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  PRAISE FOR HALSEY STREET

  “A quiet gut-punch of a debut. . . Absorbing and alive, the kind of novel that swallows you whole.”

  —Kirkus, starred review

  “Naima Coster is definitely a writer to watch. Her clear-eyed writing interrogates race, class, and family in a refreshing and thoroughly engaging way. A lovely and thoughtful book.”

  —Jacqueline Woodson, author of Brown Girl Dreaming and Another Brooklyn

  “This is the story of a family—which means it’s the story of imperfect and vulnerable creatures—failing at love no matter their efforts. In Halsey Street, Naima Coster shows us one young woman’s tangled efforts to return home and repair the intimacies we can hardly live without. It’s a poignant, moving book, written with deep empathy and sophistication.”

  —Ben Marcus, author of Leaving the Sea and The Flame Alphabet

  “In this lovely novel, Naima Coster captures, with depth and nuance, the yearnings, ambivalence, and insecurities of a woman on the brink of adulthood. In the process of healing old wounds, Penelope Grand must mend complex fractures in relationships with her estranged mother in the Dominican Republic and her father in Brooklyn.

  —Christina Baker Kline, New York Times bestselling author of The Orphan Train and A Piece of the World

  “With this debut, Naima Coster has established herself as a major new talent of literary realism. A tale of what happens when your own past is rendered as unknowable as your future, this family story looks at all the different ways loss defines us. Brooklyn is under trial for Coster’s Grand family in a way any New Yorker can recognize, but Coster goes the additional mile to investigate the nuances of the gentrified and the gentrifiers. Race, ethnicity, and class are masterfully challenged in this narrative of self-discovery and the quest to preserve one’s heritage while honoring lifesaving transformation. A brilliant debut.”

  —Porochista Khakpour, author of Sons and Other Flammable Objects and The Last Illusion

  “Naima Coster’s first novel is rich and flavorsome, a portrait of a Brooklyn neighborhood in decline and renewal and of a young woman—a risk-taker, fierce yet loving. First novels rarely come as skilled, touching, and real as Halsey Street.”

  —John Crowley, author of Ka and Little, Big

  “Coster’s absorbing and beautifully written novel, Halsey Street, haunts me still. Set in two cities I love, Pittsburgh and New York, it’s both lucidly familiar and emotionally unpredictable. It’s a novel that faces head-on the complicated ways women are split between their duty to their families and their personal passions. In this deeply profound and moving story, Penelope es tremenda!”

  —Angie Cruz, author of Soledad and Let It Rain Coffee

  “How does one gifted young woman find her life? Through a deep journey of mind, body, and spirit across cultures, classes, and city blocks. Coster’s Penelope rises and falls, flies and stumbles, and goes straight to the heart in this beauty of a debut. Get to Halsey Street as fast as you can.”

  —Stacey D’Erasmo, author of Wonderland

  “Halsey Street introduces Naima Coster as an important new voice, wise, elegant, and utterly engaging. Her protagonist, Penelope, is a fierce yet tender heroine who must navigate modern-day Brooklyn, must learn to move between classes and countries. Coster captures the ache and longing of living life as an outsider, while also illuminating the force of history and family. A remarkable, heartbreaking debut.”

  —Rebecca Godfrey, author of The Torn Skirt and Under the Bridge

  “A poignant and absorbing Brooklyn elegy, told by a young woman lost in the no-man’s-land between gentrifier and gentrified.”

  —Johanna Lane, author of Black Lake

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Naima Coster

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Little A, New York

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Little A are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503941175 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1503941175 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781503941168 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1503941167 (paperback)

  Cover design by PEPE nymi

  First edition

  For Jonathan

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  1 PITTSBURGH

  2 HOMECOMING

  3 THE HARPERS

  4 LA COPA ROTA

  5 INTRICATE AND FRAGILE THINGS

  6 REVITALIZATION

  7 THE GRANDS

  8 ADRIFT

  9 WINTER

  10 THE MOUNTAIN

  11 PARLOR GAMES

  12 NOBODY WANTS TO SEE

  13 DESPEGANDO

  14 THE BRIDGE

  15 PUTNAM

  16 MUJERES

  17 SEAMS

  18 NOTICIAS

  19 ACKNOWLEDGMENT

  20 SALIDA

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone?

  Or if the child asks for fish, will give a snake?

  —Matthew 7:9

  Porque la piedra

  en esta mano pesa más

  que lo que aguanta

  tu corazón.

  —Li Yun Alvarado, “Adiós”

  1

  PITTSBURGH

  The bar was two stories below street level, its wooden walls curved to resemble the bow of a ship. The amber glow inside was artificial and dim, the hurricane lanterns hung so low that patrons sometimes walked right into the unlit lamps. Penelope had no trouble navigating the darkness. She knew her way around the Anchor by memory, slid into the back room easily, and sat in her usual leather armchair, her drink cold and tall on her lap.

  The back was nearly empty, quieter than the bar, where revelers shouted orders across the counter and fell over each other, scrounging up quarters to pay for the jukebox. Back here, the light was blue, and it was even harder to see. The blue light was meant to be starlight, this whole back room the deck of the ship. The night sky and dark sea floated on the wallpaper, and a cratered aluminum moon revolved overhead. Penelope liked the way drinking back here could feel for a while like living inside a bad art installation. However cheap it was, she liked the immersion. The bartender knew to give her extra-long shots of the gin she liked best, and sometimes, in gratitude, she kept him company while he worked. Other times, she sat back here and waited to take him home after his shift. But tonight she wasn’t planning on spending the night with him, although he was generous and fine to talk to. Tonight, she wanted to be alone. It was her father’s birthday, and she was celebrating. He had made it to sixty-three.

  She had sent flowers and a copy of Stormy Weather, an old black-and-white musical they had watched together when she was a girl. She had called him three times over the course of the day to sing to him and tell him she loved him. On one call, he held the phone up to the air so she could hear the record he was playing. Penelope recognized the song by the lyrics: “Lush Life” by Coltrane and Hartman. They had listened together for a while. His neighbor, Miss Beckett, had plans to go over and share dinner with him that night, which Penelope thought would be festive enough. There was nothing else that she would ask for, not even to be nearer to him for th
e day. It was sufficient that he was alive, and he wasn’t alone.

  Happy birthday, Pop.

  Penelope toasted the dark and drank. Her gin was clean and fragrant—cardamom, cucumber, juniper. She inhaled its perfume. The table beside her was covered in knickknacks: a ceramic starfish, a bronze whale, bits of coral. She picked them up and rearranged them, then stared at the ocean murals on the wall. It required no effort for her to slide outside herself and into the blue of the room.

  Her eyes were closed when she felt a tap on her shoulder. A man crouched down beside her—some goon who couldn’t believe she had come to the bar to sip her gin and be left alone. He had a funny row of bangs across his forehead and eyes that shone green in the strange light of the room. He grinned at her and gave a little wave, and she was ready to tell him to fuck off, until she saw the tiny button pinned to the breast pocket of his shirt. She squinted and made out the orange letters in the dark. He offered to buy her a drink.

  “After this one,” she said, still fixed on the button. They had the same alma mater, or they almost could have.

  The boy looked a bit younger, maybe twenty-four or twenty-five, so they wouldn’t have overlapped at school, even if Penelope had stayed all four years. She sized him up, as if he were some radical alternate version of herself—boyish, white, light-eyed, further along. He wore his plaid shirt unbuttoned over a T-shirt in an attempt to look casual, like a workingman and not an aesthete, in a bar filled with servers and bartenders and cooks from across the city. His loafers gave him away: they were boxy, made of slick leather. She wouldn’t have looked at him twice, if not for the button.

  She asked if he was an artist. He said yes, a sculptor, and asked about her.

  “I was,” Penelope said, and the man laughed.

  “Aren’t you a bit young for the past tense?”

  “I’m not,” Penelope said, and he went to go buy her the second drink to smooth things over. When he returned, he didn’t ask her to explain. He went on about himself, which was fine. Penelope wanted to know.

  He had finished school in Providence not long ago, and in a few days, he’d be starting a grad program in sculpture. For his funding, he would teach a class on spatial dynamics. Penelope mentioned she was a substitute art teacher for the Pittsburgh public schools, but she hardly ever got called in because it was easier for the schools to just cancel the class. She told him about the art festival by the rivers each summer, and the galleries worth visiting, and it felt good to be able to tell him something that he didn’t yet know. After a while, she ordered him to bring her another drink, and when he returned with the wrong kind of tonic, she sent him back to the bar.

  His name was Bernie or Bryce or Blake—she couldn’t remember—and when he asked her how long she’d been in Pittsburgh, she said, “Always,” although it had been only five years. It was a half-truth. Her life hadn’t started, really, until she was on her own here. The city had been good to her. Even her father seemed to have good days when he came to visit her. He got away from that empty house, and she took him to dinners at her bar in Squirrel Hill, where he ate for free, while she worked just half a shift. He liked being out someplace, people watching and drinking coffee. They made plans every time to watch a game at Heinz Field, but they never made it to the stadium. It would be too hard for Ralph to get to his seat in the upper deck, where Penelope could afford tickets, and neither of them wanted to endure the trouble. Instead she rented cars and they went for long drives over the Allegheny and the Monongahela, all the way up to Mount Washington to watch the city flicker on at twilight. They listened to tapes he had brought along with him—Marvin Gaye and the Moments. They could do it all sitting down. They found a rhythm that helped Penelope believe it had always been just the two of them; they lived in Pittsburgh; Ralph had never been married; she had no mother; there was no woman named Mirella.

  “Drink this.”

  The green-eyed kid interrupted her, handing over a fluorescent yellow shot. He held another for himself and he beamed at her, as if they were having a terrific time and might leave together soon. Penelope had planned only to celebrate her father for a few hours, alone, and if she wanted to take someone home, it should have been the bartender. He had beautiful hands and knew how a night with her would work—a few rounds of good hard drinks, the laughter and plain talk of an easy friendship, and then ecstatic, rapid sex, before one last drink, and good-bye. Penelope didn’t think the green-eyed boy could offer her any of that. He was gawky and young, and he looked at her as if he were thinking about asking her to prom. But he was pretty and much further along in his art than she would ever be, which made them even, in a way, at least for tonight.

  Penelope drained her glass, her eyes on the sculptor as she tilted her head back.

  “Your turn,” she said, and he mimicked her, pounding the center of his chest afterward to dull the burn of the shot.

  “Let’s leave,” she said. “I want to show you something.”

  Penelope took his hand and left the blue sanctuary of the back room. By the bar, old seafaring songs were playing overhead, and the regulars were singing and swaying along. Penelope laid a fan of bills flat on the counter for her bartender. She didn’t trust the grad student to tip well, and she knew the bartender needed it—the gas was always turned down too low at his place. He winked at her and waved good-bye, and Penelope said she’d stop by to see him some other time.

  They rose out of the belly of the Anchor onto the sidewalk. Water Street was swollen with drunken college kids, back in town for the semester. The city was undoubtedly better when they were away. They started to walk uphill toward Penelope’s apartment, and Bernie or Ernie or Blake tried to put his arm around her. She kept toward the other end of the sidewalk, and eventually he gave up.

  The squat buildings along the Slopes were unlit and quiet, their Easter-egg colors obscured by the dark. After a while, the grad-boy was panting from the steepness of the streets, but Penelope didn’t slow down. She was used to the incline. Between breaths, he spoke loudly, his voice slicing through the night. He was babbling on about the year he had spent in Berlin on a fellowship, how he rode a bicycle to his workspace. Penelope shushed him and said, “We’re almost there.”

  At the door to her loft, Penelope turned on all the lights so the sculptor could take in the apartment. The floors were polished black wood, the walls unpainted brick. Large cement pillars held up the ceiling and gave the loft the look of a maze. She kept her easel against the wall facing the eastern windows, which brought in a blinding light each morning, even in winter.

  Before the sculptor could ask how she afforded the place, she told him she made good tips and few people wanted to walk this far up the hill. She poured them two more drinks, although her body was already rocking inwardly, as if they truly had been on board a ship. The grad-boy, a lightweight, was already slurring his words. He made a great effort to enunciate, as if he still had to win her over. Couldn’t he tell she’d already made up her mind?

  They sat on Penelope’s bed, one of the few pieces of furniture in the loft. She had bought it years ago with nearly all of her first paycheck from the bar. After a month of sleeping on a bundle of sweaters and a rug, the bed had been proof that leaving New York was worth all this solitude, this space. She missed her father, but life with him would have made her feeble, plastic; here she had her bones.

  They drank, and Penelope showed the green-eyed boy her portfolio, the one with her most recent drawings.

  “Is this what you wanted to show me?” he said. “You hardly use any color.”

  He flipped through quickly, barely admiring her sketches of the bridge to Herrs Island, a half-dozen bottles aglow on a table in late afternoon, watches and hats and fountain pens in the lost and found box at her bar, Josephine Street under snow, pairs of pedestrians huddled close.

  He paused at a drawing of a brick building on a shady street. The awning couldn’t be read, the letters smudged and faded. Light reflected off the glass door
and windows, so nothing inside could be seen. A crack split the pavement in the foreground.

  “This one is waiting for something,” he said. “Maybe inside, or in front. Along the sides. Something else.”

  “That’s all there is,” Penelope said, and she knew the defense would never have held in a critique, the thin idea that since it was drawn from life, she didn’t have to change anything. He told her she should go back to the building and observe it again. “It doesn’t exist anymore,” she said and slid the drawing back into the portfolio.

  “You’re no beginner,” the grad-boy said. “You should stop doing these object studies.” He went on to say Penelope should come to the colloquia at the university this fall—they were free and open to the public, although the public didn’t seem to care. She could come and learn even while she worked at the bar. There was really something to be said for studying art, but he didn’t say what. He offered these solutions for her life, fixing problems she had not named, so Penelope began to unbutton her shirt. She slipped off her skirt and her boots, her too-small underwear. The grad-boy shut up quick.

  He was attentive, if a bit delicate, and she came first, which was more than she had expected. He was sweating and smiling when they were through, his hair mussed and his face proud. He kissed her and asked for another drink. When she returned with two old jam jars filled with gin, the boy was already asleep. Penelope sat beside him, her limbs splayed apart so the cool apartment air could dry her skin. He had left his wallet on the nightstand, so she rifled through: his university ID, his health insurance card, and a tattered picture of a big dog, maybe his when he was younger, maybe dead now. He was already a card-holding member of at least three coffee shops over in Lawrenceville. On his license, she saw that he was from Oregon, an organ donor, born in December. She checked his birthdate again and did the math. He was twenty-one.

  Penelope sipped her drink and wondered whether to ask him to leave. She figured it was too late, they had already slept together, and she could let him sober up for a few hours. He was right when he said her drawings were all object studies. He hadn’t lied to win her over, which she appreciated. What he hadn’t understood was that she didn’t have to do more. She wasn’t working toward a class or a show. The drawing was an exercise, as much a part of her routine as evening tea, morning runs, these sips of gin. The sketches kept her muscles working; they tempered her moods. She had no fellowship to Berlin, but these object studies, they were hers.