Vengeance by Zachary Lazar

Author:Zachary Lazar [Lazar, Zachary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2018-02-13T05:00:00+00:00

14

It turned out that it was Marcus, Kendrick’s brother, who had driven Aysha to Angola—I met him the following day, Sunday, at Sonia’s house, the house on the West Bank she planned to leave to Kendrick and Marcus as her legacy. My first impression of Marcus was his rented SUV: impassive, almost too large for the driveway, immaculately parked with its side mirrors pushed back. There was something strict or pragmatic about Marcus in person that made it hard for me to guess what, if anything, he felt about meeting me. He didn’t look like Kendrick. He wore eyeglasses and a green golf shirt that hung loosely around his thin arms but clung more tightly around his small potbelly. It wasn’t that he was large like his SUV, it was that its largeness was under his control. He told me later that he was thirty-eight, that he lived in Harlem—“you know, one of those gentrifying places”—and when he said this I couldn’t tell if he was inviting me to join him in some knowing irony, or if he was anticipating some knowing irony on my part that he didn’t share. Sonia’s house had a comfortably air-conditioned living room, but he preferred to sit in the long screened-in porch off the back side, where even in the shade and with a standing fan I was sweating a little. That was where we talked, among the mismatched plastic chairs, some stacked with newspapers and magazines, each of us with a large plastic glass of iced tea poured from a cardboard carton. I asked him how he’d decided to become an architect, and he said that when he was in his early twenties, he was living in Brooklyn with one of his uncles, his mother’s brother-in-law, who was a master electrician, and because Marcus had dropped out of high school and had “no real direction at that time,” he became his uncle’s apprentice. After a year or two, he found a better-paying job working for Con Edison. One day, by chance, his crew was dispatched to a hospital in Manhattan where the power had gone out. The sense of urgency caused him to think a very obvious thought, he said, which is that hospitals are intricate and important buildings. That was how he became an architect, he told me. Within a month of the Con Ed service call, he’d enrolled himself in a GED program, then took the SAT and got a scholarship to Brooklyn College. After that, he went directly to get his master’s in architecture at UCLA.

“You don’t have to look like that,” he said. “Like it’s some incredible story. It’s actually a pretty ordinary story.”

I asked if he was the first person in his family to go to college, and he nodded.

“I went, but Kendrick might have been smarter than me in some ways,” he said. “You see that sometimes, the younger one smarter than the older. They have it easier. The oldest gets the rules, the discipline, the fear.”

Aysha hadn’t come out of her room since I’d arrived, about forty minutes ago.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.