She looked at me slyly, pleased to be in control. “There are so many kids in this building they probably got confused. Sherree wasn’t here.”
Mrs. Attar ripped off a question to her daughter, probably wanting to know what our side conversation was about. While they talked I sat back on the crinkling plastic and pondered how to get Mrs. Attar to talk to me. I didn’t care whether she’d ever looked after Sherree Aguinaldo. What I needed was the address where the grandmother had moved with Sherree, or the names of any men Mrs. Attar might have seen with Nicola Aguinaldo.
I looked Mrs. Attar in the eye, adult to adult, and spoke slowly. “I’m not with the government. I’m not with Children and Family Services. I’m not with INS.”
I opened my handbag and spread the contents on the cluttered coffee table. I laid out my credit cards and my private–eye license. Mrs. Attar looked puzzled for a moment, then seemed to understand what I was showing her. She scrutinized my driver’s license and the PI license, spelling out my name from card to card. She showed it to her daughter and demanded an explanation.
“You see?” I said. “There is no badge in here.”
When Mrs. Attar finally spoke to me, she said in halting English, “Today is?”
“Thursday,” I said.
“One ago, two ago, three ago is?”
“It’d be Monday, Ma,” Mina cut in in exasperation, adding something in Arabic.
Her mother put a light hand over her daughter’s mouth. “I tell. Men comes. Early early, first prayers. Is—is—”
She looked around the room for inspiration, then showed me her watch. She turned the dial back to five–thirty.
“I wake husband, I wake Mina, I wake sons. First wash. Look outside, see men. I afraid. Woman here, have green card, I find.”
“Derwa’s mom,” Mina put in, sulking because she wasn’t controlling the drama any longer. “She’s legal; Mama got her to ask the men what they wanted. They were looking for Abuelita Mercedes, so Mama went and woke her—they’re not Islam, they don’t have to get up at five–thirty like we do.”
“Yes, yes. Abuelita Mercedes, much good woman, much good for Mina, for Derwa, take with Sherree when I working, when Derwa mother working. All childrens call her “Abuelita,’ meaning “Grandmother,’ not only own childrens. I take him—”
“Her, Mama; if it’s a woman it’s her, not him.”
“Her. I take her, I take Sherree. Men coming here”— she stabbed at her chair, to indicate this very room—”I say, she my mother, these my childs all.”
“And then?”
“Leave. No good stay here. Men go, more men come, no good.”
I assumed she meant Abuelita Mercedes had to move before more INS agents showed up looking for her. “Do you know where she went?”
A sigh and a shrug. “Better not know. Not want problem.”
I asked Mrs. Attar if she knew of any men Nicola had dated. Mrs. Attar only shrugged again—she couldn’t help. When I asked about Mr. Baladine—the boss who sometimes drove her home—Mrs. Attar lifted her palms in incomprehension. Nicola was a good mother—it was the only reason she went out to work among rich strangers, to make money for her two little girls. She came home every week to see them; she was never late, she never had time for men. Mina smirked a little at this, which made me wonder if the kids would tell a different story.
“America no good place. Baby sick, mother no money, mother go jail. Why? Why peoples no help?”
She turned to Mina to put her ideas more completely. In Egypt a mother could take her sick baby to a clinic where the government would care for it, then there was no need for the mother to steal to pay the bills.
“Now mother dead, and why? Only want help baby. America very no good.”
I couldn’t think of a convincing rebuttal. I thanked her for her time and tea and let Mina take me back outside. Her friends had vanished. I tried to ask her about Nicola Aguinaldo, whether Mina had ever noticed any men visiting her or knew of talk on the streets about her, but the child was hurt at her friends’ defection. She hunched her shoulder angrily and told me to mind my own business. There didn’t seem to be much else I could do, so I got into the rattling Skylark and drove off.
I stopped in the park at Foster to give Peppy a walk. The police were sweeping the area in their three–wheeled buggies, slowing when they passed anyone with a dog, so I kept her on her leash. She didn’t like it—especially since the squirrels weren’t similarly constrained—but unlike her son she doesn’t yank my arm off when she’s tied up.
Aguinaldo had run away from Coolis without knowing that her mother had fled their apartment. And then? Had she come home, found her mother gone, and called Baladine for help, only to be beaten up? Or met up with some old boyfriend in the neighborhood with the same disastrous results?