Vigilantes of Love Read Free Page A

asked, admittedly not a personal question, but I took it as a good sign. She was Chinese and had shopped there as long as I’d worked there. She knew where the soy sauce was.
    I vaulted up the steps to Eva’s door filled with the sauce of a man on the rise. My brushes were clean, there was five dollars in my pocket and there was a pretty black-haired girl who might be stopping by the grocery tonight because she’d “forgotten” an item yesterday. My world was blue and green and bright.
    But Eva’s face was otherwise.
    “Can you drive?” she asked me when I got to the door.
    “Well, I don’t have a license anymore, but sure, I used to drive,” I said.
    “Take me to the airport.”
    Eva bade me stay at her place until she came home from her daughter’s in Des Moines, so she could phone me to say when she’d be back and I could pick her up at the airport. I couldn’t afford a phone at my apartment.
    What was supposed to be a few days of absence stretched longer when her daughter didn’t pull through. She was gone for weeks; after the death and funeral, she called to say she was hopping another plane to stay for a while with her son in Africa. It was Eva all the way. I shook my head and smiled at the thought of this little old spitfire touching down on the Ivory Coast.
    At 8:13 a.m. on a Saturday (her stove had one of those electric digital clocks) as I sat reading her paper at her table in her kitchen, after a night on her couch (I wouldn’t sleep in her bed – it just didn’t seem right) the phone call finally came.
    “Pick me up at three this afternoon,” she said. “At the United terminal. I’m ready to come home.”
    I almost didn’t recognize her when she came out of the terminal, lugging the one canvass bag she’d packed before leaving, along with two new plastic bags lumpy with additions. You don’t ever come back with less than you take. Always more.
    Eva had also come back with more on her mind. She’d aged two decades in two months. Suddenly she seemed as frail and weathered as an oak leaf in December. I didn’t know what to say to her. When she’d left it was to help her daughter after a car accident, and she’d come back without any daughter at all.
    I pushed her bags into the trunk and got the door for her, but she insisted on closing it herself.
    “Get in the car,” she said, shooing me away from the handle. “Let’s just get home.”
    It was a long, quiet ride from the airport; Eva stared out the window at the bay, and I tried not to punch the unfamiliar brakes too hard. I’d owned a car once but that had been many years before. Eva’s Chevy probably predated my Honda, but I hadn’t driven it while she was gone.
    When we got home, I picked up the couple of items I’d brought with me from home – a recently acquired toothbrush and my laundry – and headed for the door, eager to leave her with her own thoughts. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled, staring at the floor of her kitchen and clumsily shifting my plastic sack of belongings from one hand to the other.
    Eva nodded. “Don’t forget my coffee,” was all she said.
    By the end of October she seemed back to normal. Mostly. I only really saw her in the mornings, bringing her that one-cup care package that had managed to pull me off the street and into a full-time job at the grocery store (the stockboy had quit a couple weeks before) and a one-room apartment on the skid. The week before I’d even asked the Chinese girl, Soo Lee, to a movie.
    And she said yes.
    “Have you heard from the moon lately?” Eva asked me one morning.
    I shook my head no.
    “Not since that night,” I replied. “I took your advice; I stay in when the moon is full.”
    Actually, I had long ago begun to think the incident was a product of a mind ripe with street delirium.
    She nodded absently. “Just as well. There are still things here for you to do.”
    I looked around at the freshly varnished cupboards, the recently painted back door, the newly