“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Jessica was saying. The man whirled to face her, teeth bared, and suddenly I wanted to tackle her, pull her down behind the safety of another car, where could we crouch together and figure out what to do.

“Fuck you too!” yelled the man.

“Get away from my car!” shrieked Jessica.

“Fuck this rude bitch!” yelled the man, referring to Kelli, kicking Jessica’s car door again.

Jessica had skidded to a halt the moment the man turned to bare his teeth at her, losing her balance briefly as she went over on one high heel. She yanked out her phone and waved it lopsidedly at him.

“I’m calling the police!”

“Go ahead and call them! We live in a society!”

I stood blinking at the man, trying to figure out what this meant, and how to get to Kelli, and if Kelli was hurt, and how any of this could be happening. I couldn’t make sense of the person in front of me, the individual in question, couldn’t put him into any kind of context. He was, as I said, ordinary except for the snarling red face, the vicious bulge of his eyes. As I later described him to the police, he was not particularly large — around five-eleven, a little heavy, cropped hair. I didn’t say so to the cops, but he also struck me as familiar — later I put this down to his physical type being so generic. Just a man in his late thirties, a little heavy but not exactly fat — a dad-bod, as I’d heard his kind of build described. A man who’s discovered he can’t necessarily drink and eat anything he wants to anymore without developing love handles — and decided he’s ok with that. He wore a short-sleeved plaid shirt over a T-shirt with some faded, innocuous slogan emblazoned on it. Jeans. He could’ve worked in a hardware store, he could’ve been a dentist or financial analyst off the clock. He could’ve been anybody. He was just a guy.

“She’s retarded!” I screamed at the man. This was not a word I often used when it came to Kelli. But this was the one word people unambiguously understood.

“Fuck you!” the man yelled back at me, assuming an affront. “You’re retarded!”

“Not you, her!”

“You’re both fuckin retarded!”

He slammed his hand against the window close to Kelli’s head. He kicked the door again for good measure.

“The police are coming,” said Jessica. She was holding up her phone. “And I’m recording you now. You’re on video.”

The man glared at her and seemed to be gathering words in his mouth, some poisonous retort. But then he turned, spat hugely on the car, and jogged away.

What If a Man

15

Once, when I was around sixteen, my mother and I had this theological discussion in the House and Home section of Woolworth’s. Kelli must’ve been at her friendship circle or home with the sitter, because Irene and I were by ourselves, arguing over a bin of cushions printed with inspirational sayings. The cushion Irene was there to purchase was, of course, for Kelli. Irene was concerned about Kelli’s stool by the window — it did not have sufficient padding as far as my mother was concerned, not when you considered the vast stretches of time Kelli was prepared to spend on it watching the comings and goings of the street.