“The king has returned from battle,” he tells her.
“I got adobo on the stove,” she says. “And I didn’t shave a few days. You want special treatment, you gonna have to wait.”
He nuzzles her neck, smelling of sweat and beer. “I like you hairy,” he says.
She shrugs, leads him to the bedroom. She’s not in the mood, but when has that ever mattered? Besides, he’s been locked away for months. He’ll pop quick. Avon follows, holding her trailing hand, his other hand on his pants, shuffling—scrawny, white-blond hair clipped close to the skin in a flattop—and for a moment he looks like a boy again.
Freedom.
Later, they sit at the kitchen table, drinking Jack Daniel’s coolers—they both like the watermelon punch—and eating chicken straight out of the pot.
“You keeping oil in the car?” he asks.
“One time,” she tells him, “and now forever we gotta talk about this.”
On TV, Fox News is reporting on some kind of Senate committee hearings. Avon doesn’t pay much attention to American politics now that he knows what’s really going on. But he glances at the screen while he eats. A woman in a suit behind the big table is being grilled by some subcommittee (Justice?). The chyron under her name reads JUDGE MARGOT BARR-NADIR, and she’s talking about why she’s fit to serve on the Supreme Court. The chyron changes. The words Daughter missing 4 weeks appear where her name used to be.
Avon opens another JD cocktail. He tells Girlie about his cell mates—the dumb one and the stupid one—and how lousy the food was. She half listens, texting her sisters, her friends, her employees all in a constant stream. It’s 7:00 a.m. in the Philippines, and everybody’s up and writing.
“Of course I’m worried,” Judge Nadir says. “I’m her mother. But this isn’t a hearing about my daughter. This is a hearing about whether or not I should be a justice on the Supreme Court, and I’d appreciate it if you’d keep your question to that topic.”
Avon drops a chicken bone on his plate. “What’s she going on about?” he asks.
“The babies,” says Girlie, “all everybody’s babies. They just kill themselves.”
“What babies? They’re dying in their cribs?”
“No, stupid. The boys and girls. Teenage. They kill themselves.” She makes a gun of her hand and presses it to her temple.
He grits his teeth. She should know better than to call him stupid. “Who? Where?”
“Everyplace, they think. Connie at the shop say her cousin dead this weekend.”
Avon scowls. “Sounds like they found another wild-goose chase to keep us from thinking about the real tragedy. Where are the bodies? That’s what we should be asking.”
“No, it’s real. All dead. Babies. So sad.”
“Why, ’cause you saw it on TV? ’Cause Connie’s got a cousin? How many times I gotta tell you, woman, it’s a smokescreen. You can’t trust anything that comes over that pipeline. It’s all a diversion.”
Girlie shrugs, her face flushed, poking at her plate. She felt him stiffen when she called him stupid. Why did I do that? Thank God he didn’t hit her, probably because he got out of prison today, and he’s still in a good behavior mindset. But Girlie worries her words will come back on her later, when she’s in the bedroom brushing her hair or putting on lotion. She’ll feel him behind her, hear the tone shift in his breathing. But by then it’ll be too late.
She checks her phone again. In LA, her sister, Rose, is hiding in the bathroom. The Witch is nocturnal, mostly, sleeping the day away in a back bedroom with blackout curtains. The smell of cigarette smoke signals her resuscitation, followed by the sound of deep, hacking coughs, as she brings up balls of brown lung phlegm and spits them into a coffee can she keeps by the bed. Rose brings the missus her coffee then, her eyes adjusting to the slow darkness within. Sometimes after she puts the coffee on the bedside table and turns, the Witch is standing behind her in a sheer nightdress stained brown in places by hacked tobacco spit that dribbles from her lips.
How she laughs at Rose’s fear. Laughs and laughs.
She has the black eyes of a succubus.
So these days, when the afternoon turns to evening, Rose tries to make herself scarce. A long trip to the market, an hour in the laundry room.
The Witch is a New York transplant, somewhere between seventy-five and a hundred, thin as a bone. At some point in the last fifteen years, she had lip liner tattooed around her mouth, but as the elasticity has gone out of her skin, the liner has moved farther and farther from her actual lips, until now a dark halo hovers somewhere between her nose and mouth, forcing her either to fill the gap with lipstick or accept the incongruity. She speaks in an old Bronx grind, dressed in black—pants, turtlenecks—her eyes shielded by dark glasses half the size of her face. Whenever she goes out, she perches a NY Yankees baseball cap on top of her head, like a lid on a pot. Rarely does she move in a straight line.