never had all that much patience with Tina. Maybe she mopes for all of us, but she still mopes. Me, I want to live. I don’t want to be a mope or a prune, either. Indecision doesn’t become me.