No Place Like Home (13 page)

On went the bra, the T-shirt, down came the hair, which I brushed hard to get the waves out, then rebraided, just to be safe. No makeup. Flip-flops on my feet. I wished, momentarily, for a pair of glasses to hide behind, but I had had laser correction done a couple of years ago—neither glasses nor the contacts I mainly wore took all that kindly to the powders and grease that go along with cooking.

Armored, I turned off the light, peeked in on Michael, then poked my head around Shane’s door.

His bed was empty.

Empty. He’d sneaked out again.

Forgetting everything else, I dashed downstairs, still hoping to be proven wrong. Sometimes he fell asleep there watching television, but not this time.

The digital clock in the corner said 4:11. Earlier than I thought, which was why the kid was busted. With firm purpose, I went to the kitchen to find Malachi making coffee, still whistling under his breath. “Are you desperate for that caffeine?” I asked.

“Not at all. I was making it for the house.”

“Turn off the light then, and leave it. Shane snuck out, and I want to catch him coming back in.”

He winced and put the lid back on the coffee. “I’m finished with this part.” He punched the button. “Be ready in just a few minutes.”

“Whatever.” I left him, going out through the side door to the porch, where I could see the road but Shane wouldn’t see me. Out there, it was obvious how he’d left—scrambling from his room to the roof of the porch and a quick swing to the rail and out. I blew out a breath and prepared myself to wait. The blackbirds were still twittering in their melancholy way. I couldn’t help but think of all the things that could happen to him, my foolish boy, in the middle of the night with a wild friend and a car and no doubt any number of legal and illegal substances.

It was impossible to sit still. I jumped up to pace along the railing, thinking a little anxiously of the pies waiting to go in the oven, of the possibility of landing the catering job for the Dante Alighieri society. I stared down the road and willed headlights to appear.

And because you never really get over a Catholic childhood, I prayed. To Saint Joseph, keeper of children, and the Blessed Mother, of course, and Saint Jude, and the Big Guy himself, just in case he might still listen to me once in a while. Prayed that they’d keep him safe, put angel wings all around him, protecting him even if they got into a wreck.

Malachi materialized out of the darkness, and I jumped.

“Easy, babe,” he said, and gave me a cup of coffee.

I let go of a breath. “Thanks.” Leaning on the porch post, I sipped it and returned to my silent prayers.

“Did you ever sneak out when you were his age?” Malachi asked.

“Yes. Why do you think it makes me so crazy? If I didn’t know what he was doing, I wouldn’t be so damned scared.”

“He’s not stupid, you know.”

“You don’t have to be stupid to get yourself killed—just reckless.” And I should know.

“Not everybody is Billy, headed for a bad end.”

I tsked. “What makes you think you know anything?”

He lifted his chin, meeting my eyes with an unapologetic steadiness that annoyed me even more. “Everything you think shows on your face. I bet you play lousy poker.”

“It’s not about Billy.”

“Yeah, it is. You think cuz they look alike, that he’s got a wild streak, that he’s gonna end up in a coffin too soon, like his daddy did.”

I tapped my foot against the porch boards, ignoring him.

He didn’t take the hint. “Billy didn’t have a goddamn thing all his life, Jewel. I mean, less than nothing, nobody to tell him he was good or right or kind. It’s a miracle he managed to grow up at all, much less turn himself into somebody with something to offer.”

“I know all this. What’s your point?”

A shrug of that massive shoulder. “Shane’s got you. Always has. He’s got Michael. He had Billy for a while, and I do know that Billy loved that boy like he hung the stars.”

From behind the dark walls where I kept Billy carefully mummified came a fist, landing a solid right hook to my heart. “He did.” Since my heart had taken the blow anyway, I said, “He read to him every night, you know that? Read and sang, started teaching him to play guitar before he could even tie his shoes.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Shane except being seventeen and ready to fly the coop. He’ll be all right.”

“That’s so easy to say when he’s not your kid. There are a million things he doesn’t know, doesn’t get, and five hundred thousand of them could get him killed.”

“Nah. He’ll slam into a wall now and again—figuratively, you know, not literally. Get his heart broken, tangle with the wrong guy, make the wrong call, and generally fuck up. But that’s just part of living, babe. I did it, you did it. We all do.”

“Stop calling me babe and sugar,” I snapped.

His chuckle, low and rich, countered the blackbirds’ melancholy whistling. “All right, darlin’.”

“You’re incorrigible,” I said, the anger deflating. I smiled at him reluctantly and sipped the coffee. To the east, the first hint of gray clung to the edges of the trees. “I just want things to be easier for him than they were for me. I’d like to spare him at least a few of my mistakes.”

“Do you really? Which ones?” He leaned forward, bracing his forearms on his knees, the mug held loosely between his palms as he looked up at me.

“Don’t give me that. The old ‘the path we take leads to who we are.’ I don’t buy it, and neither do you, or you would have forgiven your father.”

The first hardness I’d seen on his face filled it up then. Shuttered, battened down, closed up. “That’s not my mistake. It’s my father’s, and I have a right to make judgments about what’s okay and not okay.”

“But we’re supposed to forgive
ourselves
of everything, no matter how bad?”

“You’ve gotta live with what other people think, good or bad. But yeah, you have to get over anything you’ve done, as long as you’ve repented.”

“But repentance means regret, Malachi. If you accept, that’s not repentance.”

He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “All right, you may have a point there.”

My head abruptly started to hurt. “You know what? I really can’t have some philosophical discussion at four thirty in the morning.”

He lifted his chin in the direction of the driveway. “It’s over anyway. There’s your boy. I’ll leave you to it.”

I turned, forgetting Malachi in my relief. Relief that lasted exactly one half second, because it was a police car pulling up beside the bank of dark green lilac bushes. I put the coffee down on the rail and walked around the porch to the front steps, where I stood, arms crossed, mouth hard, waiting.

A tall policeman, graying and weary by the set in his shoulders, nodded at me as he stepped out of the car, then reached to open the door to the backseat. Shane got out, stiff and thick-limbed as Gumby, and I knew immediately that he wasn’t just a little tipsy, the way he had been when I’d picked him up at jail, but something much worse.

The officer helped him, bracing Shane’s elbow as he stumbled. I noticed my fingernails digging into the underside of my left arm and forced myself to let go, waiting for my son to lift that heavy head with its splendid fall of black hair so I could see his face. I wanted to see what drug got him, what chemical burned in his eyes.

In the split second before he did finally straighten, I saw Billy all too clearly, Billy as he’d been in those long days before he finally managed to OD on crack. Even then, I’d been amazed that the demon eating him alive had only made his beauty sharper, more brilliant—turned the cheekbones to high, sweeping shelves over which the blue eyes burned with the fever of addiction. He’d been like a candle that’s suddenly caught fire before it burns itself out.

Oh, God, please not Shane.

But if my stomach had been roiling with the possibility of drugs, it doubled over itself when Shane finally raised his head. I didn’t see it all at once—it was hours before I truly clocked all the damage—but in that first instant, I saw the worst two marks: a lower lip so swollen he wouldn’t speak well for days, and an eye as red as the dawn leaking upward in the east.

“A fight or an accident?” I asked, tumbling down the steps. My voice was oddly thin.

“Are you his mother?”

I nodded. Shane looked at me sullenly, or rather not-looked at me sullenly, his shoulder up defensively. My fingers itched to brush a heavy hank of hair away from that awful bruise, but I stuck them in my pocket.

“It was more of an ambush,” the officer said. “He and his buddy were jumped.” He scowled. “Everybody was ticketed for curfew violations, and that turned up his arrest the other week, but your boy here probably saved a little asshole’s life by putting pressure on a knife wound.”

Knives. A buzzing roared over my ears and departed. “Gangs?”

“Wannabes, anyway.” The officer let go of Shane, and the boy staggered a little. “He refused treatment, so I brought him home, but I’d recommend a trip to the emergency room, ma’am.” His eyes, the color of sherry in the dim light, were piercing. “And a good counseling program.”

“Thank you.” I reached for Shane, but he jerked away, nearly knocking himself down. I gave him that mother look—the fierce one—but it didn’t work, since he still wouldn’t meet my eyes. “You’re right. Thank you, “ I said again.

He tipped his hat and drove off, leaving me and a swaying seventeen-year-old who was trying not to cry in the brightening dawn. “Pretty bad, was it?” I asked finally.

The tears fell then. Big and silent, rolling over his cheeks in mute distress. “Kid was only fourteen, maybe.” The words came out broken, between what would be sobs in a girl. “Gashed . . . like a . . . fish.”

“How did it happen?”

“I don’t want to talk about it, okay?” He wiped a wrist over his cheek. “Not right now.”

“All right.” I wavered, over my head as always in emergencies. I don’t know why that happens—the women in my family are usually good in a crisis. I never have been. My brain freezes. When Shane was six, he was playing Superman and jumped off the couch with a blanket around his shoulders and landed on his right wrist, breaking it neatly into a perfect Z. I’d been so zombied by the sight of it that I hadn’t been able to move for a full five seconds, and then I’d promptly thrown up.

I was close to that now. “Uh, get in the car. I’ll go get my keys.”

“I’m okay.”

“No. Sorry, you aren’t. That lip needs a couple of stitches or it’ll be scarred the rest of your life.”

He raised tender fingers to it. “Scarred?”

Ah, vanity, thy name is adolescence. “Yeah.” I didn’t wait for him to follow orders, just whirled around and started up the steps. I heard the door of the station wagon open and close as I flung the screen out of my way.

Inside in the dim foyer, smelling coffee and maybe bacon, I remembered the pies. The friggin’ pies. I had to finish them this morning and deliver or risk losing clients. Michael ordinarily pinch-hitted for me in a situation like this—either he’d cook or drive Shane to the ER—but he’d had a very bad night and nothing on earth would make me wake him.

For an instant, a feeling like despair crawled through me. It was too much—Michael and Shane and the big move and all the money struggles lately and my father being such a jerk. My own sexual frustration added to the mix did not help. I wanted to slide down the wall, curl up like a puppy, and wail.

But then it occurred to me that I had an entire family at my fingertips now. Jordan, Jane, Jasmine. One of them would help. I picked up the phone, and stopped to consider who would mind least.

Malachi materialized in the doorway, wiping his hands on a dish towel. “Need something?”

He was awake and strong and healthy. Shane adored him. “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do.” I met his eyes dead on. “How are you in the emergency room? Shane got beat up pretty bad.”

That slow, wicked grin. “I been there, once or twice, maybe.”

“I’m
so
not surprised.” I took a breath, feeling a little tension ease. “I’d take him, but I have to get those pies done.”

“No problem.”

My purse hung on the coat closet door, and I dug out my keys, wishing briefly and hopelessly for an insurance card. We’d had one for four entire years when Michael’s restaurant was in full swing, and it had been a great source of peace of mind. I opened my wallet and found it contained all of thirty-six dollars, which I removed and put in his hand. “They’ll have to bill me for the rest. You know the address?”

“Yeah.” He touched my shoulder. “Don’t fret too much, Mama. I got him covered.”

“Thanks.”

He started outside, then tossed the keys up in the air and turned around. “If I take the car, how are you going to deliver the pies?”

“Hmm. Good question.” I glanced at the clock. “It’s only five fifteen. I don’t have to start delivering until eight or nine. Surely you’ll be back by then.”

The dark, beautifully shaped eyebrows lifted skeptically. “Maybe emergency rooms are different around here, but it might be better safe than sorry.”

The decision seemed way beyond me. Was it bad to send a banged up kid on the back of a motorcycle to the ER with a guy he barely knew? All in pursuit of the all-mighty dollar? A good mother wouldn’t work at a moment like this—she’d just do whatever she had to do. Make apologies.

But what about my work? I thought of the struggle—not just the need to feed myself, but the real need I felt to establish myself here with something I loved—and I wanted to cry again.

“Babe,” Malachi said quietly, putting his hand on my arm. “The bike is perfectly safe. It’ll take us maybe ten minutes to get there, and he’ll be doped up by the time he gets out. It’s not that big a deal.”

I looked up into his face, seeing the kindness, the same goodness there that had drawn me so strongly to Michael. The Shaunnessey brothers might have their flaws, but there was a genuineness about them both that was rare these days. “Thanks. I’ll save you a pie.”

He put my keys in my hand. “That’d be great.”

FROM THE FALCONI’S MENU:

Nana Lucy’s Pork Chops in Red Sauce—A Falconi original. Two generous, thick chops slow-simmered in a richly spiced tomato and garlic sauce, served with our special-recipe stuffed shells. Mama mia! You’ll write home about this one!

Chapter 9

The pies were baked and loaded in the car by seven thirty, giving me plenty of time to swing by the hospital on my way in. There were six or seven others in the waiting room, some with very worried faces. The clerk behind the window was harried and curt when I asked about Shane. He wasn’t in the ER at that moment, she said, but had been taken for x rays to be sure there was no skull fracture.

“Skull fracture?”

She looked at me. “From the kicks.” There was hostility in her tone, and I didn’t understand it. “His hand, too, took a bruising.”

Ah. The kids from the fight had probably all been brought here. Shane probably looked like the bad guy, since he’d been the white one in a neighborhood that pretty much wasn’t. “What happened to the boy with the stab wound?” I asked, remembering.

“I’m not free to dispense that information.”

With one last glance toward the doors into the treatment area, doors that were obviously not going to buzz to let me in, I said, “Thanks,” and left.

For once the station wagon didn’t scream on my rounds. Not once. It was as if the wagon knew I just couldn’t stand that particular aggravation this morning, and the screaming might cost the car its life. It behaved admirably well at every stop, and everyone was pleased with the pie choice this time, except the harridan at a diner who had been after me for weeks to do some chocolate cream. I don’t like chocolate cream pie, for one thing, and while it’s possible to transport Millionaire, which can be partially frozen, it’s quite another game to try it with a delicate cream pie. I tried to placate her, but had a sense that I was going to lose the account.

So be it. I stand behind my product, but life is too short to try to please the eternally displeased.

I left Falconi’s for last. Since I’d started out early, I got there a little past nine, well before the waitstaff and bartenders arrived. Even better, my father’s car was not in its usual place, and I remembered it was Friday, the day he went to the farmers’ markets, driving in a 150-mile circle through the Arkansas Valley to the east. It wasn’t strictly necessary, but he liked it, going out to haggle over flats of tomatoes, and onions fresh from the ground, and fresh basil tied in enormous hanks.

His absence meant I was free to go cry on the shoulders of whatever women happened to be in the kitchen today. I didn’t know how badly I wanted it until it was in reach. There was no one in the dining room, only the sound of metal clanging and water running and voices coming out of the kitchen in the back.

I put the pies down on the bar, realizing this was the first time since I’d been home that I’d been here early enough to have the dining room to myself. When I was a kid, it had been the ultimate thrill to be in the place before or after hours—slipping out of the kitchen in the mornings to go color at one of the booths by myself, imagining it was mine, that the stools and the tables and the cocktail glasses all belonged to me, listening to the rise and fall of dish noises and voices from the kitchen and cars on the street outside. I reveled in the smell of garlic and bleach, the sticky, soapy smell of the bar.

I fell in love with the restaurant business at age three and have never gotten over it, that’s the truth.

Remembering that little girl I’d been, I lifted the gate to the bar and went behind the counter to walk along the rubber matting that’s supposed to save glasses and bartenders’ feet. Touched the soda gun with its little buttons for cola and Seven-Up and soda water and tonic. Ran my hand over the bottles in front of the old, carved mirror behind the bar, put my finger in the bullet holes,
one-two-three
, that are gouged deep in the wood, the legacy of the darker side of the Sicilian world. Nobody ever talks about it—in fact, it’s in very bad taste to do so—but I’ve seen pictures and newspaper clippings from those old days. I’ve heard the old men, when they were too far gone on homemade wine to care, tell stories about the Black Hand.

On the bar, the salt and pepper shakers were sitting on a tray, waiting to be wiped down and filled by the first waitress to come in. Idly, I looked in the cupboard beneath the far end of the bar and found the big containers of salt and pepper. Something else that’s fun about restaurants—industrial sizes of ordinary items. Pickles and peppers in five-gallon plastic tubs, tomato paste in quarts, coffee by the case. Maybe these days everyone has seen them, thanks to Sam’s Club and such places, but there was a time that knowing about them seemed like knowing a secret.

As I started filling the little crystal and silver shakers—sneezing as always when I got to the pepper—I listened to the voices spilling out of the kitchen. There was Nana Lucy, and then my mother, and my auntie Carol, their voices rising and falling in that singsong accent that’s so peculiar to the area. I closed my eyes, just for a minute, to listen. The rise of inflection at the end of a sentence, making everything a question, the up-and-down, up-and-down cadence of it. You almost hear it in Brooklyn, but this is softer, not so guttural, both more Italian and more Spanish, spotted through with weird grammar borrowed from both languages and imposed on English.

I lost it, that accent. Not by accident. And I realized, standing there in the quiet, intimately familiar room that had belonged to my family for three generations, that Shane would never have it. Why did that feel so sad?

Someone in the kitchen laughed, a hoot of pure, females-only freedom, and it snared me. Putting down the pepper, I made my way to the doorway of the kitchen and stood there for a long minute, waiting for one of them to notice me. They were caught in their little world of spoons and big metal bowls. My aunt Carol, skinny and tiny in her plain white blouse, tended to the dishwasher, spraying stainless steel bowls with water before fitting them into pale green racks. Nana Lucy, her silvering hair caught in a net covered with tiny glinting beads in many colors, was perched on a stool by the butcher block counter scrubbed every night under her hawkish eye with bleach and three rinses of fresh water. Her gnarled hands were still as nimble as ever—I watched an onion disappear under the chop-chop-chop of her knife. My mother, feeding cheese to a grater mounted sturdily to the counter, had her hair bound under a bright red scarf. She hated hair nets and would not wear one on a bet, so she’d purchased dozens and dozens of beautiful scarves in which she bound up her hair every day, like a Sikh. This one was silk, with a Celtic pattern on it. She was in the middle of a story.

“So Reenie goes up to her, right in front of the whole place, and says, that man is more trouble than he’s worth. You could have him. And she dumps the pot in her lap, all over that dress.” My mother’s voice was already breaking at the end of the sentence, and now she bent over, giggling helplessly. “And . . . then . . . no, wait, wait!” She held up a hand when Lucy would have interrupted. “She opened the salt and poured it on her hair!”

Carol, reddened hands on her waist, asked, “What did he do?”

“Oh, that’s the best part: he jumped up from the table and ran after her, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ ”

Nana Lucy shook her head. “She deserved it.” She caught sight of me. “Jewel! Is it that late already?”

“No, no. I’m early.” I entered the enclave, put my hands on the smooth butcher block. “Who are you talking about?”

My mother’s eyes crinkled prettily at the corner. “One of the waitresses—you know Reenie?—caught her husband out with his girlfriend last night. Your papa and I were there and knew the minute he walked in with her that there was gonna be trouble.”

“He don’t want to go nowhere,” Nana said. “He loves those boys.”

Carol made a sound, a softer, more sibilant “pish” that expressed derision as clearly as anything I’d ever heard. “Thieving woman,” she said with a shake of her head. “Did she really think she’d take him?”

Mama and Nana nodded their satisfaction. It occurred to me that this was an almost Old World approach to the problems of infidelity. Startling, almost shocking, but also familiar.

“Need some help?” I asked.

“Sure. Chop the parsley if you want.” My mother inclined her head toward a waiting bowl filled with ricotta. Stuffed shells were the special Friday nights. She looked at me. “You okay?”

I didn’t answer. Didn’t really need to. From a drawer, I took a paper chef’s hat and stepped out into the hall to tuck my hair under it, then took a clean white apron from the stack by the door and tied it on. Ties to the back, loop back around to the front. Washing my hands, I said, “Can Shane come work here maybe?”

“What happened, baby?”

The parsley was waiting in a colander, and I took it out and found a knife. Putting the straight—never the curly—leaves flat on the wood, I said, “The cops brought him home this morning. He snuck out last night and tangled with a gang on the east side.”

Identical shakes of the head, hands getting busier. I started chopping. “He has a split lip and a black eye and I don’t know what else.”

“Be good to keep him busy,” Nana said, eyes on the onion she peeled. “Can he work?”

I turned the parsley, trimmed the stems, tossed out some squishy pieces. “He’s good. He worked with me and Michael in New York all the time.”

“He’d have to start with dishes.” My mother stuck her hand into the pile of cheese, lifting it and loosening it before she cut another big hunk from the waiting wheel. “Nights, like everybody else.”

“That would be good.”

“How you gonna get him from here to there all the time?”

“I’ll drive him. I don’t mind.” I positioned the deep green herb under my knife and chopped as speedily as my grandmother, hoping she noticed. “He has his driver’s license, but I don’t trust him to come right home.”

“Good idea.” Nana Lucy shook her head. “Oh, Rose, remember your brother? Every week, it seemed like.”

“I remember,” Mama said.

“Which one?” I asked, thinking it was probably Silvio, who’d been dangerous and beautiful my whole life.

“Carlo,” they said together. “He was a fighter, a lover,” my grandmother added. “In trouble at school, with the priests, with the neighbors. Everywhere.”

“Carlo?” I echoed, thinking of my plump, sober uncle in his neat blue suit. He’d sold cars for a long time, buying his wife a nice house in the tony suburb of El Camino. “He turned out okay, I guess.”

Nana nodded. “They do, in the end. At least most of the time.”

My mother looked at me. “Even you came home.”

Even me. I lowered my eyes, but could see only a blur of messy wet greens, and couldn’t start chopping until my vision cleared. My mother put down her knife and came around the counter and put her arms around me. Her hands were cold and I didn’t care—I fell on her, putting my face against her neck, and I let go of the tears. “It was so terrible to see him like that! I brought him home because I didn’t want that to happen, so maybe he could be safe, and it’s not working and I don’t know what to do, and I love him and he’s good, but—” I took a breath “—his dad was a loser and Michael is dying and I’m an okay mom, but I can’t be a dad. He needs a dad.”

My mother stroked my hair and held me and let me cry. “He’ll come to work here, Jewel. It’ll be okay.”

And I wondered, clinging to her in the restaurant kitchen where everything good and solid about me was born, how I could ever have left. How I’d ever believed Billy was worth it, that there could be anything better for me out there in the world than this right here. For a long, bitter moment, I regretted every choice I’d made when I was seventeen and filled with lust. I wanted my accent back, a good solid husband who’d have a potbelly by now, a handful of children who’d all been confirmed. It made me dizzy, I wanted it so much.

After a minute, my mom let me go, and I finished chopping the parsley, then went out and got the pies. Nana moaned, “Oh, the gingersnap crust!” She patted her bosom happily. I cut a generous slice for her, then hung up my apron and kissed them both. Michael was probably moving around by now, and maybe Shane would be home.

“Maybe he can start this weekend,” my mother said. “How bad is he hurt?”

“I’ll know more later. I’ll call you.”

The house was quiet when I walked in. Malachi’s bike was parked in front of the porch, so they’d returned from the ER, but a quick tour showed both Michael and Malachi gone. Typical of men to leave a wounded kid alone. No mother on the planet would do that.

But, in good conscience, neither would Michael, so Shane probably looked worse than he was.

Michael’s door at the top of the stairs was open, the bed neatly made. Someone had taken a shower recently; judging by the towels in a pile behind the bathtub, it was Shane. I peeked into his room and saw him deeply, soundly asleep. Snoring loudly. I breathed in the smell of the room, hoping for a ghostly hint of the boy he’d been, but there was only scrubbed male and an undernote of dirty socks. His shoulder, spotted with a little acne, stuck out of the covers; his big hand hung off the bed. Nope, the boy was gone—except in my memory. Quietly I closed the door.