Julie and Romeo Get Lucky (3 page)

“I won't ask you anything else. I'm just going to sit here and you don't have to say another word.” I kept two fingers lightly on the top of his hand and thought about how much I loved him, how lucky we had been to find each other just at the moment when other people were giving up on love altogether.

The light from the windows was almost gone, though it wasn't even five o'clock. I switched on the lamp beside the bed so I could watch his breathing, which seemed impossibly shallow and irregular. I was crying a little again, part from love and part from his pain and mostly from my stupidity at letting him carry me up the stairs.

“Talk.” Romeo opened one eye a little and tried to smile at me.

I took a deep breath and did my best to find a steady voice. Romeo liked to hear me talk, he was always telling me the sound of my voice made him feel better.

“I'm worried about you. I know that's not what you want to hear. I love you.” Talking was a funny thing. I could think of a million things to say until someone asked me what they were; and then they flew out of my head like hummingbirds.

“Do you ever think about luck, about the way things turn out? What if your parents had stayed in Italy? Or what if my grandparents had gone to New York? They did for awhile, you know. They had cousins in Brooklyn, and they stayed there for months after the boat ride over here, but my mother kept saying it was too dirty, and she wanted to move again. Your parents could have sold fish and mine could have made hats and they never would have met and hated each other and we never would have met and fallen in love.”

In my mind I saw myself passing Romeo on the street, strangers to one another. I'm sure it happened all the time, true love missed by circumstance. “It's like every second is a chance, a choice between turning right or left, and when you stack those millions of choices on top of each other, what are the chances that we'd get here?”

Romeo took a deeper breath, and I thought I saw something in his neck relax a little. It made me feel hopeful, and the hope kept me talking.

“What if our parents had both made chocolates? It sounds like a good idea. When I was a kid I would have been in heaven. There was a girl in my fifth-grade class, Nancy Tilsman, her father owned Tilsman's Drugs. She got to have any candy bar she wanted after school every day. She could go to the rack and take anything that struck her fancy and not even ask. She told me once that she basically owned all the candy anyway, because it was all her father's and what was his was practically hers. I remember thinking at the time that there could be no luck on earth greater than that.

“But now I think I never would have lasted in the chocolate business. I would have gotten fat, my skin would have broken out, and I would have cashed out the first year I was in charge. But I'm always glad to see the flowers. No matter what's going on in my life, the flowers always make me happy. Even when things were at their very worst, when Mort left me and I just about bankrupted the store, and I had to work around the clock just to hold on to things, I never once resented the flowers.

“The way I see it, we have a lot to be grateful for. We have each other and we have our families and we have the flowers, and up until about twenty minutes ago we had our health. I have to say we're doing pretty well.”

I don't know who I was trying to convince, me or him, but the inspirational lecture seemed to make both of us feel better. Romeo lifted his fingers and I slid mine underneath them, and he lightly pressed down. It was a moment, pure and unsustainable.

Then I heard the back door open, and Tony and Sarah started shouting out for Grandma.

I
WAS NAKED, BUT STILL HAD THE PRESENCE OF
mind not to move too quickly so I didn't bounce poor Romeo. I stood up carefully and made a quick dash to the closet for my bathrobe, a shameful abomination of ten-year-old chenille that looked like the primary function of its long, hard life had been to wax floors.

“One second,” I called. I covered up my beloved, who was mostly under the covers anyway. “I'm going to go put out the fire,” I said to him. “Don't go anywhere.”

“Hah,” he said weakly.

I was three steps down the staircase of our recent undoing when Little Tony and Sarah and Sandy rounded the corner into the entry hall from the kitchen. All of our eyes landed on the same pile of clothing locked together in a loving embrace on the floor.

“You didn't hang your coats in the closet,” Sarah said in a self-satisfied voice. I was always reminding her to do just that. Fortunately, she didn't see it was more than coats on the floor.

The way I saw it, I had two options: I could ignore the clothes, or I could pick them up very fast. I decided to pretend I didn't see them.

“Are you sick?” Tony said.

“No, honey, I'm not sick, but—”

“You're in your bathrobe.”

“I am, that's right.”

“And you've been crying,” Sarah said.

I touched my hand to my face, and my eyes were still wet. I had been crying over the very thought that something could happen to Romeo, and when I remembered that, my eyes welled up again.

Sandy was looking at the clothes and looking at me and doing the math in her head. She stared at my bare feet and ankles, and chances are she was making a correct assumption that the bareness went all the way up. “Why don't you kids go do your homework,” she said in a flat voice.

“I want to show Grandma my new shoes,” Sarah said.

“I'll look at them in just one minute, sweetheart. Sandy, can I talk to you for a second?”

She looked at me sternly, the way I had looked at her when I caught her sneaking in the back door in the middle of the night from a date with Tony Cacciamani, when she was a junior in high school. She took several exaggerated steps through the piles of clothing (she
could
have walked around them) and I was heading down the stairs as the doorbell rang.

“I'll get the door!” Tony said.

“I want to get the door!” his sister said.

“I said I was going to get it first!”

Was it possible that Al could get here so fast?

“You always get to get the door. Mom, he always gets to get the door!”

Sandy, who was only two feet from the door, just leaned over and opened it.

In all of my confusion I had never thought to ask Al who Dominic was, but when they stepped inside the entry hall, it was plain to see that Dominic was Al's younger brother. They both had the same heavy salt-and-pepper hair, the same broad shoulders and beefy arms that made them look like they should be unloading crates onto docks. Al had on his regular uniform, black pants and a black shirt and a black cotton zip-up jacket, while Dominic wore khakis and a brown leather aviator's jacket.

“Hi Al,” Sandy said, and the children ran over and threw their arms around him, calling, “Father Al! Father Al.” They loved Al, and more than that, it cracked them up to say his name. They never got over the delicious strangeness of addressing someone who wasn't their father as Father. They could not say it enough. I thought briefly of my mother stirring in her grave to see her progeny embracing a Catholic priest, but the truth is, I would have hugged Al myself were I not feeling so naked beneath my robe.

“I thought Romeo was the one who was sick,” he said. There was no reference to funny business in his tone; Al was remarkably without guile.

“I thought she was sick, too,” Tony said, excited by the coincidence of jumping to the same conclusion.

“Romeo's sick?” Sandy asked.

“He's hurt his back,” I said.

Sandy lowered her eyebrows slightly. “Where is he?”

“Upstairs.” I tried very hard to banish any note of sheepishness from my voice, but I wasn't very successful. We were all more or less standing in a pool of our clothing. I had made a poor choice earlier when I decided to let them lie.

“Romeo! Romeo! Romeo!” Sarah called and bounded past me up the stairs. She took them two at a time, and in a flash she was on the second floor, a gazelle clearing a hillock in a single, graceful leap.

“Sarah!” Sandy barked just as the girl was reaching for the bedroom door. Everyone froze. It was a dazzling trick that Sandy could pull off when absolutely necessary. Wisely, she did not overuse it. The Bark was reserved for only the most dire of occasions.

“I was just…” Sarah began.

“Downstairs!” Sandy said.

Sarah considered putting up an argument, but then thought better of it. She began to slink down, one wrist trailing limply over the banister.

Al cleared his throat nervously. Sandy had always looked so unassuming, and now he would have to rethink her completely. “This is my brother, Dominic.”

Poor Dominic. He must have thought we were a flock of loons. “Welcome to the fun house,” I said, and shook his hand.

“Pleasure,” he said.

“Dominic's a doctor,” Al said. “You probably know that already.”

“Our mother used to say that having a priest and a doctor in the family meant everybody was covered one way or the other.” Dominic held up a plastic shopping bag from CVS. “I brought a few things by.” It wasn't exactly a black alligator bag but I'd take it.

“I really appreciate you making a house call,” I said, holding the neck of my bathrobe closed with one hand. “Especially on such short notice. I didn't think you'd get here so quickly.”

“We just finished Mass,” Al said. “Saturday night is a good time to call. You got me on the cell.”

“Priests have cell phones now?” I asked. I don't know why this surprised me. I wouldn't have been surprised to see a rabbi with a cell phone, at least a reform rabbi, but priests still seemed to have one foot in the middle ages, what with the incense and all.

“Did you say Romeo is sick?” Sandy said. Sandy was like one of those very clever black-and-white dogs that can teach a sheep to ride a bicycle. She was trying to cut the flock in half, herd the adults upstairs and the children into the kitchen. I had a suspicion she wanted to pick up the clothing.

“He's this way,” I said, and started walking up.

“I've never seen the upstairs of your house,” Father Al said brightly.

“Romeo?” I said quietly as I opened the door and brought our company into my bedroom.

The clothes on the floor of the entry hall looked bad—a shirt, a sweater, two pairs of pants, all those shoes touching laces—but maybe that could be written off to very poor housekeeping. In the bedroom, however, the underwear told a different story. The underwear was intermingling on the floor. In one deft move, I kicked it under the bed.

Romeo looked like he had frozen into the last moment I had seen him. Every muscle in his face, the way he held his arms, everything about him was exactly the same.

“Oh, Romeo,” Father Al said, and shook his head at the sight of so much pain.

Dominic, on the other hand, didn't seem to be bothered at all. “Didn't see you at Mass last week, buddy,” he said. “Your mother must be lightening up on you.”

Romeo's eyes opened into slits. He made a sound that was clearly intended to be “hah” but it didn't quite come out as “hah.” It sounded more like a sharp exhale.

“Horsing around with a back like yours.” Dominic shook his head and starting rummaging through his bag of tricks. “We're not kids anymore, Romeo.”

“You shouldn't give him a lecture when he can't even talk back to you,” Al said.

Romeo gave a small smile.

“You think he can't talk back to me now, just you wait.” Dominic tore open a little foil packet and pulled back the sheets enough to rub an alcohol swab over a small spot on Romeo's hip. Then he fixed up a shot. “You know the expression, ‘You made your bed, and now you're going to have to lie in it?' Well, that's the story. You stay exactly where you are. The only other place you're going to be going is to the hospital for surgery.”

“He's going to need surgery?” I asked.

“Maybe not, if he can stay still and let himself get better.” He slid the needle into Romeo's hip, and I winced, though Romeo never seemed to notice.

“What is that?”

“Demerol and Phenergan. It will knock him out and keep him from throwing up. It's a terrible thing to throw up when you've broken your back.”

“I
broke
his back?”

Both Al and Dominic turned to look at me, and Romeo used his last word to whisper, kindly, “No.”

“We won't know for sure without an X-ray, but chances are he has a compression fracture. Just think of it as two of his vertebrae moving a little closer together. At least that's what he had ten years ago, and when you have one, it stands to reason you're going to have two. But it's nobody's fault.” Dominic stopped and reconsidered this. “Well, it's his fault. Whatever he was doing, it's pretty safe to say he shouldn't have been doing it.”

I was so distraught, I wondered if there was anything left in that vial for me. Then we could be laid out side by side, Romeo and Julie, the star-crossed aging lovers who fell prey to their own passions.

“How long does he have to stay in bed?”

“It could be a week, it could be considerably more. It depends on how he heals up. Even when he's up, he's going to mostly be down. You have to keep him in bed.”

“I'll try my best.” Standing there naked in my tatty bathrobe, the comment felt tawdry.

Dominic patted me on the shoulder. He could have made any number of jokes and had a nice laugh at my expense or Romeo's, but he took the high road and gave me a pleasant smile. “I'll swing by in the morning to check on him. You take good care of him. If you need something, you call me. We go all the way back. We always felt sorry for Romeo being an only child—we used to let him tag along.”

“There were thirteen of us,” Al said.

Dominic capped the spent syringe and dropped it back into the bag, then he scrawled out a series of prescriptions. “These are for pain, and he's going to need them. Whatever he needs, I'll be here.”

“And I'll be here, too,” Al said.

“If he decides to opt for faith healing over Demerol,” his brother said. “But I think he should stick with the drugs. This man you are in love with has a very bad back.” I thought I detected a certain amount of pity in his voice, like I had been the unwitting recipient of damaged goods that I was now stuck with.

Al and Dominic offered to show themselves out, and I stood by the bed, watching the man I loved melt into a deep puddle of drug-induced sleep. Kink by kink, he let go of his waking life and spread across the sheets. I could tell just by looking at him that he wasn't going to be coming around anytime soon.

I sat down very carefully on the bed beside him and held his hand. For that minute I could see him as a boy of six or seven, worn out and hard asleep after a day of summer baseball. I could see him as a father at thirty, up all night with croupy babies and completely exhausted, or a businessman of fifty, falling asleep on his flower-arranging table after a giant wedding.

My dear Romeo. So he had a bad back he hadn't mentioned before. Believe me, there were things going wrong with my own machinery that I hadn't been so quick to share. Well, I wouldn't let him carry the boxes of flowers in from the truck anymore. Everything would be fine.

There was a light tap on the door, and Sandy stuck her head inside, her curls conveying a sense of franticness. “Is he okay? Al said his back was a mess.”

“He'll be fine,” I said, resting assured in my own sudden sense of peace.

Sandy slipped inside the door, our clothes neatly folded in her arms, the shoes balanced on top. “I brought you these.” She put them on top of the dresser.

“Thank you. I'm sorry I didn't get things picked up.”

“I was going to give you a hard time, you know, before I realized that Romeo was hurt.” She sat down on the little straight-backed chair beside my desk and looked at the two of us. “The truth is, I wish Tony and I could be alone in the house every now and then. Privacy is hard to come by around here.”

“Maybe we should have a sign-up sheet.” Sandy and I really were in the same boat. She was married to the son and I was in love with the father and with all of us in the house together with two kids, it was just about impossible to find five minutes alone.

From downstairs I heard Little Tony wail, then I heard the Candyman start to sing again. Sandy sighed and shook her head. “There she goes.”