Flashback

Nick hopes their neighborhood will be a good place for their son or daughter to grow up. (He and Dara sometimes think that they’re the only expectant parents in the city—maybe in the state or nation—who’ve repeatedly turned down the ultrasound, gene-scan, and other modern ways of knowing their kid’s gender before birth.)

“Aren’t you going to tell me your story?” says Dara.

Nick has to blink his way up and out of his I-love-my-house-and-neighborhood reverie. How many beers has he had this afternoon and evening anyway?

Not enough to dull your passion later tonight, thought the watching Nick.

“What story?” asks Nick in the real time of the summer Friday night from sixteen years and one month earlier.

“The story about your uncle Wally buying you that little telescope in Chicago and how it was the most precious thing you ever owned.”

Nick snaps a glance at Dara, but she’s smiling, not mocking, and now she takes his free hand in hers again. He shifts the beer to his left hand.

“Well… it was…,” he says lamely. “The most precious thing I owned, I mean. For years.”

“I know,” Dara is whispering. “Tell me the part about how you tried to see the stars from the tenement landing in Chicago.”

“It wasn’t a tenement, kiddo.” Nick sips the rest of his beer and vows to make it his last one for the evening. “Uncle Wally’s apartment in Chicago was just a… you know… apartment in a neighborhood that had gone from Irish to Polish to mostly black.”

“But you’d been visiting your uncle for two weeks…,” prompts Dara.

Nick smiles. “I’d been visiting my uncle for two weeks—he was a cookie salesman, formerly an A and P manager, and my old man sent me to Chicago for two weeks every summer. I loved it.”

“So you’d been visiting your uncle for two weeks,” repeats Dara, smiling.

Nick makes a fist and hits her lightly on the knee. Then he takes her hand back. “So I’d been visiting for almost all of my two weeks and we used to go walking on Madison Street in the evening, a few blocks from his little third-floor apartment, and every time we’d walk past what I thought was this camera and electronics store—it was really a pawnshop—I’d ask to stop so we could admire this little telescope in the window. Not a real astronomical telescope, you understand, just the little kind that the captain of a ship would have used centuries ago, with tiny black tripod legs…”

“So on your last night in Chicago,” Dara prompts again.

“Hey! You going to let me tell this or what?”

She sets her head against his shoulder.

“So on my last night in Chicago—it turned out to be the last time I ever saw my uncle, the only member of my family I knew outside my old man and mother, because Wally died of a massive coronary two months after I went back to Denver that summer—anyway, my last night in Chicago, after Wally and I had washed and dried the dishes—he was a bachelor, you know—and I was in the dining room packing my clothes into my little bag on the daybed where I slept, Wally called me out to the landing and…”

“Voilà!” says Dara, sounding truly happy.

“Voilà. The telescope. I couldn’t believe it. It was the coolest thing that anyone’d ever bought me, and it wasn’t even close to my birthday or Christmas or anything. So we set it up on its little tripod legs on a chair propped on top of a garbage can there on the rear third-floor landing and I tried to find some stars or planets to look at, I was nuts about space at that age…”

“Which was?” asks Dara, her voice muffled against his arm.

“Age? About nine, I guess. Anyway, the city lights blocked out most of the stars, but we found one bright one shining through the murk. I later figured out it was Sirius. And Jupiter, too. It was bright that night.”

“Way back in the nineteen-nineties,” murmurs Dara. “Who knew they had modern stuff like telescopes way back then?”

“You’re just jealous,” says Nick. It’s a running joke between them. Dara is a decade younger, born in the 1990s. Nick enjoys reminding her of all the neat things she missed in that decade. Like Ronald Reagan’s swan song? Bill Clinton’s blow job? she’d ask innocently. But they both sometimes find it odd that he was already sneaking peeks at porn on the Internet in the year she was born.

“I love the Uncle Wally telescope story,” says Dara, rubbing her forehead against his shoulder as a cat would. Nick suspects that she has another headache.

“And I love…,” begins Nick.

“Me?”

“The Friday Night Creature Feature on TCM,” finishes Nick, standing and pulling her next to him. “And it’s gonna start streaming in three minutes.”

She laughs but sets her entire body against him, her hand soft against his left hip where his holster and gun usually sit. The helicopters have gone, their noise replaced by more distant and less urgent sirens and sounds.