The Time He Desires Page 3

  Aziz did, but he let her tell him. She held up her thumb and forefinger in a circle. "None."

  "Maybe they didn't feel welcome."

  "We put flyers up." She shook her head. "They don't care. They don't want to be part of an association. They're happy to pay someone else to do it." Now with the same paw, she rubbed the thumb and forefinger against each other. "Money. They got it, so they don't need people. And that's what Vorvarts is counting on. Yes, it's a lot of money. But then what would I do?"

  "Take that cruise finally? Meet a nice tiger on the beach?" Aziz cursed his tongue, then realized that Tanska would have no idea why that meant something to him at this moment. "You could invest in another bakery?"

  "If I haven't met someone by now..." Tanska left the actual gender of her desires as vague as always. "I suppose I could look for another bakery in another neighborhood, help them out. But then what? In five years, another Vorvarts comes calling and again I'm left with nothing but money. That's not what I want."

  "Well, then." Aziz took a breath. "How would you convince the Association not to sell?"

  "Ah ha!" She beamed at him. "Now you're talking. Let's come up with a strategy."

  Aziz shook his head. "It's hard to fight against money. Some of them want to spend more time with their families. And it's hard to imagine when we'll get this kind of money again."

  "What if we pooled our resources and advertised how old-school our neighborhood is? People love that nostalgia. Your shop is almost a museum, mine is a trip to Moskva...we could become a destination neighborhood."

  "We were." Aziz walked by a hare who lived on their street and waved; the hare returned his wave with one paw, staring at a phone held in the other. "And people came to that destination, and decided they wanted a huge mall."

  "They didn't decide that. Vorvarts decided it."

  "The Homeporium voted in favor of the expansion."

  Tanska huffed. "I don't know why people go out of their way to move to a neighborhood and then tear up the neighborhood once they're there. They didn't even come to any of the shops once that abomination went up."

  "Some do."

  She rounded on him. "Why are you being such wet snow? I thought we were on the same side."

  "Wet snow?" He had to hide a smile.

  "Tch. What do they say here? Wet..."

  "Blanket?"

  Her brow furrowed. "Maybe. But sometimes I feel like you'd be happier if you let Halifa sell the store. Then you wouldn't have to make a decision."

  "It's not that." He sighed, unsure how to explain his feelings without hurting hers. "I want to be realistic about it. I don't want to sell, but..."

  "I know what it is." They had reached the point where they would have to part. "You want to be on the winning side. And you don't think we can win."

  "That is not true!"

  "Which part?"

  He looked back into her eyes. "I want us to stay," he said. "But I can't see any way to make anyone else stay. We spent thousands of dollars researching the community laws to see if we had legal grounds to prevent it. Fighting it in court would take hundreds of thousands, more than you and I have, and if we did that it would destroy the community anyway; the rest of the Association would hate us for delaying their payouts."

  "They'd thank us when we save the street."

  "But what if we lost?"

  "If we put up the fight, they might think it wasn't worth the trouble and build somewhere else."

  He gestured back to the blue glass towers. "Which of the other three neighboring streets? The block with the subway station and transit center? Or the ones facing the backs of their apartments? There's a park there and it starts running up against the town hall in that direction anyway."

  She smacked her open paw into the post of the traffic light. "I told them. They said, 'oh, those buildings are eyesores, let's let them build there,' and I said 'don't let them in, they'll just want more.'"

  Aziz stayed quiet at the unspoken reminder that he, too, had voted to let Vorvarts tear down the ugly yellow brick things. "It was those boutiques over on Rhys," he said. "All that Old World money came in, and people with money followed. We welcomed their money then; now they want to use it to change where they live. The time to stop this was six, eight years ago."

  "I don't think it's too late. I'll think of something to do." She raised a paw. "Goodnight."

  "Goodnight," he said, and watched as she walked away, his brow creased in worry. His resolve to stay felt weakest around Tanska's fiery idealism, because she always made him wonder, is this how everyone else sees me? Still, he couldn't abandon her. He'd known many people who undertook crusades, and when the crusade was over, they lost focus and direction in their life. If--when--they lost the current battle to Vorvarts, he didn't want that to happen to Tanska if he could at all avoid it.

  When he arrived home, Halifa was already in her room reading. Aziz hung his keys on the hook near the door, glanced around the dark living room and kitchen, and then walked up to the second floor. He knocked on the half-open door, then stepped inside from the dark hallway into the warm soft light.

  His wife lay in her bed with a white satin nightdress on. As he entered, she set a bookmark into her book and placed it on the nightstand. "Good evening."

  "I'm sorry I'm late." The beach, the fox and cougar, the tape flashed through his mind, but he kept his demeanor calm as he set the gingerbread biscuits and the couriered letter down on her nightstand. "I stopped to talk to Tanska."

  Halifa picked up the letter first and scanned it for the sale amount. Her eyebrows rose slightly, and she refolded the letter and replaced it, taking one of the biscuits. "She won't sell."

  "She doesn't want to." He took the other biscuit and leaned back against the wall, eating it slowly. Sweet ginger spice filled his mouth. "What do you think?"

  She smiled. "You know what I think."

  "And you know what I think."

  "Yes." She finished her biscuit and licked her lips. "You are comfortable in this life we've built. Selling the store to you means we should also sell this house, and move...closer to one of the other stores? Take over one of them personally?" Her fingers tapped against each other. "If we came up with a plan, you would feel better about selling."

  "Which you want to do," he countered, "because you feel that this store is going to decline and we would have to sell it soon anyway. You would rather spend time with your charities and move on from the business."

  She inclined her head. "So where does that leave us?"

  He brushed crumbs from his muzzle. "Are we too old to make a change?"

  "No," Halifa said immediately. "We have lived one life, but we have time to live another one as well."

  "Another life?" Aziz brought a paw to his muzzle. The rosewater filled his nostrils. "But where to start?"

  She folded her paws over her stomach and smiled. "We didn't know where to start here twenty years ago, and yet we did."

  "We had Ahmad and Zaynab." The lions who had welcomed them to Upper Devos had passed away seven and eight years previous. Both Aziz and Halifa bowed their heads for a moment. "And now who do we have?"

  There was a time some years ago when she would have said, "We have our family." Now she said, "Why do we need someone else?"

  He shook his head. "The meeting is tomorrow. We have to decide what we're doing by then."

  "You know that the smart business decision is to sell. The money we would make by staying open in this location for another year or two, as people move out, would not come close to the price they've offered us." She softened her tone. "And you don't have to figure out what you want to do right away. We will have plenty of time."

  When he didn't answer, she reached to the nightstand and picked up her phone. Her fingers tapped, chatting with friends, most likely. Aziz thought about the couple on the beach, how close they'd been. His gaze swept over the hardwood floor, the nightstand, the bed, and up to Halifa. "How was your day?"

  She look
ed up from her phone and fixed him with a puzzled expression. "It was fine, thank you. How was yours?"

  "The store was not terribly busy. You had a meeting with the...the Balanore Relief Fund?"

  Slowly, she laid the phone down on the sheets next to her tail. Her puzzlement turned to amusement. "That was Thursday. Today was the Play Around committee meeting. And it went well. We're talking to builders about what we can put into the new playground over in Thornberry Street, and ..." She broke off and tilted her head, looking at him. "Are you interested because we might be selling the shop? Do you want to come to the next meeting? I would not recommend the Play Around committee, but the Balanore Relief, that one you might be interested in."

  "No," he said. "Just wondering what you've been doing." But would he be interested in the charities? That might be an avenue he could follow, using his money and time to help others. He admired that about Halifa, and while these charities often seemed like crusades as well, there were enough of them for her to spread her energies and never acquire a fanatic's focus about any individual one. He had tried to involve himself with her charities years ago but had grown frustrated at the amount of paperwork and planning that went into it. More patient, Halifa enjoyed the time spent working with her friends in the charity groups, but Aziz didn't know any of those people. It felt to him as though the charity meetings had become more focused on social business than charity business, and that if someone had come up with a document that would solve their problem with a single signature, they would all have been disappointed because it would have meant an end to the meeting before they had a chance to go out for coffee together.

  Still, if he didn't have his shop to manage, he might have the patience for it. With Halifa at his side, he could navigate those meetings, do some good for the world, bury himself in other people's problems.

  The problems of Balanore, though, those were massive: a huge flood had devastated the area and thousands of people were without homes. And yet, Aziz would never have heard of the disaster if not for Halifa's involvement. She kept up on the news better than he did.

  "There's always something to do," she said. "Always someone to take care of. Refugees in other countries, Muslims in this country, children everywhere. I showed you the school we built in Princeport?"

  "Let me see it again." He leaned over as she called up pictures on her phone.

  The school, a low building with prefab walls and roof, gleamed with recent rain. Next to it stood a small group of mice, hutia, ocelots, and a few other species, their fur soaked but their smiles wide. "If we had more time," Halifa said, "we could actually go to some of these sites and meet these people. It would be nice to be more directly involved."

  Aziz could think of little he'd want less than to get his fur soaked in the warm, humid air of some devastated region. Yes, they would be doing good work, but there were other ways to do it. "It sounds great," he nodded, and looked through the rest of the photos with interest, albeit detached interest.

  "And here," she said, bringing up one last album, "is a shelter for runaway teens."

  The unassuming house looked to be located in a poorer Port City neighborhood. Aziz was about to ask where it was when he noticed the rainbow flag sticker, prominent in a front window. He cleared his throat. "What kind of teens?"

  "Well," Halifa said, "most of them left their families because their families didn't approve of their lifestyle."

  "I see." He stood. "Thank you for showing me."

  She followed him with her eyes, but didn't say anything as he left her room.

  Their townhouse had three stories, but both his and Halifa's rooms were on the second story. Upstairs was storage and their son's room, barely used for the last seven years and not at all for the last three. Aziz padded over the familiar intricate designs of the plush hallway carpet, one paw on the thick wooden railing by the stair. On that peacock design his son had sat holding the knee he'd banged into the doorway after running too fast up and down the stairs; on that Tree of Life Aziz had stood with the papers for their second store and read the terms to Halifa, with Marquize dancing around their legs in contagious excitement; that patch of carpet on the stairs was worn where Marquize had always stepped to the left, taking the stairs hastily even into his teen years; the stair above it was almost new because he had always leapt up that stair as though it was bad luck to touch it. On the stair above that one, Marquize had stood sullenly and listened to Aziz lecture him, then had turned and walked up to his room without another word.

  Here, on this row of diamonds, Aziz had stood and watched his son walk down the stairs and out of his house for the last time. Of course he would remember that now, after Halifa had so indelicately reminded him of it. He turned to the door of his room and walked inside.

  He often indulged himself in memories before retiring, but tonight he put them out of his head and knelt on the prayer rug, already oriented properly, and give himself to the isha, the night-time prayer. When he'd completed that, he felt calmer and more sure of his place in the world, and he stood and stretched, walking over to sit at his desk.

  This room had formerly been Aziz's office. His desk had been below the window that looked out onto the window of the Jacksons' brownstone; now it was in the far corner so that there was room for his bed and wardrobe. He could no longer remember when the bed had been acquired nor even who had acquired it. He and Halifa had agreed one day that the bed they shared was too small for them both, and that the best solution was to buy a new bed for his office.

  He only sat long enough to make sure that no urgent messages had come in over e-mail, and then he undressed and lay back in his bed. Usually following the night prayer, his mind was clear and he could think about his schedule and duties the following day. Tonight, however, his thoughts remained a jumble of the offer letter, the tape, the talk with Tanska, the school in Princeport. Rosewater remained strong in his nose, reminding him of his transgression even though he'd already told himself there was nothing wrong with it. Finally, he accepted that sleep would not come unless he relaxed, and he padded to the bathroom.

  Halifa knocked while he was waiting for the shower to heat up. "Aziz? Is everything okay?"

  "I spilled rosewater on myself at the office," he said. "It's keeping me from sleeping."

  She didn't respond for a moment, then said, "All right," and moved away from the door.

  Aziz washed himself clean, and whether it was the absence of rosewater or the warm shower, when he returned to his bed, he closed his eyes and fell asleep without any more trouble.

  5

  Delivery

  In the morning, he set the camera on the counter by the cash register with a neat price tag reading "$50" and another saying, "SOLD."

  Aziz believed that if he got one customer in the first half hour, it would be a good day. This belief had sometimes been proven wrong, but by and large it had held true enough that he watched the clock tick toward 9:30 with anxiety until that first customer entered the store. Even someone selling rather than buying was good luck, though the sellers rarely came in so early.

  Today, his coffee from café Casablanca had barely cooled when the front door bell tinkled, and Benjamin walked in, tugging nervously at the collar of his green shirt, a blue tie swinging above khaki pants. He walked right up to the counter, eyes on Aziz. "Hi," he said. "I'm sorry if--oh."

  Aziz slid the camera to the middle of the counter, drawing the fox's eyes to it. For a moment, he found it difficult to talk, contrasting the love in the eyes of the fox on the tape with the desperation in the eyes of the fox at his counter. He shook his head clear and focused on the camera. "I believe it is the right camera. If you want to check the tape, ah..." There was no reason he shouldn't suggest this, not if he hadn't seen the tape. "I can hook up one of the televisions."

  "Ah, no." Benjamin grabbed the camera and turned it over, then ejected the tape and stared at it. His ears came up and he looked like he might cry again. "This...this is it," he managed, and pu
shed the tape back in. "You said fifty?"

  Aziz indicated the small sign. "Of course," Benjamin said, holding the camera in one paw while fumbling for his wallet with the other. "Thank you. Thank you so much. You have no idea what this means."

  "You're most welcome." Aziz took the proffered credit card and ran it, then presented the fox with a receipt to sign. Benjamin held onto the camera while signing and then pushed the receipt back. The passion and devotion was as evident on his muzzle now as it had been in the tape, and again Aziz felt curiosity and shame at his spying burn together in his chest.

  Benjamin hurried out without another word. Aziz followed him with his eyes, but the fox didn't break down against the post and cry again, simply took off into the crowd and vanished with a flick of his white-tipped red tail.

  Aziz's own tail curled behind him, and for the rest of the day he kept seeing the fox's bright smile and perked ears. To have seen that kind of passion up close--and for another male, no less--kept him on edge, as though he'd looked out to see that the Homeporium's glass had turned a hazel green. Even his midday and sunset prayers didn't settle him as they normally would. Finally he closed the store early again and headed for the café, hoping a talk with Doug would keep his mind off it.

  But before the Prevost's squirrel had even arrived, Aziz spotted the cougar in military gear again. He sat by himself at a table, one large paw (with a gold band on the ring finger) wrapped around a tall glass, the other resting on a tablet computer that held most of his attention. Aziz saw again that body in the tight swimsuit and closed his eyes until the reality of the café reasserted itself and he could study Gerald again.

  He was as certain as he could be that this was Benjamin's (ex?) husband. The cougar's muzzle had a similar marking and his eyes were the same warm hazel. His t-shirt was not a uniform olive green, on reflection. Discolored patches that appeared to be food or drink stains marred the area below the chest. As Aziz watched, Gerald gulped down the last of his iced tea, wiped his mouth with the back of his paw, then wiped the paw on his shirt as he got up from the table, eyes still glued to his tablet. Those eyes...Aziz couldn't look away. They'd been so alive on the tape, and now they seemed dead. Had Benjamin messaged his husband to let him know he'd gotten the tape back? Was that the message Gerald was looking at so disinterestedly? What had gone wrong between them?