Sugar Street by Jonathan Dee

Author:Jonathan Dee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2022-08-19T19:26:09+00:00

I WENT TO that refugee center on Laurel, the one that was in the paper because refugees were afraid to go there. I thought I could volunteer. Volunteer to do what? I don’t know. Does it matter? The story mentioned adults taking English classes. I speak English. I could teach someone else how to do it. But of course the first thing they want to do, for some unknown fucking reason, is run a background check on you. Government money, government rules. “All I need is your social,” the nice white lady with the gray hair said to me. Bye.

Late March and only mysteriously hardy crusts of snow remain. The trees are bare, but the grass is bright green. Mud everywhere.

And then one afternoon I hear a car idling outside; a young man, wreathed in exhaust, leans deep into the trunk of his car and pulls out an armful of signs. The cheap kind, with two wires that stick in the ground supporting a cardboard image—political signs, urging me to vote for someone, based on their friendly face I guess. There’s a local election coming up, in May or June, I don’t know. School board, family court judge, things like that. I guess this young party operative was given this task a while ago and has been waiting for the ground to soften. He presses down on each end of the sign to drive it into the muddy strip of earth between the sidewalk and the street, takes the remaining signs and moves down the block. About half an hour later, after his car is gone, I hear Autumn’s door bang; she walks out to the end of her yard, yanks the signs there out of the ground, throws them into the street, and goes back inside.

The library books, the ones still there, are such crap. Two entire shelves of James Patterson, but if you want to look for, say, Balzac, who wrote a stupefying amount in his day, too, tough luck.

What are books anyway, though, in this world? Little antiquities. A library is a sort of roadside museum.

Sometimes I sit in one of the leather armchairs and reflect, which is tricky, because you can’t fall asleep in there, tempting as that is, what with the warmth and the silence and the luxuriousness of the chairs. If you fall asleep in the library, looking like I look now, the librarian calls a security officer who escorts you right out into the street. I’ve seen it happen.

The wiry boy, Haji’s buddy, the gymnastic one: maybe fourteen, though he looks younger, shorter anyway. He was trying to impress the girls again—the same girls he walks with every day, you’d think the hope of impressing them would have dimmed by now—and he jumped up to one of the higher branches on the low-slung tree like it was a trapeze or the bottom rung of a fire escape. He swung back and forth, arms extended. The girls kept walking without looking back. He swung

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