Mr Harris

The phone rang the next afternoon. My father was playing golf, thank God, but my mother was home and she took the call. She came into my room where I had secluded myself in dread; she had her worried look on her face. She said, ‘There’s a man on the phone for you.’

I picked up the phone in our back atrium. The view was of our yard, the flowers blooming in the beds. The man on the phone was the man I hit, his voice was deep and black. I understood right away that my mother knew that a black man was calling me; black people never called our house. He said to me, ‘I took the car in and had them look at it.’ I thought to myself, ‘On a Sunday?’ Then he said, ‘It’s going to cost a thousand dollars to fix the car.’

‘A thousand dollars?’ I said. ‘I don’t have a thousand dollars.’

Without even pausing he said, ‘How much do you have?’

‘Two hundred dollars,’ I told him.

‘Well maybe you can ask your father for some money.’

‘If I ask my father for money he’ll talk to his lawyer.’

‘Oh yeah well you’re the guy who hit my car.’

‘I know I hit your car but I don’t have a thousand dollars.’

‘Then how much do you have?’

‘I have two hundred dollars.’

‘Then maybe I should call back until I get your father.’

‘My father is away.’

‘Then maybe I can keep calling back every single day until I get your father.’

The room became small around me, the colours of the beds of flowers too strange to understand. I said, ‘Maybe I can find more money.’

‘Yeah well how much can you find?’

‘How much to fix your car?’

‘I can probably fix it for four hundred dollars.’

‘I can probably get four hundred dollars.’

‘Okay, Anthony, I got to talk to my wife. I’ll call you back.’

My mother was listening at the door of course. She looked stricken when I came out of the room. She said to me, ‘Is it about drugs?’ ‘It isn’t about drugs,’ I told her. Then I told her what had happened. After she had a moment to think about it, my mother said, ‘You shouldn’t have been on the West Side.’