The Color of Light (9 page)

There were four giant soup pots on the restaurant-size stove. He poured gallons of chicken broth into the pots and started it simmering while we washed and chopped vegetables and herbs. Everything was dumped into the pots, along with about ten pounds of brown rice and a tub of leftover spaghetti.

“Do you do this every day?” I asked him.

“People eat every day,” he said, fitting lids onto the pots. “Hey, McGonagle, I have a good idea. Why don't you do one of your programs about homeless people, break some hearts, loosen some wallets?”

“Already did that one, years ago,” I said. “You should work on your skills dividing loaves and fishes instead.”

“Every day I ask for God's help with that particular sleight-of-hand,” he said with a chuckle. “And today he sent me you.”

“If there's a miracle in this story, it's Mr. Sato's green thumb.” I untied my apron and hung it back on the hook he had taken it from and gave him my cap.

He asked about Mom and my daughter, Casey, and I filled him in.

“And how are you?” I asked, watching him closely as he decided how to answer. He leaned back against a counter, arms crossed over his chest, looking down.

“Floor needs a good mopping,” he said instead of answering the question.

“Kevin Halloran told me you were back in the parish,” I said. “I wanted to say hello, so I called the church and asked about your schedule. I was told you'd be here.”

He turned his face up to me, grimacing. “What blabbermouth did you talk to?”

“Lorna Priddy,” I said. “She told me you're in remission.”

“My missing cook calls it recess,” he said. “When I was diagnosed, the diocese offered to assign me a rocking chair at the old priests' home to wait until Our Father calls me home.”

“I can't imagine you accepting that deal.”

“Me either. So I asked if there was a rack available in the rectory at St. Mary's that I could use until the recess bell rings. Cancer be damned, there's still some use in me.”

“Your soup's starting to smell good.”

He asked me to stay and help serve lunch, but I had too much to do. I did, however, agree to stay and keep him company until the church ladies arrived. There was something fragile about him that had never been there before; I sensed that he very much did not want to be alone, any more than I did.

I knew he wouldn't tell me anything about his relationship with Larry Nordquist if I asked him directly—that penitent-confessor bar. But I thought he might talk to me about the work he and Mrs. Bartolini had done with Vietnamese refugees. It seemed to me that at the end of a failed war there would be people from all sides who, as Mom suggested, still needed enemies, and he might have some ideas about who they were. But I could not bring myself to launch into that topic just then. He seemed so happy, so relaxed that I did not want to upset his peace.

Instead, we talked about nothing and everything as we stirred the soup and argued over seasonings. He was curious about my current film project, a two-hour special scheduled for fall Sweeps Week. He had met the subject of the film, a murdered former congressman, and found him to be sympathetic to issues relating to poverty.

I told him, “I'm calling the film
There Was a Crooked Man
.”

He began to recite the poem, “‘There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile / He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile...' Was your congressman a crooked man?”

“You'll just have to wait till September when the film airs,” I said. “Then you can decide for yourself.”

“I liked the man,” he said with a little lift to his shoulders. “Maybe I don't want to learn something that might change my opinion of him. I think I'll just read a book the night of the broadcast.”

“That's up to you,” I said, knowing from experience that there was a lesson in the offing.

“Maggie, I'm not your only old friend who's back in town.”

“Oh? Who?”

“Larry Nordquist. Do you remember him?”

“I saw him yesterday,” I said, wondering where Father John was headed, but happy that he had brought up the subject.

“Was he okay?” he asked.

I shrugged. “He came and went. Seems he's been hanging around in Mom's backyard.”

“Who'd you hear that from?”

“Toshio Sato,” I said. “Mr. Sato was with me yesterday when Larry came into the yard.”

“Ah.” He didn't look happy with that answer.

“Father John, Larry is on parole for murder—”

“Manslaughter,” he corrected. “Involuntary manslaughter. He got into a bar brawl and the other guy lost.”

“Okay. The thing is, he's out on parole. When the police picked him up last week, it was you who came to fetch him, not his parole officer.”

“His parole officer called me because I'm Larry's employer,” he said. “Larry is my missing cook.”

I chuckled. “I shoulda known.”

“I thought maybe you did when you popped in here out of the blue this morning,” he said. “Thought maybe you wanted to talk to him.”

“You read me like a book, Padre.”

“Comes with the job, child,” he said.

“And?”

He raised a shoulder, a small self-deprecating gesture. “And yesterday, when I told Larry that you were staying at your folks' place he got very agitated. It was all I could do to get him to finish making the spaghetti before he shot out of here. When he didn't show up today, well, I was a bit concerned that maybe the demons he struggles with got the better of him. Or you did.”

“Should I be watching my back?”

“Not on his account,” he said. “When he's sober, he's a peaceful man.”

“Small comfort,” I said. “Father John, someone broke into the house last night.”

“You think it was Larry?”

“I didn't see who it was, and I don't think anything was taken,” I said. “Why does Larry hang out around at Mom's?”

“Maybe he figured you'd show up sooner or later.” He hunkered down to put his eyes on a level with mine. “He's worried about it, but he wants to talk to you, Maggie.”

“Whoever came into the house last night was definitely not looking for conversation,” I said. “If Larry has something he wants to say to me, he could have said so when he came into the yard.”

“One of the things they don't teach 'em in the slam is social graces. He's very resourceful—he's had to be to survive this long. When he's ready to talk to you, he'll figure a way. I can't believe there's any harm in him where you're concerned. Talk to him, child, you might just learn something that would change your opinion of him.”

“I knew you were working a lesson into that conversation.”

“Occupational hazard.”

We heard a clatter of feet and overlapping conversations coming down the stairs: The church ladies had arrived.

“My cue to leave,” I said.

“Bye, McGuff.” He folded me into an embrace. “See you at Bartolinis' party tomorrow?”

I remembered to ask him to say a rosary for Mark while the hungry ghosts were being consigned back to hell. He promised that he would, but he would do so in the church.

On the drive back to Berkeley, I tried to calculate how many times over the last few days I had been called
honey
,
dear
, or in Father John's case,
child
. Just two weeks earlier, the senior network producer who was my boss had suggested that it might be time for me to have a little tuck taken under my chin and maybe a little nip in my eyelids. In the TV world where I worked, I was an old lady, over forty. Among my mom's friends I was still a kid. The reality was both and neither, I thought.

There was a good shoe store in Berkeley on Shattuck, catty-corner from Beto's deli. I found a big enough space to park Mike's pickup truck in a public lot off College, suffered through a few comments about the environmental irresponsibility of driving such a big vehicle—people in Berkeley feel quite comfortable about sharing their opinions—and walked over to Shattuck.

I was in luck. The perfect pair of shoes—high-heeled silver sandals—was displayed in the front window of the store. At least, they were perfect until I tried them on. I could hardly walk in them, much less dance. I settled instead for practical, medium-heeled black sling-backs. The dress was long. Who'd see the shoes? Besides, I might actually be able to wear the black shoes again.

The next errand on the list was getting in some basic supplies for house guests: eggs, milk, juice, bread. As I left the shoe store, I noticed that the ragged man—face shrouded by the hood of his stretched-out sweatshirt—who had been curled up on the bench in front of Beto's deli when I arrived was now upright, pacing back and forth.

Since the Summer of Love in the 1960s, Berkeley has been a magnet for street people. Old hippies, hippie wannabes, tokers and tweakers, musicians and purveyors of tie-dye garb and handmade bongs, professional panhandlers and various other folks who have slipped away from the bonds of the nine-to-five world, hang out in the city's parks and set up stalls along the streets. Generally, they are a harmless and colorful element of local daily life; a street festival every day.

The man pacing around Beto's store, however, did not seem harmless to me. He seemed agitated, as if on the verge of something. I dialed Beto's mobile phone to give him a heads-up.

“It's okay, Maggie,” Beto said. “Why don't you cross the street and talk to him?”

“Who is he?”

“It's Larry Nordquist. He's been out there since yesterday afternoon. Someone told him you've been coming by, so he's out there waiting for you to show up.”

I'd only had a quick glimpse of him the day before, a face peeking around the garden gate. With his head covered, I did not recognize him. I was still staring at the pacer—Larry—when he caught my reflection in the deli window. I took a breath, steeled myself, and began to cross the street. He stopped dead, watched me for a beat or two. And then he took off running.

Beto stood in the open deli door, watching.

“What was that about?” I asked as I walked inside with him.

“Larry is making amends to people he thinks he's harmed,” he said, taking his place behind the refrigerated cases. “At any rate, he's trying to.”

It was just past eleven o'clock and the store was still fairly quiet, the lull between the breakfast and lunch-time storms.

“Which one of the Twelve Steps is making amends?” I asked.

“I don't know.” Beto picked up two plates, piled salad greens on them and topped both with hefty scoops of curried chicken salad. “At least he's working on his problems. When he came in yesterday to make amends with me, he told me he needed to make amends with you, too.”

“Guess he changed his mind.”

“He said with you it would be harder.”

Beto handed the plates across to me. While he gathered forks, napkins and hard rolls, I carried the plates to a table.

“I'm not sure he was sober when I talked to him,” he said, taking the seat opposite mine. “I don't know if it was alcohol or something else, but he was on the verge of freaking out the whole time.”

“Was he apologizing about that fight when we were kids?”

His mouth was full so he answered by toggling his head back and forth, meaning yes and no. He reached around and pulled two bottles of bubbly water out of a drinks cooler.

“What did he say?”

Beto winced. “It wasn't so much the fight, as the day it went down. Do you remember?”

“Who could forget, Beto?”

“Well apparently that's what's been on Larry's mind. No statute of limitations on guilt, huh?”

“What does he think connects the two?”

“He told me that after the fight he was still plotting what he was going to do to us next when he heard about Mom. He was afraid we'd think he was the one, you know, who did that to her. So he took off for a while.”

“I never thought Larry had anything to do with it,” I said. “Did you?”

He flushed bright red. “When Dad told me Mom died, I thought I was being punished for fighting. Major bad karma.”

“Ah, Beto.” I covered his hand with mine.

He patted my hand and smiled gamely. “What? Don't you like your lunch?”

“Almost as special as your pastrami.”

He laughed. “Then eat it.”

After a few quiet bites, he said, “I got lots of counseling, Maggie. Your mom referred us to a child psychologist who wanted me to reason my way through my feelings. How do you reason your way through something like that? Father John told me that I needed to believe that Mom was happy in heaven, sitting next to God. That just pissed me off, because if she was sitting around anywhere being happy, I thought she should be with me and Dad in our house.”

“Perfect kid logic.”

“You know who really helped the most?”

“Who?”

“The Buddhist priest Mom got to know in the refugee camp,” he said. “He told me that Mom's spirit was really angry because of the way she died. That made total sense to me, because, like I said, I was pretty pissed off, too. Then he told me I could comfort her by making fresh offerings to her every day. He told me she was always close by. That was the answer I liked the best, and that's the one I picked.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “I asked Father John to say a rosary for my brother, Mark. But this year I think I'll burn some offerings for him, too.”

“Cover all the bases, Maggie.” He laid his fork across his empty plate and leaned back in his chair, content, smiling. One of his staffers came and took the plates away.

“You know,” he said, “Mom started that Hungry Ghosts celebration in our backyard because when the refugees first got here after the war, none of the local Buddhist temples followed the Vietnamese lunar calendar. Think of all those ancestors left behind in Vietnam, all those people who died in the war and never had a proper burial. All those unhappy hungry ghosts who could come through and cause mischief if they weren't taken care of. The problem was, the Gates of Hell open and close a whole month earlier in Vietnam than they do in China and Japan. Way too late to deal with pissed-off ancestors.”