No Place Like Home (2 page)

Then I was up and running down the aisle. They spotted me and everybody started cheering. All of them, I swear, surged forward, arms out to enfold me and touch my head, to exclaim and kiss my cheek. They blurred together in their clean shirts and good haircuts and the solid shoes of the old women, and the rosary in my Nana Lucy’s hand. She felt like sticks when I hugged her, and all at once I was dizzy with the recognition that she was still alive. How could I have dared let so much time go by?

My father wasn’t there. I hadn’t realized until then that I’d been harboring some hope that he might be ready to throw in the punishment towel.

At last, everybody kind of cleared away, or maybe they surged around Shane. Either way, I was just standing there, looking at my mother, who also had big fat tears rolling down her pretty face. “Finally,” she said, and hugged me.

Jordan had convinced everybody that maybe we wouldn’t want a big party after being on a train for two days, and the family, mollified by the promise of a real celebration on Saturday afternoon, got in their Buicks and SUVs and drove home. Jordan took us to the farm in her slightly battered old Volvo.

The farm, like everything else, has a bit of a story attached.

Most of those Sicilians who came here went to work in the steel mill. A few did other things—grocery stores and the like. My mother’s line has a restaurant that’s justly famous, called simply Falconi’s, which is where I learned to cook.

But in 1919, my great-grandfather Sal and his brother Antonio Falconi had a fight about a woman, Sylvia Rosario. She was a lush beauty who, by all accounts, bewitched—and I do not use the word lightly here; there are still people who say she knew more than she should about herbs—half the men in Bessemer when she came to Mass for the first time on an August Sunday morning. She was fresh from Lucca Siccula, the younger sister of a man who had finally saved enough money from his job as a smelter to send for his siblings.

Sylvia, so the story goes (and I heard it often enough from Sylvia herself to know), took one look at Antonio Falconi and made up her mind in that instant that he and no other would be her husband. Unfortunately, my grandpa Sal had made up his mind that Sylvia would be his wife, and he was the older brother. This might not be a problem where you live, but it was a really big problem for Antonio and Sylvia.

Obviously Grandpa got over it, because he was married to my nana Lucy for forty-nine years. But at the time, it meant war. The restaurant would go to him, of course, so Antonio had to find something else. He bought a farm out on the Mesa where he grew apples and peaches for cider, and although he never got as famous as Merlino’s, he actually became rather wealthy once he started growing the chiles and beans that thrive in those hot, irrigated fields. The apples liked the irrigation, too; it just drove my uncle crazy to have to outguess the last freeze every year.

What they never grew, Antonio and Sylvia, was children. So eventually they healed the rift with the family and it became a tradition to have holidays at the farm. The house was a rambling Victorian with a porch that wrapped around three sides. Nearly all the downstairs windows opened on to it. My aunt used to put out dozens and dozens of red geraniums in clay pots every summer, and over the years, some got so big she had to put them on wheels. I used to help her move them, every spring.

It had been a long time since I’d seen the farm. The trees had grown a lot bigger since the last time I’d been there, and a bank of lilac bushes, just about to explode into blossom, had taken over the western property line. There weren’t any geraniums, only a forgotten basket that had withered on a hook over the winter.

Other than that, it looked exactly the same. Outside.

And, sadly, inside, too.

Shane surveyed the living room with its overstuffed furniture and dusty carpets, its plaster walls made grimy by years of cooking and my uncle’s cigarettes. Probably the result of failing eyesight on my aunt’s part, too. If she could have seen the grime, she would have scrubbed it away. Shane couldn’t know that. Couldn’t know that my imagination filled the room with Christmas trees and the four of us girls and innumerable cousins all racing around the grown-ups’ legs until somebody shouted at us to get outside.

He said, “We aren’t really going to live here?”

“As a matter of fact, we are.”

“What’s with all the little statues?” He pointed to an altar in the corner and one visible in the dining room.

Jordan and I exchanged a smile. “Saints,” I said. “Sylvia was big on saints.”

Jordan shuddered. “I think you’re brave to take it on, Jewel.”

“Bravery has nothing to do with it.” I moved inside, beckoned for Michael to join us. He was hanging back, his hands in his pockets, looking over the fields. I wondered what he was thinking.

I wondered what
I
was thinking. Jordan put the keys in my hands ceremoniously. “There’s some bread and a lasagna Mama sent over from the restaurant; just bake it for an hour. I got some groceries stocked for you, and cat food’s in the cupboard below the sink—you know about the cats, right?”

They came with the house, three of them. I nodded.

“Sylvia only gave them Science Diet, so you have to feed them that or you’ll be sorry. Mama and I aired things out and cleaned things up a little, but she’s been fretting over Dad so much—” A touchy subject and she skittered away from it.

“Thanks, Jordan.” I kissed her head, surprised still at the height difference between us. I hadn’t quit growing until I was pregnant with Shane, and I felt my height almost everywhere. Jordan had halted just shy of five feet and I could easily kiss her crown. “You’ll never know how much it means to me.”

“Well, watch out. Not everybody is thrilled that you inherited this place.”

“Who wanted it?”

Jordan lifted a shoulder. “A few people. Land values have gone up like you wouldn’t believe, and even without the house, a hundred acres of land is worth something.”

A hundred acres. I’d forgotten that. I wondered about taxes on that much land and when they’d need to be paid. “Was it making any money before she died?”

“Some, maybe. I don’t know how much. Her estate paid off any encumbrances, though, so you should be okay until you get your sea legs.” She grinned and clasped my arm. The bells on her bracelet rang. “Buck up. She really wanted you to have it.”

Jordan went out and stopped on the porch to put a hand on Michael’s skinny waist, looking up at him in concern and no awe whatsoever. She’s a nurse, and a good one, though she is at heart an artist. I’d asked her a million questions about things when we’d first found out he was sick. I loved her for the gentleness of that hand.

FROM THE
PUEBLO CHIEFTAIN
CLASSIFIEDS:

Thank you to Saint Jude for answering my special prayer. This is my publication.

Say this prayer for nine days, nine times each day.

“May the sacred heart of Jesus be adored, glorified, loved, and preserved throughout the world now and forever. Sacred heart of Jesus, pray for us. Saint Jude, worker of miracles, pray for us.” On the ninth day your prayers will be answered. It has never failed. Publication must be promised.

—Rose Falconi Sabatino

Chapter 2

Two months after we got there, the phone rang at 3:00 A.M., starting what would turn out to be one of the longest days of my entire life.

I picked up the receiver from a sound sleep, then dropped it and had to fumble around in the covers to find it. Pushing my hair out of my eyes, I said, “Talk to me.”

“Mom, hi. This is Shane.”

“I know.”

“First, before you get mad, I have a good reason for being late.”

He was always late, and he always had a good reason. “Mmm.”

“Mom. Are you listening? Are you awake?”

I settled deeper into my pillows, waiting for him to come to the point.

“Mom? Mom! This is important. I’m in jail and I need you to come get me.”

“Jail.” As well as I could remember at three o’clock in the morning, it was Shane’s first brush with the law, but I was familiar with the procedure. Way too familiar. “I hope you don’t need bail money, because I don’t have it.”

“Um. Yeah. Well, actually, I do.”

A boy named Horace wouldn’t end up in jail at the tender age of seventeen. Wouldn’t happen. No how, no way.

“Mom?” Nervousness was creeping in now. “Are you there?”

“I’m here.” Sitting up, as a matter of fact. “How much?”

“Uh, I don’t know.” He said something to someone else, and I imagined some bored cop in a starched uniform, his pockets pressed neatly against his chest. “Hundred bucks.”

I closed my eyes. “I don’t have it.”

A long pause at the end of the line. “You aren’t going to leave me here, are you? I swear, Mom, it wasn’t my fault.”

“It never is, Shane.” And I did something it had never occurred to me to do before: I hung up the phone. Since I knew for a fact he’d only get one call, I didn’t have to worry about him calling back to wheedle and cajole and try to wear me down. It would be good for him to stew there.

While I figured out where to get his bail. A hundred dollars. So he’d done something very stupid this time—and got caught. It crossed my mind that maybe I ought to just let him stay there all night, teach him a lesson. I’d done it with his father.

I fell back on the bed, feeling a dull kind of pain across my shoulders, and thought about the pies I’d have to start baking in two hours, then deliver to various spots all over town. If I didn’t bail him out right now, he’d be stuck there until at least noon.

Leave him,
said the annoyed mother in a voice that sounded a lot like Madonna’s—the singer, not the saint.

But what about all the creeps in the holding cell?
This one was June Cleaver’s.

Be good for him,
Madonna said.

But what if they hurt him?
June argued.

I squeezed my eyes shut and ripped out a good, solid roar of frustration. Shane, brilliant and bad, arrogant and sweet, lost and proud and troubled, was driving me out of my mind. June’s voice said quietly,
He needs a father, you know.

Yeah.
Madonna snorted.
To beat him.

In the end, I decided to bail him out for purely practical reasons. If I left it till noon, I’d be exhausted and wouldn’t be able to mete out punishment well enough. If I did it now, especially without coffee, he’d get a furious earful.

But that meant I had to get the bucks. The only two people who wouldn’t either make me eat crow for the next six months or throw a fit were Jordan and Michael. Michael had no money, either. Jordan might scrape it together, but it would be a sacrifice, and I couldn’t stand to ask.

My father wouldn’t talk to me about the weather. Little chance he’d bail out my bad-seed child. My mother might have done it on the sly, but it was kind of tough to hide a middle-of-the night phone call.

Which left only one person. Jasmine, my other sister. She’d have the money, and she’d get up in the middle of the night to give it to me. I would also have to live with the polite tsking and ladylike sighs for ages and ages.

It amazed me faintly, lying there, that I had so many resources after so many years of having only myself to rely on. Another good side of roots, I guessed, but it was hard for me to settle back into it, to remember that I did have options.

With fierce, quick stabs, I dialed the number. The phone rang four times before Jasmine picked it up and answered in her perfectly accentless voice, which was fluty and sweet even in the middle of the night. I wondered if she did drills.

“Jasmine,” I said before I could chicken out, “I’m sorry to wake you up, but I need a huge favor and you’re the only one I can ask.”

“Jewel! Tell me, honey. What is it?”

Honey. Like
I
was the younger sister. “I need your help, and I wouldn’t ask, but you’re the only solvent person I know. I need a hundred dollars right now to bail Shane out of jail.”

“Jail?” There was as much glee as dismay in the word. “How awful! What did he do?”

“I don’t know yet. Can you help me?”

“Of course!”

“Cash, Jasmine.”

“Even I know that, Jewel. I’ve got it in my cookie jar. Just run by on your way and pick it up.”

“Thank you. I owe you big. I’ll take the kids for a whole weekend so you and Brian can get away.”

“Don’t worry about that right now. Just get that boy out of that awful place.”

I thought, suddenly, that maybe it wasn’t June Cleaver mouthing those worried words in my head. It was Jasmine, the sport-utility-driving, aerobics-going, Land’s End–wearing 1990s version of June. God love her. And in spite of everything, I was glad of the blessing of family. “Jasmine,” I said. “Please don’t tell Dad.”

“Oh, Jewel! I won’t.”

She would, of course. I don’t know why I cared. It would be just what he expected, and things were so bad between us anyway it wouldn’t make any difference, but for once I wanted to keep a thread of dignity.

I think I’d hoped that my father would drop the war after I’d been home for a little while. After two months, I fit right back in with my sisters and my mother, the relatives I was beginning to reacquaint myself with. They moved, my family, as easily as water, to incorporate me and Shane and Michael, embracing us in that mercurial fluid of
la familia
. It was as if I’d never left.

Except for my father, who considered me banished and invisible. I didn’t go to my mother’s house or even call there. The family water flowed around the banishment, making a pocket for my father to occupy without me, and I was trying to live with it.

Turning on the lamp by the bed, I made myself put my feet on the floor and straighten up, forget about my father. There was enough to worry about without tossing him into the mix. My jeans were flung over the back of a chair, and I put them on, then shucked my nightgown and turned around, yawning, to look for my bra. My hair swished over one shoulder, brushed across my breast, and for some reason, it brought awareness to my skin. My body. Maybe it was being awakened in the middle of the night. Maybe it was just that that there was no father in this boy’s life made me feel so alone.

Whatever the reason, I stood there in the lamplight in the middle of the night, thinking about how long it had been since I’d touched anybody. A man. So very, very long. So long that I’d forgotten to notice that the soft air of an almost summer predawn could arouse me.

Touch. Once, my greatest comfort had come from lying, naked flesh to naked flesh, with Billy. Not having sex, necessarily. Just touching him like that, shoulder to foot, arms entangled. It somehow healed wounded places in me, eased the tension of a day.

Standing there in the coolness, I honestly couldn’t remember the last time I’d been touched in any but the most cursory of ways. Michael held my hands, and I touched him a lot when he needed help or when he was hurting. Since I’d been back home, I’d fallen back into the hugging and kissing my family does, and it was great, really, so much better than I remembered.

None of that was the same as touching a man. But then, what had touching men ever gotten me? Trouble. Nothing but trouble.

At my knee, a dog collar rattled, and Berlin made a soft woofing noise. Oh, yes. I do have animal touches. There was Berlin, ostensibly Michael’s dog, who had named me Favorite Human years ago. And on the bed were the three cats, who’d likewise nominated me F.H., inherited from Sylvia. Two were sort of neurotic and needy and wanted attention all the time. The other one was an aloof and gorgeous tuxedo male named Giovanni. It was naturally him that I liked the best, and I reached over to give him a little scrub.

It was only then I realized I was still half naked, and it made me feel very silly. Moony. I put on the rest of my clothes and pulled my hair out of my eyes with a scrunchy, then went to get my rotten child out of jail.

Women often tell me, with a piercing kind of longing in their voices, that they always wanted sisters. I somehow end up being friends with women who don’t have them—Michael said once that I must be such a sister that they gravitate to me instantly.

My mother had four sisters and is so entwined with them that I think the force of her pleasure is what caused her to have only daughters. She has four and would have kept going, but my father insisted they couldn’t afford any more children. She once confessed to me that she wanted twelve kids. I don’t know why. The four of us gave her fits enough as it was.

I don’t hate my sisters, but having a crew of them is not exactly what these sisterless friends of mine always seem to think it is. I have the scars on my arms from Jasmine’s fingernails—which was her usual response to my borrowing one of her shirts, even if all of mine were in the laundry and she didn’t like the shirt I borrowed—to prove otherwise. She and Jordan used to gang up on me and call me conceited and vain, which I admit I was. They tattled when they got mad at me.

And when I left them behind, I missed them more than I could ever tell you.

The thing is, there is no more complicated relationship on the planet than sisters. I completely adore them. They completely drive me insane. I can’t imagine my life without them and have often said I hope I’m the first one to die because I don’t want to have to bury them. I think it would kill me. I’ve watched my aunts and grandmothers bury sisters. They just fall all to pieces, and I know I would, too.

Maybe that’s what all my sisterless friends are looking for when they wish for a sister of their own. That connection. I mean, we might have called one another names and said awful things, even
done
awful things, but when it comes down to the wire, sisters are there for you in a way you can’t always count on from your friends. Or maybe you’ll just ask your sisters for the support you need when you know they’ll be pissed but will help you anyway.

Like Jasmine now. I drove to her house, a luxurious Mediterranean-style adobe built in a community that would have been gated anywhere else in the country, and made all sorts of pretensions to being gated here, though there was no earthly reason for it. True to her word, she’d turned on the porch light. I left the car running in the street—I’d never dare drive that old car into that pristine driveway and risk dripping oil on to the concrete—and dashed up the sloping, curved walk to the porch. Jasmine must have been waiting. She opened the heavy carved door just as I landed on the top step and said, “Come on in.” Her voice suited the moment—subdued and quiet. “I’ve got it right here.”

I followed her inside. Even in the middle of the night, she looked like a Hollywood version of a southern belle. Her robe was apricot satin, showing a glimpse of the negligee beneath it, the fabric swooping dramatically over a chest that was her pride and joy, and neatly flat in the back. Billy had made a joke about that lack of rear end, once upon a time. Remembering that made me miss him suddenly.

From the table beside the door, she took two crisp fifty-dollar bills. Her manicured nails matched her robe and I wondered if she coordinated the polish color and her clothes for a week or changed the nails every day or if it was a coincidence. “Here you go,” she said.

I took the money, feeling a sting that I’d had to ask at all, but another surge of gratitude that Jasmine had it to loan me. “I’ll pay you back in a couple of weeks.”

“Whenever, Jewel,” she said in a hushed voice. “I know it’s hard for you right now.”

Without her usual armor of makeup, Jasmine’s skin glowed pearlescently, and her eyes were as purplyblue as the gloxinias she grew as a hobby. I shook my head, knowing my own skin was greasy with summer and sleep. “It’s unbelievable that you look this good in the middle of the night.”

Her eyes went soft. “Thank you. That’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me since you got home.”