“You’re shipping the rest of it?”
“Mom, there is no rest of it. This is it.”
Her nostrils widened with an insuck of breath, just as they used to when I was a child showing her a math test with a failing grade. After all this time it was nice to know I hadn’t lost my gift for disappointing her, and who wouldn’t be disappointed by a son who had nothing but socks, skivvies and T-shirts to show for himself after thirty-eight trips around the sun?
“Well,” she said, “come in, come in. Dinner is ready.”
My mother called the Sunday afternoon meal “dinner,” even though she always served it at four in the afternoon.
I realized I was still standing on the stoop. I took a deep breath, picked up my bag and stepped inside the house.
My father was standing by the tiny gas-jet fireplace they never used, hands hovering over the side pockets of his jeans, as if he were ready to reach for a pair of six-shooters.
“Hello, Dad.”
“Mick.”
We approached each other but stopped a few feet apart. He seemed shorter, too, and beefier, but he still had Popeye forearms. He’s an auto mechanic, and he’s always had these amazingly powerful forearms. He never missed a day of work, and that’s why he was known around Little Neck as Steady Eddie DeFalco.
His hair had gone totally gray but it was all there, and those brown eyes still burned out of his face with a weird kind of sorrow, the sorrow of a disappointed man who can’t even remember what it was he wanted and never got.
“I could have picked you up, you know.”
“The cab ride was fine.”
“Yeah, but they rob you.”
“Not so bad.”
“How much?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Fucking crooks.”
“Eddie!”
He ignored my mother’s outcry.
“A twenty-minute ride, a dollar’s worth of gas. How do they hit you for twenty-eight bucks?”
“You got me, Dad.”
“That include the tip?”
“No.”
“Jeez, I hope you didn’t tip him more than three.”
“Four.”
“Big shot, eh?”
“Used to be.”
“Hug your son!” my mother commanded. “For heaven’s sake!”
An embarrassed grin crossed his face. He came to me as if to embrace me, but instead he grabbed me by the elbows of my dangling arms, squeezing tightly enough to make me tingle. It was a welcome home, a real welcome home.
“All right, come, let’s sit,” my mother said. “It’s on the table. Michael, you might want to wash your hands.”
I was home. Good God in heaven, I was home, and it really hit me hardest as I washed my hands in the downstairs bathroom, where a blue-green mineral drip stain on the porcelain sink had grown like an obscene tongue beneath the hot water spout.
I remembered when that sink was as white as snow. That’s how long I’d been away.
We ate at the kitchen table, the only place meals were ever eaten in this house. Nothing much had changed. There was a new coat of linoleum on the floor, and my mother had discovered refrigerator magnets, but the refrigerator they clung to was the same one I’d raided after school, and instead of my spelling tests there were coupons up on display. Back then the refrigerator was silent, but now it ran with an ominous hum, as if to warn that it could be just days, hours, minutes before it broke down once and for all….
“How was your flight?”
My mother was trying to jump-start a conversation. The three of us had been sitting there eating meat loaf and mashed potatoes, silent foods, mushy foods that made no noise when you chewed them. The silent food made the other silence all the more excruciating.
I swallowed the meat loaf, tangy with paprika. “It was all right.”
“Do you feel jet-lagged?”
“Mom. It’s three hours earlier in California.”
“Well, you know what I mean. Tired. Do you feel tired?”
If they knew I’d checked into a local motel for a night’s sleep they both would have had fits. Paying good money just to sleep! The waste!
“Nahh, I’m all right.”
I watched my father cut his meat loaf and bring his fork to his mouth. He has exquisite table manners, my old man. I never saw him gulp a drink or wolf a meal, and not until he’d chewed and swallowed did he speak.
“The pool thing didn’t work out, huh?”
In my sporadic communications with my parents about my working life I’d exaggerated what I’d been doing. I’d told them I’d been running a pool maintenance business that went bust. They had no idea I was just a hired bug-skimmer.
I shrugged. “I got run out of business by a big outfit. They undercut everybody’s prices.”
“Bastards!”
“Eddie!”
“Well, it’s rotten, that’s all. What’s the point? Why kill the little man?”
“It’s business, Eddie.”
“That’s not business, Donna. That’s murder, when you take away a man’s living.”
“Business is business.”
My old man let it go at that. He always let her get the last word, as long as his own words had been read into the record. I always admired him for that, even though I could never work that trick myself. I like getting the last word. I like getting the first word, too, and all the words in the middle. I’m like my mother that way.
She turned to me. “You want coffee, Michael?”
“No thanks, Mom.”
“It’s made.”
(Translation: I made it, don’t waste it, there are under-caffeinated children yawning away in Africa.)
“All right, I’ll have a cup.”
She cleared the plates away and set mugs of coffee, milked and sugared, in front of me and my father. That’s the way she did things. You got what you wanted all ready to eat or drink. Nobody ever asked anybody to pass the string beans or the mashed potatoes, because my mother loaded up the plates at the stove and carried them over.
It was like a diner. When I was sixteen I once left her a tip under my plate, and she didn’t think it was one bit funny.
While she did the dishes I sat back with the man who’d sired me and sipped coffee, coffee with absolutely no punch.
“Is this decaf, Mom?”
“Do you want regular? We don’t drink regular.”
“No, no, this is fine.”
“There’s a Starbucks now on Northern Boulevard,” my father said. “They line up for it. Latte. They need latte, these kids. Three bucks.”
My mother’s eyebrows rose. “How do you know how much it is?”
“I checked it out. Three bucks. More than that, if you want a grande.”
“You had a latte?”
“No, I didn’t have a latte.