Jo Piazza (2 page)

Hook also had distinctive red curls that even in the streetlight screamed, “Fire, Danger, Step back or I’ll cut you.” I knew those curls. I had been braiding them into pigtails since I was seven years old.

I met Annie Capaletti in the second grade when she saved me from what could have been a completely embarrassing and wholly defining moment for me as the new girl in town. My family had just moved to Yardville, New Jersey, from the Chicago suburbs. We had driven the fourteen-hour trip in a single day in our Ford minivan; our small family of four was helmed by a father who was too cheap to shell out $59 for an Econo Lodge. My brother and I were so cranky and ornery (remember this was back in the days before family cars had DVD players) that my mom broke her cardinal rule of not allowing us to eat fast food and let us have Happy Meals four times along the way. Those delicious burgers with their waxy yellow cheese and chicken nuggets in the shape of an old man’s thumb quieted us down but also wreaked havoc on our faux-food virgin bellies. And so I sat in my first day of second grade with a grumbly, fussy stomach and no idea where the bathroom was in this new strange school building.

I held it in. I held it in all through the Pledge of Allegiance and roll call and when Miss Sherman called me in front of the class to introduce me. By that point I was shuffling from foot to foot as I smiled shyly, praying that Miss Sherman would pull me aside to show me around the school before we began the lessons for the day—making the bathroom tour a priority. But the completely clueless Miss Sherman just told me to take my seat.

That’s when it happened. My stomach had different ideas than I did about how to impress my new classmates. Out escaped a low grumbly fart … the kind of fart that can brand you a freak from the second to the twelfth grade and ensure the boys call you something horrible like Flatulate Face, Air Poop, or Log Leaver into puberty and beyond. A cute redhead with pigtail braids and a smattering of freckles across her nose was the first to react. She looked at me for a split second just as the snickers began and she moved into action. She put the heels of her palms to the middle of her heart-shaped mouth and vibrated her lips against them making a
Pfffffffffttttttttttt!
sound almost identical to the one that came out of my other end. The entire class let out the laugh they had been about to release for the first noise and assumed Annie had just made them both. Miss Sherman stared down at the little redhead with a look of consternation.

“Miss Capaletti, I believe you know your way to the principal’s office, don’t you?” she brayed down at the girl.

“Sure do.”

And with that Annie stood up, gave me a wink, and marched out of the classroom to collect her punishment. I later learned she was sentenced to an afternoon of clapping out erasers, a task she said she never really minded anyway because she got to snoop on the teachers in the lounge after class let out.

That particular day she heard Miss Sherman declare her love for Principal Nailer to the school nurse.

From then on I was completely indebted to and in love with Annie. We did everything together until I left Yardville for college at Villanova and she went to Boston for culinary school. But even after that we still saw each other on holidays and found ways to work together at the local waterpark on our summer vacations. Annie’s job was actually to tell larger women they were too fat to fit down the waterslide. She reveled in it.

Annie was the first person I called when my mom told me the news that my grandmother had died from a prolonged battle with colon cancer, and she had visited me almost every day that I had been staying in town.

How the hell did Annie end up in a police car?
wasn’t the first question to cross my mind. This wasn’t even the craziest vehicle I had seen her commandeer for a joy ride—that would be Old Man Jenkins’s John Deere tractor the night of our senior prom.

When I opened the door to nudge her awake, her head teetered forward and she vomited all over my bare feet. It had been weeks since I had a proper pedicure, but this was gross all the same.

The vomiting roused her a bit, which was good since I wasn’t game for wading through what didn’t end up on my toes to pull her from the car.

“Hi, Sophie,” she said as if we were meeting for coffee on a Sunday afternoon and not four hours past midnight with one of us in a stolen municipal vehicle.

“Hi, Annie,” I said back with the same nonchalance. “Whose car is this?”

She looked back and up, and I realized she didn’t have a clue how she got there. She was just coming out of a blackout. Annie had been drinking a lot lately. She was the owner of the town’s most beloved bar, so it didn’t seem out of character for her to have more than ten cocktails in an evening and, unfortunately, more often than not, still drive herself the two miles home from the bar.

Her job, after all, was to entertain customers and keep them happy so they came back and kept drinking. No one liked a sober bar owner. They were the pedophile priests of the hospitality industry.

At that moment I finally felt the unmistakable buzz of my iPhone, coupled with my ringer, turned to loud, in case I had dozed off and nearly missed this last stream of communications. Now was not the time for “Rump Shaker,” in the classical stylings of Wreckx-N-Effect, to be playing at maximum volume. I yanked it out of my pocket and stumbled through the pool of puke that had started to harden a little around my feet.

Eric (cell): You need to move on with your life. I’ve moved on with mine.

I instantaneously thought of a dozen things I could reply with. I could tell him I didn’t need to move on with my life since I could forgive him and we could get through this and move on with our lives together. Before my fingers could stroke the buttons, an aftershock rumbled through Annie and she dry heaved—and then retched out of her mouth and onto my phone. Sometimes a higher power does give you signs.

“Come on.” I pulled Annie’s shoulder and dragged her out of the car, half carrying her into the house, tears streaming down my face and other bodily fluids down hers. She threw herself onto the couch I had just vacated, forcing a plasticky
POOOOOOT
sound. I went to the bathroom to clean my feet and phone and change into an appropriate pair of pajamas. I grabbed a damp towel and de-puked Annie as best I could, then perched on the floor, my back against the plastic. I picked up the phone to read the message again, and as I composed and recomposed exactly the perfect thing to say that would make Eric fall madly back in love with me the instant he read it, my eyes became heavy and I fell asleep with the phone in my hand.

The morning sun hit the east-facing living room windows around 6:30. If my eyes were puffy and my head pounding amid the smell of dry vomit I could only imagine what Annie was about to experience when she opened her eyes to greet the day. There was no point in postponing the inevitable. I prepared to wake her with a swift tug of her big toe when Eleanor’s bellowing brass doorbell did the work for me.

“What the hell?” Annie gurgled before grabbing a pillow and pushing it down over her eyes. I managed to stand and looked out the window to see the police cruiser still parked askew in the driveway and two very pissed-off officers on my doorstep to match it. Apparently they had driven over in Annie’s abandoned car.

“Get up, cowgirl. You’re about to be corralled and you might want a change of clothes for this,” I yelled over my shoulder. I knew these cops. I had known these cops since the third grade when Sergeant Chris Zucker had these horribly smelly feet that he let air out at his desk in Teva sandals, and everyone called Sergeant Alan Bress, Alan Breast, something that still made me giggle because Alan had an unfortunate pair of man boobs, impossible to conceal even in his blue uniform.

“Morning, Sophie,” Chris said, crinkling his nose a little at the smell when I opened the door. “I think you have something that belongs to us.” I had seen Chris a few times since I came home a month ago. He had been at Eleanor’s wake. He came with his grandfather, who kissed my hand and told me the world, in Eleanor’s passing, had lost one of the true great beauties.

“We were just giving her a place to park for the night, Officer,” I said, smoothing down bangs that refused to settle against my forehead.

“She here?”

“Of course she is. She’s getting cleaned up.”

“Got our keys?”

“I believe they are still in the ignition.”

“Great place for ’em.”

“How’d she get them in the first place?” Now Alan, his chesticles straining against the brass buttons of his vest, looked sheepish and began playing with his imaginary bangs—the ones that were there before his receding hairline got the better of them.

“Alan made a bet with Annie and he lost,” Chris chimed in for his partner.

“Darts?”

“What else?”

“Doesn’t he know better than to challenge Annie on her home turf to her game?”

“I think Alan was a little tipsy himself. Anyway, he lost the bet.”

“So he gave her his car?”

“No, no, she just asked to run the siren. She said she wasn’t going to take it. But then she took it.” It was pretty obvious that these two, despite being on duty, had also been partaking of beverages at the bar, which is why they didn’t end up tracking Annie down until after the sun came up.

“Of course she did. It sounds like this is just as much Alan’s fault as Annie’s. I don’t see any reason to haul her in.”

Annie was famously good at darts. She had learned how to play while studying abroad in Prague, when a group of gangsters in her local pub took a liking to her because they had never seen a ginger before and took her under their wing. To pick up extra cash Annie worked with them hustling tourists who didn’t think such a pretty American girl would be so good at hitting a bull’s-eye or remaining standing while shooting bathtub vodka.

Chris looked down, and Alan shuffled his feet some more.

“There’s the problem. Annie caused quite the path of destruction on her way over here. She took out two mailboxes, dented a fire hydrant, and ran over Ms. Dinkdorf’s cat.”

I put my hand to my mouth. “Fluffy!”

“Cat heaven. Half the town saw her rip shit barreling through the streets with that siren going. We’ve got to get her for DUI and destruction of private property or we are going to be held liable.”

“So what are you going to do? Arrest her?”

“She can come to the station with us willingly and we’ll have to charge her and we can tell the judge to go easy on her. She’ll probably get probation and some alcohol education classes,” Chris said. Then, dropping his tone to a conspiratorial whisper, he went on, “Which I don’t think is necessarily a bad thing at this point. She’s kind of outgrown adorable drunk, don’t you think, Soph?”

“I hear you out there,” Annie said, all of a sudden appearing and looking absolutely no worse for the wear from the night before. Serial abusers of alcohol never suffer the same hangovers as us moderate drinkers—the same way I imagine serial daters rarely experience the same kind of heartache that the serial monogamous person enjoys after a bad breakup. She had somehow found a washed pair of jeans and a violet button-down top that looked killer with her green eyes and fresh-from-the-shower hair. It’s too bad Annie doesn’t like boys like “that,” because both the officers turned to mush when she strode over to them.

“Last I saw you I was getting my latest bull’s-eye,” she said, wrapping an arm around a red-faced Alan’s formidable waist.

“Last I saw you, you were burning rubber on Decatur, siren blaring and Backstreet Boys on the radio.” Now it was Annie’s turn to go red. If I knew anything about my friend’s tendency for blacking out, and at this point I knew a fair bit, it was that she had all her faculties about her until she hit some mysterious wall and then the rest of the night was a complete loss to her.

“You hauling me in?” Annie clasped her hands in front of her own waist with a coy smile, her embarrassment turned to obeisance in an instant.

“Get in your car, Annie, and we’ll sort it all out at the station.”

Annie and I rode to the police station together in silence.

The Yardville cop shack is a four-room affair with a reception area and tiny lobby containing a faded yellow couch that had seen better days back in the ’70s, a drunk tank, where I knew Annie had ended up a couple of times before I came back to town, a bathroom, and an open area for the town’s six cops and sheriff to do their desk work, which was minimal given the low level of exciting crime activity. I perched on the edge of the crusty old sofa waiting for Annie to emerge from the back, hopefully properly cowed after she had been filled in on the destruction she caused in the wee hours.

Cowed she wasn’t.

“BULLSHIT! Probation? Rehab? I don’t have a drinking problem!” Annie was stomping through the station like a rhinoceros on Red Bull.

“Annie, come on now,” old Sheriff McNulty said in his grandfatherly tones, better suited for public radio than reading people their rights. “We called the judge and we can give you probation and rehab, and none of this will stay on your record once you do those things. You don’t even have to go to court. He’s doing you a favor, you know, because he was a friend of your dad.”

“I. Don’t. Need. Rehab.”

I was starting to think that she did need some rehab, but I didn’t know how to tell her they were right. I stood up and asked McNulty, “What kind of rehab are we talking about? Does she have to go away? Does she just have to go to meetings?”

“That’s up to her and the judge. She needs to start by going to the town’s AA meeting tomorrow night in the Presbyterian church basement. Then we can talk about options and we can try to figure something out.”

Annie tossed me the keys to her MINI Cooper convertible in the parking lot.

“I don’t drive stick,” I shrieked, tossing them back.

“Figure it out. Suspended license, bitch.”

Blerg! I hadn’t touched a stick shift since high school when my boyfriend, Matt Siggman, got hopped up on whippets at a Dave Matthews concert (the first time he proved himself anything but boring and stone-faced sober) and I had to drive us home from Jones Beach in his Mustang convertible, the one he bought because he thought it made him look like Dylan McKay from
90210
. Matt had a real thing for
90210
. He had every episode on VHS. He recorded them himself and labeled each tape with a white label in sequential order from 1 to 27. He let me watch them all when I had mono, which was really nice of him, but also led to our inevitable breakup, when I lost tape number 11, the one of the summer before senior year where Brenda goes off to Paris with Donna and Dylan cheats on her with her best friend, Kelly Taylor. I always thought Kelly was such a skank for doing that. Kelly Taylor may have been my first encounter with a BTCBT (blonde that can’t be trusted). Anyway, Matt broke my heart after number 11 went missing. We’re on speaking terms these days, and when I’ve been home in the past few years, I’ve had a glass of wine over at the house he shares with his husband, Robert. The Dylan McKay thing should have tipped me off.