The market itself was laid out like a cross, with a bluegrass band and trestle tables set up in the center. Children with faces painted like pandas and cows ran through the crowd, half of them barefoot. Saina hoisted one bag over her shoulder. It was full now, a spray of turnip greens spilling over the top, and she remembered, too late, that it had started life as a gift bag from Gucci’s UNICEF fundraiser, one of the endless roundelay of events that made up her New York life. The fashion label’s logo was printed on both sides, so she couldn’t even turn it around to hide the giant interlocked Gs.
Saina was examining a bunch of multicolored carrots when she saw a movement, a series of movements—an arm, a twist, a shoulder, a lift—and froze, swallowed her breath, dropped the carrots. Not Gabriel. Leo. He was smiling now; she could see just the edge of his face, but she knew the folds and bumps of it so well that she could read them even through this scrim of carbon dioxide and chlorophyll. He was smiling and holding a bag of salad out to a white-haired woman in a draped sweater and red-framed glasses who faced Saina straight on. This is the person Grayson should have seen, this tall, sure man.
How good it made them feel, these well-meaning Upper West Side transplants, buying organic produce they didn’t even have to wash from a handsome black man who would greet them with an exotic fist bump! An attractive, articulate chap, not unlike the young senator from Illinois they had just congratulated themselves for nominating, who would show the world that slavery was behind us and that we could appreciate hip-hop. Yes! So many pretty boxes to check all at once!
Saina stopped herself. She and Leo used to do this together sometimes—half jokingly turn everyone around them into the worst kind of self-congratulatory liberal, using that familiar colored-person shorthand to align themselves with each other. But it was unfair. It was just a step down, really, from her father telling her that Indians were nice to look at, and held beautiful festivals, but were not to be trusted under any circumstances.
For a minute, Saina let herself picture her father meeting Leo. His reactions to people were completely unpredictable—with Leo he’d either be moved to embarrassing displays of emotion or an ugly patrician prudery would rear up and he’d declare Leo and all he represented to be irreparably beneath the glorious Wangs.
No matter what, Leo would be a puzzle. His full name was Lionel Grossman. The Grossmans had a long Catskills lineage of Borscht Belt comedians, big band leaders, and the occasional heroin addict, men whose love of romance was equal only to their love of the road, resulting in a peripatetic lust that produced generations of illegitimate—but adored!—children and an ever-shifting backdrop of spouses. Leo was adopted into that family at age seven, brave and small, a ward of the state since he was two, already resigned to being unwanted. “It was the early ’80s,” he told her once. “We knew that nobody took little black boys. Celebrities weren’t scooping up bushels of chocolate babies from Malawi. It was a different time.” And then he joked that the big-living Grossmans thought they were lifting a pickaninny out of the ghetto, but really they were bringing him into a family of shiftless musicians. If they’d been black, they would have been trouble; as Jews, they were just bohemian.
Saina lifted her bag of produce over her head, shimmied past the folding tables, and ducked out the back of the booth, her eyes on Leo. He was still smiling.
She felt light-headed.
It seemed unfair to walk up behind him, to surprise him like that, but she couldn’t, didn’t want to, approach from the customer side, where flats of lettuces would be wedged between them. As she crunched across the gravel towards an unsuspecting Leo, a tiny piece of rock wedged itself between her toenails, red now. She leaned down to pick it out and felt the strap of her mint-colored silk dress, just a summer dress, nothing special, slip an inch off her shoulder. Good. Heart beating, she pulled her hair over to the opposite side, leaving her neck bare. Not that she was expecting Leo to even look at her, really, but it didn’t hurt to be worth looking at.
And then, before she was ready, there he was. Close enough to touch. Close enough to smell. Shoulder blades pulling on the fabric of his faded black T-shirt.
Saina meant to tap him lightly, but instead her hand laid itself on his warm back and felt its way down to the curve of his waist. He turned. She dropped her hand. Stepped back.
“Oh. Hi. Leo. Hi.”
He looked down at her, neutral.
She lifted up her bag. “I’m buying things. Vegetables. I got river trout from the fish guys. And cheese. Taleggio.”
A nod. His eyes flicked to the oversize logo.
“It’s from an event. I didn’t buy it. I wouldn’t do that—I wouldn’t buy a Gucci farmers market bag.” Saina remembered that Leo didn’t know about her father and his fall.
“You might.”
Now. Say it now.
“Grayson’s gone.”
Leo froze, looking at her.
“He’s . . . I didn’t want him here anymore.”
He considered this for a moment. “Did he still want to be here?”
Hesitate and all is lost.
“Yes,” said Saina, immediately.
And then Leo’s eyes got soft in that terrible, amazing way that only men who are supposed to be invulnerable can soften. He looked at her, full of hope, and Saina felt herself die a little bit inside.