My wife's cousin lived upstairs

They're doing the forty days for him the fourth of next month, eleven in the morning, at the church on Schaefer. My wife had the suit at the cleaners the same week we heard.

We found out off a phone. My middle girl had it before anybody thought to call the house. Somebody's daughter over in Sydney put up a picture of him standing next to a car with the dates under it, and then forty people knew inside an hour. He'd been sick since around Christmas. We heard about that the same day we heard the rest of it.

I asked how old he was. Fifty eight. I said that's young. My wife said it isn't young anymore, and she wasn't being hard about it. She's the oldest one left on her side now.

My youngest got up to pull the bread before it went dark on her. Nobody sat there long. My wife put her hand on my arm on the way past, the way she does with anybody. Forty years with her in June.

He came over in the spring of '94. Beirut. Twenty six years old with one suitcase. He had a coat in a plastic bag that was no good for a February here. His papers were going to take two years.

Three days off the plane and he said everything to me twice, in Arabic and then in English, like I might have lost it. I hadn't lost it. His mother and my wife's mother were sisters, and in that family that's plenty.

I had him on the line the second night. I say I had the place twenty two years because that's when my name went on the paper, but I'd been in that kitchen since '91, when it was my uncle's. Ammo Georges, Allah yerhamo, a man who'd hire you and then stand there breathing on your neck. The kid could work. Second week he's on the grill and he's already quicker than I am, and he never once made a face when a Rouge guy came in at four in the afternoon wanting eggs.

Above the kitchen there were two rooms and a bathroom with a window that never shut all the way. My uncle had kept boxes up there. We had it cleared out in an afternoon and he put a fan in the window and a hotplate on a milk crate. He tried about four times to pay me for it. I wouldn't take it and he kept bringing it up.

My girls were small then and they were all over him. He'd come to the house on a Sunday and sit on the floor with them and let the little one do his hair with those plastic clips. He rehung our storm door because it had been dragging since we bought the place.

My wife's got a blue dish in the cabinet he bought her at the Eastern Market. Thirty years and she still won't put it in the dishwasher. She'll tell you where it came from if you pick it up.

In '88 a fryer went over on me in that same kitchen, back when it was my uncle's. Forty pounds of oil. Eleven days in Oakwood and they took skin off my thigh to make up the difference. My wife saw it at the hospital. She hasn't seen it since and she's never once asked to.

End of August in '95 the compressor went out and the building sat at about ninety degrees at midnight. Everybody else had gone home. I had my shirt off at the mop sink running cold water over my head, and I heard him coming down the back stairs. So I stood there and let him come in and look at it.

He didn't say anything about it. He put his hand on it.

Then he wanted to know, ya zalameh, was the big pot down there or up in his room, because he'd told his cousins in Toledo he'd do a rice for them Sunday, and did I think our meat guy would come off the lamb shanks on a Saturday. He talked at me about lamb for ten minutes with the water still running.

The back stairs came up out of the prep area so you never passed a window to use them. From about the second week of September I was going up them most nights after I counted the register, and that's how it went until he left. The house was nine minutes from the door. Three girls under ten and a wife who had it that I did inventory on Tuesdays.

His brother had a shop out in Bankstown, in Sydney, and the papers finally came through that summer, and he flew in October of '96. My wife drove him to Metro. We had a party of thirty coming in at one and that's what I told her, and it was true, we did have them, the church up on Ford Road did their fall luncheon with us every year and they tipped the girls like it was a wedding. He left the fan in the window.

He called on Sundays for a while and I'd hand the phone to my wife after four minutes. Then it was a card at New Year's, one of the ones with the gold on it, and then a couple of years where it came in February instead, and then it didn't come.

Her mother died in 2015 and he didn't fly back for it. He sent flowers and the name was spelled wrong on the card, somebody at a shop taking it down over the phone. That's the thing the family settled on. Nobody's said his name at a table in ten years.

There'll be people at that church who worked for me. One of them's going to say to my wife, he lived over your husband's place, didn't he, and she'll say two years.

My son in law wants me at the second store on Tuesdays now, since the girl who was doing his books went back to school. He's a good kid, he asks me before he changes anything even when he doesn't have to. It takes me two hours and it used to take one.

I practiced in the car on Telegraph. Just his name, and then, he used to work for me, he was a good worker. It came out wrong.

I drove down Warren last Thursday. It's a coffee place now, the Yemeni kind, open till two in the morning. Kids in there with laptops. I'll tell you they've done a beautiful job with it, better than I ever had it in there.

There's a unit in one of the two windows upstairs now. I went in and bought a coffee with the cardamom so I wasn't just a man sitting out front in a car, and the boy behind the counter called me ammo and wouldn't take the five.