Reckless Endangerment by Robert K. Tanenbaum

start getting anxious when they can’t read the letters on your chest.”
    A long, uncomfortable silence. Marlene tilted her head to fix him with her real eye. Karp glowered at her, but as always, that tilt of her head, birdlike, interested, the symbol of her damaged body and its resident courageous spirit, charmed him and drained any resentment from his heart. “Well,” he said dryly, “you may have a point. I will strive to do better in that department. And how was your day?”
    “Oh, a day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our lives, as Walter Cronkite used to say. Girls and guns. Oh, and lest you think you’re the only member of this family who doesn’t live up to expectations, I got a tongue-lashing from Mattie about what a shitty feminist I am. Yes, you may well be amazed. She’s got this goddamn woman who can’t be made to understand that her husband is going to hurt her, that he’s always going to hurt her, and every time we help her out she ends up getting back with him. I think she calls him, in fact, or lets it out where she is so he finds her. So I say there’s so many woman desperately trying to break away, we don’t have time to fuck with an idiot like this, cut her loose”—she made a helpless gesture—“but you know Mattie.”
    “Yeah. I wish I didn’t.”
    “Oh, she’s all right, really. I guess you have to admire her. She never gives up.”
    “Neither did Hitler,” said Karp. “Marlene, she’s a vigilante.”
    It was an old argument that Marlene did not at this moment wish to pursue. She shrugged off the comment and said, “You have to work with all kinds of people, and you have to take them for what they are, not for what you’d prefer them to be. That was Marlene’s daily spiritual advice nugget, and I expect you to take it to heart.”
    “I will. You could put out a calendar.”
    “I could. The feminist failure date book.” She stood and stretched. “What I need, and what I intend to have, is a long, perfumed, luxurious tub. Care to join me?”
    “That’s definitely the best offer I’ve had all day.”
    “Well, I should certainly hope so,” said Marlene.
    Hassan Daoud had been in the United States for ten years, since shortly after the Six Day War, in fact, when the famous lightning victory of the Israelis had convinced him that the Arab armies were never going to push the Jews into the sea and get him back into his grandfather’s land in the Jezreel. He had a cousin in America. Transportation was arranged, he worked double shifts in a warehouse for seven years, saved every penny, and was able to send for his wife, Rima, his son, Walid, and his daughter, Fatyma. He started baking the flat bread of the Middle East, as his father had before him, in a borrowed oven, in a space rented in a friend’s garage. He would bake the night through and then deliver the loaves before dawn to a string of Arab grocery stores in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, using an old Pontiac station wagon, also borrowed. Again, every penny saved, until he had the down payment on the storefront off Atlantic Avenue he now occupied, and saw the lettering in real gold, in Arabic and English inscribed on the window, Ahsen Foruhn, BEST BAKERY (for it was nothing less), and his own name beneath it. A proud day, second only to the day his first son had been born.
    The bakery prospered. Hassan worked like the devil, and Rima worked silently beside him, as a woman should, like a donkey. They had three more children, of whom only one, thank God, was a girl. The bread was in demand, not only among the Arabs, whose population in Brooklyn had exploded in the last decade, but also the specialty-food stores in Manhattan were buying, even some of the local supermarkets. He bought a large white GM step-in delivery truck. Each package of a dozen he sold for the equivalent of a day’s wage in Palestine. He was rich, which was only to be expected. In America everyone was rich; why else