The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (17 page)

I picked her up at the end of her shift and took her to the only place in Three Rivers, other than the dives that my father used to haunt, that was open after eleven p.m. Over mugs of coffee in a booth at the Mama Mia Bakery, we talked about our lives—families, marriages and divorces, the way personal goals and actual outcomes could diverge. And we
laughed:
about my adventures working for the Buzzi family, about the funny things her patients sometimes said and did. God, that felt good. And when Alphonse came out from the back with a couple of just-made cinnamon doughnuts, it more or less sealed the deal—for me, anyway. Biting into that aromatic deep-fried dough, watching the way sugar clung to her lips as she ate hers: the warm deliciousness of that moment reawakened in me a hunger I hadn’t felt
in years. Two dates later, at her place, we made love. And afterward, when I was spent and sleepy, she told me in the pitch-dark that if part of what I was looking for was kids, I was going to have to keep looking because she couldn’t have them. A nonissue, I assured her, with all the certainty of a guy still in his thirties—a guy whose childhood had been an unhappy one, and who didn’t particularly want to be in charge of some theoretical future child’s happiness.

We were married seven months after that first date of ours—a month or so after Grandpa’s passing. November 8, 1988. Mo was twenty-nine and I was thirty-seven, a third-time groom in a charcoal gray suit with a red carnation pinned to my lapel. Lolly and Hennie were our witnesses. After the exchange of vows, the four of us went out to a nice restaurant and then returned to the farm. Hennie had baked that morning: a wedding cake for Mo and me and a birthday cake for Lolly. “Damn, Lolly,” I said. “With everything else going on, I forgot about your birthday.”

“Your father’s birthday, too,” she reminded me.

“Best Wishes Mr & Mrs Quirk,” Mo’s and my cake said. In Lolly’s cake, Hennie had stuck candles and a little cardboard sign: “Good God in Heaven! Lolly’s 57!” Fifty-seven, I remember thinking—if he had lived. Shoveling frosting and sponge cake into my mouth, I did the math. My father had been only thirty-three when he died. I had, by then, outlived him by four years….

I WALKED TENTATIVELY TOWARD THE
stairs, stopping at the threshhold of the room I’d slept in as a kid, and later had returned to during bouts of marital troubles. Marital and
legal
troubles, the last time I’d had to come back home. I didn’t particularly want to admit it, but I guess I’d been like my father in that respect: screw up, then come back home to regroup, to be good for a while…. My old room had been preserved as a museum of my boyhood. Red Sox and Harlem Globetrotters pennants on the wall, stacks of comic books
and
Boy’s Lifes
still sitting on the pine shelf I’d made in seventh-grade shop class. The room had been a closet when the house was new, they’d told me, which was why it was windowless. I snapped on the overhead light. The twin bed pushed flush against the wall was covered with the same cowboys-and-Indians spread my mother had bought at the Durable Store, back when I’d watched
Wagon Train
and
Bonanza
each week without fail. To enter that claustrophobic former closet was to become, again, the boy whose father was a public nuisance, whose mother washed priests’ dirty clothes and answered sass with a stinging slap across the face. This was
that
boy’s room, and I backed out again. Escaped down the front stairs and out into the morning sunlight.

AFTER I DROPPED OFF LOLLY’S
suit, I swung by the bakery to see Alphonse. “He’s in back in his office,” the counter girl said. “Supposedly doing his payroll, but he’s probably looking at Internet porn.” She had spiky red hair, a pierced eyebrow. Her nipples were poking out nicely from beneath the thermal undershirt she was wearing. This must have been the one Alphonse had been salivating about in his last few e-mails. “Make sure you knock first, or he’ll bite your head off,” she said.

“Or shoot me with his paintball gun,” I said.

Instantly, I was her ally. “I know! Isn’t that lame? He’s like my father’s age, and he’s still playing army over at that stupid paintball place.”

When I opened his office door
without
knocking, Alphonse hit the off button on his computer and popped out of his chair like a jack-in-the-box. “Quirky!” he said. “What the hell you doing here?”

“You know, if you don’t shut that thing down properly, you’ll shorten the life of your hard drive,” I said.

“Yeah? Well, don’t tell Bill Gates on me. So what’s up, bro? You get homesick or something?”

He seemed genuinely sorry to hear about Lolly. “She used to come in here every once in a while,” he said. “Her and her friend. What was her name?”

“Hennie.”

“Yeah, that’s right. They were a matched set, those two, huh? Always got the same thing: blueberry muffins, toasted, with butter—
not
margarine.”

I smiled. “Gotta support the dairy farmers,” I said.

“Hey, remember the summer when your aunt found those pot plants that you, me, and my brother were growing out behind your apple orchard?”

I rolled my eyes recalling the incident. “The three stooges,” I said.

“And remember? She made us pull them up and burn them in front of her? And we all got stoned from the smoke—Lolly included.” “She didn’t get stoned,” I said.

“The fuck she didn’t! I can still see her standing there, scowling at first and then with that goofy grin on her face. She was toasted.”

“What
I
remember is that she didn’t rat us out to my grandfather,” I said. “Which is probably why we’re still alive.”

The comment dropped like a stone between us. One of the three of us
wasn’t
still alive. Rocco had died of leukemia in 1981.

“Aunt Lolly, man,” Alphonse said.
“A buon anima!’

I asked him if he’d be one of her pallbearers.

“Sure I will,” he said. “Absolutely. Whatever you need. Hey, you gonna feed people after the service? Because if you want, we can make up sandwiches and do some pastry platters. Coffee and setups, too. I’ll get one of my girls to help out. What do you figure—somewhere around thirty or forty people?”

I shrugged. “What do I do—pay you by the head?”

“You don’t pay me anything. This will be on me.”

“No, no. I don’t want you to—”

“Shut up, Quirky. Don’t give me a hard time. Hey, you eat breakfast
yet? Let me get you something.” He disappeared out front and came back with bagels, cream cheese, and coffees.

We sat and ate together. Talked Red Sox. Talked basketball: how sweet it had been when UConn beat Duke in the championship game. “Jim Calhoun is
God
!” Al declared. “Takes those street kids and molds them into NBA players.”

“With seven-figure incomes,” I said. “You and I should be so lucky.”

“Yeah, well, keep dreaming, Quirky. You never could play b’ball.”

“Guilty as charged,” I said, smiling. “Although, as I recall, you were more a master of the brick than the jump shot yourself.”

I asked him how his quest for the holy grail was going—if any hot prospects had shown up on eBay or in the Yellow Mustang Registry.

“Nah, nothing lately. It’s out there somewhere, though. One of these days, you wait and see. Some poor slob’s gonna kick the bucket and they’ll have an estate sale or something. And there it’ll be: my 1965 Phoenician Yellow sweetheart, all two hundred eighty-nine cubes of her.”

I took a sip of coffee. “Right,” I said. “That’ll probably happen right after monkeys fly out of your butt.”

He nodded, deadpan. “Kinda redefines the concept of going apeshit, doesn’t it?” I’d forgotten how funny Alphonse could be—how quick he was. Before his father had chained him to the bakery, he had talked about becoming a stand-up comic.

I asked him how his parents were doing. The Buzzis had always been good to me—treated me like family. In college, whenever they drove up to visit Rocco, Mrs. Buzzi always packed
two
care packages: one for him, one for me. Grinders heavy with meat and cheese and wrapped in tinfoil, Italian cookies, packs of gum, three-packs of underwear and athletic socks. My mother sent me clippings from the
Daily Record
—bad news, mostly, about kids I’d gone to school with. She was too nervous, she said, to drive in Boston traffic. “Here,” Mrs.
Buzzi would say, shoving a ten-dollar bill at me at the end of their visit. And when I’d put up a show of resistance, she’d say, “Come on! Take it! Don’t make me mad!” and stuff it into my shirt pocket.

Rocco’s death had wiped out Mr. and Mrs. Buzzi. Of their two sons, he had been the favorite, the superstar: their college and law school graduate, their young lawyer with a fiancée in medical school. That Rocco’s intended was an
Italian
girl had been the cherry atop the sundae. Alphonse, on the other hand, had been the family’s baker-designee—the crab his parents had never let crawl out of the bucket. I’d stayed in touch with the Buzzis—called them from time to time, sent them cards, stopped in with a little something around the holidays. After they retired and moved down to Florida, I’d more or less let them go.

“I call them down in Boca maybe three, four times a week,” Alphonse said. “Still fighting like Heckle and Jeckle, so I guess they’re okay. Last week, Ma gets on the phone and she’s honked off at my father. Hasn’t spoken to him for two days because, when they were watching TV and the Victoria’s Secret commercial came on, she told him to look away and he wouldn’t.” He launched into a dead-on imitation of his mother. “And you know what that louse had the nerve to say to me, Alphonso? That I was just
jealous.
Ha! That’s a laugh! Why should I be jealous of a bunch of skinny
puttane
parading around in their underclothes?”

I laughed. “How old are they now?” I asked.

“Ma’s seventy-eight, Pop’s eighty-five. Of course, every time
he
gets on the phone, I get the third degree about the business. Has to point out all the things I’m doing wrong. We been selling these bagels for a couple years now, okay? Dunkin’ Donuts sells bagels, Stop & Shop sells bagels, so
we
gotta sell them. My pop still hasn’t forgiven me for it. ‘You’re running an
Italian
bakery, Alfonso. Since when does an Italian bakery sell Jew rolls?’ ‘Since I’m out of them by noontime,’ I tell him. ‘Yeah? Well you listen to me, Mr. Smarty Pants. When people come into an Italian bakery, they want rum cakes,
il pastaciotto,
Napoleani.’
Yeah,
his
generation maybe. But all those old spaghetti benders are either dead or down in Florida where
they
are.”

“What this place needs is another miracle,” I said, pointing toward Mrs. Buzzi’s statue of the Blessed Virgin on top of the refrigerator. Back in the days when that statue had enjoyed more prominent placement in the window out front, a rusty red liquid of undetermined composition had, inexplicably, begun dripping from Mary’s painted eyes. The Vietnam War had taken its toll by then, and when Mrs. Buzzi placed a white dishcloth beneath the statue, the “blood” stain that seeped into it had shaped itself into a map of that ravaged country. And so the Mama Mia, for a time, had become a tourist attraction, visited by the faithful and the media. Business had spiked as a result, particularly after
Good Morning America
came calling. A yellowing newspaper photo of then-host David Hartman, his arms around Mr. and Mrs. Buzzi, was still Scotch-taped to the back of the cash register out front. I’d spotted it on my way in.

“Hey,
tell
me about how I need a miracle,” Alphonse sighed. “You know what the wholesalers are getting for almond paste these days?”

“Can’t say that I’ve been keeping up with that one,” I said.

“Yeah, and you don’t
want
to know either. But hey, it’s a mute point. The only Italian product we move these days are cannoli and sheet pizza.”

“Moot point,” I said.

“What?”

“It’s moot point. You said mute point.”

“Fuck you, Quirky. I already passed English, okay?”

“Just barely,” I reminded him. “In summer school.”

“And that was only because I used to bring doughnuts to class and crack up Miss Mish: remember her? She was pretty hot for a teacher, except for those sequoia legs. By the way, what do you think of these?”

“The bagels?” I said. “They’re good.”

He shrugged. “They’re okay. Nothing to write home about. We get ‘em from U.S. Foods and bake ‘em frozen. Takes ten minutes, but they go out the door, you know? The thing my old man doesn’t understand is that you gotta swim with the sharks these days. He never had to compete with the grocery chains and Dunkin’ Donuts the way I do now. And if Krispy Kreme comes north? Orget-it fay. I’ll just hang the white flag out front and lock the door.”

“Orget-it fay?” I said.

“Yeah? What?”

“You’re forty-five years old, Al. Stop talking pig Latin.”

“Uck-you fay,” he said.

I asked him if he wanted to go out that night. Get a bite to eat, have a couple of beers. “Can’t,” he said.

“Why not? You getting your bald spot Simonized?”

“Ha ha,” he said. “What a wit. Don’t forget, you got two more years on the odometer than I do. You look good, though. You still running?” I nodded. “Life treating you okay? Other than your aunt, I mean. You like it out there?” I nodded some more. Why go into it?

On our way out to the front, he stopped me so we could ogle his countergirl. “How’d you like to stick your dipstick into that?” he whispered.

“She’s a woman, Al,” I whispered back. “Not a Mustang.”

“Yeah, but I don’t hold it against her. I’d like to, though.”

I asked him which he thought would come first: losing his virginity or getting his AARP membership card.

“Yeah, if only I was more like you,” he said. “What wife are you on now—sixteen? Seventeen? I lost count.” He stuck his middle finger in my face, then jabbed me in the breastbone with it. “Gotcha,” he said.

WITH NOTHING BETTER TO DO,
I drove over to the mall and walked around. The sound system was playing that Cher song you couldn’t get away from—the one where she sings that part with
her techno-electro voice:
“Do you believe in life after love, after love, after love, after love …”
Cher, man. You had to give her credit for career survival. She’d been around since the days when Lyndon Johnson was president and Alphonse Buzzi’s Phoenician Yellow Mustang was rolling off the assembly line. If there was a nuclear holocaust, there’d probably be two surviving life forms: cockroaches and Cher.
“Do you believe in life after love, after love, after love, after love …”
Hey, more power to her. I just wished they’d give that fucking song a rest.