From the bleached boardwalks tiiat do for sidewalks, clusters of people stare at his high square orange truck as if its appearance is an event; they look, in their medley of bathing suits and beach towels and tattered shorts and T-shirts imprinted witli hedonistic slogans and jibes, like refugees who were given no time to gather their effects before fleeing. Children among them wear towering hats of plastic foam, and those who might be their grandparents, having forsaken all thought of dignity, make themselves ridiculous in clinging outfits of many colors and patterns. Sunburned and overfed, some sport in complacent self-mockery the same foam carnival hats as tJieir grandchildren wear, tall and striped ones as in die books by Dr. Seuss or headgear shaped like open-mouthed sharks or lobsters extending a giant red mitt of a claw. Devils.The guts of the men sag hugely and the monstrous buttocks of die women seesaw painfully as tiiey tread the boardwalk in swollen running shoes. A few steps from death, these American elders defy decorum and dress as toddlers.

Searching for the address on die last invoice of the day, Ahmad steers the truck dirough a grid of streets back from the beach. There are no curbs or sidewalks. The macadam's edges crumble into patches of sunbaked grass. The houses are shingled and small and close togetiier, widi an air of minimum upkeep and seasonal rental; about half of them display signs of life within-lights, a flickering television screen. Children's bright beach toys litter some yards; surfboards and inflatable Nessies and SpongeBobs wait on screened porches for die next day's oceanic romp.

Number 292, Wilson Way. The cottage shows no exterior signs of habitation, and the front windows are masked by drawn Venetian blinds, so Ahmad is startled when the front door pops open seconds after he presses die chiming doorbell. A tall man with a narrow head made to seem narrower still by his close-set eyes and tight-cropped black hair stands behind die screen door. Unlike die crowds near the beach, he is dressed in sun-repellent clotiies, in gray trousers and a long-sleeved shirt the indeterminate color of an oil stain, buttoned at his wrists and throat. His stare is not friendly. There is a wiry tension to his whole body; his stomach is admirably flat.

"Mr."-Ahmad consults his invoice-"Karini? I have a delivery from Excellency Home Furnishings in New Prospect." He consults the invoice again. "An ottoman in multicolored dyed leather."

"In New Prospect," the flat-stomached man repeats. "No Charlie?"

Ahmad is slow to understand. "Uh-I drive the truck now. Charlie is busy in the office, learning the business in the office. His father is sick with diabetes." Ahmad fears these superfluous sentences will not be understood, and he blushes, there in the dark.

The tall man turns and repeats the words "New Prospect" to the others in the room. There are three others, Ahmad sees-all men. One is short and heavyset and older than the other two, who are not much older than Ahmad. All are dressed not in resort clothes but as if for manual labor, sitting on the rented furniture as if waiting for the work to begin. They respond with mutters of approval in which Ahmad thinks he hears, buried among the inflections, the words fuliis and kdfir; the tall man observes him listening and asks him sharply, "Enta btehki 'arabi?"

Ahmad blushes and tells him, "L«'-ana aasif. Inglizi."

Satisfied, and a shade less tense, the man says, "Bring in, please. All day we wait."

Excellency Home Furnishings doesn't sell many ottomans; they belong, like New Prospect's City Hall, to a more ornate age. Wrapped in a thick transparent plastic to protect its delicate skin of tinted leather patches sewn together in an abstract six-sided pattern, the item, pre-owned but well preserved, is a stuffed cylinder solid enough to take a sitting man's weight but soft enough to support pleasantly the slippered feet of one stretched at his ease in an armchair. It makes a lightweight armful, slightly rustling as Ahmad carries it from the truck across the crabgrass to the front room, where the four men sit in the light of a single wan table lamp. None offer to take the burden from his arms.

"On floor is O.K.," he is told.

Ahmad sets the thing down. "It should go very nicely in here," he says, to break the silence in the room, and, standing up, "Would you please sign here, Mr. Karini?"

"Karini not here. I sign for Karini."

"None of you is Mr. Karini?" The three men smile the quick, hopeful smile of those who have not understood what has been asked.

"I sign for Karini," the leader of the group insists. "I am colleague of Karini." Without further resistance Ahmad lays the invoice on the end table with the dim lamp and indicates with the pen where to sign. The nameless lean man signs. The signature is thoroughly illegible, Ahmad observes, and he notices for the first time that one of the Chehabs, father or son, has scrawled "NC" on the invoice-no charge, significantly less than the hundred-dollar minimum for free delivery.

As he closes the screen door behind himself, more lights come on in the cottage's front room, and as he walks across the sandy lawn to his truck he hears an excited gabble of Arabic, with some laughter. Ahmad climbs up into the driver's seat of the truck and revs the engine to make sure they hear him depart. He moves down Wilson Way to the first intersection and turns right, parking in front of a cottage that looks unoccupied. Quickly, quietly, his breathing shallow in his chest, Ahmad walks back along a path worn in the grass in place of a sidewalk. No car or person is moving on the scruffy little street. He goes to the window at the side of 292's front room, where a struggling hydrangea bush with parched lavender blooms offers some concealment, and carefully peeks in.

The ottoman has been disrobed of its plastic protection and set up on a tile-top coffee table in front of a worn plaid sofa. With a retractable touch-knife the size of a silver dollar, the leader has cut the stitches on one of the triangular patches that form a six-sided star, a snowflake of red and green, in the circular leather top. When this triangle has become a big-enough loose flap, the leader's lean hand can insert itself down the inside and extract, pinched between two long fingers, quantities of green American currency. Ahmad cannot read, through the dying hydrangea bush, the denominations, but, to judge from the reverence with which the men are counting and arranging the bills on the tile-top table, the denominations are high.

CHARLIE'S UNCLE and Habib Chehab's brother, Maurice, rarely comes up from Florida, but the heat and humidity of Miami in July and August drive him north for those months. He stays off and on at Habib's home in Pompton Lakes and shows up occasionally at Excellency Home Furnishings, where Ahmad sees him-a man much like his brother, only bigger and more formal, given to seersucker suits, white leather shoes, and shirts and neckties rather too obviously coordinated. He formally shakes Ahmad's hand the first time they meet, and the boy has an unpleasant sensation of being sized up, by eyes more guarded than Habib's, with even more gold in them, and less quick to break into a twinkle of amusement. He is the younger brother, it turns out, though he has the overweening manner of an older. Ahmad, an only child, is fascinated by brotherhood-its advantages and disadvantages, the quality it imparts of being in some sense duplicated. Had he been blessed with a brother, Ahmad would feel less alone, perhaps, and rely less on the God he carries with him, in his pulse and thoughts. Whenever he and Maurice see each other in the store, the portly, smooth man in his pale clothes gives Ahmad a slightly smiling nod that says, / know you, young man. I have your number.