Significant Others (3 page)

I should never have let my mother out of my sight. The memory of her swaying over my father’s grave still haunts me. If Donny hadn’t caught her, I think she would have fallen—no, she was definitely about to jump—into the hole of freshly turned dirt to join her husband.

I took her small, shapely hands into mine and rubbed my fingers against her wedding ring. She still wasn’t ready to let my dad go, to break the bond between them. Even though it breaks my heart, I had to admit it made me feel secure that she hadn’t forgotten my father. It was also another reminder that my mother had a better relationship with her dear departed husband than I did with my live, lying one, and that her marriage—even beyond the grave—was in better shape than mine.

My mother had been heavily involved in the negotiations with Hammond Reddekker, but lately her focus hadn’t been on business and her heart hadn’t been in the acquisition talks. Her recent pronouncement that she was going to pull out of the company completely was not entirely unexpected. The final decision was hers, but right now Palladino Properties was my life and I didn’t know what I’d do without it. Maybe that was selfish, but that was how I felt.

While my mother walked into the kitchen to fix us lunch, Donny approached me about the buyout.

“Not now,” I cautioned. “We just got here. We can talk about that later.”

Donny grumbled.

As I surveyed the living room in disbelief, he announced proudly, “So, sis, how do you like the changes I’ve made to the place?”

“You’ve redecorated,” I noted, rubbing my fingers against my jaw and across my mouth, trying not to register my shock. “It’s very...retro,” I said charitably.

Taking my remark as a compliment, Donny smiled one of those big goofy smiles that lit up his green eyes and his entire face, while I continued to look around the darkness in confusion.

Walking into the living room of my mother’s condo was like walking back in time. The blinds were closed and the lights were dimmed, except for strategically placed spotlights designed to enhance the vintage photos on the wall. It was obvious my mother didn’t really “live” here. She just existed. The atmosphere was as sterile as a museum. I wondered if I needed a ticket for admission.

“Is this supposed to be some kind of a shrine?” I asked in the hushed tones that the room demanded, thinking that maybe it was something like the Elvis shrine Mrs. Shelby down the hall had in her spare bedroom. “Did you do all this for
your
dad?”

Okay, now it was official. Both my mother and my brother were skating on the edge of sanity. And it was my job to pull them back from the brink. Work was the perfect prescription. It was the only way to help them get over the pain of losing a husband and a father. It was the way I planned to cope with a marriage that had turned to mush. If I could convince my mother
not
to sign my father’s company away.

“Yeah, and I already know what you’re going to say,” Donny blustered. “
Stanley Palladino
was my dad.”

“I wasn’t going to say that.” I frowned; however, I
was
thinking it. It was still spooky how well my brother could read me.

Donny had obviously set the place up as a memorial to honor his
real
father, a World War II flyer who was shot down in a bombing mission over Europe. Donny never knew his real dad. The only remnant of him was an out-of-focus and now faded picture—the only picture Mom had of him. Donny had set it up on the sideboard on a lace runner, in a place of honor, next to his team picture of the Kingfishers, his wedding picture, a photo of Barbara and the children, and a high school graduation shot of Hannah that Marc had taken. That was the only trace of my husband in this condo. Which was appropriate, because I was trying to erase all traces of him from my life. But I’d been in love with my husband for twenty years, so it was hard to break the habit, even for a serious indiscretion.

I circled the room. It was a throwback to the ’40s. Donny was obsessed with World War II, and it showed in the way the place was decorated.

“Is this what you’ve been doing down here the last few months?” I asked in disbelief, thinking of all the time he had wasted.

“These are great books, huh?” Donny said, hefting a particularly bulky volume from the coffee table and placing it gingerly into my hands. He indicated several other books with World War II themes displayed around the room, as well as a wealth of wartime memorabilia hanging on the walls.

“Look here,” he said eagerly, picking up each book in turn. “
The World at War 1939-45; Bombers: the Aircrew Experience;
and
Bomber Missions: Aviation Art of World War II.
You wouldn’t believe what I had to go through to get these. Go ahead, don’t be afraid to handle them.”

Flipping through some of the pages of the book in my hand, in an effort to humor my brother, I glanced at color photos of Superfortresses, pin-ups painted on the planes, and personalized jacket art worn by fearless young men dressed in leather flying jackets with fur collars to ward off the cold in the cockpit. My eyes skimmed the words—“dangerous missions,” “strategic targets,” “intrepid bomber pilots.” I tried to muster up some excitement because these books meant something to my brother, but they were echoes of a past I wasn’t part of and couldn’t relate to.

I returned the book to Donny, who pressed the button on a wall panel that sent soft background music from the 1940s spilling into the living room.

“I’ve piped the music into every room in the house,” Donny announced proudly. Apparently you couldn’t even go to the bathroom unaccompanied by the big band sound.

My mother and Donny’s father met at a USO dance at a women’s club in Pittsburgh during the war, and Donny was obviously trying to recreate those happy memories.

“Your father was very handsome in his uniform,” my mother used to say, when Donny asked about his dad, which was often. “He was an exceptional dancer. He had the most gorgeous green eyes. You have his eyes.” But Mom didn’t have much else to tell about their compatibility off the dance floor. They danced to all the greats—Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey. The romance lasted for several months. They fell hopelessly in love. He went off to war and got himself killed. End of story.

When Donny asked to see their love letters, so he’d have a tangible record of his parents’ history and get a better mental picture of his father, she told him they must have gotten lost after all those years.

Looking around the condo gave me the creeps, because I didn’t think now was the time for my mother to be dwelling on painful memories of her first dead love while she was still recovering from her grief over her second one.

But how could I be critical when I had a lifetime of memories with my dad, and Donny didn’t even have one real memory to cling to. So he’d created his own memories in a cramped condo in Millennium Gardens.

“Stanley Palladino was a good dad,” I said, feeling the need to defend my father, especially now that he was gone. Why hadn’t he been enough for my brother?

“You don’t have to tell me,” Donny said, “but he wasn’t my
real
dad.” Donny lowered his voice so our mother wouldn’t overhear. He had heard the story; we both had, more times than we can count.

My dad adopted Donny and gave him his name when he married my mother. She and her baby boy were making a new life for themselves when they moved from Pittsburgh with my grandmother and Mom’s younger sister—my Aunt Helene—to Atlanta, where she took a job as a typist at my dad’s real estate agency. She worked herself up to agent, and after a couple of years of courting, she agreed to marry him. The rest, as my dad used to say, was history. My birth was part of their history.

“Your mother was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen,” Stanley Palladino was fond of saying when he told the story of their romance. “She was prettier than any model on the pages of a fashion magazine. She refused to marry me so many times I stopped counting, but I never stopped asking. Then one day when I arrived at her apartment for dinner, little Donny greeted me at the door and said his first words, ‘Da Da.’ Your mother burst into tears. I’ll never forget that night. I caught her at her weakest point and closed the sale,” Stanley grinned. “She finally said yes. Of course, I’d been carrying the ring around in my pocket for more than a year. Let that be a lesson to you, Honey,” he used to say, tapping a long finger to my nose. “Persistence pays.”

Speaking of my nose, sometimes I think Donny is lucky. Maybe it would have been nice to have been adopted. It would be handy to have a non-existent parent where I could lay the blame for my physical flaws. This nose? It must have come from my
real
father. Stanley Palladino’s nose looked just fine on Stanley Palladino, but on me, it was a different story. And there was absolutely no way to get past my fat ass, literally or figuratively. That big butt? Right again. My
real
mother.

Actually, I got my tendency for substantial hips from Grandma Lewis, my mother’s mother. Probably as a result of the eight years she lived with us and admonished Donny, Helene, and me to “eat everything on your plate because the children in Europe are starving.” Grandma Lewis must have been the founding member of the clean plate club. I’d spent most of my adult life fighting the Lewis genes so I could fit into my own jeans. Thank God for Talbots® Woman. Other than Mom, I didn’t really know where Donny’s genes originated. But Donny was pretty much perfect in my eyes and owed no apologies to anyone. Everyone adored Donny, and I got to bask in the glow of that adoration, so I couldn’t complain. Even though it was obvious everyone preferred Donny.

I picked up a picture of Donny and my dad that sat on the pass-through between the kitchen and the living room. Donny was probably eight years old when that picture was taken, dressed in a dirty Little League uniform, with smudges all over his face. It was taken right after his team had won the championship game and my dad was beaming into the camera, bursting with fatherly pride.

Stanley Palladino was thrilled to have a son. He took Donny to Little League, taught him how to throw a ball, went to all his high school baseball games, and was as proud as any father when Donny, the hottest prospect in the country, was recruited by the coach of one of the top SEC East teams and later as a pitcher for his first major league team. But as much as Donny loved Stanley Palladino, I knew that my brother still secretly longed for his own father, even after all these years. Donny was a grown man, but he couldn’t stop searching for clues and connections, no matter how tenuous, to a man he never knew.

Stanley Palladino’s death forced him to lose a father all over again. After mourning my father, he turned to his past with a vengeance and became obsessed with finding out all he could about his real father. Did I think it strange that my brother redecorated his condo to recapture memories of his father after all these years? Yes. Might I have gone to the same lengths to preserve my heritage if our situations had been reversed? Quite possibly.

“You still miss him a lot, don’t you?” Donny asked. “So do I.” The sadness was still fresh for both of us, even a year later, I thought, as I wiped the tears from my face, blurring the moisture I saw sparkling in Donny’s eyes. I guess my mother wasn’t the only one affected by the anniversary of my father’s death. Stanley Palladino had not been a big man in stature, but his presence in our world had loomed larger than life.

Donny took the picture from my hand and placed the silver filigreed frame back on the granite countertop.

“Hey, we’d better not let Mom see us like this,” Donny whispered. “I don’t want her falling apart again.”

Donny was a strapper, probably the biggest baseball player in history; so big, in fact, he could have played defensive football. He reminded me of a big stuffed bear I once saw at the Museum of Natural History in Miami. But Donny was not all brawn. He was also sensitive and very smart. Not many people knew that about my brother. Donny didn’t just slide through college on a baseball scholarship. He majored in botany, and his favorite pastime was puttering in his garden in Atlanta and ensuring that Jackson and his girls drank in everything he could teach them about tending indigenous plants.

No one would have guessed that “The Slugger” grew tomatoes, green peppers, and cantaloupe in a compost heap behind his backyard. And no one would have suspected that beneath that bulk beat a soft, sensitive, and generous heart. I wished I could patch that gaping hole left by the loss of his real father, but I couldn’t. No one could.

Donny walked over to the couch and began turning the pages of another one of the World War II picture books.

“My dad was a hero,” Donny stated, “like the guys in this book. Do you think he would have been proud of me? I hope I’ve made him proud. I’m the only thing left of him in this world, except my kids.”

“Oh, Donny,” I sighed, facing him. “How could you not? You’re the best person I know. Whoever had a hand in making you must have been pretty great. He certainly did something right.”

“Then why did he have to die?” Donny bit his lip, and I could tell he was close to tears again. He tried to blink them away. At that moment, he looked as young and vulnerable as that eight-year-old in the photograph.

“I wish I could answer that.”

“And how come Mom never wants to talk about him?”

“I guess it’s too painful to love someone and lose them like that,” I answered quietly.

“I always thought that if I asked her it would seem disrespectful to Stan—to our dad—I mean. Now that he’s been gone for a year, I have some questions.”

“I’m not sure now’s the right time,” I cautioned, indicating with a slight turn of my head that my mother was within earshot—right in the next room.

“Questions only Mom can answer,” Donny persisted. “I wish I could have known him. I wish he could have known my children. Do you think they—the ones who’ve passed on—can see what’s going on down here?” And now I knew he was talking about both dads.

That question was easier to answer. I talked to my dad, my dead dad, all the time, in my mind. His presence was tangible. I felt him looking down on me, watching out for me, watching over me, from wherever he was. I guessed Heaven. Heaven would be lucky to get a good man like Stanley Palladino. I didn’t think that made me crazy. It would have made me crazy if I couldn’t have reached out to him. I still asked his advice, and I thought I heard him answer.