June 12–13, 2014
### Lia — Thursday
The man in the newspaper article had lived in an apartment at 311 DeKalb. Lia had written his name beside the property's company before noticing that the article called him a tenant.
She read it again.
An arrest at an address. A company owning the building. She had joined the two with a line so confidently that the mistake annoyed her more than the discovery pleased her.
She crossed out the line and wrote occupant beside the man's name.
The crossed-out line had nearly torn the paper.
She turned to a fresh sheet instead of trying to correct the diagram until it looked as if she had never been wrong. At the top she wrote the date of the article, then the date of the property document. They were not the same year. That had been sitting in front of her the whole time.
She leaned back and rubbed her eyes. The firm had answered that morning. The receptionist offered to take a message, then asked whether Lia was calling on behalf of a client. Lia said no. Asked for her name and number, she thanked the woman and ended the call.
Now she had an unanswered question and a reason to prepare better before trying again.
Two browser tabs repeated the same newspaper report. She closed one, then the rental listing that supplied nothing about the transfer.
"Great." Half her morning disappeared with the tabs.
She kept the property record and checked its reference against a second copy. Same date. Same company. The article's tenant could stay off the ownership page.
She ran a finger down the envelope's copy until she found Chancellor's entry, then matched it to the page on the screen.
The company named on the transfer appeared in a project filing with Atlas Development listed as a partner. Lia put the two pages side by side: the property company on one, the same company beside Atlas on the other. Chancellor's name remained on the transfer.
She circled Atlas once. Beneath it she wrote: Why were you looking, Papi?
By the time Carmen called her to eat, Lia had three facts she could support and a question about how they belonged together. She had also lost the theory she had liked best that morning.
"You look tired," Carmen said when she came downstairs.
"I was reading."
"Reading what?"
"Dad's papers."
Carmen put a plate in front of her. "And you came all the way downstairs without them?"
Lia looked up.
"Eat," her mother said. "They'll still be there."
Abuela called from the other room to ask whether anybody had seen her glasses. Carmen looked at the glasses hanging from the neck of Abuela's blouse, then at Lia. Neither said anything until Abuela came into the kitchen and caught both of their faces.
"Don't start."
"I didn't say a word," Carmen told her.
"You said it with your whole face."
Lia laughed and made room at the table. Abuela looked at her plate, decided it was too little, and added something before Lia could object.
"You sit upstairs thinking and forget you have a body."
"I came down."
"After your mother called."
Carmen lifted a hand. "Thank you for acknowledging my contribution."
The conversation settled into groceries, a cousin who said he was coming by and never meant the same hour everybody else meant, and graduation photographs Abuela wanted printed rather than displayed on a phone she could not see properly.
Lia took out the phone and found a family picture. Abuela pointed to someone at the edge and complained that he had been talking while everybody else was smiling.
"He's always talking," Carmen said.
"He gets that from your side."
"My side?"
Lia kept eating while they argued with the ease of people who had been arguing longer than she had been alive. Her father's absence lived inside it, too, in the person she could imagine agreeing with whoever was losing just to keep the exchange going.
When she returned upstairs, she brought a glass of water. She set it away from the papers and opened the record again with less expectation that it would supply the man she missed.
### Nasir — Thursday
Maine was trying to explain his questions about the program without making them sound like a complaint.
"I know what they say they offer. I want to know what we actually do."
Nasir waited while his son turned the information page toward him.
"Then ask them."
"I don't want my first email to be a hundred questions."
"Pick the one you need answered first."
Maine considered that. Outside, Rome was calling somebody a liar with the happiness of a man who had found an argument he could enjoy. Jermaine glanced toward the window and smiled.
"You can go," Nasir said.
"I'm finishing this."
"Leo let me try the list," Maine added. "Three people asked for things yesterday. Two asked for the same one. He said ask them when they'd actually buy it before I get excited."
"Good advice."
"He also said he ain't paying me to write down conversations."
Nasir laughed. Maine had brought the notebook back with crossed-out guesses and something to ask next. He still wanted to go outside, too.
"Your mother would've told you to enjoy this part."
Maine's fingers stopped on the page. The pendant rested against his shirt, visible above the table.
"She would've asked what I was doing with the rest of the day first."
Nasir laughed softly. "Probably."
He let his son finish the question. He did not tell him that Bishop was asking other questions about the same program.
Maine read his drafted email aloud. The first version asked about everything in the program description. Nasir heard his own advice returning to him when Jermaine stopped halfway through and said that was too much for one message.
"Which answer tells you what to do next?"
His son looked at the page. "What kind of work we actually do."
"Then start there."
Maine edited in silence. Nasir waited, resisting the urge to turn it into a lesson about how to impress the recipient. His son had spent enough time making a statement sound like himself. He did not need his father putting a suit on every sentence.
"You want to read it?" Maine asked.
"Only if you want me to."
Maine turned the laptop. The question was plain. It asked what participants would do and what they were expected to bring into the work. Nothing entitled. Nothing so apologetic it disappeared.
"Send that."
His son hovered over the button, then clicked. The small decision seemed to release something in his shoulders.
"Now I got time to be unemployed again."
"You planning to put that on a résumé?"
"Officially graduated. Professionally waiting."
Nasir smiled. Outside, Rome called up that people on the court did not accept email as an excuse for being late.
Maine closed the laptop and went to the doorway. Nasir called him back, then found that he had no further warning worth giving.
"What?"
"Have a good run."
His son nodded and left.
### Lia — Friday morning
The new property relationship did not pass through the same company name. Lia almost closed it, then saw the partnership reference she had marked earlier.
Atlas again, through a different route.
She added the second route beneath the first and checked the company names. She would ask Curtis whether contractors dealt with Atlas directly or through those other businesses.
Her phone buzzed with Deion's name. She answered before she could decide she was too busy.
"You eat?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Why you say it like I was accusing you?"
She smiled and moved the papers away from the edge of the desk. While he talked, she looked at the note she had made beneath Atlas.
Who decides?
That was a question she could take into a conversation. She would have to choose which one.
### Nasir — Friday
Bishop had received both ledgers from the summit. The two-thousand payment appeared in each; the remaining balance was four. Nasir approved paying that balance through the business, with the employee left out of it. The Prophets representative agreed by phone. For this dispute, at least, somebody had kept the arrangement.
Then Bishop brought out the separate arrival requests.
One volunteer had been asked through a community contact. Another through somebody helping with transportation. A third had been told the question was for coordination.
"Three requests," Bishop said. "Each asks for arrivals, not the stage times. One even lists speakers in the wrong order. They weren't just reading the public program."
Darius read the wording. "Anybody give out the sequence?"
"I'm still checking what was sent."
Melo moved a chair away from the table so he could stand without leaning over Bishop. "We can narrow who gets changes from now on."
Nasir nodded. "And tell the workers why they're bringing private timing questions to one person. Don't make them feel like doing their jobs got them in trouble."
"What explanation?" Darius asked.
"Too many versions circulating. It's true."
He read the sheets again. The first inquiry had been an oddity. These made a task: find the original question, find what had been answered, stop distributing changes casually. None told him who would be waiting on June 19.
The people who received the questions were easier to find than the person who had begun them. One volunteer apologized so often Nasir asked Bishop to let him speak to her himself.
She described somebody trying to confirm a pickup arrangement. The request had sounded specific because, she assumed, the person already knew half the answer.
"What did you send?" he asked.
"The public times. And I said I'd check the other part."
"That's all?"
"Yes."
"Then you've helped us. Keep the original message. Don't answer the next question until we know who it's for."
She stopped apologizing after that. She asked whether the celebration was still happening.
"It is."
"You'll still be there?"
"I intend to."
When she left, Melo pointed out that a legitimate person could have asked through an illegitimate intermediary without ever realizing it.
"I know."
"Then don't make everybody look over their shoulder at the person helping with chairs."
"I'm not trying to."
"You been looking at the door a lot."
Nasir turned away from it.
Bishop clipped the original messages together. Nasir kept the one with the wrong speaker order on top.
He told her which worker would collect future private-timing questions. Darius checked that the change would not leave transportation people without what they needed. They had to preserve the event while making it harder for ordinary helpfulness to become a way through.
Nasir left with that problem still open and a person responsible for each next step.
He took that uncertainty with him to the community center, where an older volunteer handed him a stack of chairs before he had finished saying hello.
"You campaigning or you working?" she asked.
"Apparently working."
"Good. Those go inside."
He made two trips. On the third, his phone vibrated, and he let it. A boy was trying to get a folded table around a doorway without losing either the table or his temper. Nasir helped turn it sideways.
When he finally checked the phone, a photograph filled the screen.
The community center, from across the street. A stack of boxes showed through the doorway. He turned toward the boxes he had stepped around less than ten minutes earlier, then looked back at the image. Their arrangement matched. So did a volunteer's bright bag hanging from the back of a chair.
He called Melo.
"I got a picture."
"Of?"
"Where I am."
Melo asked him to stay inside while he checked the approach. Nasir returned to the volunteer room and asked who had received questions about the center. His voice remained ordinary. The table still needed moving. Families still needed somewhere to put their food.
* * *