Julie and Romeo (10 page)

“No,” I said, as if I hadn’t noticed. “I guess not.”

I kept waiting for the other Cacciamani boys to come harass me. I thought it would be like a fairy tale. Each one who came would be bigger than the last, their threats would be scarier, until finally some fire-breathing Cacciamani boy nine feet tall and covered in hair would break down the door frame as he entered my shop. “Release my father!” he would shout, and his fiery breath would singe off my eyebrows. But even under such duress I would continue to hold my ground.

“Sorry,” I’d say to the fire-breather. “No can do.”

And when that happened, when I had stood up to the very worst of them, the spell would be broken. They would all be restored to regular guys, decent sons who would dance the lambada at our wedding. It would be explained to me then: We were all victims of some ancient curse having to do with a slight made to some witch two thousand years ago in Bimini, something terribly
far away from us for which we could not possibly be held responsible. My daughters would love Romeo and I would love his sons. The phone rang and suddenly my heart was filled with hope.

“I’m waiting for you at your house,” Nora said. Then she hung up.

So the path to broken curses was going to be a little more treacherous than I had imagined. I flipped over the
CLOSED
sign and went to meet my fate.

I loved Nora, I know I have mentioned this before, but the sight of that Lexus in my driveway struck greater fear into my heart than the sight of Joe Cacciamani decapitating miniature daffodils ever could. I thought about that great old song, “You Always Hurt the One You Love,” and thought that the inverse was also true, The One You Love Always Hurts You.

“Alex and I have talked it over and I’ve told Sandy that she and the kids can come and live with us,” Nora said before I had both feet inside the door.

This before, Hello, Mother. This before, Heard you had a rough day.

“Nora, Christ, ease up on me, will you?”

“No, Mother, I will not ‘ease up on you.’ ”

Where these girls picked up this irritating predilection for mimicking, I do not know. It was not a habit of Mort’s or mine.

“When you look me in the eye and you swear something, I expect I can take you at your word,” Nora said, her tone a subtle blend of hurt and righteous condemnation. “What can we count on now, hmm? Can you tell me that? What else are you lying about?”

“Okay, you win. You were adopted.” This conversation was taking place in the entry hall. I was wearing my smock. My purse was in one hand, my keys were in the other. “Where are the kids?”

“Sandy thought it would be better if they didn’t see you just now.”

“Why, because I’m such an evil influence? I had a
date
, Nora, remember those? I don’t really, because I haven’t had one in thirty-nine years. A sixty-year-old woman goes on a date and the children have to be evacuated from the house?”

“This
date
, as you call it, isn’t the issue, though you have a hell of a definition of a date, from what I hear. The issue is—”

“Hang on to that thought for one second, sweetheart, your mother needs a glass of wine in the biggest way.” I dropped my keys into my purse and dropped my purse onto the floor. Then I headed for the kitchen. Nora followed close behind in her smart gray pantsuit. She’d been doing a lot of yoga along with her running and she was now impossibly fit, as supple and lean as a greyhound. I wanted to tell her I couldn’t argue with her while I was wearing dirt-covered jeans, not when she was dressed like that. It put me at a terrible disadvantage.

“The issue is trust,” she continued. “The issue is honesty. The issue is
family
. The Rosemans do not keep company with the Cacciamanis. That was your guiding principle when we were growing up.”

I took the wine out of the refrigerator and held it up to her. She shook her head and so I poured for one. “I Made A Mistake,” I said. “Tell me if I can make this point more clearly. I’m sorry.
No one knows what we did to them or what they did to us. What happened with your sister in high school could have happened to anybody, with anybody. Your sister is thirty-two years old now. It’s time to put that one behind us.”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”

“Believe it.”

“So you’re telling me you’re going to see him again?”

I took a sip. For a minute there I really wanted to talk to her, to open up and tell her about the jam I was in. She was my daughter, after all. Why did we always tense our backs before we spoke to each other? “I don’t know. I’d like to. I’m just not sure if these are insurmountable odds. I’ve got you and Sandy to contend with, I’ve got his kids to contend with.”

“Sandy told me she was afraid this afternoon. She thinks he might really try to hurt us. I’m calling the police and filing a report, I can tell you that much.”

“You can’t,” I said. “You weren’t even there.” I took a longer sip. I took a drink. “I keep thinking this all might blow over and I could go out with Romeo. He’s so nice, Nora. That’s the thing you won’t believe. He’s the nicest man I’ve ever met.” I had tried talking to her one way, now I was banking on compassion. Never bank on compassion where Nora is concerned.

“So that’s your answer,” she said. “I’m taking the kids.”

“For what
reason
?”

“If you don’t see it by now, I can’t explain it to you.”

“Well, are they coming back tonight?” For all the times I’d wished that Sandy would pull her life together and get a place of her own, suddenly the thought of them leaving seemed so awful
to me. No little Tony to do homework with? No Sarah wanting me to put her hair into pin curls? I was a good grandmother. Maybe I was proving myself to be a lousy mother, but I was one hell of a good grandmother.

“Sure,” Nora said, looking at her watch. “They’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“And then they’re going to your house? Sandy has school tonight. You’re going to take the kids?”

“Not tonight,” Nora said. “I have to show a new listing and Alex has a meeting. In fact, I need to get going.”

“So let me understand this, you’re moving Sandy and the kids out because I’m an unfit influence, but you’re doing it at a time that is more convenient to you?”

Nora started to say something, but then she thought it over for a second, raised her eyebrows, and nodded. “More or less.”

“I won’t hold my breath.”

“Think about what I said, Mother.” Nora was back in her yellow silk coat and sailing toward the door.

“Oh, I think about everything you say. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

After Nora left I had about ten minutes to finish off my wine and stare vacantly at the wall in the kitchen, in which time I came up with the idea of painting everything pale yellow. Then Sandy and the kids came home. For whatever my girls had been plotting, they seemed at least to have had the decency not to tell the children about it. Tony and Sarah came flying at me like I had just come home from a tour in the Peace Corps.

“We didn’t see you last night and then we didn’t see you this morning,” Tony said breathlessly. “We haven’t seen you in ages.”

“Ages,” I said, kissing his head madly and then his sister’s head as well.

“Mom said you were sleeping in this morning. I said I wanted to sleep in like Grandma, but she says, Nope, up, you have to go to school.”

“She was absolutely right.” I looked over at Sandy, who was hanging back by the door. She had a guilty look on her face for having sicced Nora on me. No matter how mad she was at me, I think she realized the punishment did not fit the crime.

“I drew you a picture,” Sarah said. “Because you were gone for such a long time.” She knelt down and extracted a drawing from her tiny pink Cinderella backpack. It was a stick figure with her hair in a flip, and she was holding a giant bunch of flowers. The flowers went from the floor to past her head.

“It’s divine,” I said.

“It’s you,” Tony said.

After Sandy went to school, I shifted into total indulgence mode. I made popcorn balls with Karo syrup and played Go Fish with real enthusiasm (it’s not
that
one plays Go Fish, it’s
how
one plays Go Fish). We watched the video of
Lady and the Tramp
, a movie that I must say moved me almost to tears in my present circumstances. I identified with both Lady and Tramp. Since it was Friday, I extended bedtime by a full hour. In short, we partied. Maybe I was trying to secure my place in their hearts, but really I think that had already been done. I wasn’t going to risk my family. I wasn’t going to be bossed and I wasn’t going to be foolish. The trick was finding the line between those two things. I tucked everyone tightly into bed, read every book that was requested of me, and made a series of exhausted
good nights. I believe I was asleep myself no more than seven minutes later.

It was still dark when I felt a hand shaking my shoulder. I used to get up on my own.

“Grandma?”

I rolled over. “Tony, baby, what is it?”

“Somebody’s stealing your roses.”

I looked at the clock. It was five forty-five in the morning. “Are you having a bad dream?”

He shook his head and hustled himself under the covers. “It isn’t a dream. It’s a lady. There’s a really old lady outside and she’s stealing the roses.”

Tony’s bedroom was in the front of the house, just above the roses. “What does she look like?” I asked cautiously.

“A witch.”

I was up and in my bathrobe in a heartbeat, a fluffy pink chenille number that Mort bought me for my birthday on a year I had hoped for something romantic.

“Don’t go down there,” he cried. “She’ll do something awful.”

“Not a chance, baby. I know who it is. It’s a friend of mine. She’s just going to borrow the roses. I just want to go down and say hello to her.”

“It’s too early.”

“You’re absolutely right. I thought she was coming later. You sleep in my bed and I’ll come up in just a minute and we’ll sleep in together.”

Again, I was running down the stairs, running through the door and into the yard. I had forgotten my slippers and the grass was cold and wet with dew between my toes.

The old bat had attached my hose to my spigot, something I had yet to do this season, and was watering the roses. It was too early for blooms, but they had their leaves already and some nice little buds. I could see it all there, a spade, two empty, giant-size boxes of kosher salt. She had to use kosher.

“Hey,” I said. “Turn my goddamn hose off!”

She looked good for almost ninety, still tall and thin with a bunch of steel-wool hair. She was a little stooped, but then she had been digging. She looked at me with utter contempt, like I was coming into her yard instead of the other way around. “What are you doing up so early?” she said. “Rosemans are a lazy bunch, everybody knows that.”

I ripped the hose out of her hand and threw it back into the boxwoods still running. I didn’t care how old she was, I was going to take her out. “Get away from my flowers. Get away from my family.” Since my yard, like all Somerville yards, was about the size of a half bath, I was very much in her face.

“No,
you
get away from
my
family, you tart.” She took her bony finger and she poked it into a soft spot beneath my collarbone in a way that actually hurt quite a bit. You could tell she had poked a lot of people in this exact spot in her lifetime and she knew just where to aim. There was a blue Dodge idling in front of my house and when the old bat poked me, out flies yet another Cacciamani boy, this one not quite as big as the other two, which ruined my theory of the expanding sons.

“Hey, you,” he said, raising his voice to wake every neighbor
who had dared to sleep with their window open on a cool spring night. “You get your hands off my grandmother!”

Old woman Cacciamani smiled and folded her arms, her rottweiler boy bounding up on me.

“Do you have eyes?” I said. “Do you see who is poking who here?”

“Whom,” the old woman said. “Who is poking whom.” She turned to Wolf Boy. “It’s appalling. They can’t even speak.”

“Please,” I said. “Both of you, stay exactly where you are. Make yourselves comfortable on my lawn. This time I am calling the police.”

“Everybody in town knows you’re a crummy florist,” the old woman said. “You probably think salt is fertilizer.”

“Shouldn’t you be dead already?” I asked.

“Hey,” Cacciamani Boy said, lunging again.

She raised up the skeleton of her hand, which was draped in a layer of parchment paper so thin it let through the first rays of morning light. “Alan,” she said. “Wait for me in the car.”

“I’m not leaving you alone with her. It isn’t safe.”

“Alan. The car.”

What a short leash these men lived on. He turned in miserable obedience and slunk back toward the Dodge. He didn’t get inside but leaned up against it, the muffler making a racket while going nowhere.

“I’ve had it with you Rosemans,” she hissed. “I’m an old woman and I’ve lived to protect my family from the likes of you, your parents, and your whorish little girls. I will not leave this earth until I know that my people are safe from yours.”

“For the remark about my daughters alone I should break
your sorry neck, and I could, do not think otherwise. I am in a bad mood, Mrs. Cacciamani. You are pushing me too far.”

“Come near my Romeo again and you’ll know all about broken necks.”

I tried to control myself. This could be my big chance after all, my shot at the truth. “Since you have ruined my sleep, frightened my grandson, and killed my roses, will you at least do me the courtesy of explaining to me what the hell your problem is?”

“You are unfit to be in the same room with my son.”

“Fascinating. I mean before that.”

“Your daughter tried to trap my Tony into a life of misery.”

“Well, Tony surely contributed to that one.”

“If he was going to marry her, it’s because she lied to him. She probably told him she was pregnant. She probably tricked him.”

“Please,” I said, breathing deeply. “Before I am forced as a mother to cut your heart out, I want you to think back before the business with Sandy and Tony. Use the last few brain cells you have and try to think. What went on between you and my parents? I know this didn’t start in the previous generation because your crowd and my crowd did not run together in the Old Country.” My hands were shaking. Every fiber of my being wanted to grab her and throw her to the ground and jump up and down on her chest. An old woman! Where was my decency? I have never felt such seething hatred in my life.