The moment she saw the car pulling up on her street, 229th Street in Rosedale, on this summer night in quiet Queens, she stood at the dark screen of her two-story attached house and watched the car, with one man inside, without any feeling at first and then she felt the beginnings of anxiety.
Inside the car, the lone man put on an Army officer's hat. Then he stepped out and stood in the street and pulled his officer's jacket down. In his right hand was full of death. But while she could not see this, there was a dark loss in the air, and it added to the rising disturbance of her nerves.
"I hope he's not coming here," Simona Francis remembers saying to herself. She is a pretty 42-year-old who had spent the day assisting the handicapped.
The man in the Army uniform now was walking from the car. When he got on the sidewalk, she called out, "Keep on walking."
He did not hear her, and he could not see her as she stood in the darkness of the front room of her house with her face behind the dark screen door.
The man in uniform only had to take a few steps to be at the walk leading up to her door. "Keep on walking," she said.
Read more...
