Читать книгу The Hour I First Believed - Wally Lamb - Страница 13

I LIKED VICTOR GAMBOA, WHO was sympathetic without being smarmy. Cradling Lolly’s file, he told me how much he’d enjoyed working with her when they were both second-shift COs. “She was always fair with the ladies, but she didn’t put up with any of their monkey business either. What do they call it now? Tough love? I think your aunt invented it.”

“Or inherited it,” I said. “From what I’ve heard, that was her grandmother’s style, too.”

“Oh, the old lady? Yeah, she’s a legend at that place. Or was, I should say. Different story over there these days.”

“Tough love minus the love, right?”

He nodded. “We get a lot of the suicides.”

Victor had photocopied Lolly’s preference form, and we reviewed it together. She’d requested a nondenominational service, a cut-rate casket, and cremation. Her ashes were to be mixed with Hennie’s (“blue jar in our bedroom”) and spread on the farm. No obituary. (“You have to pay the paper for it now. Nuts to that!”) No flowers. If people wanted, they could buy a book and donate it to the prison library. In the margin, she’d written, “The girls like murder mysteries, movie star biographies, and romance novels.” Under “Music,” she’d written, “Amazing Grace (my grandma’s favorite hymn.)” We scheduled the wake for Wednesday evening, the funeral for Thursday morning.

The form had six slots for pallbearers. Lolly had written:

Caelum Quirk (nephew)			Ulysses Pappanikou (employee)
Grace Fletcher (friend)			Hilda Malinowski (friend)
Lena LoVecchio (lawyer)			Carl Yastrzemski (ha ha ha)

“Women pallbearers?” I said. “Is that okay?”

“Don’t see why not, if that’s what she wanted,” Gamboa said. “You may have to get a stand-in for Yaz, though.” As far as “Amazing Grace” was concerned, he said he had a recorded version he could pipe in, or he could call the soloist he sometimes used. “Or—” he said. He stopped himself.

“Or what?”

“Department of Correction’s got bagpipers. They hire out, but they’ll usually play gratis if it’s one of their own. Of course, it’d have to be cleared by the higher-ups, which might be a problem. I know that, toward the end, there was no love lost between your aunt and the department.”

“She had good reason to be bitter,” I said. He nodded in agreement. I said the canned music would be fine.

He asked me if I’d bring over an outfit that Lolly could wear to her wake—that day, if possible, or the next morning. I could bring pictures, too, if I liked. Some families liked to display framed photos, or put together a collage of candids. “Celebrate the person’s life,” he said.

I nodded, my mind on something else. “You know what?” I said. “She gave them almost forty years. What the hell. Try for the bagpipes.”

ULYSSES’S PHONE RANG AND RANG, unanswered.

Hilda Malinowski cried when I told her. Lolly and she had been friends since 1964, she said. She’d never been a pallbearer before, but if there was anyone she’d give it a try for, it was Lolly. She just hoped she was strong enough. She’d call Grace Fletcher for me, she said; Gracie was big-boned and she went to Curves, so she should be able to handle pallbearing.

Alice Levesque told me she knew something was up; Lolly hadn’t looked right the last time at bridge club. “She played lousy, too. She was my partner, and I gave her the devil about it. Now I wish I’d kept my big mouth shut.”

Millie Monk volunteered to make lemon squares, if we were having a get-together at the house after the funeral, which people would more or less expect, so she suggested I should. Lolly had always loved her lemon squares, she said. “She asked me for the recipe once, and I said, ‘Who are you kidding? You wouldn’t even know how to turn on the oven.’ We always kidded each other like that, her and me. Jeepers creepers, I just can’t believe she’s gone.”

Now that she thought about it, Millie said, maybe she’d come over to the house on Tuesday and tidy up a little. Run the vacuum. “Lolly was a sweetie pie, but she was never too zippedy-doo-da on the housecleaning.”

“Caelum Quirk! Long time no talk to,” Lena LoVecchio said. “You haven’t been swinging any more wrenches, have you?” I quieted her horsy laugh with the news about my aunt. “Jesus Christ! You’re kidding me,” she said. Lena told me she’d be honored to help carry Lolly’s casket, and she’d be happy to meet with me while I was in town so that we could talk about the estate. Had I looked over her will? I told her Lolly had sent me a copy, but I’d never read it.

“Well, let’s go over it together then. How does five o’clock tomorrow sound?” I told her I’d be there.

“Last time I saw Lolly was when I took her to a basketball game,” she said. “The Lady Huskies versus the Lady Vols. Lolly wore her UConn sweatsuit and booed Pat Summit so loud, she drowned me out, which isn’t easy to do. That’s how I want to remember her: screaming her head off at Tennessee. Well, okay, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’s Tuesday, right?” I asked.

She paused, momentarily taken aback. “Tuesday the twentieth,” she said.

I tried Ulysses a few times more. No answer. Well, I might as well get this over with, I told myself, and headed up the stairs.

Lolly’s bedroom—it had been her grandmother’s originally, and then the room where she and Hennie slept—was at the far end of the hallway, adjacent to the sun porch. The bed was unmade, the blankets and sheets rucked up at the bottom. Nancy Tucker was curled up on Lolly’s pillow. As I entered the room, the floorboards creaked and she opened her eyes and raised her head. Then she jumped from the bed and exited, bellowing down the hallway. “I miss her, too,” I said.

There was clutter all around: on the night table, the chair, the bureau top. The hamper was open, more dirty laundry on the floor around it than in it. Above the bureau, on the wall, were Lolly’s framed photographs: she and Hennie as younger women, arm in arm at some beach; a studio portrait of the two of them in middle age—some bank promotion, if I remembered right. They’d given me a copy of that picture, but I’d never framed it and put it out. There was a black-and-white photo of Grandpa, dark-haired and in a jacket and tie, holding some Farm Bureau award. Lolly’d put up two pictures of Great-Grandma Lydia: a formal portrait of her in an old-fashioned oval frame, and one of her at her desk down at the prison. There were several pictures of me—as a second-grader with missing front teeth, a high school kid, a college grad, a ridiculously young-looking groom at wedding number one.

The two photos that got to me the most that morning—put a lump in my throat and made me sit down on the bed—were the ones she’d hung in the middle of her montage: her own and her brother’s high school graduation portraits. By the time they were both in their twenties, Daddy’s alcoholism had begun to untwin them and, in their mid-thirties, that train speeding toward Boston had made the separation official. But there they both were again, on Lolly’s wall—smiling seventeen-year-olds, hinged together in twin gold frames.

Riding atop Lolly’s photo gallery, hung crookedly six inches below the crown molding, was Great-Grandma Lydia’s wooden sign: “A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.” I reached up and touched it, inching it back and forth until it was straight.

I opened Lolly’s closet door, looked through her bureau. The top right drawer brimmed with odds and ends: loose pictures, ancient elementary school report cards, a Camp Fire Girls medal, a Ted Williams baseball card from 1946. I removed the lid from a small white cardboard box—“Bill Savitt Jewelers, Peace of Mind Guaranteed.” Inside were two envelopes, labeled in blue fountain pen ink: “Louella’s first haircut, June 1, 1933” and “Alden’s first haircut, June 1, 1933.” I opened Lolly’s envelope. The soft, dead golden tuft between my thumb and fingertips felt creepy and strange. How odd that families kept this kind of stuff, I thought. How strange that children grow up, grow old, and die, but their hair—dead cells, if I remembered from high school biology class—remains as is. I put the lock of Lolly’s hair back in the envelope, tucked in the flap, and put it back in the box. Replaced the lid, closed the drawer. I didn’t open the envelope containing my father’s hair. Couldn’t go there.

Wardrobe-wise, once you eliminated T-shirts, flannel shirts, jeans, and coveralls, there wasn’t much to pick from. I chose the only thing Lolly had bothered to put on a hanger: the brown velour pantsuit she’d worn to Maureen’s and my wedding. If I remembered right, she’d worn it that Christmas afternoon when we’d looked at the old pictures, too. It had a grease stain on the front—no one had ever accused Lolly of being a dainty eater. Maybe I should have it dry-cleaned, or maybe Gamboa’s could camouflage it. It was either this pantsuit or her UConn Huskies sweatsuit, and I was pretty sure that outfit wouldn’t fly with Hilda and Millie and the girls.

From Lolly’s room, I wandered out to the sun porch. Cardboard cartons and wooden apple crates lined the floor. Stacks of ledgers and state reports, leather-bound albums and newspaper clipping files depressed the springs of the sofa bed. Two army-green filing cabinets, chock-full, stood against the west wall. Great-Grandma Lydia’s prison archives mostly, I figured. Lolly had tried several times to get me to look at some of this stuff with her. It would take forever to sift through it and see what I should probably save. Alternatively, it would take twenty minutes to heave it all out the window and let it fall into a Dumpster below.

I picked up one of Lydia’s musty-smelling diaries. Its rotting cloth covers exposed the cardboard beneath; its crumbly, age-browned pages were bound together with what looked like black shoelaces. I opened to a page dated September 17, 1886—a letter that had never been sent, I figured, addressed to a sister of hers named Lillian. “As ever, dear Sis, I struggle with two minds about Grandmother. Here, seated beside me, is the esteemed Elizabeth Hutchinson Popper, brave abolitionist, valiant battlefield nurse, and tireless champion of orphans and fallen women. But here also is the cold woman who has yet to remember her granddaughter’s fifteenth birthday, now eleven days past…. Had Lizzy Popper been in charge during the time of the Biblical flood, she might have led all of God’s creatures onto the ark, two by two, then closed the door against the torrent, and floated away, having forgotten her poor granddaughter at the pier!”

Well, it was interesting in its own way, except I wasn’t that interested. Maybe some historical society would want it. Maybe not. When Maureen and I got back in summertime, I’d have to deal with all this stuff. I knew one thing: I wasn’t going to ship it all out to Colorado. It would cost an arm and a leg to do that, and once it got there, where the hell would we put it all?

I walked up the hallway to Grandpa’s room. It looked the same as it always had, except for the two missing drawers in his mahogany dresser.

At first, Alzheimer’s had merely toyed with Grandpa’s brain. There’d been an incident at CVS when the cashier, having pointed out that his coupon was from the previous week’s circular, refused to give him the sale price on a jar of Metamucil. In response, Grandpa had called her a “dumb nigger” and stormed out of the store, product in hand, without benefit of a purchase receipt. Luckily, the cop who investigated had been, as a teenager, one of our farmhands. He and the store manager talked the cashier out of pursuing my grandfather’s arrest for having used hate speech. Not long after that, we discovered that Grandpa—that most frugal of men—had sent two thousand dollars to an “astronomical consortium” for the purpose of having a star named after his long-deceased wife. The documentation for “the Catherine star” had rolled out of a dot matrix printer, and the Better Business Bureau said there was little they could do without a return address or phone number. In September of that same year, Grandpa drove to the Eastern States Exposition for the Holstein judging—something he’d done every year for decades. He had left the house at seven that morning. One of the fair’s security guards had finally found him at ten p.m., asleep in a Port-a-Potty. He’d wandered the labyrinthine parking lot for hours, searching for a car he’d sold years before and later failing to remember what he was searching for, or where he was.

The mahogany dresser had lost those two drawers one afternoon when Grandpa had felt a chill. Hammer in hand, he’d converted them to kindling, added newspaper, and lit a cozy fire atop his braided rug. That had been the last straw for Hennie. She’d put her foot down—either Lolly was going to take hold of the situation, or she was moving out. Better that than die in a fire! And so Lolly had surrendered her father to Rivercrest Nursing Home.

The relocation had agitated Grandpa at first; he was baffled about why he was there and pissed as hell that an alarm would beep whenever he put on his coat and tried to walk out the front door. He’d had no idea that that alarm was triggered by the plastic bracelet around his ankle, or even that he was wearing a bracelet. Lolly visited Grandpa twice a day, at lunch and dinnertime, usually, figuring that if she bibbed and fed him herself, she wouldn’t have to worry that he wasn’t eating enough. I dragged myself there once or twice a week at first, less frequently as time went on. Entering his sour-smelling room, I’d often find him rifling through his dresser drawers, searching furiously for something he could never quite identify. Eventually, his restlessness subsided and he became sullen and withdrawn, sometimes rapping his knuckles against his skull in frustration. Toward the end, he sat listlessly, recognizing no one.

It was during that final phase of Grandpa Quirk’s life that I met Maureen. A recent divorcée, she had just become Rivercrest’s new second-shift nurse supervisor. Our first conversations centered around my grandfather. Who had he been before the onset of his disease? How had he made his living? Who and what had he loved? It moved me when she said that my answers to her questions would help her give him better care. I’d been divorced from Francesca for three years by then. I hadn’t dated since, or wanted to. But Mo was as pretty as she was compassionate, and my visits to Grandpa Quirk increased. On the night I finally got up the nerve to ask her out, I felt the heat in my face when she said no. Too soon after her divorce, she said; she hoped I understood. “Of course, absolutely,” I’d assured her, nodding my head up and down like freaking Howdy Doody. But a week later, Mo stopped me in the hall to ask if my offer was still good.

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.

I bought a newspaper and sat down in the food court to read it. The front page had stories about Kosovo, the casino, the Love Bug virus. In the second section, there was an article about a project at the prison. That morning? When I’d walked past and seen the inmates out there, digging around for something? Apparently, they’d been unearthing graves. Baby graves, identifiable by flat stone markers, some with initials carved into them, some not. A surveyor had come upon what had been, in the early days of the prison, a cemetery for the inmates’ infants. Back then, it said, women had gone to prison for something called “being in manifest danger of falling into vice.” Translation: they’d gotten knocked up. Raped, some of them, no doubt. Talk about blaming the victim….

Two local ministers were leading the women in the recovery project, the article said, and the administration was cooperating. They weren’t sure yet what they were going to do once all the graves were recovered, but a couple of suggestions were on the table: a healing ceremony, a little meditation park where inmates with good behavior records might be allowed to go. One of the women interviewed, identified only as Lanisha, said she felt the infants’ souls knew they were there, looking for them. Another, Sandy, said it was hell being away from her own three kids while she served her sentence. “These babies were suffering back then, and my babies are suffering now. There’s no one in this world can take care of my kids as good as I can.” It got to me, that article. For a few seconds, I was on the verge of tears over those long-buried babies. When it passed, I looked around to make sure nobody’d been watching me. Then I got up and threw the paper and my half-drunk coffee into the trash.

On my way back to the farm, I picked up a six-pack, a Whopper at BK, and cat food for Nancy Tucker. Passing the prison yard, I braked. Looked out at the field where I’d seen those women digging. There was no one out there now. I counted the ones I could see: eleven unearthed grave markers.

Maureen had left me a long, rambling phone message. The travel agency had had a hard time getting her a flight. She couldn’t get out of Denver until Tuesday night at 7:00 p.m., which meant she wouldn’t get into Hartford until 1:15 a.m. Wednesday morning. She’d probably just go in to school Tuesday, since her flight was so late. I could reach her there until two o’clock or so, but then she’d have to go back to the house, pick up the dogs, and bring them to the kennel. At least this way, she wouldn’t have to cancel out on Velvet; she hadn’t been able to get hold of her to say she was going to be away. She’d been thinking about me all day, she said; she hoped I wasn’t feeling overwhelmed. She was sorry she’d be getting in at such a hideous hour. She loved me. She’d see me soon.

That night, woozy from beer, I let myself fall asleep on the couch again rather than head upstairs. I got up in the middle of the night, peed, got up again, peed again. At dawn, I awoke from a dream. My grandfather and I were in a rowboat on a lake that may or may not have been Bride Lake. There were graves along the shore, and I was a boy again, sitting on the seat nearest the bow. Grandpa was in the middle of the boat, rowing in long, steady strokes. “Don’t cry,” he said. “Be brave. She’s all right.”

“Who?” I asked. “Mother?”

“Maureen,” he said. And I saw in the water’s reflection that I was not a boy but a grown man.

ULYSSES CAME BY THE HOUSE the following morning. He looked scrawnier than I remembered. Grubbier, too. His eyes were bloodshot, his pupils jumpy. When I handed him a cup of coffee, he took it with trembling hands.

He already knew about Lolly, he said. He’d walked to the hospital the morning before and identified himself as the man who’d found her and called 911. “The woman at the visitors’ desk was full of herself. Wouldn’t give me the room number. Kept stalling, calling this one and that one. Then finally she just told me that Lolly had died. I was afraid I was going to break down in front of her. So I left. Walked down to the Indian Leap and tied one on.”

He was okay, though, he said. He’d just come from an AA meeting. It happened now and again, him falling off the wagon, but then he’d get himself to a meeting and climb back on. “Lolly was always good about it when I messed up,” he said. “She’d get mad at first—say that was it, she was done with me. But then she’d calm down again. She always took me back.”

I suddenly realized why she had, despite the fact that she’d nicknamed him “Useless” and was forever complaining about what a lousy worker he was. Ulysses was a drunk like my father and had been my father’s friend. Over the years, he had become her brother Alden’s surrogate.

He fished into his pocket and took out his key to the farmhouse. Placed it on the table. “Why don’t you keep it?” I said. “I’m just here for the next few days, and then I have to get back to Colorado. Probably won’t come back here until the start of summer. And until then, I’m going to need someone to look after the place, make sure everything’s okay. You interested in the job?”

He looked away and nodded.

“I’m seeing her lawyer while I’m here. She can help me figure out how to pay you. So I’ll have to get back to you about that. How did Lolly pay you?”

“By the hour,” he said. “Ten bucks per.”

I nodded. “Fair enough. Just keep track of your time.”

“What about Nancy Tucker?” he said.

“Well, I guess you’ll have to feed her, empty her litter box.”

He nodded. “I got catnip growin’ wild in back of my place. I could bring her some of that when I come over.”

I thanked him for helping Lolly. “She was good people,” he said. He swallowed the rest of his coffee, stood, rinsed his cup in the sink. Without another word, he started for the back door.

“One more thing,” I said. “Lolly planned out her funeral before she died. She wanted you to be one of her pallbearers.”

He turned and faced me. “She did?”

I nodded. “Do you think you could do that for her?”

Tears came to his eyes. “I’d like to,” he said. “But I don’t have no good clothes.” I reached for my wallet, then stopped myself. It wasn’t going to do either of us any good if he drank up his clothing allowance.

“Come on,” I said.

At Wal-Mart, I bought him a pair of navy blue pants, a boxed shirt and tie set, socks, underwear, and a cheap pair of black tie shoes. A chili dog, too, and a large Dr Pepper. “Now I’m good to go,” he said.

MY MOTHER’S BEDROOM WAS AS I remembered it: pale yellow walls, lace curtains. Her dust-covered Sunday missal still sat on her nightstand.

I walked up to the crucifix on the wall opposite her bed. Mother’s crucifix had been blessed by Pope Paul and given to her by her father, Grampy Sullivan, when, on his deathbed, he had at last made amends with the only one of his six daughters who had married a Protestant, and the only one who’d ever gotten a divorce. A chain smoker, Mother had died of lung cancer a few years later—the year she was fifty-five and I was thirty. On the morning of her final day, she’d asked me in a whispery voice to lift the crucifix off the wall and bring it to her. I’d done it and she’d cradled the cross in her arms, as tenderly as if it were an infant, while I stood and watched in envy.

I had never quite loved my mother the way other sons—the Buzzi brothers, for example—seemed to love theirs. Growing up, whenever Mother had held out her arms for one of those hugs, it was almost as if there was something parked between us. Something intangible but nevertheless real, I didn’t know what…. I’d stayed with her at the end, though, from early morning until late that night. People had come in and out all day, whispering: Lolly, Hennie, some of the nuns Mother had befriended, the priest who mumbled her last rites and, with his thumb, anointed her by drawing an oily cross on her forehead. Back in catechism class when I was a kid, they’d made us memorize the sacraments, and those seven “visible forms of invisible grace” had remained stuck in my brain: baptism, confirmation, penance, Holy Eucharist, Holy Orders, Holy Matrimony, and, at every good Catholic’s final curtain, extreme unction. “Thanks a lot, Father,” I’d said when that priest had finished and started for the door. Slipping him a twenty, I’d added, “Here’s a little something for your trouble.” For your holy hocus-pocus, I’d thought but not said. It was weird, though. Even with the lights dimmed and the window shades half-drawn, that cross on Mother’s forehead, for the next several hours, had glistened eerily…. It was just the two of us at the end, and I witnessed, clearly and unmistakably, when life left my mother. One moment, she’d been a living, suffering woman; the next moment, her body was nothing more than an empty vessel. Later, after the McKennas had retrieved the corpse and Hennie had stripped the bed, I’d returned to Mother’s room. Her crucifix lay against the bare uncovered mattress. I picked it up, kissed Jesus’ feet, and hung it back on the wall. I made the gesture for her, not for her god or for myself. I was a twice-divorced thirty-year-old, teaching Twain and Thoreau to indifferent high school students by day and, by night, going home to my life of quiet desperation and one or two too many Michelobs. I’d long since become skeptical about an allegedly merciful God who doled out cosmic justice according to some mysterious game plan that none of us could fathom.

THE DOORBELL RANG. I LEFT my mother’s room, went downstairs, and opened the door. The woman on the other side looked vaguely familiar. “Millie Monk,” she said. “Here’s the lemon squares.”

I thanked her. Took the box she held out and stood there waiting for her to go. She reminded me that she’d come to do some vacuuming and tidying up. “No, really, I can do it,” I insisted. Millie was insistent, too.

“You put these on top the Frigidaire and then go relax,” she told me. “Put your feet up and watch some TV so I can get busy.”

I did as I was told, channel-surfing in the den while she vacuumed the rest of the downstairs. I’d just switched to CNN when the vacuum cleaner’s whirr turned the corner and entered the room. I got up, went into the kitchen. Figured maybe she’d like some tea.

The vacuum stopped. She called out to me over the sound of tap water rattling the bottom of the teakettle. “What’d you say?” I called back.

“Something bad’s happening,” she said. “Out in Colorado. Do you live anywhere near Littleton?”

“Littleton?” I said. “That’s right…that’s where…” By then I had made it back to the den.

I stood there, stupefied. Why was Columbine High on TV? Why was Pat Ireland crawling out onto the library’s window ledge? Shot? What did they mean, he’d been shot?

“You’re looking at live pictures from Littleton, Colorado, where the local high school is under attack by as few as two or as many as six shooters,” the news anchor said.

Patrick dangled, then fell from the ledge, landing in the arms of helmeted men on the roof of a truck.

What the—? In the kitchen, the teakettle screamed.

I’ll probably just go in to school tomorrow, since my flight’s so late.

“Oh, no! Oh, please, God. No!”