BRASS
17
twenty-five miles per hour. Always it was my dream to have an American sports car.”
I didn’t tell him that no American had ever dreamed of owning a
Fiero, that at best they’d settled for it.
“Now pull into that parking lot up there on the right,” he said,
guiding me to another tucked-away warehouse. “Put the shifter in neutral and turn the car off.”
After a minute he still hadn’t given me the next direction, so I
turned to him and asked silently for it. The glow from the nearest
streetlamp barely lit the car, but even so, I could make out the lines around Bashkim’s eyes, radiating like the beams of a sun in a child’s
drawing. He smiled, and it filled in the creases around his lips. Before that night I wondered how those lines had even gotten there, when I’d never once seen him smile.
“Now come over here.” He patted his lap. “I want to teach you
something else.”
I obeyed. After all, he’d gotten me this far.
For weeks Bashkim and I dated in the front seat of that Fiero. He
never let me drive it again, and I took that for another act of chivalry, that he wanted to chauffeur me around, because why would I want to take it for anything else?
But eventually I started complaining about the stick shift leaving
a dent in my lower back, and that I was starting to feel like one of
those two-dollar whores we sometimes cruised past on Cherry Street
on our way to the Burger King. Finally he caved one night, negoti-
ated with Gjonni to work a single instead of a double, and drove us to the dozen-room Queen Anne he shared with two dozen other people. The house was like most of them at the top of Hillside Ave-
nue, all clapboards and gables and places for Rapunzel to let down – Brass: A Novel by Xhenet Aliu –
19