Read Angela Sloan for Free Online

one side of Ray’s head, then the other, studying the swollen eye.
    â€œHer, too?”
    â€œYes,” Ray said.
    â€œHow old is she? Twelve?”
    â€œShe’s eighteen.”
    â€œShe might be fifteen. No more than that, I think.”
    His English was better than Wang’s. He gave me the lamp treatment, then nodded at my knapsack. “Have you got some makeup in there, miss?”
    â€œNo.”
    He opened a desk drawer and brought out a greasy tackle box, which he laid in my hands. He sent me to a small, grim lavatory.
    There was my face in the cloudy mirror. Fatigue makes an adult look older, but it makes a child look younger and more childish. The skin under my eyes had a gray shine to it, and the knit forehead didn’t help.
    I put a lot of beige powder all over my face and ears, used a pencil around my eyes, and smeared some lipstick onto my mouth. I tried a few things with my hair, but it is the kind of hair that lies fairly slick no matter what is done to it. There was a comb in the tackle box, but I was unwilling to handle it. I pulled some hair forward to cover the sides of my face.
    When Ray saw me he said, “Oh, that’s not good.” I thought I had better go wash my face off, but the Chinese man said we’d try a picture first. He put me on a stool in front of some blue paper taped to thewall and snapped a Polaroid. Then he took another with the hair pulled even farther forward so that all but a three-inch strip down the middle of my face was covered with my hair. In the picture, I did not look older so much as embalmed. Well, but that was a strategy. The thing in the picture was ageless.
    On the desk he spread out a dozen driver’s licenses from various states. The idea was to choose the ones that would need to be altered the least.
    The faces had a sad foolishness about them. I suppose it is hard not to look foolish in your driver’s license picture once it has been stolen from you. All of the licenses were current. They included a set of three that belonged to a husband, wife, and daughter, judging by their names and by the way the young woman resembled both of the older people, who did not, however, resemble each other, except that all three of them were black.
    Ray had his mind made up on licenses from a southern state. “Don’t you have a couple from Tennessee?” he said.
    â€œNo. I could get a couple.”
    â€œOkay, get a couple.”
    The man said it would take him one week.
    Wang had waited in the alley. As he led us back through the kitchen, the mean-looking girl was receiving a good, loud scolding in Chinese from a gray-haired woman with an iron pot in her hand. The girl faced a few degrees to one side, as though to let the high-pitched coughing fit of language be deflected.
    â€œMy mother took the girl on for charity,” Wang said. “She is dull. Speaks no English, very little Chinese.”
    â€œWhat does she speak?” Ray asked.
    â€œA little Cantonese, that is all. We have a lot of trouble with that simpleminded girl.”
    I twisted to get one more look at her and saw an interesting thing. The hard eyes that had at first seemed calculating and full of foreign malice now struck me as merely stolid and flat. There was something to learn in this. I had seen a face I couldn’t read and attributed cunning to it. It never occurred to me that her face might be unreadable because she had been dropped on her head as a baby.
    Wang left us at our table. When the girl came out again, a little pinker for being shouted at, Ray ordered more beer and a large meal of Chinese food, taking care to include the number of each menu item and see that the girl wrote it down. It was a relief to know she was simpleminded. That made it easier to put up with her slow pace and sullen manner. Ray left her an oversized tip, as was his habit whatever the service.

15
    O utside in the sun Ray patted himself for a matchbook. A cabdriver