I called Brooklyn Union Gas, and a repairman was sent to our house. He was a heavyset African American man in a blue uniform that covered him from head to toe. The belt cut into his belly, and when he came in through the door, he looked around our apartment with pity in his teddy-bear eyes.

“I’m going to do my best for you folks, all right,” he said, “but I can’t promise nothing. That last guy really broke this thing up.”

“Please,” I said. I tried to keep the panic from my voice. “Please do your best.” My breath came out in white puffs. I didn’t know how we would even get through that night if he couldn’t fix the oven. The apartment had grown steadily colder with every day the oven remained broken. It was already getting dark outside and I could hear the wind gusting against the walls.

“I know, honey,” he said. “You and your mom just take it easy and I’ll try to figure this out.”

And he did. With his blunt fingers, he smoothed the pieces back into place and when the stove came to life again with a burst of blue flame, Ma clapped her hands from happiness.

She tried to give him a tip, only a dollar, but he folded the money gently back into her hand.

“You keep that,” he said in his slow, deep voice. “You get something nice for yourselves.”

I would have liked to have a man like that as my father.

Matt had dropped out of high school so he could work full-time. Now that he was working the entire day, he could often finish his work earlier and got to leave before we did. By then, I’d received special permission to take freshman and premed classes at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn. On the days when I had Polytech classes, which usually ended later in the afternoon, I sometimes saw Vivian waiting for him to leave when I had just arrived.

One spring day when I got to the factory in the early evening, Vivian was standing outside as usual, waiting for Matt to finish work. As was often the case, there was a group of Chinatown teenage boys huddled around her, and I was surprised to see one of them holding a large hanging plant. The acne-faced boy with the plant leaned toward Vivian and I saw the striped leaves sweep against her pretty cowboy boots. Then she murmured something to him and he immediately lifted the plant higher, so its leaves wouldn’t brush against the sidewalk. Of course, the plant was hers and he was just holding it for her.

The guys were busy trying to impress Vivian and they paid me no notice. I could hear they were speaking English, to seem cooler.

“Hi, Kimberly,” Vivian called as I approached the doorway.

“Hi,” I said.

A few of the boys looked up but dismissed me and turned back to her.

The door opened and out stepped Park. Staring at the ground as usual, he didn’t see me standing in front of the doorway and bumped into me behind. This set off the whole group of boys laughing. I saw that Park was wearing bright orange pants. His plaid shirt was buttoned wrong and it bunched up where it met his neck.

“Are you all right?” Vivian asked Park.

He didn’t reply and just tried to walk on, past the group.

One of the teenage boys, who was wearing a red bandanna on his head, stepped out in front of him. Like an imitation of a gangster in a bad movie, the boy said in accented English, “Lady asked you a question.” Then he switched into Chinese. “You, white disease.”

“Don’t call him that,” I said.

“Who made you his keeper?” Red Bandanna said.

“It’s not a problem,” Vivian said to him. She had a smile plastered to her face. She seemed unsure of what to do.

The boy pushed Park again, no doubt thinking that this would win him points with her. “Say a word.”

“Stop it,” I said.

He kept shoving Park. “C’mon. The lady asked you something, now you answer her. C’mon.” He punctuated each word with a push. Park’s eyes were looking in every direction, bewildered and disoriented.

Vivian just stood there, frozen.

I stood in front of Red Bandanna. “Stop it!” I reached up and pulled the cloth off his head. His hair tumbled out in matted locks. “Least he’s not so ugly that he’s made of essence of monkey.”

The whole gang laughed.

Underneath the wild strands of hair, he was red with fury. “Give that back!”

I tossed it in his face, then grabbed Park’s arm. “Run!”

We’d already taken a few steps. Red Bandanna was just about to race after us when I looked back and saw him get jerked by the scruff of his neck. He was yanked around to face Matt, who had just come outside.

“What are you doing with my little brother when you don’t even have a hole in your ass?” With his arms and fists clenched, Matt had swelled to twice his normal size, it seemed. He threw Red Bandanna to the ground, effortlessly.

“That your brother? Sorry, Matt, I didn’t recognize him.”

Now Matt pulled him off the floor again.

“You knew. You remains of a human being.”

There was a chorus now from the other guys. “Take it easy, Matt. He was just starting a child’s game, that’s all, it was just a prank.”

Matt looked like he wanted to hit him but instead, he dropped Red Bandanna abruptly onto the ground. “You’re not worth planting.” Matt meant he wasn’t worth the effort.

Red Bandanna scrambled up off the floor and the whole group fled, leaving Vivian standing there, still looking apologetic.

By this time, Park and I had come back within a safe distance.

“You guys all right?” Matt bent down and picked up one of my barrettes, which had fallen onto the sidewalk when Park and I had tried to escape. Gently, he clipped it back in my hair. It seemed to me that his hand lingered a moment longer than was necessary. His look to Vivian was cool. I saw she was almost in tears.

“Vivian tried to get them to stop too,” I said.

“Sure,” Matt said. He was still breathing heavily; I could almost feel the adrenaline draining from his body. He glanced at the plant, which had been abandoned on the ground, and turned to Vivian. “Your admirer took off without giving you your plant back.”

“Matt…” she said.

“Forget it,” he said. He picked up the plant and swung an arm around her. “Come on,” he said to Park, and the three of them left together.

Through the tall windows, the spring rain fell onto the trees in the distance. I was still tutoring Curt. Many of the kids were nervous about the upcoming standardized tests at the end of eleventh grade, and had already been enrolled in outside test courses for months. Curt’s parents had pressured him to do the same, but he’d gotten them to agree to extra tutoring by me in his school subjects instead. My own preparation for the tests was going to consist of filling in a few sample exercises in the booklets I received with my registration form, since I didn’t even have a book with practice tests.

We often met in the Art studio, where he spent so much time that the teachers allowed him to leave some of his work in the back. I’d gotten there early this lesson and was thinking about the upcoming SATs while I waited for him to be ready. I looked down at the studio floor, which was covered in paint splotches and wood shavings. I had to be careful not to step on the electric saw and sanding machine, which Curt often left lying around on the floor, still plugged in. The studio was filled with the smell of rain and cut wood and wallpaper glue.

Curt was using a paintbrush to smear a few pieces of wood with glue before our lesson started. He started telling me about a pair of shoes he’d found in the trash, which he was delighted to be wearing now.

“It is proof that serendipity does exist. They showed up just when I needed them.” He fit the pieces of wood together carefully and used a clamp to hold them in place.

I studied the shoes, peeking out from under his faded jeans. They were brown work boots, heels worn down. “Did you clean them first?”