Uncle Janice by Matt Burgess

seen only her own ridiculous rictus grin reflected and doubled in the wide silver lenses. “So what’s going on?” he asked. “How have you been?”
    “How have I been,” she said.
    “Hey!” he said. “You’re a cop now! Marwan Mehta told me. Just the other day. Right here, matter of fact. Congratulations! What you always wanted, yeah? Officer Itwaru? Man, that’s crazy. Well, not
crazy
. Hey, listen, are you doing anything now? I got my brother’s car here if you need a ride or whatever.” He turned his head toward her, as if about to confide something, or as if volunteering his ear for secrets of her own. “Your father’s not gonna kick my ass, is he?” he said. “Ha-ha, just kidding. You need a ride, though? Seriously. My brother’s car is right there.”
    The smoker Tevis had been working on slunk away down an alley that separated the clinic from a computer repair shop, but nobody followed him. Two separate skinny white kids lit up brand-new menthol cigarettes. A leashed poodle tried dragging its owner, a buff-looking Chinese guy who had stopped to look around as if he sensed the sudden good mood all around him. Except for him and his dog and Tevis and the third old man, everyone was smiling at her.
    “I think maybe what you heard got a little twisted,” she told Jimmy. Not like this was her biggest problem right now, but because she had brushed her teeth with her finger that morning, she tried speaking without really moving her lips. “I was
gonna
join the police,” she said. “I tried, but I got flunked on the drug test, so …”
    The second old-timer, the one who’d laughed at her earlier, laughed again, a caustic bark that seemed to jolt Jimmy. At least widen his eyes. Yank him away from the recovering drug addict’s natural habitat—the Garden of Nostalgia—and plop him down into his gray-and-white sneakers, on this cold panel of sidewalk outside the clinic. For the first time he seemed to notice all the happy staring faces.
    “Oh,” he said.
    “You know, I really wish we could catch up,” she said, speaking into her cupped palm. “But I got an appointment. My mom. I gotta take her to the doctor.”
    “I’m so sorry,” he said. “You know what? I think Marwan? Yeah, I think Marwan told me you, like, applied. Years ago. And I guess I just assumed. I’m sorry. About your test.”
    “I’ll see you around, okay?”
    She felt fairly certain that of her two parents he had met only her father, and only that one disastrous time, but as a way of saying good-bye he asked Janice to say hello to her mother for him. He hoped the appointment wasn’t anything too serious. And again, he was sorry. Super sorry. He jaywalked across the street and got into the idling Volvo with the bearded black man who apparently was his brother. Janice put her head down. While the Gellars drove east, toward the darkly malignant snow clouds, she went the other way, headed for the Impala around the corner on Jamaica Avenue, leaving her meth clinic spectators without a word of farewell. The second old-timer, the laughing man, had already snapped her picture with his cell phone camera.
    “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Puffy said on the drive back to the rumpus. He was eating her bialy because she didn’t have the appetite. “These sorts of things happen.”
    “It’s not your fault,” Richie told her. “You shouldn’t be sent out to make buys in your own neighborhood.”
    “Totally,” Puffy said.
    “They’ll probably post your picture on the Internet,” Gonz told her. “On some cop-killing site. That’d be my guess, at least.”
    “Not funny,” Tevis said.
    “Oh, I’m not trying to be funny.”
    Later that afternoon, when she came home from work—from two days of work—her mother attacked her. Janice had just walked through the back door into the kitchen, where the microwave was heating up what smelled like leftover goat pepper pot. Power-drained, the ceiling’s fluorescents burned at half