The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

For the rest of the month of December, Sepha watches and longs for the return of Judith and Naomi. He has trouble sleeping without them next door. He finishes The Brothers Karamazov without Naomi and writes in the margins so the librarians will not return it to the shelves. In his boredom, he starts making a list of aphorisms for Naomi to spare her any disappointments in life. When he tries to pay his rent at the end of the month, he finds he barely has enough money to do so. Business declined in the last four months since the gentrification began; the newcomers want nothing to do with his store. With Kenneth’s encouragement to adapt to the times, Sepha installs a new deli counter to appeal to the new, respectable, customer base.

Sepha calls his mother on January 7, which is Christmas Day in Ethiopia. Because Sepha let the prostitute take his mother’s gift of perfume, Sepha sends his mother the book of poetry he originally bought for Judith. When his mother asks him why he got her a book of poems, Sepha tells her what he knows about Emily Dickinson, emphasizing the beauty of her solitary life: “She wrote all of those poems entirely alone. She was able to live on just that” (192). Sepha’s mother just thinks they are sad.

The number of evictions increase in Sepha’s neighborhood. Eventually his neighbor, Mrs. Davis, comes by with flyers advertising a neighborhood meeting of the “Logan Circle Community Association,” which Sepha has never heard of before, but he promises to attend. When he goes to the meeting, he sees Judith for the first time since before Christmas. She offers him a seat next to hers, but he just smiles at her and deliberately walks in the other direction to sit down. Except Judith, everyone at the meeting has been in the neighborhood at least as long as Sepha. He quickly realizes there are going to be “sides” in this meeting, and he notices “they” and “them” are used to assign blame for the changes in the neighborhood. When Judith tries to speak, someone in the group tells her to “shut up” (200). After the meeting, Sepha joins Judith on the steps of her front porch. She tells him Naomi is staying in Connecticut to attend boarding school. Naomi wants Sepha to have the typewriter her father gifted her with the hope that he would write to her while she was at school.

The next day, Sepha alerts Judith that someone threw a brick through her car windshield. Much to Sepha’s surprise, Naomi’s father, Ayad, opens the door at Judith’s house when he knocks. Ayad traveled back with Judith from Connecticut. Sepha chastises her ex-husband for leaving her alone to deal with the police. Sepha hears them fighting later that night. In the morning, he finds a brick on the pavement in front of his store. He suspects someone threw it at the grated windows and it bounced off and landed on the sidewalk. He uses it to prop open the door. His first customer is Judith, who tells him her rendezvous with Ayad was a mistake, and he is gone. She hands Sepha a letter from Naomi. He asks for her address so he can write back. He treasures the letter and stashes it under the cash register to read again later. He and Judith make plans to meet for dinner the next evening.

Sepha leaves his uncle’s apartment on May 4 and walks home to Logan Circle. On the way, he recalls late afternoon walks with his father in the silence of a small park in Ethiopia. His father would sometimes talk to himself and name dead ancestors as he walked. As Sepha nears his apartment, he wishes he had taken more time to notice the important things along the way.

Sepha’s narrative shifts back to the night of Judith’s house fire; Franklin Henry Thomas, a local resident at the end of his rope, started the fire. Sepha, Kenneth, and Joseph hang out in the store like they often do, and Sepha tells them about the bricks and rumors of men in black marauding through the neighborhood. Joseph relates this to the beginnings of a coup and cautions Sepha that the people of the neighborhood are powerless to prevent the violence. At that moment, the men notice the firetrucks and Judith’s burning house. Judith is at the movies when the fire breaks out. When she returns, Sepha hugs her, says he is sorry, and then leaves her alone to deal with the firefighters while he returns to Kenneth and Joseph at the store. The last time she visits the neighborhood is in April, when she stops by the store and tells Sepha he should come over for dinner once she settles into her new place.

As of May 4, Sepha has never sent the letter he wrote to Naomi, and he never heard from Judith again. As he sits on his stoop and looks down the block at his store, he thinks his store looks “more perfect than ever before” (228).