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"Move it, lady!" a man yelled from the window of his station wagon. |
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Kyna pulled over into the corner of the lot, turned halfway around and looked behind the seat again. Either she had lost her mind or just a moment before she had seen a nun peering at her in the mirror. Black penguin suit, bib, the whole nine yards. It hadn't been anyone she'd recognizeda woman with ice-blue eyes and creamy skin, but she'd been right behind the seat, staring over Kyna's shoulder. |
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Kyna laughed and pawed through the console, hoping to find one of the cigarettes she'd given up. |
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"You got all that from a split-second glance in a mirror?" She chuckled. |
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But the nun's face was indelibly etched on her mind's eye and Kyna wondered if thirty was too young to be going through the change. Hands shaking, she upended her purse and came up with a badly crumpled cigarette with about five strands of stale tobacco left in it. |
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The cigarette didn't help. Kyna rolled the window down, leaned back and blew a cloud of smoke into the air. Her head was buzzing like she had a dozen angry bees trapped between her ears. |
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Nights growing up in New York had sounded like that. From her parents' twentieth-floor apartment in Queens, the sound of traffic on the BQE had sounded just like the buzzing of beesangry bees. God, she could still see the place: tiny, the closet in the room she'd shared with her cousin had been barely big enough to hold two plaid school uniforms and a winter coat. The apartment always smelled of cabbage and cats and the stale, somehow milky odor of the old couple two floors down. In the summer the place was like an oven and you could smell the garbage and diesel fumes from the buses. In the winter it was a meat locker and she remembered hearing her father, when he was sober enough to notice, banging on the radiator with a wrench and screaming at the top of his lungs, "Send up the heat, you son of a bitch!" |
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