I told everyone he was my cousin

The store was on the corner of Storer and West 45th, ground floor of a three-story my father bought in 1971 for eleven thousand dollars, which nobody believes when I say it. You came into the store off the corner. The door for the apartments was around the side on 45th, three concrete steps up, and everybody gets that part wrong when I tell this. Two apartments to a floor. The ones facing Storer were the better ones on account of the afternoon light, and those went for a hundred and sixty a month.

Paul had three, the one facing the street. He was thirty-one when I met him, maybe thirty-two. He cooked at a place on Detroit that did a fish fry and had a line out the door in Lent, and it's a nail salon now.

He'd come in for a Barq's and a pack of Winstons. A pack was about ninety cents and I charged him eighty. I was in a gas station on Lorain in the spring and they had the same pack at nine and a quarter.

I'm deaf on the left side. That's from a gym on Clark, and it didn't happen in one night, it came on over a couple of years and nobody called it anything at the time. Paul had it worked out inside of a week and I never said one word to him about it. After that he walked on my right. He'd switch sides at a corner to do it.

He told me once that I stood like I was waiting on somebody to swing at me. I told him to mind his own posture.

One night in June he came down for a bag of ice and didn't go back up until the morning. We didn't talk about it after. He came down for ice a good deal that summer. The man had a freezer.

In the fall he started losing weight. His face went first and then the rest of him went fast, and by the end of October he wasn't going in to work. There was a fellow with a shop on Lorain who wouldn't take a five out of a certain customer's hand. The visiting nurse stood in the doorway the first time and did the whole visit from there without stepping in, and I'm not going to say her name, because she's got grandchildren.

My brother Elias delivered for me on Saturdays and he had a key to the side door, so he saw me on the stairs with a tray the second week. I told him Paul was a cousin on my mother's side. My mother's youngest sister went to Akron in 1954 and married a man with a Slovak name, and that is how you get a Paul in my family. I made the whole thing up standing there with a mop in my hand.

It took about four seconds and I never once had to add to it. My mother has eleven brothers and sisters between the living and the dead, and there are people in Michigan with my blood I wouldn't know in a line. Elias told Fouad and Fouad told George, so by the third week I'd said it the one time and the whole family had it. Nobody asked me his last name.

I told Mrs. Kudela on two, because she asked me straight out on the steps. I told Father Rahme when he came around before Christmas with the calendars. A man at the counter wanted to know who the sick fellow upstairs was and I said my cousin, and he said God help him and bought a lottery ticket. My father's name was on that deed and mine was going on it after him. Forty-two years and nobody has ever come back at me on it.

Then I carried food up there for eleven weeks. Both hands on the pot, because of how my knuckles are. Sixteen steps to the second floor, and I'd set the pot down on the radiator cover on the landing and get my hands back, then sixteen more. That's how I know it's sixteen. The landing bulb went out in December and I put in one of the long-life kind, a dollar nineteen at the hardware on Lorain, and I'd have told you at the time that was too much for a bulb.

My mother cooked most of it. Rice and lentils mostly, and the soup she makes with the chicken and the lemon. A jar of laban every Sunday for me to take with me. She asked twice if she could come up and I told her he was too sick for company.

The television up there was a Zenith with the wood down the sides and the tuning knob was gone off it, so you turned it with a pair of pliers he kept on top of the set. We had that on. I couldn't tell you one thing that was ever on it.

He wanted the window open in December. I opened it.

By January he was taking crushed ice and flat Seven Up and that was the whole of it. Thirty-two steps for an eight-ounce glass.

Christmas Eve it got to fifteen below in this city. That isn't me making something out of it, that's the number, you can go and look it up. The pipes in the back of the store let go and I was down there with a torch at two in the morning, and then I went up.

They took him into Lutheran the second week of January. They told me things up there because I'd said cousin. I sat on his right so I could hear him. He died on a Thursday, four in the morning. I was in the chair.

The funeral was at a place on Detroit near 117th. Closed casket. His people came. Most of them hadn't spoken to him since he moved out of Parma. They sat in the front row and I sat in the back with two fellows from the building. I shook hands at the door on the way out.

The priest there, not mine, asked me if I was family. I told him the ham loaf was good.

The sister asked me how we were related. I gave her the Akron thing and she said oh, she'd heard of them. Then she said something else, on my bad side, and I nodded at it.

They had the apartment cleared out by the end of the month. I stood in the hall while they carried it down, because the stairs turn at the landing and you need a man on the low end. A fellow asked me if I wanted anything out of there and I said no.

My mother asked after him for years. At dinner, with the plates going around. How is your cousin's family, Sami. I'd say fine. She asked me about getting married every Sunday of my life, and then about ten years ago she quit asking. She's ninety-two and she's still got most of her mind. She doesn't bring it up.

I sold the store in 2004 and the building with it, to a man from the east side, for sixty-two thousand. My father gave eleven. It's a smoke shop now with paper over the windows, which I would never have allowed. The pot came back down with me the last time I was up those stairs and I never told my mother which one of hers it was. It's in the cabinet under my stove.