[SS01] Assault and Pepper Read Online Free PDF Page B

produce stands, and specialty food stores. Two hundred plus craftspeople rent daystalls, operating alongside more than 200 owner-operated shops and services and nearly one hundred restaurants. The Market is also home to more than 350 residents—all in nine acres.
    —Market website
    My shout brought people running, people whose phones weren’t buried at the bottom of their tote bags or knapsacks, like mine. “Help is on the way,” someone assured me as I knelt beside Doc, holding my breath and his wrist, praying for a pulse. A nurse on her way to the Market clinic nudged me aside but, when she got no better result, turned her kind face to me.
    “He’s gone,” she said, her voice almost too soft to hear amid the chit and chat and scrape and squawk around us. In the distance, a siren screamed, but whether bound for here or some other unlucky locale, no telling.
    I nodded. Years ago, at the law firm, a client stumbled into my office in search of the restroom, keeled over, and died. The image of his red face matching his red tie, contrasting sharply with his white shirt and hair and his classic navy blue suit, had stuck with me.
    In contrast, Doc wore his usual olive green raincoat and scarred brown shoes. His eyes had lost their sheen, the dull, sandy skin around them pooched and pocketed like a Shar Pei’s after an all-nighter. And yet, despite the world of difference from that long-ago client, he was just as dead.
    The nurse pushed herself up, fingers pressing lightly into my upper arm. I shook her off. It seemed indecent to leave him, to stand back and join the small crowd staring at this odd, dead man. The merchants, farmers, and craftspeople of the Market call themselves a family, and family doesn’t make one of their own into a curiosity, even a newcomer.
    I’m a newcomer, too.
    His hand lay half open, fingers gently curved, as if still holding the cup. The fingers were pale, nails well trimmed and scrubbed clean.
    Amazing what goes through the mind at moments like this. My family was never traditionally religious, though both my parents were active in peace and justice causes during my childhood. My mother helped found a soup kitchen in the basement of St. James Cathedral but rarely attended Mass, entering the nave only to hear chamber music. Once I went with her to hear the Tallis Scholars sing and wondered, as I stared up at the gold-and-white-trimmed vaults, how their voices could climb so high and who was up there listening.
    My father had chosen to study Zen Buddhism. Whether because of or in spite of his experiences in Vietnam, he never said. If asked, no doubt he’d smile and ask me quietly what I thought. Friends had wafted through the big house on Capitol Hill, day and night, to sit in meditation in the third-floor ballroom. Where Kristen’s great-grandparents had held formal dances and her grandmother learned swing and defied convention by inviting a black jazz band to entertain soldiers during the war, we heard rhythmic breathing, mantras being chanted, and the rolling tones of a Tibetan bell. Kristen and I had helped our mothers melt the used candle ends and remold them, adding sandalwood or lavender oil. A mere whiff of Nag Champa Incense takes me back.
    Later, when Kristen’s mother discovered yoga, we heard the soft gummy sounds of sticky mats being rolled onto the maple floors, punctuated by groans as stiff joints responded to gentle coaxing from the teachers who came and went.
    All my life, the medieval harmonies my mother loves have slipped into my consciousness when I least expect them. When my heart’s been ripped open, when the stakes are highest. They swirled around me now as I tried to summon the sacred peace of the Cathedral and the ballroom studio, and wrap it around the man we knew as Doc.
    I stayed there until another hand touched me. “Pepper,” Tag said. “Let the EMTs take over.”
    He led me down the sidewalk, out of the way. Just yesterday, Doc and Sam had argued on this