Julie and Romeo (11 page)

“Why should I tell you?”

“Because this is madness! It’s insanity.” For the sake of my neighbors I tried to control my voice.

She looked at me for a while. I hated to make eye contact;
death seemed to be leaking off of her. “I owe you nothing.” She went to poke again, but I saw it coming this time and I stepped aside, at which point she fell face forward into my lawn.

I backed toward my door, my hands raised as a clear sign that I had not touched her and would not touch her. Cacciamani Alan came running back and scooped the old pile of sticks up in his arms. I turned my back on the family drama, utterly disinterested as to whether she was dead or alive. I went inside and closed the door.

I OPENED SANDY’S DOOR. SHE WAS ASLEEP IN A CLOUD
of curls. “Get up right now,” I said without much tenderness. “I need your help.”

She sat up quickly. She was a mother. She was used to waking up in a hurry. “What is it?”

“The roses,” I said. “We’ve got to move fast.”

Nora would have rolled over and gone back to sleep, but Sandy knew by the tone of my voice that I wasn’t kidding around. This was a higher priority than whatever argument we were having. I went to the linen closet and got a stack of sheets and towels. I went to the kitchen and got a box of twenty-gallon lawn and leaf bags. I went to the garage and got two shovels. I was moving. There wasn’t much time. I didn’t know if there was any time at all.

“What is it?” Sandy said, scurrying behind me. She slept in her sweats, so she was essentially dressed. All she had added were her glasses and her scuffs. I was still in my bathrobe. To hell with it.

“That old Cacciamani bitch salted my roses!” When I threw
open the front door I half expected the paramedics to be there performing CPR on what was left of her. I imagined the yard would be taped off as a crime scene, but in the first pleasant surprise I’ve had in I do not know when, I found that all the Cacciamanis were gone, swept away in the blue Dodge. The only trace that they had been there at all were the two empty boxes of salt. She had taken the spade, so I guessed she wasn’t terminal.

“She salted the roses?” Sandy said, stopping to stare at me in utter horror. “That’s what Sherman did after he burned down the South. That’s like the lowest thing one human being can do to another.”

“Sherman salted the roses?” I stuck my shovel in and heard a crunch. Sandy grabbed the other one and we were digging.

“He didn’t just salt the roses. He salted everything. He wanted to ruin all the farmland so the people who came back after the fire wouldn’t be able to feed themselves.”

Sandy had done very well in history. She had a long memory for facts. “Yeah, well, I think she was operating under a similar impulse.” I spread a sheet over the lawn. “Put all the dirt here. It all has to come up. We might have a chance, but it’s going to be tough. She took the time to water it in.”

“She
watered
the salt?” Now Sandy was really throwing her back into the digging. She wasn’t hurt anymore. She wasn’t scared. She was mad. She was my girl. “Only a total sociopath would stop to water the salt.”

“That’s not all,” I told her. “It turns out she salted my mother’s roses, too. Years ago. We didn’t know it, of course. We just knew they died and nothing could ever be planted in that spot
again.” One good thing was the old woman wasn’t strong enough to dig very deeply. There were still full pockets of coarse kosher salt in the ground, little rocklike diamonds shining in the black dirt. You had to kind of admire her for doing it herself, for making Alan stay in the car while she marched up my walk like Sherman to repeat the crime she had committed God only knows how many times before.

“How did your mother find out who did it?”

“She never did. Romeo told me.” I pulled up the plants and gently loosened the dirt from their root systems, then wrapped them each in a towel. My Queen Elizabeth, my London Best, my Pink Lady.

“You think about this, Mother. You think about the kind of family who would do this.”

I thought about it. Eight mature rosebushes wrapped in towels on my lawn. I thought about it while I dug an even deeper hole beneath where the bushes had been to get out any salt that might have trickled down deep. The ground was heavy and wet and I felt like I was digging a grave. It gave me some perverse satisfaction to think of it as the old lady’s grave. “I’m thinking about it, Sandy. I’m thinking about very little else.”

When we felt we had dug wide enough and deep enough to ensure clear margins, we went to the garage and began lugging out fifty-pound bags of dirt and fertilizer. As a florist I get incredible deals on these things; distributors sometimes give them to me as an incentive. We loaded up the ground with the best dirt money could buy. Then I rinsed off the roses’ roots in the street just for good measure and together Sandy and I planted them all
back again. By the time it was over we were mud-caked, exhausted, and proud. The children, tired out from their night of fun, were still asleep. Sandy came to me and hugged me for a long time.

“She didn’t win,” I said.

“The grocery store is full of salt,” Sandy said.

“Then I’ll dig them up as many times as I have to.”

“What are you going to do, Mother?” Sandy said. We sat down together on the front porch, too tired to make it inside. “Really, what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“I’ve been thinking about what you said. I want to try and see it your way.”

“I appreciate that.”

Sandy looked down the street in both directions, maybe to see if we were really alone, if there wasn’t another one lurking in the hedge. “Did Mr. Cacciamani say anything about Tony?” she asked tentatively.

Maybe this would hurt her, maybe it wouldn’t. I didn’t know anymore. All I was sure of was that I shouldn’t lie to Sandy about anything. “He never got married. He’s in Ecuador giving out vaccines.” I reached over and took her filthy hand in mine. “Romeo said he was so sorry about what he had done to break you up. He said that Tony had really loved you, that he never got over you.”

Sandy kept her head down for a minute, and I didn’t know if this was going to start her crying again. “I know this is terrible of me,” she said finally. “But I think that’s the nicest thing that anyone has ever said.”

Saturdays were always a juggling act. The store tended to be packed for the first half of the day and utterly dead after two o’clock. Usually we just brought Tony and Sarah with us, and if one of them had a party or a play date (I could not believe the social calendar these children had; Sandy actually had to write all their engagements down to avoid double-booking), then one of us would drive them over and hurry back to work. I liked having the kids in the store. It’s like taking children to restaurants or on planes or anyplace else where other people are loath to see them. If you do it right from the start and make it part of their normal lives, they were usually very well behaved. Certainly I had grown up in this flower shop, and I knew that sitting in a corner for hours wrapping florist tape around wire gave me no end of pleasure. Tony liked to work in the back. The more tasks you gave him, the happier he was. While he was perfectly willing to sweep the floors and unpack boxes of ribbon, nothing gave him a sense of purpose like filling up stik-piks, which he accomplished to absolute perfection. What he wanted to do was strip the thorns off of roses, but I was twelve before my father let me have a knife. Sarah, on the other hand, was an up-front girl. She reveled in speaking to strangers. I believe that “May I help you?” was her first complete sentence. People were very charmed. That kid could have sold water to fish. When there were no customers around, she would check all the plants for dead leaves. She pinched them off gently, carefully, and stuck them in her pockets.

The four of us worked briskly. Sandy and I were both invigorated by our morning’s triumph over the salt and our own tenuous reconnection. People loved to ask us questions about working together: “Is that your mother?” “Is this your daughter?” “Three generations? How wonderful!” This morning we all beamed our answers. “Yes, she is!” “Oh, she’s pretty incredible, all right.” “I’m very proud of her, yes.”

But even in the midst of all the good feelings, I could not help noticing the man who was parked in an older black Ford across the street. He would sit there for a while and then drive away for an hour. When I thought he was gone for good, I would look up and there he would be again, sitting in his car reading. From time to time he got out and walked up and down the street a ways, but he never got out of sight of the shop. He’d stretch up on his toes and roll his shoulders, then he’d feed a couple quarters into the meter and get back in his car for more reading. Then he drove away again, then he came back. He was a heavy man in a black raincoat with a full head of close cropped silver hair. He looked Italian.

Sandy didn’t see him. I know that for sure because if she had, she would have called the police. After days of threatening to call the police myself, I knew there was no point in doing it now. As much as I knew that man was there for me, I couldn’t bring myself to call and complain about someone who was parking, parking with an unexpired meter. As the shoppers came in and the traffic picked up, car after car would pull up behind him and turn their blinker on, waiting for him to pull out. But the man in black just stuck his arm out the window and waved them around.

At two o’clock it was as if some unseen switch had been
flipped and the customers simply stopped coming in. I can’t explain it, but it worked that way every week. Sandy rounded up the kids to go home. I would stay until five, cleaning up whatever Tony hadn’t gotten around to and working on the books. People like to know you’re open until five on Saturday, even if they never come by.

“Okay,” Sandy said. “We’re off.” She kissed my cheek in celebration of our good day together. Kissing was something we rarely did anymore. I held on to her for a second. I didn’t know what was coming, but I knew it might be bad. I had a maudlin flash that maybe this was the last time I was going to get to see everybody. I hugged the kids. I could sacrifice myself to save them.

“Go,” I said, trying not to choke up. “Have a fantastic day.”

I stood at the door and waved good-bye to them. Tony and Sarah loved to wave and be waved to. After they had gone I just stood there at the door. It was nice of him to wait until my family was gone. It made me feel better, knowing it was just me they wanted.

He watched Sandy and the kids drive away and then he tossed his magazine on the seat beside him, got out of the car, checked the meter again, and came across the street. I was sick with dread but wanted to appear brave. I held the door open for him.

“My,” he said, “that’s service.”

He was dressed as a priest. I hadn’t noticed the white collar before. I was sure he caused less suspicion that way. “What do you want?” I said straight out.

He looked at me a little puzzled. “Want? Oh yes, some flowers. I was thinking about getting something different for the altar. We’re in a bit of a rut.”

I sighed. All the work of my day fell on me all of a sudden, the digging, the sales. I felt old. “Cut the flowers,” I said, not intending any pun. “Just get to it. I’m really tired of you people. If you’re going to shoot me, shoot me, whatever.”

Now the man looked very puzzled. There was not one chance in the world that he was a priest who had spent the entire day in his car trying to figure out what floral arrangement he wanted for his church. “Shoot you?”

“Whatever your plan is. I don’t know. Threaten me, scare me to death—whatever it is you have to do, I just want to get it done, okay?”

“Do you know me?” the man in black asked.

“Sure, you’re the guy who’s been parked across the street off and on since nine o’clock this morning, waiting for my daughter and my grandchildren to leave so that you could come in and have a private word with me. Am I right so far?”

“Oh, I am bad at this,” he said, looking genuinely crestfallen. “It never occurred to me that you might notice.”

“And what you have to say to me has to do with the Cacciamanis, correct?”

“How do you know all this? This is very impressive. Romeo was right, you really are something. Except for the shooting part. You’re wrong about that. I have no intention of shooting you.”

“Romeo?”

“I’m Father Alphonse,” he said, sticking out his meaty hand. “You can call me Al.”

“Father Al?”

“Just Al is fine. Whatever you feel comfortable with. You’re Jewish, right?”

I nodded.

“It’s all about what works for you. I answer to anything. I’m not so crazy about Alphonse, but you can call me that if you want.”

“Romeo sent you?”

“It isn’t really part of my job description: baptisms, weddings, last rites, courier service. It could be a new direction for the church to go in, though.” He chuckled at his own joke. I might have chuckled, too, at another time, but as for now I was completely beyond jokes.

“And Romeo sent you because …” I was trying to prompt him.