Between Friends (16 page)

The arrangement from Burke was quite beautiful. But so unexpected and overwhelming as to make Dallas uncomfortable with them. They felt like a payoff.

Thanks for the other night …

When Burke called her at five-thirty that afternoon she understood better why she’d felt strange about the bouquet.

“Did you get a delivery today?” he asked.

“Yes, I did. There was no need to do that. Way too expensive.”

“You deserve it,” he said. “I’m not taking any chances this time. I’m telling you up front I probably have to cancel tomorrow night.”

“Is that why you sent the flowers? Getting ahead of yourself? Covering all the bases?”

“I sent the flowers first. Then I found out about tomorrow,” he corrected.

“Please don’t send any the next time.”

“I thought you’d appreciate them.”

Appreciate …

Dallas was overanalyzing, but she couldn’t shake the feeling of being set up. “I would appreciate the forethought better than the apology,” she murmured.

“Ummmm. They sure smell good. How’re you going to get them home?” Brenda asked, buttoning her coat as she prepared to leave the office an hour later.

“I don’t know,” Dallas responded flatly.

“Have Terry call you a cab. I can’t see you getting on the subway with that.”

“I don’t want to take them home with me.”

“Well, you could always leave them here. I’ll see you people tomorrow. Night,” Brenda said, leaving.

“Night,” Dallas answered.

She looked at the small white card again. The message still made her frown.

“Dallas, I’m going to ask someone else to cover that Pediatric AIDS gala next month. If you don’t mind, I’d rather have you take on the lecture at NYU Film School with Cosby and Lee. I know it’s a little beyond what you normally write about, but …”

“… a writer should be able to write about anything,” Dallas finished for Letty Daniels. “That’s okay,” she sighed. “I’d like to write about something that’s not going to get me slammed for a change,” she said, turning the white card facedown on the desk.

“I hired you to write what you believed in. You’re willing to take more chances than some of the other writers. It’s okay that people don’t agree with you.”

“I know,” Dallas agreed. “But some of it comes across as personal attacks.”

“You mean like the piece about butts. I liked it. It was different.” Letty nodded, putting the best spin on the controversy.

Dallas let her lips curve grimly. She wasn’t going to repeat again that the essay was not about anatomy but self-image. And perception. “Thanks,” she said.

Letty touched the flowers with gentle fingers. “How pretty …”

“Go ahead. Take some,” Dallas offered. Letty pulled out two roses, a daylily, and baby’s breath.

“Burke was sweet to send you flowers. It’s so romantic. If we do a piece on black men, we
have
to interview him. See you tomorrow.”

“You staying late?” Terry, the receptionist, called out as she closed and locked the doors to the inner offices, and returned to her desk for her coat and purse.

Dallas shook her head. “No. I’m leaving, too.” She turned off her computer and stood up, picking up the little white card again.

“Well, good night, Dallas.”

“Would you like these?” she asked suddenly.

“Me? You mean, the flowers?” Terry asked, incredulous.

“Yes. Go on, you can have them.”

“Well …”

Dallas opened her bag and took out her wallet. “Here … why don’t you take a cab home. My treat.” She held out a twenty-dollar bill to the receptionist, whose face showed a combination of astonishment, suspicion, gratitude, and delight.

“How come you don’t want the flowers?” the young woman asked, examining the floral arrangement as if she really had to think about it carefully.

“I’m not going right home,” Dallas improvised. “And they’ll dry out and die overnight here in the office.”

“Nobody ever sent me flowers.” Terry shook her head.

Dallas chuckled. “Then pretend they’re from a secret lover.”

“Yeah, right,” Terry snickered. She took the money. “If you’re sure you don’t want them.”

“I am. You enjoy them.”

Terry lifted the vase carefully, her head hidden by the stalks and greens of the arrangement. “Thanks a lot.”

“I’ll leave with you,” Dallas said, relieved to have gotten rid of them. No guilt. No remorse. No obligation.

No failure.

Dallas crushed the card in her hand and dropped it into the wastebasket as she and the receptionist boarded the elevator.

D
ALLAS REALIZED THAT THIS
was the first time she’d felt totally comfortable in Lillian Marco’s house in almost fifteen years. It was the first time she’d ever been to any other part of the house beyond the kitchen and basement, the first time she didn’t sit stiffly and alertly, monitoring the time and knowing when she had to leave. The reason was that Nicholas was dead, although she knew she could never admit that to anyone. Least of all to his mother.

As a child, once she felt safe with Lillian’s friendship, it was easy to see her just after school, or sometimes on the weekend or holidays, with careful planning. After that incident with Nicholas, she
never
wanted to risk being there in case he walked in.

There was something eerie and surreal about being in the room that had belonged to Nicholas Marco. She, of all people, was aiding in the disposition of his belongings. Shifting through his life, piece by piece, getting to know him in a way not possible when he was alive.

“I think this will make up the last box,” Lillian murmured from inside the open closet.

“Here, I’ll take those,” Dallas said, getting up from the floor, where she knelt in front of a corrugated box, half-filled with Nicholas’s old clothing and other accessories.

Dallas relieved Lillian of the armful of hangers with shirts and jackets and pants, and laid them on the bed for sorting and folding. The clothing had more than just a musty smell. They were limp with age and many of the colors faded. You could mark the changes in Nicholas’s size and age by the kinds of things she found.

“Some of these are very old, aren’t they?” Dallas couldn’t help commenting. “You’re very sentimental.”

Lillian shook her head as she joined Dallas again in removing hangers and separating the clothing into piles by category. “No, it was Nicky. He never liked to get rid of anything. You give him something, he wanted to keep it forever. I can understand, in a way,” she said cryptically. “One year he had so much stuff in this room I came in while he was away at camp and got rid of whatever I could. Only things I knew he couldn’t wear anymore, that I hoped he wouldn’t miss.”

“Did he?”

Lillian chuckled. “I almost got caught when he couldn’t find some special shirt from one of the school teams. I told him, maybe you left it someplace. Look around again. He did, over and over again, getting very upset. My goodness, he carried on. He didn’t want anybody fooling around in his things.”

Dallas was a little stunned, both at the degree of Nicholas’s self-absorption, and the kid gloves with which he had been handled. As if he could do no wrong.

Dallas looked at the older woman, but saw only love and sadness in her eyes as she handled her dead son’s things. Lillian didn’t look like a mother who had been afraid of her own child. So how had Nicholas become the kind of person he had?

“What are you going to do with all of his things?” she asked.

Lillian stopped for a moment and looked at the already packed boxes in the middle of the floor. “Father Cirelli said he’d take everything and give them away to needy families—oh, for heaven’s sake! Look what’s in here …”

Lillian bent and retrieved something from the box. She shook it out, turning her face from the dust that billowed out. It was a tank top of navy blue with faded yellow print. It was very wrinkled, but Dallas could make out the words “Long Beach Swim Club, South Shore” forming a circle in the front.

“This doesn’t belong to Nicky,” Lillian murmured, bringing the shirt close to examine it, running her fingers on the cracked and dried-out acrylic ink that formed the lettering. She held it against her nose briefly. She slowly smiled. “It still smells like the ocean. Salt water.” She glanced at Dallas, her eyes bright and the gaze slightly distant. “This is Vin’s shirt.”

“Do you want to keep it? Or should it go into the bag with the other things?”

Lillian didn’t respond right away, and seemed to have drifted back in time as she stroked the blue cloth. She held it with a reverence that indicated it held very important memories for her. “No. I want to keep this …” she finally whispered.

Feeling like a voyeur, Dallas returned to the closet to check if anything else needed to be removed. There was nothing but dust and scraps of papers on the floor.

“I think that’s it,” Dallas said. “We can seal the boxes and …” She turned around to find herself standing alone in the room. “Lillian?”

After a minute Lillian returned. She held the shirt in one hand and a small piece of paper in the other. She held it out to Dallas. It was a yellowed and faded black and white photograph, the old kind with the serrated edges. In the center of the image was a couple. Teenagers. A young boy and a younger-looking girl. The girl was sitting on a blanket or towel in the sand, squinting against the sunlight. He was kneeling behind her, his hands on her shoulders. And he was wearing a shirt just like the one Lillian held.

“That’s me and Vin,” Lillian said.

Dallas regarded the picture intently. She could see it now. A very young, shy-looking Lillian, her hair surprisingly blond, pulled back into a ponytail. She didn’t look older than fourteen or fifteen. And Vincent, perhaps eighteen. Sturdy and muscled and
very
handsome. So close together in the picture, Dallas could also see the obvious ethnic differences between them. She’d never considered that before. That Lillian might not be of Italian heritage. She was very fair, and Vin an olive tone, with dark thick hair.

“Did I ever tell you how Vin and I met?” Lillian asked, her voice lilting and a bit dreamy.

“No,” Dallas responded.

Lillian took the picture back. “Let’s go downstairs and I’ll tell you.”

Lillian said no more for a while, even after they’d reached the kitchen and begun their comfortable ritual of preparing coffee and tea to go with the plate of biscotti. Lillian added a bowl of strawberries taken from the refrigerator.

“I remember when I was growing up, you had to wait until the summer for fruits like strawberries and melon and peaches. Now you can get anything you want all year long. That’s too bad,” she said, sitting down.

“Why? Don’t you think it’s great that you can get them anytime you want to?”

Lillian shook her had. “Then there’s nothing to look forward to. I’d wait all year for the summer to come so my mother could buy fresh watermelon. When you can get it anytime, the surprise is gone. The fun of going to buy the first of the season. My mother would cut up a melon into chunks, and we would take it with us to eat at the beach.”

“We almost never went to the beach when I was small. My parents didn’t like sitting in the sun and getting sand in everything,” Dallas said as they settled down together at the table. “I went with Valerie Holland’s family, her sisters and brother.”

Lillian picked up the small photograph and looked at it once again thoroughly. “I met Vin at the beach. He saved my life.”

Dallas stared at Lillian and waited for the details, wanting to know the story of how someone as gentle and kind as Lillian came to marry a man as tough and taciturn as Vincent Marco.

“I was just standing on the edge of the water, no deeper than my knees. I didn’t know how to swim. My mother didn’t want me to learn how. She was afraid I’d get out in a pool somewhere or go too far out in the ocean and drown.” Lillian chuckled silently at the irony of her mother’s logic. “She said girls didn’t need to know how to swim. They need to find a husband who was going to take care of them.” She shrugged when she sensed Dallas’s smile. “Well, you know … in my day that’s what a girl did. She got married and had kids. None of this career stuff. A little part-time job was okay. But it was supposed to be temporary.”

“How did Vin save you?”

“I was standing there when all of a sudden this wave came rushing in. I turned my back thinking, well, I’ll get wet a little. Instead, it washes right over me. Pulled me clear off my feet. I felt myself being dragged along the sand, and water was going into my mouth and nose. I couldn’t even scream. Then suddenly my head came out of the water and I was lying in wet sand and the water had rolled back. I was gasping and choking, and before I could catch my breath or get up, here comes another wave.
Bam!
pulls me down again.

“Well … I finally did hear someone start to scream. I’m thinking, my mother is
never
going to let me come near the ocean again as long as I live.” Lillian chuckled at her own humor. “Then I felt something grab me real hard, and hold my arms real tight. I couldn’t stand up, so I was lifted and carried out of the water. I thought it was my father, except he couldn’t swim either. When I opened my eyes, there was this young guy bent over me. And he was whispering that I was going to be okay. And he was touching my face. I started to cough up water, and he pulled me up and told me to put my head down. The water ran out of my mouth and nose.

“My mother was crying and my father was crying, and there were all these people around me, but he, this boy—this man—he kept holding my hand and telling me I was fine. That was Vincent Marco.”

In Lillian Marco’s expression as she retold the story, Dallas could see a light reflecting the magic of that moment. She could really see a young, virile Vin coming to the rescue. But Lillian had seen something more. Her hero.

Lillian was pensive for a few moments, and then sighed and shook her head. She absently sipped her coffee, and nibbled on the fresh-cut strawberries. “I thought he was the most handsome man. My folks were very grateful, of course, but they wanted me to stay away from the beach after that. I think it had less to do with my almost drowning than it did with the fact that I wouldn’t stop talking about how wonderful and strong Vin had been. I didn’t understand, at first, why they weren’t as impressed. But I knew I wanted to see him again, and I knew I couldn’t tell them. So, for the first time in my life I started lying to my parents about where I was going, and getting my girlfriends to cover for me. And when I could I’d go to the beach when Vin was there on duty as a lifeguard. And later, after school, when he worked at a garage his uncle owned. He was so sweet to me. But we
never
did anything … you know …”