Act of God

man came from the swinging doors and bent over to take a drink at the water fountain. His footsteps weren’t much more than clicks as he’d come toward me, and I went into the men’s room as he walked back toward the swinging doors. From inside, I couldn’t hear him at all, and I wasn’t even in a stall, like Joel Bernstein had been, where the walls would be another barrier to sounds.
    I left the rest room and moved back into the store. I dawdled a little on the fourth floor, fending off two eager salespeople, then risked my knee to climb down to the third and did the same. I confirmed what I’d thought on the way up with Karen: plenty of places for somebody to hide until after Value Furniture closed for the night.
    I was moving gingerly down the staircase, the knee seeming pretty stable inside the brace but me not wanting to press my luck. On the last flight to the first floor I saw Karen at the main entrance, pointing up toward me as she spoke to a kid in his early twenties with clean-cut good looks over a, golf shirt and blue jeans. He came up the steps two at a time, bouncing on the balls of his feet like a dancer and smiling at me. I smiled back, and the kid hit me in the stomach with his right fist.
    As I doubled over, Karen screamed and ran out of my sight to the left. The kid swung his knee up toward my face, and I parried it with my right palm, pushing forward so that he went backward down the stairs. He stumbled at first, regaining his balance as I straightened back up, my left knee not even wobbling. He charged and decided to try another punch, this one a swooping left cross. I blocked it with my right forearm and slipped my hand up and under his arm at the triceps, pinning his wrist and hand at my underarm and lifting up just enough to let him know I could dislocate his elbow if things didn’t calm down.
    “Hey, hey that hurts!”
    The voice was familiar. I said, “It’s supposed to.”
    “Let go. Let go of me!”
    “Not just yet. Who are you?”
    “Fuck you.”
    I lifted a little more.
    “Ow. Ow! I’m Larry Rivkind, all right?”
    The son from the telephone. “Why did you attack me?”
    “Let me go.”
    “Same question.”
    Exasperation, then resignation. “My mother shouldn’t have hired you, and I don’t want you going around, trying to throw mud at my father.”
    “I’m not I—”
    “You are, if you’re here asking questions. He never had any affair. He told her he didn’t, and my father never lied.”
    “So people keep telling me.”
    “Now let me go.”
    “If I do, you going to behave?”
    “Yeah. Yeah, come on.”
    I let him go as I backed away on the step. He rubbed his arm a little, then said, “I’m telling you, butt out of this. Butt out now.”
    I expected that Karen had gone for help, and she returned with a husky guy about thirty in a powder blue, short- sleeved shirt and dark blue pants. There were no patches of badges on the shirt, but the forearms were corded with muscle, and the nose looked like the next break might take it into double figures. His hair was red and cut in an old- fashioned butch. The brows were so fair as to be almost invisible, the eyes under them more playful than wary.
    He said, “What’s this, now?”
    “Nothing,” said Rivkind, moving down the stairs but not rubbing his arm anymore with company having arrived. Taking the last few steps two at a time, he went out the door. I said to the guard, “Why didn’t you stop him?”
    “They don’t try leaving with a lamp under their arm, they’re welcome to go.” The brogue was thick, the voice syrupy with that harsh edge that makes you pay attention to it. “Besides, he’s family of the owners. And who might you be?”
    “John Cuddy.”
    “Ah, the one we had the call about.”
    “Probably.”
    “Finian Quill. I suppose you’ll be wanting to hear my side of it, won’t you?”
    “I would.”
    Quill looked over to where he’d come from. “There’s a place in back might suit us.”

    “Kerry. And your family, now?”
    I said, “ Cork , both sides.”
    Finian Quill nodded. He was sitting on a recliner chair in an employees’ lounge furnished comfortably with pieces that looked too expensive for the purpose until you noticed a tear here or a ding there. His hands were folded casually over his belt, his head resting back at the half-mast position in the chair.
    I shifted my rump on a leather love seat. “How long have you been in the states?”
    " Oh, you lose track of that