Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 19__
Connor Harding came home from work every morning at six a.m., Tuesday through Sunday. He got a blessed Sunday night off, and when he finished work early on Saturday morning, around three a.m., he made it to the middle of the 2:30 mass at Epiphany Church. The mass had originally been set up for Catholic newspaper printers who wanted to be able to attend a service after they finished at the press Saturday nights. Harding wasn’t Catholic anymore, but he kept after those early morning services. There hadn’t been a Catholic newspaper in Pittsburgh then for probably thirty years, so the mass was usually filled up with men and women like him, just off their mill shifts, streaked with grease and perfumed with the stale air of the mills. Trickling in from a Saturday night uptown were also the streetwalkers and their pimps, the women’s tired faces half hidden by lavish, netted hats.
They would all rub their hands together vigorously at the holy water station, in Harding’s case not any particularly ardent expression of faith so much as an attempt to rinse the black off his otherwise delicate hands. His hands were unusual for those of a steelworker, especially one who’s been at the job for as long as he had. His mother, when he was a boy, had him soak his hands in buttermilk at the end of an afternoon playing in the street near their home in Lawrenceville. She had watched his father’s hands change from the hands that were the first to touch her soft shoulders, at seventeen when they were married, to a steelworker’s splintered, chapped, machine parts. His mother had been fond of saying that young Connor should run away and learn the piano, since his fingers were so long and his nails shapely.
Now, in the front hallway of the church, when he rubbed his hands with holy water beside a young black woman, he could see the where his clean blue veins were hidden, and he could savor a small dose of almost feminine vanity admiring his nimble fingers, which were used most creatively those days at the extruding machine.
The mass was solemn, reflective of the weariness of its congregants, and in Latin, although the revolutionary days of guitars and an English liturgy had come and transformed most Catholic churches, even in Pittsburgh. When it ended, Connor Harding walked in the first stains of light toward his home two miles away in Oakland.
In South Oakland in those days it was hard to pass an alley that wasn’t piled with discarded junk, the students from Pitt having taken up permanent residence in the tenement-like apartments there, and if you looked long enough you could find someone, absurdly, selling it. Harding’s neighborhood was great for small mobile enterprises like these—he had bought his coffeepot for twenty-five cents from a haggard Pakistani man with a Shop n Save cart, and his wife never failed to uncover a yard sale that yielded longer pants and skirts for Geena, whose legs got longer every time the Dow-Jones fell.
This morning he passed the 24-hour yard sale. The woman who owned the stuff set her daughters up in shifts to hide behind the gate and show themselves only when a stranger took an ancient baby bottle or fondue pot in his hands, as if they were the proctors at an ongoing test of integrity. Harding leafed through a beer box full of old 45s. Among them was a brand new jazz record, still in its plastic.
“What’s this doing here?” he asked. A skinny girl in a long t-shirt and magenta leggings stood up, maybe surprised that he knew anyone was behind the gate. She shrugged. “You want it,” she said, or asked.
“I dunno,” said Harding, feeling in his pockets. He never listened to jazz, except for George Benson, mostly out of local pride. “What are you doing up so late?” he said suddenly. It was five in the morning.
“Gettin the paper.” She sat down to extract the comics from the Pittsburgh Press.
“What day is it,” said Harding, mostly to himself. Shit. He had forgotten something.
“August twenfourth,” mumbled the girl.
It was Geena’s birthday, that was what he had forgotten, and on the day he would be awake to see her, too. He had never been very good at knowing what to buy little girls, and Geena had never played with dolls very enthusiastically. She was big on the idea of the birthday outing, which was exactly the most inconvenient preference she could have had, given how often Harding was around.
Harding fingered the record. “Yeah, I guess I’ll take this,” he said, peeling a dollar from around the pile of junk in his jeans pocket.
“K,” said the girl, and took his dollar without looking up from Andy Capp.
Harding took the record and shuffled the few blocks home, looking forward to a cup of coffee and a nap. It would be clear he had forgotten a real gift. There was no wrapping paper and there was an orange, handwritten price sticker on the sleeve that he couldn’t scrape off with his stub of a thumbnail. Geena probably wouldn’t know the difference? There were hardly any records in their house? If she didn’t like it, hell, they could use another dinner plate. Ha, ha.
