“I wouldn’t get too close, if I was you.”
By stepping back, I acknowledge the stocky worker in garden clogs, sipping ice water on a stoop by the Mexican restaurant. My mother would have called him “Pedro,” but she calls everyone in a Mexican restaurant that, even if their badge clearly reads “Charlie.”
“Shit’s still falling,” he warns. “We hear stuff moving in there. Rats, maybe.”
“Were you working the day it happened?”
Clearly, he’s answered the question before and basks in it. “I sure was. I was starring in a commercial. In my mind, anyway. They filmed me holding a skillet in the window. Then boom! Things started hitting the roof. I thought it was a freak hailstorm.”
What I want to know is if he noticed three souls ascending toward heaven.