The Seeker Read Free Page A

and flattened themselves against the wall, she’d scrub the chipped legs of the ragged, brown sofa, wipe the cinder-block walls, mop the floors and move and rearrange the lone table and three chairs in the living room again and again. She’d stop when the shooting stopped and continue with her cooking or sewing as though nothing had happened.
    The only time her face livened up was when she spoke of Max and Sophia’s future. “These two will become something,” she’d tell her friends in the courtyard every evening before the dealers took over the place for the night. Back home, she’d slowly repeat the names of private schools—Horace Mann, Trinity, Dalton—she had heard of from people whose houses she cleaned in the city. She’d construct tantalizing images of them. Instead of the broken windows and smoky stairwells of PS 65 (where they went), these schools had swimming pools and ceramics studios. You didn’t have to smear a thick coat of Vaseline on your face each morning to prevent scratches in fights, nor hold your stomach for hours in fear that some kid you had a beef with would slash your face with a razor blade if you went into the dark bathroom. She’d been pulled out of school in fifth grade in Greece, but she’d dreamt her kids would go to the best schools in America. And they had. She just wouldn’t be around to see them make use of it.
    The building stirred to life as the sun arose. Tupac and Nas songs blared from the apartments. A teenager in an ill-fitting jacket and white underwear staggered out of the front, an asthma inhaler wedged tightly between his fingers, a dazed look on his face. Was he a crack fiend? Would he also end up dead on the streets like many of Max’s friends from childhood had? So what if he did? Max’s mother had worked two jobs—cleaning houses in the city in the morning, bagging groceries at the bodega down the street late in the evening—and had been so tired every night that she sometimes fell asleep in her bowl of Avgolemeno soup. All so they could go to good schools and get out of the projects. Hadn’t she realized that illness and death didn’t go away just because you crossed over to Manhattan on the 6 train? Everything was so fucking pointless. Max went to the front of the building and touched the scratched, bullet-dented metal front door, then turned around and walked back toward the subway station, glad he’d gotten a chance to say some kind of a goodbye to his mother.

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    Max’s mother died the next day, finally free from the kidney cancer that had spread to her uterus, bladder, liver, bones, and lungs over the past three years. A week later, Max and Sophia held her memorial service at St Ann’s Episcopal Church. They briefly considered holding the service at St George-St Demetrios Greek Church in Spanish Harlem but his mother hadn’t identified with the Orthodox faith just as she hadn’t fasted at Lent or sought any Greek family in the US. “Talking of past is like two birds sitting and knitting sweater. Fools’ daydreams. You think only of future,” she had said in her halting English, whenever Max and Sophia asked her too many questions about her childhood. Not that it mattered. Orthodox or Episcopal, everyone ended up in some spot under the ground. At least she had died a natural death. A life not cut short by a shooting or an overdose was a minor blessing in the projects.
    On his way back from the Columbus Circle subway station after her memorial service that evening, Max saw the Indian food-cart guy from a week before standing on a small stool in front of the open-air cart, still naked from the waist up. He was scraping snow from the cart’s tin roof with a look of complete absorption on his face. Max hesitated, then removed his overcoat and walked up to the cart, shivering in his sweater. The man saw Max and smiled.
    “From the other night, yes?” he said, getting off the stool.
    Max nodded.
    “I came to give you this.” Max handed him the