No Place Like Home (28 page)

The frown deepened. “Are you all right, babe?”

“I’m fine,
babe.
” I shook my head and headed toward the house, not looking to see if he followed. After the shadows of the orchard, the sun hit me hard on the top of the head, heavy as a dropped iron, and I had to stop, blinking hard against encroaching prickles of black, focusing on the white-painted clapboards of the kitchen. Through the window, I could see Shane holding a colander, an apron tied around him.

A little shattered voice cried,
Michael, what will I do?
But I shushed it and kept putting one foot down in front of the other until I had the screen door to hold on to and the cool of the deep shade running in a three-inch strip around the house.

I was swaying pretty hard, and even if I was furious with Malachi, I was grateful when he caught me with one big arm around my waist. He was strong and sturdy, something to hold on to in the spinning of a world that didn’t have any markers. “I got you, honey, just lean on me and we’ll get you a drink of water.”

“I’m all right,” I said.

“I know you are,” he said, as if he were speaking to a cranky four-year-old. “Glass of water won’t hurt nothing, though, will it?” He steered me through the tangle of people in the kitchen and dining room, their faces blurring absurdly, in and out of focus, and out to the side porch. “Head between your knees,” he said, settling me in a chair, and someone must have helped him because there was a glass of water in my hands, and he held it a little longer than I thought I needed him to. When I got it to my mouth, the water was so cold and silvery going down my throat that I thought it had been too long, that I hadn’t been drinking enough water.

“Thank you.” I looked up at him, and he was peering back at me with those way too vivid eyes that almost hurt me they were so beautiful. The rippling edge of a scream came up through the back of my brain, and I gritted my teeth against it.

Only a little longer. Just get through this part, and I could go completely crazy if I needed to. Get Michael buried, see Malachi off . . . and, well, I couldn’t lose it entirely, because there was Shane to think of, but maybe Jasmine and Jordan could keep him for a few days so I’d have some time alone.

Malachi’s big hands closed around mine. “Jewel, why don’t you let a little of it out?”

I took a breath. “I’m okay.” Then I thought of his father, coming in a few hours, and wondered how to tell him. If I should tell him. “I’m making your dad’s pie. Just a warning.”

“I smelled it.”

I remembered his dare at the wedding. And I will never be able to say what made me do it—maybe I had to be just so far beyond caring that nothing mattered—but I said, “Will you get the phone?”

He went inside and came back with it. “A miracle no one is on it.”

Before I could lose my nerve, I punched the buttons for Falconi’s, and Lorenzo answered. “Hey, guy,” I said, meeting Malachi’s eyes. “It’s Jewel. Is my father around?”

“Sure. Let me get him for you.”

“Tell him it’s me.”

A noisy pause. “I will.”

My heart wasn’t beating any faster. My hands didn’t sweat. A couple of tears leaked out of my eyes while I waited. I heard a clatter and then my father’s voice. “Hello.” Abrupt, but not brusque. Worried.

“Daddy, I have a favor to ask you,” I said, and my voice, which had been very stable to that minute, turned croaky.

“Whatever you need,” he said.

I couldn’t speak for a moment, couldn’t get enough air through my throat. “Um . . . I need one more pallbearer. Can you help me?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Sure, of course.”

“Thank you, Daddy.”

“Whatever you need, baby,” he said.

Oh, it was dangerous to talk to him. “I have to go,” I said, trying to maintain some kind of control. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“You take care, Jewel. It’s not so easy, saying good-bye to somebody you love a lot.”

“I will, thank you.”

I cut the connection, tossed back my hair from my hot eyes, and said, “Your father is going to be here at four o’clock.”

He dropped his head in his hands. “Ah, hell.”

“You want to pick him up?”

“I—uh—” He turned his lips down, blinking hard. “I don’t think so.”

Nodding, I said, “Shane can do it.”

I went back inside and my mother was waiting. She hugged me. “Good girl,” she whispered, and I felt her tears on my neck. “Thank you.”

I patted her arm. “Let’s get back to work.”

Shane found me a little before three. Somehow—I couldn’t really remember getting there—I was sitting in a plastic lawn chair in the shade of a tree in the backyard, watching a crew of male relatives, all of them Falconis, getting things ready for the barbeque we’d have. Shane had the keys to the station wagon in his hand. “I need directions,” he said.

He looked pale, and violet shadows stained the hollows below his eyes. “Sit down for a few minutes,” I invited. “You don’t have to go just yet.”

Reluctantly he dropped down beside me, resistance in every line of his long body. “I’d really just like to get outta here, Mom. No offense.” He winced a little, looking at a pair of six- or seven-year-old girls screeching out in the orchard. “But this is crazy. I don’t know how you stand it.”

There wasn’t a smile anywhere in me, but I looked at the circle of cars lining the drive and lifted a shoulder. “It’s always been like this. It was terrible when your dad died, trying to take care of everything right. You need family for this.”

He raised his eyes. “You talk different when you talk about family, you know that? I always noticed it, but now I know where it comes from.”

“Yeah? How’s it different?”

“You just start talking like them.” One side of his mouth lifted, an Elvis expression I suspected he’d once practiced, but now was natural. “You sound like Pueblo then.”

“Hmm. I thought I lost my accent.”

“No way.”

“My dad is going to be a pallbearer,” I said suddenly.

“Cool.”

“You don’t sound surprised.”

He shook his head. “Mom, he misses you bad. All he talks about when I’m there is you.”

“He does?”

“Every day, Mom, he finds a way every day to ask me questions about you. ‘Does your mom put cinnamon in this pie?’ ” He adopted my father’s lilt exactly. “ ‘Your mom teach you that song?’ ‘Your mom ever tell you about the time we went up to Denver to see the opera on her sixteenth birthday, just me and her?’ ”

A fierce pain went through me. The opera—that had been such a special evening. I dressed up and so did he and we had dinner, then went to see
La Boheme,
and as we drove home, a hundred miles in the dark of a summer night, we talked and talked and talked.

“Why didn’t he talk to
me
?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I’m still trying to figure out the family stuff here.” He touched my hand. “He loves you, Mom.”

“I know.”

He left then, and I was too exhausted to do anything more than just sit there, the world blurring out again. I was still there when Shane returned, a tall thin man in the car with him.

I had always imagined Abe Shaunnessey to be an older version of Michael. The man who got out of the car, his hair badly cut, his clothes old but painfully clean, was instead the spitting image of Malachi. Same dark hair, same dark eyes, same hard-hewn swooping angles of jaw and cheekbone and nose. He looked to be about sixty, a hard-lived sixty, of course, but not yet worn out. He was thinner than he should have been, and down on his luck, but his grip was strong, his gaze direct when he grasped my hand. “Thank you for taking care of him all this time, Jewel. He loved you a lot.”

Malachi came out the back door and just stood there, hands loose at his sides, his mouth drawn in a hard line. Abe turned around, his shoulders square, and said, “Hello, son.”

Malachi closed his eyes, and it almost seemed he would faint there in the hot sun, but then he came down the steps. I watched it in slow motion, my perspective divided almost as if I were in two places at once—looking at them from above and from the side, so I could see the part in Malachi’s hair where the sun burnished two hot reddish lines through it, and the gray in his father’s which was a slightly faded version of the same dark brown. I could also see Malachi’s face and his father’s shoulders, which looked suddenly vulnerable when Malachi’s huge hands embraced them. Cicadas set up a racket in a nearby elm, and two of my cousins argued over where the barbeque pit should go, and a cat skittered through the grass at my feet.

Above and straight on, I saw their faces. Tears wetting Abe’s craggy features. Something far deeper covering Malachi’s. His eyes were closed, and his hands were in fists, and I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone in my life the way I loved Malachi Shaunnessey in that moment, seeing his heart break and his walls come down. It moved through me in waves of red and yellow light, strong as sound, washing away everything else, even grief.

And knowing not even this would keep him didn’t change it, but it made me look at him, memorize the shape of his fingers, the tips white where he was holding his father’s thin form; look at the angle of hip to leg, the uneven fall of his hair. It wasn’t like looking at someone else, but at a part of my own body. It was the same way I felt about Michael, that he could never be gone because he was living inside of me, forever and ever, as long as I walked the earth, as long as there was breath in me. That’s what love does, that’s the sweetest part. I didn’t have to make sense of it or justify it or even have it returned. Love just arrives and fills you up and that’s enough.

Sitting there, in the sun, missing Michael, I realized it was something I was really good at. Maybe it was the best thing I did. Loving Michael and Malachi, loving my mother and father and sisters and cousins and uncles and aunts and all the ones in between. Loving my son so much it sometimes overwhelmed me.

And loving Billy. It had been the right thing to do. There, half-crazy with grief, filled in every cell with a kind of rocketing, blistering recognition of my own life, I could see that loving Billy had given him everything he could possibly accept—someone he could count on, no matter what, to love him. A child who would carry him all his life. Someone to turn to. Someone to worry about him.

But he’d given me so much more. He’d given me a chance to taste the world and live in it, a chance to love wildly. He’d given me a son who was the best thing I’d ever offer the world. He’d given me Michael, who would always be my truest and deepest friend. Even that day, I knew that.

Billy had even brought me, in a roundabout way, the love of my life, who’d walked in that first day smelling of clothes hanging on my aunt Sylvia’s line, and stolen my heart.

I stood up and leaned in to kiss them both on the cheek. “Come in and have something to eat,” I said, my hand lingering on Malachi’s arm a little longer than on his father’s. “There’s plenty.”

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3 kegs beer, 2 Budweiser, 1 Bud Lite donation

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Chapter 20

The day of the funeral comes back to me in bits and pieces. It was sunny and hot, the kind of still, close day when everything living scurries away to the shadows and waits for night. I remember it in the contrast of that blazing sun and the shadows it created—the shattering brilliance of the church windows, the sweat on the faces of the pallbearers, the depth and coolness of the grave.

Afterward, the wake at Sylvia’s house—my house—the rectangles of the windows in the dining room bright in the dimness. The fabric of my uncle T.J.’s coat, nubby and brown as he stood talking with Shane, his arm around my son’s shoulders. The smell of aftershave and lotions and basil and tomatoes and coffee. The press of kisses imprinted my face, dozens of kisses, pats on the cheek, squeezes of the arm, deep hugs. Never wordless.
We liked him, Jewel. He was good. You’re good. We’re proud of you.
And,
What a good boy you’ve raised, look at him taking care of things,
and
I hear he’s a good cook,
and
Isn’t he handsome
and
He sings like his grandfather
and
The girls must be beating a path to his door, I bet.

So soon after a wedding, it was easy to pick out the differences in family gathered for this—there were even more people coming in and out than there would be for a wedding, coming to offer whatever they could, like the kegs and the wine and the music. Like my cousin Vince finding a hammer in the back room to fix the loose step on the porch so nobody would trip on it. Like Jasmine finding a notebook for people to sign so that I’d be able to write thank-you notes later, and my mother taking over the care and feeding of the New Yorkers and Californians come to pay Michael their respects. One of them was Jimmy Angelo, the one who had invited Shane to come live with him for Shane’s last year of high school. Jimmy had gained weight since the last time I’d seen him, and his hair was thinning across the top, but his arms were sturdy and strong as he embraced me. “Let’s find some time to talk, huh?” he said.

I nodded.

It was good to see them, even better when three or four of them brought out their instruments in the backyard and played a tribute to Michael—singing all of his songs, every single one he’d written.

Shane sang my favorite. Next to me, Abe sighed with a kind of pained sound. “He sure looks like you, don’t he? But he sings like Michael. Boy had the best training in the world.”

I poured some more beer into his plastic cup from a pitcher on the table. It was getting dark now, the crickets and cicadas coming out to lend their song to the dance. “Where did Michael get his voice, Abe? Was it from you?”

“Nah, I can’t sing a lick. His mama always had aspirations that way, you know, but she didn’t have no range, and once she stopped being the cutest young thing, she stopped landing gigs.” He sipped his beer, his face shining like his wife had just stepped out into the next room. “Broke her heart clean in half, it did.”

“She was always beautiful, from the pictures I’ve seen anyway.”

“She sure was, Jewel.” He drew in on his cigarette and I noticed that his fingers were cracked along the tips, the telltale sign of a mechanic. He’d scrubbed them well, but nothing ever got rid of grease that went that deep. I wondered if he could fix the scream in my car.

“You know,” he said quietly, “she’s been gone nigh on fifteen years and I didn’t see her for three before that, and there’s not a day that goes by that my heart doesn’t ache a little with missing her.”

I nodded, touching his hand. “I can see that.”

“Folks are sure foolish.” He shook his head. “Makes me happy to think of Michael and her on the other side, waiting for me when I go.”

It startled me a little, and I blurted out without thinking, “You think she’s waiting? Did she forgive you?”

His eyes stared into the distance. “Sure she did. She wasted away without me, darlin’. Only reason I didn’t waste away without her—” his mouth twitched in emotion “—is ’cause I was tryin’ to get home to my boys.”

And I realized it was probably true. “I’m so sorry.”

He sighed. “My own fault.”

“That doesn’t make it any easier, though, does it?”

“No. I reckon it don’t.”

From the corner beneath the trees came an explosion of laughter. We both looked over. Malachi had been herded by a band of my male relatives into a knotty little group that was intent on fine drunkenness. A sacred duty when a man’s lost his brother, and one they took seriously. They wouldn’t let anybody get sloppy—though Malachi would be given that freedom if he showed an inclination—but they’d take the time to listen to him, tell stories of their own brothers, living and dead.

“He looks right at home,” Abe said.

“He fits right in,” I agreed. My son, who should have, started to sing with a pack of wild men in wild clothes and wild hair and wild hearts. He’d never stay, my boy. His heart had been burned early with the imprint of his father’s music, and music would be his mistress. I guessed, sitting there in the darkness, that I’d raised him right after all. He’d had the perfect training for that world—how to survive and how to screw yourself up and how to make it work.

I’d miss him. So much.

Through the roar of the others, I heard Malachi’s laughter weaving under all it, thick and deep and rich. “He’s got restless feet, though.”

“Malachi?” Abe said nothing for a minute. “I don’t think it comes natural to him, not like Michael and me. Malachi was always more like his mama, wanting to set down some roots, crying about the friends they’d made, the gardens they planted.”

“And now he’s the one who’s leading adventure tours all over the world.”

“Only cuz he’s scared.”

“Probably.” Across the open lawn, Malachi raised his glass at me. I raised mine in return.
“Salud,”
I said aloud.

A figure emerged from the darkness, dapper and perfectly pressed even after so many hours of eating and drinking and talking following the funeral, except for a betraying lock of hair falling on his forehead in that rakish way. He carried a plate of food, which he put down in front of me. “Your mama sent this out,” my father said. “Said you need to eat some more.”

“I’m not very hungry,” I said.

“I know.” He sat down with us, pushed the plate and fork toward me a little. “But you don’t want to get sick. I remember when my brother died, I had trouble remembering to eat.”

I looked up at him, at those deep beautiful eyes that were finally focused on me, the rift just—gone—and I realized I’d always known it would go this way, that when I really needed him, my father would be there. And I knew, finally, what I’d been waiting for.

The dam I’d carefully constructed that morning of so much rain simply gave way. A trickle, at first, a sudden spring of tears that overflowed and fell on my cheeks, then more, and more, and more.

My father said, “Come here, baby,” and I fell forward heavily, knowing he’d be there to catch me in the net, the web, of his arms. In the arms that had cradled me from babyhood, I wept, feeling those hands that had made me hollyhock dolls smooth my hair, that voice I had missed so much murmuring quietly, “It’s okay, let it out. You just cry, Jewel. You just go ahead and cry.”

Malachi found me about midnight. In the kitchen, all the food had been put away, and the dishes done, and nearly everyone had gone. A few of the younger cousins lingered, along with Jordan and Henry, out in the back where citronella torches tried to hold off the mosquitoes that bred by the river no matter how dry and hot it got over the rest of the city. I sat on the side porch by myself, looking at the sky and thinking about nothing, just listening to the homey sounds of a loose group of musicians at play. Sudden thrums of guitar or snatches of song, spontaneous riffs weaving together, laughter and commentary. It sounded, I thought distantly, like they were getting serious about something now—somebody repeating something over and over on a guitar while someone else wove some sax through it, and someone else belting out wordless voice notes. A properly melancholy minor key, the song of men expressing their sorrow—and celebration.

I heard Malachi’s heavy step on the wooden boards, coming around from the front. I looked up. “Hi.”

“Where’ve you been? I been looking all over for you,” he said. Weariness weighted every syllable. “Even went down to the river to see if you might be there.”

“I took a shower.”

He took my hand in both of his. “Guess we got over our father issues, didn’t we?”

“Guess so.”

“Michael engineered it all.”

It hadn’t occurred to me, but of course he had. “Yeah.”

“I’m leaving in the morning, Jewel.”

I looked at him. Nodded. “I thought you might.”

He lifted my hand and pressed his mouth to my palm. “Will you . . .” His mouth worked, the same gesture I’d seen his father make earlier. He cleared his throat, raised his head to look at me with those brilliant, sad, broken-hearted eyes. “Can we go upstairs?”

“I’m too tired for sex,” I said. “Thanks, anyway.”

“Not sex,” he said, letting go of a sigh. “I just want to hold you.”

“We can do that.” I touched his face. “Don’t go without telling Shane, all right? He’s gonna miss you.”

“We talked already.”

“Good.” I stood and tugged his hand. “Come on, big boy, let’s go on up.”

In the moonlit darkness of his room, we shed our clothes and lay down, finding each other across the bed. The windows were open to catch any spare breeze that might cool the thick air, but it was very hot and our skin burned and sweated wherever we touched. It didn’t matter. We curled up together. Swept by some impulse, I found myself humming the song that had been in my head all day, “Shall We Gather at the River?” Malachi hummed along, picking up the refrain when we got there, and I felt his heart breaking, felt his sorrow as he pressed his forehead to mine, whispering, “I love you, Jewel.”

Tears fell on my neck, and they felt like an anointing, lighting a pure white light inside of me, a light that grew and grew, flickering at first, then steadied as my certainty solidified. “I love you,” he repeated, the sound so quiet I barely caught it, and then again, he said it, raggedly, “I love you. I never knew what this was like.”

I caught his big head and opened my eyes. “I know, Malachi.” Then I kissed him and rested my head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat. “You don’t have to leave, you know.”

His hands tangled in my hair, and there was trembling in them. “Come with me, Jewel. Please.” He smoothed my hair urgently from my forehead. “There’s a whole world out there, a million places I want to show you.”

“No.” I put my hand on his face. “If you want to, you can stay here. And we’ll visit any place you want.”

“I can’t,” he whispered. “I can’t.”

And he didn’t. I wish I could tell you that I woke up in the morning and he’d had some epiphany that let him go out and buy me a big flashy ring I could use to make my sisters jealous, but he didn’t.

He left me sleeping, something he’d probably had some practice at doing. The first I knew of his going was the sound of his motorcycle starting up in the gray light of dawn. I didn’t throw on my clothes and go running out into the morning, but I didn’t stay in bed listening to him drive away, either.

I got up and put on my robe and went to the window with a view to the east, a view of the road that leads to the rest of the world. It took him a few minutes to clear the local roads and hit the highway, but I saw him, a lone rider heading toward the dawn. I watched until he sailed over a hill and disappeared.

From the door, Shane said, “Are you okay, Mom?”

I turned, smiling even though I had to wipe my cheeks. “I’m fine.” Tugging the tie of my robe, I added, “Go back to bed, sweetie. You were up late.”

But instead he ambled over in his new man’s body, on giant man feet, and bent down to hug me. “How about if I fix you some eggs or something?”

“You don’t have to take care of me, Shane. I’m going to be okay.”

“I know that. You’ve done all right so far.” He rocked me back and forth a little, and it made me think of Michael with a burst of love and sorrow.

“Listen,” I said, pulling back. I sat on the bed and patted a place beside me. “Jimmy and I talked last night.”

He bowed his head, lacing his long-fingered hands together. “I changed my mind, Mom. I’ll hang here until I finish school.”

“No.” I shook my head for emphasis. “I had already decided, watching you at the wedding, that there’s no reason for you to stay here.” I swallowed. “You’re ready. It’s time for you to go find your life.”

“Mom!” He lifted his head and looked at me with his father’s eyes. Or rather eyes the color of his father’s. Shane’s held a level of maturity that Billy had never reached. “No way! I can’t leave you here, all alone like this!”