Numbers Don't Lie by Terry Bisson Page B

trees grow in Brooklyn. They grow behind the apartments and houses, where people don’t see them from the street. Right, Studs?”
    Studs nodded, snapping the battery into the phone. “Irv the Perv,” he said again.
    â€œCandy is my fiancée. We just flew in from Alabama,” I said. “We’re on our Honeymoon.”
    â€œFiancée? Honeymoon? Alabama?”
    Studs seemed distracted. While he got a dial tone and punched in a number, I told him how Candy and I had met (leaving out my trip to the Moon, as told in “ The Hole in the Hole ”). While he put the phone under the carousel and replaced the access panel, I told him how I had moved to Alabama (leaving out the red-shift and the nursing home, as told in “ The Edge of the Universe ”). I was just about to explain why we were having the Honeymoon before the wedding, when the baggage carousel started up.
    â€œGotta go,” said Studs. He gave me the secret Ditmas Playboy wave and disappeared through an AUTHORIZED ONLY door.
    â€œNice uniform,” said Candy, straightening her own. “And did you see that big gold medallion around his neck? Wasn’t that a Nobel Prize?”
    â€œA Nobel Prize for baggage? Not very likely.”
    Our bags were already coming around the first turn. That seemed like a good sign. “How come there’s a cell phone hidden underneath the carousel?” Candy asked, as we picked them up and headed for the door.
    â€œSome special baggage handlers’ trick, I guess,” I said.
    How little, then, I knew!
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    Flying into New York is like dropping from the twentieth century back into the nineteenth. Everything is crowded, colorful, old—and slow. For example, it usually takes longer to get from LaGuardia to Brooklyn, than from Huntsville to LaGuardia.
    Usually! On this, our Honeymoon trip, however, Candy and I made it in record time, getting to curbside for the #38 bus just as it was pulling in, and then catching the F train at Roosevelt Avenue just as the doors were closing. No waiting on the curb or the platform; it was hardly like being home! Of course, I wasn’t complaining.
    After a short walk from the subway, we found Aunt Minnie sitting on the steps of the little Ditmas Avenue row house she and Uncle Mort had bought for $7,500 fifty years ago, right after World War II, smoking a cigarette. She’s the only person I know who still smokes Kents.
    â€œYou still go outside to smoke?” I asked.
    â€œYou know your Uncle Mort,” she said. When I was growing up, Aunt Minnie and Uncle Mort had been like second parents, living only a block and a half away. Since my parents had died, they had been my closest relatives. “Plus, it’s written into the reverse mortgage— NO SMOKING! They have such rules!”
    Born in the Old Country, unlike her little sister, my mother, Aunt Minnie still had the Lifthatvanian way of ending a statement with a sort of verbal shrug. She gave me one of her smokey kisses, and then asked, “So, what brings you back to New York?”
    I was shocked. “You didn’t get my letters? We’re getting married.”
    Aunt Minnie looked at Candy with new interest. “To an airline pilot?”
    â€œThis is Candy!” I said. “She’s with the Huntsville Parks Department. You didn’t get my messages?”
    I helped Candy drag the suitcases inside, and while we had crackers and pickled lifthat at the oak table Uncle Mort had built years ago, in his basement workshop, I explained the past six months as best I could. “So you see, we’re here on our Honeymoon, Aunt Minnie,” I said, and Candy blushed.
    â€œFirst the Honeymoon and then the marriage?!?” Aunt Minnie rolled her eyes toward the mantel over the gas fireplace, where Uncle Mort’s ashes were kept. He, at least, seemed unsurprised. The ornate decorative eye on the urn all but