Inside the O'Briens (20 page)

CHAPTER 20

T
he smell of Sunday supper permeates their bedroom. Joe can't identify what boiled animal or vegetable he's detecting, and it's not actually an appealing odor, but it triggers his hunger anyway. He stands in profile in front of the mirror and pats his relaxed stomach, now flattened to the shape it used to temporarily take when he sucked it in as far as he could. His love handles and gut are gone. His physical therapist told him he needs four to five thousand calories a day to maintain his weight. Even with medical permission to eat all the donuts and pizza he wants, he's rapidly shedding pounds. Constant fidgeting burns calories.

Joe's just arrived home after a day shift. Changing into civilian clothes, he's removed his gun belt and pants, but he's stuck in his shirt. His fingers are flicking, playing Mozart on an invisible flute over the buttons of his uniform shirt, ignoring Joe's commands, refusing to cooperate. He's concentrating on his fingers as if he were aiming to thread the world's smallest needle, trying to will his thumbs and index fingers to work the simple buttons, but no amount of focus will stop them from goofing around. Heat is building inside him, and he's holding his breath, losing patience, about to rip the goddamn shirt in half.

“Joe! Supper!”

Fuck it. He'll change later. He throws on a pair of gray sweatpants and walks into the kitchen.

The table is set, and everyone is gathered around it but Katie. Colleen's chair is pushed back a considerable distance from the table to make room for her enormous pregnant belly. Her swollen, socked feet are propped up on JJ's lap. The poor girl looks as if she could pop any minute, but her due date isn't until December. She needs to hold the little bugger in for one more month.

Joe prays every day that their baby is healthy. Ten fingers and ten toes and no HD. But once the baby is born, the decision to know his or her gene status will belong to the baby, not the parents, and the youngest age eligible for testing is eighteen. So they won't know if JJ's baby carries the HD gene until he or she is an adult, and then only if he or she wants to know.

Eighteen years. Joe probably won't be here. And if he is, he probably won't be
here
, living in their triple-decker on Cook Street. He'll be either dead or in an assisted-living facility, and either way, he'll likely never know the fate of his grandchild. Will this cursed disease extend its wicked tentacles into the next, innocent generation, or will this lineage of HD end with JJ? He prays every day that it ends with JJ.

And Meghan. God, he's having a hard time accepting that she's got this monster hiding in her DNA, too. Meghan's going to get HD. It's a bleeding wound in Joe's gut that no surgery can fix, and the pain at times is almost unbearable. He prays, sometimes through tears, that she'll dance into her forties without so much as a whisper of HD. He prays and hopes for all of his kids, and on good days, he believes. But the future weighs on him, on all of them. And the guilt. It's a miracle Joe can stand upright with all the guilt he's carrying.

Rosie places a basket of soda bread and a stick of butter on the table.

“Are we starting without Katie?” asks Meghan as she adjusts the wrap of the black wool scarf around her neck.

“She has one minute,” says Rosie, threatening the second hand of the clock.

Joe takes a sip of what he expected to be water through his straw and is surprised by the tingly, crisp taste of beer in his mouth. He swallows and looks to Patrick, who is wearing a sly grin. Joe winks at him and sucks up another sip. Everyone else at the table has been given a glass jelly jar filled with water. No beer until supper. Joe's “glass” is an opaque, plastic Dunkin' Donuts to-go cup with a lid and straw. He's accidentally dropped, sloshed, and even flung too many glasses and mugs. Rosie grew tired of picking up the shattered mess, and he certainly can't be unpredictably smashing glassware or tossing hot coffee into the air once there's a baby around, so he now drinks everything out of one of these plastic, lidded cups. At times, it's felt downright humiliating, a grown man restricted to drinking from a sippy cup, but now he's seeing the upside. Beer before supper.

Katie appears on the threshold of the kitchen, looking stiff and terrified. She's not alone.

“Everyone,” says Katie, clearing her throat. “This is Felix.” She pauses. “My boyfriend. Felix, you've met Meghan. This is JJ and Colleen. That's Patrick. And my mom and dad.”

Felix smiles and says hello to everyone. He shakes hands with JJ and Patrick.

“Hi, Mrs. O'Brien. Mr. O'Brien.”

Rosie smiles. “Welcome, Felix.”

Joe stands. He and Felix shake hands. Joe pats him on the shoulder.

“Hey, Felix. Good to see you again. Glad you finally made it to supper,” says Joe.

“I'll go get him a chair,” says Meghan.

“Wait,
again
?” asks Katie, her head swiveling from Felix to Joe and back.

“Hun, I'm your father and a cop. You think I don't know for
a second if someone's been coming in and out of this house for the past six months?”

Katie blushes, and her eyes don't know which way to go.

“Why didn't you tell me you already met my dad?” Katie asks Felix.

He shrugs and smiles. “I was kind of looking forward to this moment.”

“I suppose you did a background check on him,” says Katie.

“Yup. He's clean,” says Joe. “We'll have to beat that Yankee thing out of him, though.”

“She must really like you if she's bringing you to supper,” says JJ.

“Or she's trying to scare you off,” says Patrick.

“Ignore them,” Katie says to Felix. “Felix works for Biofuel.”

“We know,” says Joe. “Felix and I are pretty well caught up these days.”

“What? How?” asks Katie, her voice shrill.

“We chat when we walk Yaz,” says Joe.

“Are you kidding me?” asks Katie.

“Sometimes, I just so happen to be on the stoop when he's leaving. Quite early in the morning, most of the time,” says Joe, enjoying every second of this.

Rosie tells Felix to please have a seat and hands him a plate. Rosie's playing it cool now, but the lid completely blew off her kettle when she first found out about Felix from Joe. She took it personally. She's consciously and specifically taught both girls what to look for in a man. He should be a man of faith from a good family, have a steady job, and ideally live in Charlestown. Joe pointed out that Felix is, in fact, all of these things, but Rosie just scoffed at him and simmered.

He knows the fine-print subtext of her “suitable husband” lessons. Being a man of faith can only mean being Catholic, preferably a parishioner of St. Francis Church. Being from
a good family means being Irish. Having a steady job means working for the post office, the fire department, the police, BEMS, the MBTA, or Logan Airport, not for some highfalutin corporate company she's never heard of. And living in Charlestown means born and bred. Townie, not Toonie.

Rosie sits and says grace. Meghan passes a beer to everyone but Colleen. Today's supper is ham, baked potatoes, boiled turnip and spinach, and salad. Joe grabs the salt shaker.

“Felix, do you eat meat?” asks Rosie, holding the platter of ham.

“I eat everything,” says Felix.

“So you thought before today,” says Patrick.

“Don't be fresh,” says Rosie, passing the platter to Felix.

“Ma, I won't be here for supper next week,” says Meghan. “
Nutcracker
rehearsals.”

Rosie nods. “Okay. Felix, how is everything?”

“Delicious, thank you.”

The ham is rubber, the potatoes are rocks, the turnips are unrecognizable, and the spinach looks more like what Joe hawks up when he's got the flu than an edible vegetable. This young man has some damn fine manners. And he must really like Katie.

“We're gonna have a high chair in here soon,” says JJ, his broad shoulders slouched and elbows tucked awkwardly close in front of him. “How are we all gonna fit in this kitchen?”

“We'll fit,” says Rosie.

“How?” asks JJ.

“We'll fit,” Rosie says again.

Joe agrees with JJ. He looks at Colleen and Felix. It's time for a change here.

“I'm thinking of taking that wall down,” says Joe, happy with the idea of making room for his expanding family, a high chair at the table, a playpen in the corner, an extra seat for his daughter's boyfriend.

“What?” asks Rosie. “You'll do no such thing.”

“Why not? I could turn that wall into a bar with a nice stone countertop and some stools, open it up to the girls' old bedroom, make that a dining room. I bet you could sit ten comfortably in there.”

“No.”

“You could—that room's much bigger than this room. If we move all the crap out of there and—”

“You're not doing that.”

“Why not?”

“Taking down the wall? Building a stone counter? Are you crazy? You don't know how to do any of that. You'll make a huge mess.”

“Ye of little faith.”

“More like ye of vast experience.”

It's true, his past attempts at home improvement haven't exactly been episodes of
This Old House
.

“I'll get Donny over to help. We could replace these crappy old floors and the countertop, too.”

“I'm handy,” offers Felix. “I could help.”

“Yeah, I'll work on it with you, Dad,” says JJ.

“I want to demolish the wall,” says Patrick.

Joe offers up his sippy cup, and the four men toast to their new construction job.

“No one's demolishing anything,” says Rosie.

“Why not, Ma?” asks Meghan. “I think it would look awesome. And you don't use our old room for any real purpose.”

Meghan's right. The girls' old bedroom is where Rosie stores the Christmas decorations that don't stay out all year, boxes of old clothes, and all kinds of junk. They could clear it out, relocate everything to the basement or a closet or give it all to Goodwill. Joe could knock down the wall and give them a proper dining room. The idea excites him. Their kitchen is tired and outdated. It needs to be renovated. This is just the kind of
project he needs, something big and manly and meaningful. Something to keep him from going batshit crazy when he can no longer work. He hates to face it, but that day is coming. It's either knocking the wall down or watching Rosie's
Oprah
tapes all day, every day. Rosie's going to have to come around on this. He's going to need a sledgehammer.

“We can talk about it later,” says Rosie.

“Dad, you working another shift tonight?” asks Patrick.

“No.”

“Why you still in uniform?” asks Patrick.

Joe slams his sippy cup down on the table. “Why don't you mind your fuckin' business?”

Everyone goes silent. The clinking of silverware stops. Patrick holds his beer midair and doesn't move. Katie's eyes are wide, unblinking, her drawn face the color of the baked potatoes. Joe doesn't look at anyone else.

Heat rushes through him. For a fragile moment, he recognizes that his reaction was too big, his anger inappropriate, that he was wrong to snap at Patrick and should apologize, but in a flash, all reasonable thoughts are gone, eviscerated by a screaming, boiling-hot rage.

He pushes back from the table to stand, but the push is dramatic and too forceful, and the chair crashes to the crappy linoleum floor. Joe then stumbles over the upturned legs as he backs up, and now both the chair and Joe are on the ground.

A mocking laugh leaks out of Patrick before he strangles it.

Now riding the back of humiliation, Joe's rage accelerates. He stands, lifts the chair by two legs, and smashes it against the floor. The legs crack off and several of the back spindles break apart. He tosses the chairless legs to the ground and marches off to his bedroom.

He paces and paces, wanting to scream or break something else or rip his hair out or scratch his skin off or throw that statue of the Virgin Mary through the fuckin' window. He
paces and paces, and he's praying that no one comes in, that no one he loves steps in front of this burning rage that's tearing through him, that doesn't belong to him. He feels possessed, a puppet strung to the sadistic hand of the devil.

He paces, and the white-hot rage consumes him, the pressure building and blistering and pressing against his every molecule, and he's sure he'll physically explode if the rage doesn't leave him in some other way. He paces, searching for a safe place to send it.

He catches his reflection in the mirror. His uniform shirt. He grabs the shirt at the midline and rips it wide open as if he were Clark Kent called upon to save the world. Buttons pop off and scatter along the wood floor. He stares at himself in the mirror. His face is red. His eyes look crazy. He's breathing fast and hard through his mouth, fogging up the mirror. There is no Superman
S
on his chest. Just a Kevlar vest over a Hanes white T-shirt over an ordinary man.