Death Will Help You Leave Him (22 page)

“Gimme the eight,” Patti ordered. “We’ll see about that, Miss Shirley. You got a fitting room?”

“Behind the mirrored wardrobe to the right, madam.” Luz kept her eyes down and her hands busy, pulling the silky garments from their drawers and refolding them with practiced speed. “Let me also show you one that is a little different. You may like it better. And we have both in lavender and a very pale green.”

Soon Shirley and Patti were tucked away in the fitting room. Squeals emerged from behind the wardrobe. In minutes they had thrown half a dozen rejected garments onto the plush carpet. Nightgowns and peignoirs spilled out under the latticed half-door. Luz bent to retrieve them.

“What did I tell you? An eight, honestly!”

“I am so an eight. This gown is cut small.”

“Listen to huh. Or is there something you’re not telling me? Maybe you should make an appointment with Dr. Feingold.”

“Shush! Netta will hear you. She has a fit if you mention him, after that mess last year.”

Luz frowned. What were they talking about? Luz’s gynecologist was Dr. Feingold. Frankie had asked her for his number last year. He’d made it sound as if Netta needed a hysterectomy. Female trouble, nothing to suggest they still had a sex life. She hadn’t questioned him because she wanted so much to believe him. He’d been lying, or Netta wouldn’t be pregnant now. But what had happened last year? A mess. Did they mean an abortion?

“Miss! Miss! Can we get some service here!”

Luz hurried back into the showroom.

“May I offer you some espresso, ladies?”

“No caffeine for me,” Netta said, “until this one decides to come out.” She patted her swollen belly. “Oh, look, Mamma Silvia, he’s awake.”

Sure enough, a little cone-shaped ripple traveled across Netta’s belly like a shark’s fin moving through the water. Luz started the noisy espresso machine, glad of the excuse to hide her face. She brought the tiny cup with its sliver of lemon and minuscule sugar cubes to Silvia. Frankie’s mother had two fingers pressed to her forehead, just above the bridge of her nose.

“Your coffee, madam.” She turned to Netta. “She is ill? Or she has lost someone, perhaps?”

Netta thrust her elbows out and dug her hands into the small of her back.

“Actually, I’m the one that’s lost my husband.”

“Oh, I am so sorry. I did not know.”

“Well, how could you?” She didn’t add “stupid girl,” but her tone supplied it.

Silvia opened her eyes and took the coffee.

“You cannot imagine a mother’s grief. God should not allow a child to die before his parents.”

“Well, I have a wife’s grief.” Netta sounded sulky. “I can’t help it if everybody says I have to pull myself together and move on. A man is not supposed to leave his wife and children to manage on their own, either.”

The corners of Silvia’s mouth pinched together.

“As if he died on purpose, out of spite! You have no respect. And you are not left to manage on your own. You have plenty of help from family and friends— all kinds of help.”

She means financial help
, Luz thought. She bent down and picked an imaginary grain of sugar off the rose-colored carpet to hide her face.

“When I had babies at home,” Silvia said, “I still had to work long hours in the bakery. For thirty years I got up with Massimo at four in the morning.”

“I can’t help it,” Netta pouted, “if my brothers love me and my kids enough that they’re trying to make it a tiny bit easier for me to give them my full attention. Times have changed since your day.”

So Netta’s brothers supplied the financial support. If they dealt in half-million-dollar cars as a hobby, they could afford it. They had been angry about Frankie’s infidelity to their sister. Did they disapprove of Frankie’s drug dealing? Or were they part of it? Vinnie had said they were dangerous. They’d seemed aboveboard to Bruce and Jimmy.

Luz smiled as she thought of Bruce. She hadn’t known a man in early sobriety could be so nice. The frozen heart she had carried around since Frankie died thawed a little whenever he was around.

All at once, Silvia gave a keening cry. Luz whipped around just in time to catch the empty espresso cup. The saucer fell to the floor and bounced once on the carpet as Silvia clasped her hands on her breast.

“Oh, my heart! My heart!”

Shirley and Patti popped out of the fitting room.

“What happened? Is she having a heart attack?”

“Aunt Silvia? What’s the matter? Are you all right?”

“She’s fine,” Netta drawled.

“Heartless, heartless,” Silvia breathed through stiff lips. She pounded her clasped hands against her left breast, as if to emphasize her broken heart and Netta’s lack of one.

“Oh, all right, I’m sorry,” Netta snapped. “Though don’t ask me what for. Look, we’re both upset. Maybe this trip wasn’t such a good idea. Get yourselves changed,” she ordered Shirley and Patti. “We gotta get her home.”

The two women disappeared with little squeaks.

“Would you like me to call you a cab?” Luz asked, struggling to sound polite rather than eager.

“No, we came by car. Are you okay now, Mamma Silvia?” She tugged at her hand, now gripped firmly in Silvia’s. The brief storm between them seemed to be over.

“I want to go home,” the older woman said.

Netta pulled away and stood up, rotating on the fulcrum of her huge belly. As Shirley and Patti emerged, bundled up and ready to leave, she waddled over to the door. She opened the door, letting in a blast of cold air, and stuck her head out.

“Vinnie!” she bellowed.

“Oh, no!” Luz’s hand went to her mouth in an unconscious gesture of dismay.

Frankie’s cousin Vinnie, dressed in a brown leather bomber jacket and rugged jeans, peered over Netta’s shoulder into the hot and intensely feminine room. His heavy brow made his genuine frown more menacing.

“So ya ready to go already?” he began. “I’d a bet you’d be ages. Didja buy—” He stopped short as his gaze fell on Luz.

She stood helpless in the middle of the rosy space like a maiden staked out for a boutique-stalking dragon. Her eyes pleaded:
Don’t tell them who I am.
The frown bulged downward as if his eyebrows might reach the tip of his nose. His jaw set like a slab of concrete. His gaze bored into her, then passed with slow deliberation from Silvia, drooping martyred on her gilt stool, to Shirley and Patti, twittering obliviously. He looked down at Netta, who stood as close to chest to chest with him as her belly would allow. Her face tilted upward under his chin like a buttercup.

“Oh, Vinnie, take us home.”

“You got it.” His face softened. Then the squared chin came up. His glance ranged over Netta’s head and back to Luz. “Lemme go bring the car right up to the door, a guy just pulled out. Miss, wanna come help? You can hold the spot.”

“Certainly.” She shouldn’t leave these ladies alone in the store. If the boss knew, it could mean her job. “Of course, sir.”

She followed him out, his disapproving back looming like a wall ahead of her. In the street, he turned and faced her.

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” he said.

“I didn’t— it was a— a coincidence,” she faltered. “I didn’t know.” She gestured to the women inside the shop. Shirley and Patti still chattered as they picked up the delicate garments, shook them out, held them up, and exclaimed over them. “It’s not my fault. They just came in.”

“You’re not a good liar, Luz.” Vinnie shook his head sorrowfully. “I like you, Luz, but I’m telling you for your own good. It’s over. You gotta get out of our lives.”

Her chin set.

“I loved him. I want to know what happened to him.”

“Let the past rest.”

“I can’t.” Her chest felt tight, her breath constricted. Her eyes brimmed with unshed tears.

“Then I can’t help you,” he said.

Jimmy breasted his way through the usual crowd around the church door toward where I stood talking with my sponsor.

“What’s happenin’?” I gave him the ritual greeting. Jimmy usually gave me a lot of space when he saw me in serious conversation with Glenn. He approved of my sponsor, who had an even shorter way with my bullshit than Jimmy did.

The ritual answer was, “What’s happenin’?” Jimmy didn’t give it.

“I need to tell you something bad. Sorry, Glenn.”

“No problem,” Glenn said. “Take it easy, man, and think about what I said.” He do-si-doed around a couple of smokers standing close by and fell into effortless conversation with two women just beyond them. I didn’t know if he knew them or not. In AA, it didn’t matter.

“What? Is Barbara okay?”

“Oh, no, no, nothing like that.” Jimmy patted my shoulder. “Didn’t mean to scare you. I just ran into Mars, remember Mars?”

“The god of war,” I said. “So he hasn’t picked up.”

“I saw him in the beginners’ meeting next door. He told me Kevin is dead.”

“Your new sponsee? He picked up?” I had become interested in whether or not anybody I knew had relapsed. Just like every other sober alcoholic.

“I don’t know.” Jimmy shook his head with an impatient snap, as if a pesky fly kept trying to land on it.

“Come on, let’s go down the block for coffee. Tell me what’s bothering you. Anyhow, I know. This poor guy croaked and you feel responsible.”

“You’re right. I do feel responsible.”

“So come on.” I started down the path. This particular church had a postage stamp of a front lawn, surrounded by wrought-iron fence.

Jimmy didn’t follow.

“The meeting isn’t finished. The break is over. They’re going back in.”

“There’ll be another meeting tomorrow,” I said. “Tonight, even, if you want to find one instead of going home after we get some coffee. You want to talk. I want to hear it. I’ll even comment in nothing but program slogans if you like.”

“Don’t be a dork.”

“Hey, I’m powerless,” I retorted.

“Okay, okay, I’m coming.”

The greasy spoon around the corner had good coffee. The thick white cup and saucer with the thin green line didn’t hold much, but they didn’t call it “tall” or charge three dollars and change for it. And an old-fashioned waitress in a green cotton dress came right to our table and filled it up again for free. The name embroidered on her pocket was Galadriel. You can’t have everything.

I tapped a cigarette out of the pack. You couldn’t light up even in a coffee shop any more. But they wouldn’t stop me from playing with it. Jimmy tore off strips of paper napkin, twisted them into thicker strips, and twiddled with them. He’d done that forever. Since we were too young to drink coffee.

“Okay, bro, what’s on your mind?” I asked. “You always say nobody’s sponsor is their Higher Power. So how come Kevin dying is your fault?”

“He was doing so well. Maybe I overpraised him, so he thought if he admitted he was struggling, he’d be letting me down.”

“So how did he die?” I asked. “Did he OD or didn’t he?”

“Mars said no. He talked to Kevin’s parents. The cops called it a mugging. They found him down on West Street around four in the morning.”

“Where the far-out gay bars all used to be. A gay-bashing, maybe? Love gone wrong?”

“I don’t know.” Jimmy took a sip of cooling coffee. “They’ve cleaned that neighborhood up a lot— rebuilt the whole waterfront. And he was supposed to put relationships on the shelf for the first year.”

“Most of what happened in some of those bars wasn’t what you and I would call a relationship,” I said.

Jimmy laughed, but he still looked unhappy.

“So what’s bothering you, bro? No OD means they didn’t find drugs in his system. So he was clean.”

“I think he went down there to cop,” Jimmy said. “And I know he had zero money. He was crashing with his parents out in Queens and waiting tables a few hours a week.”

Galadriel the waitress came over with the brown coffeepot in one hand and the orange one in the other. She gave us an inquiring look.

“No, thanks,” I said. “Not even unleaded. I’m awash.”

Jimmy shook his head.

“No, thank you.”

We watched her retreat behind the counter and start putting donuts from a box into one of those clear plastic domed display containers.

“Dude, I hate to tell you,” I said, “but there’s a time-honored way for gay guys to get drugs without money.”

“I know that. But Kevin was deathly scared of HIV. He’d survived both IV drugs and the old gay sex scene without getting the virus, and he wouldn’t do anything that might put that at risk. He said if he did have money, he’d rather spend it on crack than on the HIV cocktail.”

“Sounds to me like the guy was all but waving a sign in front of your face that he was planning a mission.”

“It does now!” Jimmy said. I hadn’t seen him lose his equanimity like this in ages. “I thought he was being dramatic, making a point. How could I have been so stupid?”

“Oh, Lord, have mercy!” I exclaimed. “James F.X. Cullen is human like the rest of us.”

“You don’t have to rub it in. I feel bad enough already.”

“I still don’t get what you think the scenario could have been. If he wasn’t copping drugs or renting his ass out, what was he doing there?”

“I think he went there to cop, he just didn’t get the chance before someone killed him. Maybe a mugger took the money off him.”

“What money? He had no money.”

“I think he got some,” Jimmy said. “I think it had to do with Frankie’s murder.”

“Why would you think that?” I asked.

“He hinted,” Jimmy said. “I don’t know how he got the idea we were looking into it.”

“That would be me. When I asked him and Mars all those questions at the meeting, I must have been less subtle than I thought. It’s not your fault.”

“It’s my fault if he got involved and it got him killed.” Jimmy groaned aloud. The couple at the next table swiveled to stare, then turned back to their coffee and their conversation. New Yorkers.

“He wanted to find something out,” I said. “And lay his little triumph at your feet, like a cat bringing you a mouse. You can’t help being such a fucking good example of recovery that your pigeons idolize you.”

“I told him to let it go!” Jimmy was too agitated to sit still. He stood up and shrugged his jacket on. He wound a scarf around his neck. Unwound it. Wound it on again. Pulled his gloves out of his pockets and stuffed them back in again a couple of times. “I told him to keep the focus on his sobriety.”