THE BAD THIEF by Carol Edelstein
One day a man robbed a pizza shop during a blizzard. He ran home through deep snow with the money. A policeman easily followed his tracks the few blocks to the man’s apartment and knocked on his door. The man opened it. I didn’t take the money, he said. What did you do with it after you didn’t take it, said the policeman, although he could see the money right there behind the fellow on the kitchen counter – several wads of bills – twenties, tens, fives, lots of ones – next to his wet mittens.
That evening, the policeman sat on a stool in the center of the kitchen so his wife could trim his bushy hair and ample moustache. They enjoyed this ritual every couple of weeks. Sometimes she offered to put a steamy towel on his face and then give him a shave. Usually this meant she was in the mood to make love, and if he started something she wouldn’t stop him. But on that particular evening, it looked like it was going to be just the trim.
He asked her about her day, and she told him their neighbor had again been taken to the hospital thinking he’d had a heart attack but again, sent home told, it was just anxiety. They have good medicines for this now, she said – for anxiety – if only their neighbor wasn’t such a stubborn mule. They considered how they might coax the old fellow into trying some medicine, but came up with no new strategies.
How was your day? she said, giving a snip here and a snip there. He told her about the bad thief. He had thought this would be a funny story, but as he told it, it seemed sad to him, and by the end, very sad. The policeman had a much older brother, Joel, who had never been right. Something had slowed him down in the birth canal and he had not gotten enough oxygen. When he was a teenager, Joel had been sent away to a special school because he had gotten to be too much for their mother. Something in the bad thief’s way of holding his body, almost as if there was another body right beside him who was crowding him a little, reminded the policeman of Joel.
Did you arrest him? asked the policeman’s wife.
Well, he handed the money right over, and when I asked him why he’d taken it, what he needed it for, he didn’t know. So I gave him a warning. I told him if he took money again I would have to put him in jail.
He thought his wife knew nothing of Joel’s existence. Although he visited Joel a couple of times a year, and periodically thought of trying to tell her about him, the more time passed, the more it seemed too late to raise the subject. In fact she’d known about Joel for ages, and was thinking of him too, because of the way her husband talked about the thief and had been soft on him.
They didn’t say more as she finished up the haircut. He thought about Joel, she thought about Joel, and then she thought about the person she’d somehow never found the way to mention, the baby girl she’d given up for adoption five years before she’d met her husband. That baby would be thirty now – a mature woman – perhaps with a child of her own. Living in Oklahoma. Maybe. Last she knew.
She put the kettle on. Asked, did he want a shave? He said yes, that would be very nice. She took a towel from the cupboard and together they waited quietly for the water to get hot, but not too hot.
Carol Edelstein’s short stories have appeared in Flash Fiction, Epoch, Word of Mouth, and The Fiddlehead. She is the author of the poetry collection, The Disappearing Letters (Perugia Press, 2005).