Expiration Date (16 page)

Mom asked me if I wanted another beer, but instead I helped myself to some of Whiplash’s whiskey—Johnnie Walker Black. Probably a gift from a grateful client. God knows the cheap bastard wouldn’t spring for it himself.

Mom excused herself to go to the basement. I knew where she was going.

“It’s okay. It’s your house. You can smoke here.”

“You know I don’t smoke, Mickey.”

“I totally know you do.”

“You’re being silly.”

I turned to Meghan.

“She totally smokes.”

“I
do not
smoke.”

Mom excused herself anyway to go downstairs to smoke. In a few moments we would hear the wrinkling of the wrapper, then the flick of the lighter. And in a few minutes we would all smell cigarette smoke.

I explained to Meghan, not bothering to lower my voice.

“Both of my mom’s parents died of lung cancer. She wants me to think that she quit smoking in 1990, when her father died. And I really do think she tries to quit. She just never has.”

Whiplash was clearly uncomfortable with this, so he made some small talk with Meghan. Once he found out her father was
the
Nicholas Charles, the small talk became more pointed, asking what her father was working on now, and hey, does he go to the Capital Grille every so often, and hey, is your dad looking to hire oh I’m just kidding but really I’m not.

My mom returned to the kitchen, absolutely reeking of smoke. It wafted from her clothes and invaded our nostrils. I fought back the urge to sneeze. We all sat down to eat.

Within sixty seconds Whiplash had whipped through his dinner. Then he stood up and wordlessly made his way down to his basement office. But not before giving my mom a none-too-subtle pinch on her ass.

The plates in front of Meghan and me were still full, as we hadn’t had time to pretend to enjoy more than a few bites of our rigatoni and meatballs. My mom leaned in closer to us, all confidential-like.

“He’s working on a case.”

I leaned in, too.

“Don’t worry about it.”

Whiplash spent a lot of time in Northwood, but he’d never move here. Going from suburbia to Northwood would be serious slumming, even for a personal injury lawyer. So he kept his own condo in Ardmore, but spent most of his time at my mom’s house.

“More wine?”

“I’m good, Mrs. Wade.”

“Hey, I told you. It’s Anne. We’re all adults here.”

“Right. Anne.”

Bringing Meghan had been a tactical decision. With a buffer in the room, my mom might not come at me with both barrels blazing. She might even be forced to answer a question or two directly.

“Mom, what do you know about Grandpop and the Adams Institute?”

The fork in my mother’s hand froze for a brief moment, like the fancy slow-mo bullet time of a Wachowski flick. She smiled.

“That’s where I thought I’d end up when you told me you wanted to be a writer.”

And then the fork completed the journey to her mouth, which chewed and grinned at the same time.

The Adams Institute was a popular punch line in Frankford. Misbehave, and your parents would say, “You’re going to drive me straight to Adams if you don’t knock that off.” Or, “Where we going on vacation, Mom?” “To Adams, if you don’t stop goofing around.” Adams was the loony bin. It was the most beautiful piece of land in Frankford, spread across ten gorgeous acres on the fringes of Northwood. But nobody wanted to end up there.

Meghan laughed politely.

“How many years did Mickey’s grandfather work there?”

Oooh,
kapowie
. Anne hadn’t seen that one coming. She was very practiced at smacking away my questions. She had since I was a kid. But the two-on-one assault had left her flummoxed.

“Oh, gee. I think he retired a few years ago? We really don’t talk too much. You know your grandpop, Mickey.”

I took a slug of Johnny Walker Black for courage.

“How long before Grandpop found out Billy Derace was there?”

You should have seen the death stare on Anne’s face then. My God. Blue eyes like dagger icicles.

“Billy who?”

“
Mom.
The guy who killed dad.”

“Excuse me.”

My mom pushed her chair back, wiped her mouth with a white napkin, placed it on the table, then left the room.

Meghan and I exchanged glances. I took another gulp of Whiplash’s good scotch, which burned my throat as I followed my mom into the kitchen.

My mother’s palms were pressed to the edges of the countertop. I didn’t know if she was trying to keep her balance or keep the counter from resisting the earth’s gravity and floating into the air.

“Mom?”

She looked up. Tears were running down her cheeks. I had the strangest sense of déjà vu. Wasn’t I just here—my mother looking at me and crying? Like, thirty-seven years ago?

My mom wiped her face dry.

“You don’t understand. For years I’ve been waiting for the call that your grandfather’s murdered someone over at Adams.”

“Not just someone.
Billy Derace.
Why didn’t you ever tell me the truth? You said it was a bar fight. But this guy just attacked Dad out of nowhere. I read the news clips.”

“When would you have liked to know? When you were nine years old? Or maybe when you turned sixteen? Twenty-one, just in time for you to go out drinking?”

“Any of those times would have been better than you lying to me.”

“I never lied to you. You assumed things.”

This was true. I had filled in the gaps. But only because I’d never heard the full story, and had little else to go on. My mother was masterful at shutting down awkward conversations or ignoring them completely.

I tried a different way at it.

“I found a bunch of newspaper clippings that Grandpop kept—all about Dad’s murder. I think he saved every newspaper article, and even got a copy of the police report.”

“Well, that’s a surprise. Your father hated your grandfather and always assumed the feeling was mutual. Who knew he gave a shit.”

It was always that. Your grandfather. Your side of the family. Your gene pool, not mine.

“Why did he hate Grandpop?”

“It’s a long story, and we have a guest.”

Now it was “we.” Now I was part of the family again. Our weird dysfunctional family of two.

“Okay, now here’s what I don’t get. You don’t like him. That much is obvious. You never speak to him, you barely seem to tolerate his existence, and yet you’re always bugging me to visit him. You put me in his friggin’ apartment, Mom. Why would you push me toward somebody you hate? Somebody you tell me my own father hated?”

“Because he doesn’t have anybody else.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“And because someday he might wake up. And the doctors say if he does wake up, he’s going to need some help. I can’t do it, not with work. You’re his grandson.”

Then I understood what my mom had wanted all along. A way to ease her conscience. A way to take care of everything. Me. And my grandpop.

That is: me taking care of my grandpop. Because she sure as hell didn’t want to deal with him.

We didn’t say anything for a short while. I knew Meghan could hear every word of this. My mother’s house, as spacious as it may be by Northwood standards, wasn’t a Main Line McMansion.

“Why did Dad hate Grandpop? Was it because of the divorce?”

“I should have never brought that up.”

“Come on, what’s the difference now? Dad’s gone, and Grandpop is not in a position to care.”

“I wish you’d just forget about it.”

“No, I’m not going to forget about it. This is bullshit. Can you for once, please, just tell me something about my family so I don’t have to keep on inventing details?”

Oh, the look my mother gave me. A withering, icy-blue stare that instantly reduced me to a child.

“I didn’t find this out until after you were born, but apparently your grandfather used to beat up your grandmother.”

My skin went cold as I imagined my grandmother—my sweet grandmother who had nothing but kind words and cookies for me growing up—being struck.

Mom saw she had me. She kept going.

“Your father said he really didn’t remember it until after you were born. But when he became a parent, I guess it all came flooding back. He was depressed all the time, and spent most family holidays avoiding your grandpop Henry—only talking to him when he had to. And that’s the way their relationship stayed until your father died. Now can we finish dinner?”

In 1917 a Philadelphia developer named Gustav Weber went to Los Angeles on his honeymoon. He fell so deeply and promptly in love with the Spanish mission-style architecture that he decided to re-create a piece of Southern California on the East Coast. Upon his return, Weber bought a triangle of land on the outskirts of Philadelphia, divided it up into blocks with street names like Los Angeles Avenue and San Gabriel Road, and then built the homes of his dream: stucco bungalows with red-tiled roofs.

Weber, however, didn’t take into account the harsh East Coast winters that killed the plants and froze the occupants of the uninsulated homes. By the time the Great Depression hit, Weber was bankrupt.

But Hollywood never died.

My grandmom had lived there—at 603 Los Angeles Avenue, near San Diego Avenue—ever since I can remember. While her ex hopped around various apartments in Frankford over the years, Ellie Wadcheck—she never went back to her maiden name—stayed put. I used to waste away many summer afternoons in the postage stamp–sized yard behind her house. Especially in the years after my father died, and my mom needed someone to watch me.

I didn’t think anything was weird about Hollywood, PA, until I went to college, and discovered that my friends thought I was full of crap.

Meghan didn’t believe me either—at first.

“She lives where?”

“Hollywood. It’s a neighborhood in Abington.”

“How have I never heard of this?”

“Oh oh oh, you’re a rich girl, and you’ve gone too far…”

“Shut up.”

We stopped at the Hollywood Tavern. I didn’t have a chance to finish my Johnnie Walker Black at my mother’s, and I needed another drink. Meghan decided she could use one, too. Maybe something that didn’t come from a box.

The place was a former show home for the Weber development that was later fitted with a brick addition that stuck out like a cancerous growth on the face of the mission-style pad. Inside, the bar was designed for serious drinking and sports watching. I ordered a Yuengling; Meghan had a white wine.

“My God, you weren’t full of crap. This place looks like it was scraped out of the Hollywood Hills, flung across the country and it landed here.”

“Pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

“Did any famous actors grow up here?”

“I don’t think so. Unless you consider Joey Lawrence famous.”

We drank. I pretended to watch baseball—a Phillies night game. But mostly I was thinking about what my mother had said.

Grandmom Ellie was surprised to see me. I never dropped by unannounced. In fact, I usually tried to wriggle out of family commitments whenever I could. Not that I didn’t like to see my family, but I always found the first ten to twenty minutes of reacclamation to be awkward and painful. There was always an undercurrent of guilt to it—
gee, it’s been so long, Mickey, you’re never around, you don’t seem to want to associate with the rest of us…but anyway, how are things? How’s the writing career coming along?

But Meghan took the edge off. Oh, how my grandmom fawned over her.

“Look at how beautiful you are! My God. Mickey, do you tell this beautiful woman how gorgeous she is every day?”

“Hi, Mrs. Wadcheck. So great to meet you.”

Meghan even pronounced the name like a pro. She was a quick study, that one.

“Oh, you’re so lovely.”

The interior of my grandmom’s bungalow hadn’t changed…ever. If I were to pop one of those white pills now, I have a feeling I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the early 1970s and now until I stepped outside and checked the cars. Everything was off-white or blinding yellow. Yellow is her favorite color.

Grandmom insisted on serving us giant tumblers of Frank’s vanilla cream soda—which let me tell you, does not go well with Yuengling or Johnnie Walker Black—as well as a tray of the most sickeningly sweet butter ring cookies I’ve ever tasted. If she noticed that I only picked up my soda with three fingers of my left hand, she didn’t let on.

Instead, Ellie Wadcheck smiled at us, but you could tell she was waiting for the other shoe to drop. You could count the times I’d dropped by just to visit on…my missing right arm.

“I wanted to ask you about something, Grandmom.”

Deep in the throes of sugar shock, I lied and said I was writing a piece about my father, and how he’d died. In my defense, I wasn’t totally lying. Maybe there was a magazine piece in this, or even a book. But writing about my father and his killer hadn’t yet occurred to me. It was just something to say to my grandmom.

She smiled at us.

“Billy Derace was the son of a whore.”

Meghan and I sat there, momentarily stunned.

“Don’t hold back, Grandmom. Tell us how you really feel.”

Grandmom laughed. She was pretty much the only relative who thought I was remotely funny.

“Oh, I didn’t know her. But she was notorious. I’ll never forgive that Billy Derace for what he did, but I’m not surprised, considering how he was raised. He was born to a very immature mother. She married young, but refused to stay home. She worked all day and went out drinking and dancing every night. Eventually the husband had enough, he left. Everyone in the neighborhood talked about it.”

“This was Frankford?”

“Yes—where I lived with your grandfather until I moved here. Anyway, there was a rumor that Billy had a younger brother who died when he was young—only three years old, they say. And Billy was the one watching him when he died.”

Meghan turned pale.

“What happened?”

“The story goes that he choked on a piece of cereal. Billy didn’t know what to do. This was…oh, 1968? 1969? Nobody taught children the Heimlich maneuver back then.”