Authors: Bill Loehfelm
Fresh Kills (38 page)
I put my finger to her lips. I pulled her to me, ran my fingers up through her hair. It was like holding everything in the world.
“It’s crazy,” she said. “I tried staying home. I really did. But I just couldn’t. I couldn’t stop thinking about you. And all this. And then I got here and I couldn’t get through the door.”
I held her face in my hands, my fingers feather-light on her cheeks, and I kissed her. I kissed her right there in the street, out in the open, where anyone passing by could see us. She moved into me, lacing her fingers across the back of my neck. I kissed her gentle and slow, deliberate, and she kissed me back the same way. Our hands didn’t move at all. Not like at my apartment, where kissing was just an excuse to tear at each other’s clothes. This time, kissing her was quiet and easy, and as natural as falling asleep. Behind me, or maybe just way back in a memory, I heard a train roll into the station.
Molly finally broke the kiss, pulling me even tighter to her, resting her head on my shoulder. Her lips brushed my cheek, my ear. “What am I gonna do about you?”
I felt her breathing against me, savored her body rising and falling against mine, warm and alive, as she clung to me. “You’re doing it now.”
were gathered around a small back table in front of the fireplace, when Molly and I walked into Joyce’s. Julia must’ve said something, because nobody reacted much over Molly being there. Jimmy winked at me when he pulled up a chair for her, and that was the end of it.
Julia and I didn’t talk much, content to listen and laugh as the other three traded stories. As the night wore on, I watched Molly carefully, for signs of discomfort, or reluctance to be there, for signs of the old rules. Outside we were alone, but now we sat and talked among people who knew her situation. But Molly seemed entirely at ease. She didn’t check the door, or keep an eye on the other patrons like she did when she came to me at work. She leaned into me when I draped my arm over the back of her chair. She grabbed my tie and pulled me to her for a kiss, told me I looked great in a suit when I got up to buy a round of drinks. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so relaxed.
Shortly before midnight, as Jimmy returned to the table with a fresh round of drinks, Rose, ever the matchmaker, announced to the group that she had a friend who’d be perfect for Julia.
“As long as she’s not the gym teacher,” Julia said.
“Not at all,” Rose said. “She’s a massage therapist. Looks kind of like a redheaded Molly.”
Julia arched an eyebrow at me, then at Molly. She dove into her bag for a pen. She scrawled her cell phone number down on a cocktail napkin and slid it across the table to Rose. “Feel free to pass this along,” she said. Rose said she would, her next appointment was on Monday.
“Can I borrow that pen?” Molly asked, already reaching for it. I expected her to ask for the therapist’s number, but she wrote something on a napkin then slid it over to me. I picked it up. “Just wanted to make sure you had it all,” she said. She’d written her own cell phone number, her home number, and her address. “Feel free,” she said. She grinned at me. “I will be.”
We left Joyce’s not long after the exchange of numbers. Jimmy and Rose had taken the next morning off; they would meet us at the church. As I walked Molly to her car she told me that, when she’d left school that afternoon, she hadn’t planned on attending the funeral. But if she was still welcome, she said, she could still arrange for a substitute teacher in the early morning. I told her how glad I was she’d changed her mind, and that she was welcome anywhere she wanted to be. See you in the morning, she told me, and she kissed me good night beside her car. I watched her drive away, her hand out the window, waving at me as her taillights disappeared down Richmond Avenue.
When we got home, Julia trotted upstairs to change into sweats. I stripped off my jacket, tie, and dress shirt in the living room and tossed them on the couch. In the kitchen, I opened a beer for each of us, pouring hers into a glass and setting it on the table. I checked the answering machine but there were no messages. I remembered I’d told Brian that I’d call him about the services. I felt guilty about forgetting, though I was sure he’d understand. I called his office at the bar and left the time and location for the funeral Mass on his machine. He’d never get the message in time to let anyone know; he was always headed home to the wife by eleven. It was no big deal. No one from work would’ve come anyway. I didn’t know any of them well enough.
I’d learned years ago that the bar business is a poor place to find friends. You could work beside someone for years, even sleep with them occasionally, and never really get to know them. I’d always liked that about the business. There was no time for anything more than the most superficial of entanglements. Too many people came and went, killing time and making money through the in-between: in between jobs, or marriages, or schools, or moves. It was true of customers and coworkers alike. As much as I liked working at the Cargo, and liked most of my coworkers, it was in that way no different from any other bar.
But I found myself looking forward to going back to work. Maybe I’d even stop in before my next shift. Just to say hello, get any awkward moments out of the way. The Cargo would be a good place to be, familiar territory and familiar faces. Everyone would know enough to give me a little space and sympathy; nobody would know enough to ask any questions I didn’t want to answer. The bar might actually be for me what it was supposed to be for the customers, something I hadn’t been able to find for what felt like a really long time: a place to catch my breath.
Julia joined me in the kitchen, folding her legs under her on the chair at the head of the table. I moved from the bench to the chair on her left. We sat there for a while, in our parents’ old seats at the table, Julia in her pajamas and me in my undershirt and dress pants. Julia ran her finger along the rim of her beer glass. I smoked a cigarette, using her empty bottle for an ashtray.
It occurred to me that this might be the last night we sat together at the kitchen table in our parents’ house. I knew she was thinking the same thing. Watching her watch her finger make circles, I could see she was miles away, deep into our past. We hadn’t talked yet about what to do with the house we grew up in, but I knew we wouldn’t keep it. She’d never expressed any interest in coming back to Staten Island from Boston, when and if she ever graduated. I wasn’t going to live here alone. This table, these chairs, they would go somewhere else. Another family would move into the house, bringing their own kitchen table with them. I hoped it’d be a young family with plans to be a big one. There had always been more space than people at our table. I hoped the new family would make enough noise to chase our ghosts away. I hoped they’d have better luck with the place than we did.
“You feeling okay?” Julia asked.
“You gonna miss this place?” I asked.
“Yeah. I am. I can’t think of Mom without seeing her here.” She looked around. “It’s weird, though. We grew up in this house, it’s the only one we ever had, but I feel like we weren’t here very long. All of us together, you and me, especially. Makes it harder to let it go.” She sipped her beer. “Will you miss it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s hard for me to think of the place without thinking about Dad. But still, I never thought about this house being empty one day. That seems strange.”
“I know. I always assumed Dad would live forever.”
“Me, too,” I said.
Julia finished her beer. She wrapped her fingers around the empty glass. I wondered if she felt as exhausted as she looked. “You still want to have your say tomorrow?” she asked.
“I do. I told you I’d do it, and I feel like I should. I don’t want to wake up one day wishing I had.”
“Any ideas?”
“A few,” I said, lying. I didn’t want her to worry. I had no clue what I’d say. “It’ll probably be brief.”
“Brief is fine,” she said. “I’m proud of you. For finally taking this on, for showing up.”
“Sorry I was so late and so much trouble along the way.”
“You got here,” she said. “That’s what matters.”
“You should go to bed,” I said. “It’s late.”
She stood. “Don’t stay up too much longer.” She put her hand on my shoulder and I covered it with mine. “This time tomorrow,” she said, “it’ll all be over.”
I patted her hand. She kissed my cheek and told me she loved me before she left the kitchen. I heard the stairs creak under her footsteps. I realized, as I heard her bedroom door close, that I was now the oldest member of my family.
the living room with a short glass of whiskey and several blank sheets of paper on the coffee table in front of me. I propped up the photo of my father’s football team, leaning it against Julia’s box of photos. I had run out of time to get the eulogy together. Julia’s words about the end had been meant as a comfort, but facing the last day of this whole ordeal, facing saying good-bye, frightened me. It was something I thought for a long time I had already done, but I’d been very wrong. Not only had I not said good-bye to my father but now that it was really time, I didn’t feel ready at all.
I didn’t know where to begin; all my different responsibilities got tangled in my head. I wanted to do right by my sister, by my family, and not sell myself out at the same time. I didn’t want to embarrass myself or anybody else. I had no desire for spectacle. But I didn’t want to, I refused to, lie. What did that leave me to say about a man who, until a few days ago, I only ever knew well enough to hate and to blame? It was suddenly my job to encapsulate a life I knew very little about. I didn’t know how what I knew before and what I had learned fit together. I certainly hadn’t forgiven him. I wasn’t over it; I didn’t feel healed. I couldn’t say I ever would. In fact, I resented him for leaving me this task. But I also knew it hadn’t been his choice for me to do this. It hadn’t been Julia’s choice. It had been mine.
I got nowhere for about an hour. I filled one piece of paper with sketches of names: mine, Julia’s, my mother’s. At one point, I even dug out the family Bible. I flipped through it, regretting again that I hadn’t paid more attention to Father McDonald at the wake. I glanced through the prophets, the Gospels, Revelation. But nothing was revealed to me, nothing inspired me. Despite my Catholic school education, the Word of God proved to be foreign and un-navigable territory. I gave up and put the book back atop the liquor cabinet, relieved it hadn’t burst into flames in my hands.
I set Julia’s box of photos on my lap. I went through them one at a time, separating pictures with my father in them from the rest. I found all the ones Julia had shown me plus a couple of others. One shot was, according to my mother’s note, my christening, the after-party at least. I was bundled in blue on the couch, my mother touching my cheek. My father was in the background, Jackson on one side of him, Stanski on the other. They were all laughing. I found only one photo of just my father and me. We were on the ferry, my father standing against the rail, a five-year-old me perched on his shoulders, smiling, my hands in his hair. Manhattan, against a cloudy backdrop, Twin Towers and all, rose in the background. My father and I wore matching New York Mets sweatshirts. I wondered what we’d done that day in the City.
I remembered a field trip I’d taken with school, three or four years after that photo. We’d gone to the Towers. School trips were how I’d seen the few Manhattan landmarks I’d ever visited: the Statue, the Empire State Building, the Museum of Natural History, the Bronx Zoo. On the trip to the Towers, my father had come along as a chaperone. I hadn’t thought about that trip in years, even when the Towers came down. That day, like everyone else, I’d been too caught up in real time to think about any history. It was the only one of those school trips he’d taken with me.
I couldn’t remember anything about the trip into or back from the City. I couldn’t remember the name of the teacher who had taken us. My classmates blurred together into a generic gaggle of schoolchildren. All I could recall was a few moments up on one of the top floors, standing at a wall of windows, looking out at the sprawling world.
I could see Staten Island, all of it, from end to end. It seemed so small, just a gray and green bump of land floating in the blue water, a brown cloud of pollution hovering over it. I wondered if all the people went away, would the cloud? Would the island look any different? I reached up and covered the whole island with one hand, making it disappear. I stared over my hand, at the horizon, wondering how far I was really seeing. Was I looking at New Jersey? Pennsylvania? Beyond? It seemed there was nothing in the way. If I was on the roof, how much more, how much farther could I see? Maybe I would work up at the top of the Towers one day. Then they would let me onto the roof. I would have a pass and permission and I could find out how far I could see.
I asked my father about the building where he worked. It was down there somewhere, he said, among all the others. Look for it. See if you can guess, he said. I leaned against the barrier, pressed my hands and my forehead against the cool glass. I was too warm in my winter coat and the cold felt good. I looked down at a million rooftops, at helicopters flying below us, at countless cars and people. We were so high in the air I couldn’t see the foot of the tower. It was like we were floating in the sky. I leaned more of my weight onto the glass. I felt my father gather the back of my coat in his hand and waited for him to pull me back away from the window. But he didn’t, he just held onto me. There was nothing, I realized then, between me and falling forever but a few inches of glass. It fascinated me that this was even allowed, that we were permitted so close to the edge. But I wasn’t afraid. Even if the glass fell away, I felt, even if it suddenly wasn’t there, I still wouldn’t be afraid.
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