Ask Again, Yes (17 page)

“What are you going to do?” they asked her one day when this had been going on for a few weeks.

“Nothing,” Kate said. “See what happens, I guess.”

Eddie was one of those eighteen-year-olds who looked like he could be twenty-five. He was nice, as far as Kate knew, though she’d never spoken to him and couldn’t imagine why out of all the girls at Gillam High he’d set his sights on her. Sara, too, seemed puzzled by the whole thing. She told Kate that based on the few interactions they’d had he seemed neither smart nor dumb. He was just there. He was neither funny nor serious. He’d worked on the paper for a while but then he quit. He’d joined the yearbook but he might have quit that, too. Girls liked him, Sara granted. It was just another fact about him, same as the fact that his hair was brown.

He waited for her after practice one day, and when her teammates saw him they fell back and urged Kate forward. Kate pretended not to
see him and instead walked around the back of the school and snuck into the girls’ locker room through the custodial door. The next morning he was waiting by her locker, and the whole thing felt way too much like a movie she’d seen once.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” she said.

By lunch, the whole school knew they were together.

Eddie didn’t have a car but when they went out, he was usually able to borrow his mother’s. They went to the movies a few times, always with other kids from school, and which movie they saw didn’t matter because they spent the whole time kissing and feeling each other in the dark back row while the kids who were uncoupled chucked popcorn at them. He had to circle back to his house once after picking her up because he forgot his wallet, and when she assumed she’d just wait outside, he’d looked at her like she was crazy and insisted she come in. “Hello,” she said, tugging down the hem of her skirt when Mrs. Marik came down to the kitchen to meet her. “It’s nice to meet you. I was just—”

“Sit down, sit down,” Mrs. Marik said. “Are you hungry? You’re Francis Gleeson’s daughter, right?” When Kate nodded, she knew that Mrs. Marik knew every single thing that had happened on Jefferson just a year and a half earlier, and wondered for the first time if Eddie did, too.

Their game schedules mostly conflicted, but he managed to come to a few of her home games and brought friends along with him, which made the girls on her team happy. They went to the Gillam Diner one night, just the two of them, and instead of driving her straight home, he drove his mother’s hatchback to the most shadowed corner of the lot behind the post office and took her hand and slid it into his pants. “You’re so serious,” he whispered as she raised her hand up and down like he showed her. In the moonlight—full and luminous that night—she saw
how handsome he was, how much he liked her, and yet sometimes, after being with him for a few hours, she felt lonelier than she had before. He reached up and pulled out her hair tie so her hair came tumbling down. He closed his eyes and inhaled.

The only fight they had was not a real fight, just a very tense few hours. They were at Pies-on-Pizza, the Giants game blaring over their heads. Eddie kept sucking on his straw though his cup was empty. He rattled the ice inside, looked at her, and out of nowhere asked about Peter and everything that had happened at the end of eighth grade. “When you first got to school last year it was like you were famous. Everyone knew you were Sara and Natalie’s little sister, and that your dad had been shot. So that guy was really into you, I guess?” Eddie put his elbows on the table. “Made his mom crazy?”

Kate felt something in her close up. She couldn’t account for how angry she felt that he’d asked, that he presumed to know a thing about what had happened.

She put down her slice and pushed her plate away.

“I heard different stories at school but I figured I’d ask you.”

“It’s really no one’s business.”

Eddie smirked. “Well, that’s true. But your ex-boyfriend’s mom shot your dad. Something like that will get mileage, Kate. Look at your dad’s face. You think people aren’t going to talk about that?”

“Don’t talk about my dad,” she said, and stood up from the table.

“I can talk about whatever I want.” He sat back and folded his arms. “Why are you acting like this?”

“And he wasn’t my boyfriend.”

She walked out of the pizza place. She turned onto Central Ave. and with her head down walked quickly past the dance studio, the tobacco shop, the firehouse.

Eddie jogged up beside her. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry. The newspaper said he was your boyfriend.”

It had never occurred to her that the whole thing had been in the
newspaper. She walked faster. Her mother must have stopped the papers from coming to their house. She must have hidden them away.

“He was my best friend.”

“So then—”

“I want to go home.”

“Kate, come on.”

“I’m walking. You can go.”

But he couldn’t go, of course, because he’d been raised to see a girl home when he took her out. So he followed her from a few paces behind until they arrived at Jefferson. Then he jogged back to town to retrieve his mother’s car.

At home Kate told Sara that she would never speak to him again. She told her mother that she didn’t feel well, and went to bed early. She heard the phone ringing, her mother asking Sara to see if she was awake, so she closed her eyes and pulled the covers over her head. The next morning, a Sunday, as Kate and her parents were headed out to Mass—Sara claimed she went the night before but Kate knew she spent the hour browsing lipsticks at CVS—they opened the door to find a pot of mums on their welcome mat, and a note from Eddie. “From who?” her father said as her mother elbowed him. “John Marik’s kid? Wouldn’t he be older than Kate?”

“What am I supposed to do with a pot of mums?” Kate asked.

“You should invite him over some night for dinner,” Lena said.

“Oh, that would be wonderful,” Sara said.

They made up because it was the easiest thing to do. Paul Benjamin asked Sara to the holiday formal, and for a second it looked like they’d be at the same table as Eddie and Kate. Kate looked forward to sitting with Sara, but Sara seemed annoyed by the idea, so it was for the best when the table got too big and had to be split in two. At the dance, once Sara went out back to smoke, Kate let Eddie kiss her on the dance floor, in full view of their teachers and chaperones. Eddie drew her close, his hand pressing the hard cage of her dress’s bodice, the reflected light from
the disco ball dancing across his face and the white tuxedo shirt he’d rented, the purple cummerbund selected after his mother called Lena to ask the color of Kate’s dress. He’d left his tuxedo jacket at his seat, but he’d already sweat through the back of his shirt and kept asking Kate if she wanted something to drink. He was nervous, Kate realized, and felt a swell of real affection for him. After the dance, he told the rest of the people who’d been at their table to go ahead without them. Sara looked over her shoulder at her sister as she and Paul exited through the gym doors as if to ask if all was well. Kate waved her on.

Alone in the parking lot, Eddie asked if Kate wanted to check out his older brother’s apartment, so Kate went. His brother had graduated from college, was commuting in to the city every morning, had renovated the garage by himself so he’d have his own space. The Mariks lived just two blocks from school so they walked, and when Kate complained that her feet hurt from the stupid heels she was wearing, he offered her a piggyback ride. “Giddyup,” he said when she climbed aboard. She swatted his butt while he galloped along the sidewalk, her dress dragging along the ground.

When they got to the brother’s apartment, the brother was not there, and Kate understood immediately. “He’s in Boston until Sunday,” Eddie offered casually. “Visiting some of his college friends.” The lights of the main house were off and she wondered if it was only the parents of girls who waited up or just Kate’s parents in particular. Eddie unzipped her dress and she thought, Okay, this is fine. When he guided her to the pullout couch that had already been pulled out and made up, she felt a tiny bit scared. She was wearing new underwear. She’d spritzed perfume on her stomach. A person who did these things, she knew, could not then pretend to be taken by surprise. “Be careful,” her mother had said when he picked her up, another couple, a pair of seniors, in the front seat of an unfamiliar car. She’d looked at Kate as if there was something urgent she wanted to tell her but had forgotten, and now there wasn’t enough time. And though Kate didn’t mind what was happening, didn’t object, she found herself thinking of home, and how she would have
been just as happy staying in that night. As Eddie reared away from her to open a condom—no doubt his brother’s—and tug it on with a look of total concentration, she thought of a mug of hot tea with honey and Sara on the couch next to her with a pile of cookies lined up on her lap and Natalie on the phone at the stroke of nine o’clock to ask what were they doing, put her on speaker, let her listen to the house for a minute.

After, Eddie propped himself up on his elbows and studied her. He wanted to know if it hurt. When she said it did, he wanted to know if it mostly hurt or if it hurt just a little. Did it also feel good? Kate said it did, though it did not. He seemed very sober despite all the sips from the flask the boys had been passing around back at school.

“I love you, Kate,” he said.

“Get outta here, Eddie. Cut it out.” She wondered what they were going to do about the sheets. Did the brother have his own washer and dryer, or would Eddie have to sneak them into the house?

“I’m serious,” he said. “Don’t say it back if you don’t mean it, but I think you love me, too.”

Kate rose up to kiss him.

She told no one. Not Sara or Nat. None of the friends she sat with at lunch. It didn’t seem that important, not nearly as important as people would make it. It was just a thing that happened, same as all other things that happened. The main difference was that Eddie stopped by all the time now, and no longer called first. She’d see the shape of him in the glass before he rang the bell and feel tired, wish she had five minutes of warning so she might hide. At Christmas he bought her a pair of earrings, and when she popped open the box and saw them, she knew she’d learned at least a little something because she didn’t blurt out right away that she didn’t have pierced ears. Sara and Nat had warned her that he’d probably get her a present, so she’d gotten him a book about football
because football was his favorite sport and it was on display at the end of the aisle at the bookstore.

“You like him?” her father asked one night. He was sitting in his recliner, a drink in one hand, the remote in the other, and for a minute Kate could pretend he was just home from work. There had been talk about him going back in a few months, an inside job he’d called it when she overheard him telling Lena, a desk jockey, they’d drum something up for him. But his eyesight was a problem, even with the prosthetic eye. He’d get his pension, and while he hadn’t been on duty when he got injured, they’d found a way that he could go out on the higher tier of disability so he’d get more. Sometimes men came to see him in pairs or groups of three, and Kate recognized them as cops from the moment they stepped out of their cars and looked around. Now, he muted the television before swiveling around to look at her.

“Yeah, he’s fine,” Kate said.

The room was silent. In the kitchen, Lena was mashing bananas for bread and watching an episode of
Days
she’d taped.

“Kate,” Francis said simply, an admonishment and a question all wrapped into one.

And then her busha died. She had a cough, which turned out to be the flu, and then that turned into pneumonia. Kate’s lab partner had had pneumonia that fall but she’d returned to school after only a week, so it never crossed Kate’s mind that Busha wouldn’t return to her little kitchen, to the leftover bits and pieces of food she kept Saran-wrapped in her fridge for far too long. Lena went to stay in Bay Ridge for a night to help sort her things and figure out what to do about Nonno. As they planned the funeral and made decisions, Kate’s parents talked about money bluntly and openly, something that had never happened before, and for the first time Kate worried that they might not have enough.
The price of a mahogany coffin. The price of food for the reception after, whether they could get away with cold sandwiches or if people would expect hot food, whether they needed a full bar or just beer and wine. Lena said she didn’t want her father to feel ashamed, and at that Francis had sighed. How much could Karol kick in on his bartender’s salary? And Natusia? “There can’t be any surprises now,” Francis said to Lena as they sat at the dining room table and calculated, recalculated. But how could a person head off what they don’t know is coming? Kate wondered. She remembered the expression on her mother’s face when she told her that she’d grown out of her cleats.

If Kate could chart on a graph when she thought of Peter and when she didn’t, the week of Busha’s wake and funeral would have shown a seven-day-long peak. New York City was a big place, and Bay Ridge was only a small part, but still, she kept imagining him showing up at the church for the funeral Mass. She fantasized about turning around in the pew and spotting him standing at the back by the holy water font, but when the day came and she did turn around, the back half of the church was completely empty, the front half populated mostly by childhood friends of her mother, aunt, and uncle. After the funeral, Kate and Sara spent two nights at the apartment keeping their nonno company while Lena and Natusia completed paperwork at Busha’s little kitchen table. Whenever she had a chance to be alone—one day she walked down to the diner for an egg cream, the next day over to the water to look at the bridge and the birds—she thought, it will be a time like this. It will be an ordinary, overcast day, and he’ll just walk by. “Kate?” he’ll say, doubling back.

Eddie was waiting for her when she arrived home. His family had sent flowers to the funeral home, but now he was on their porch with a tray of eggplant rollatini from his mother. He hugged Lena. “Hey, Eddie,” Sara said and kept going past him to the front door.