Heart of Palm (9 page)

The linens came from the churches with strict rules for handling, and Arla followed them to a T: soak the fabrics first in fresh water to remove any possible remains of the Precious Body and Blood. Take the water outside and deposit it in an appropriate place, never a drain or a basin, given that it may contain consecrated particles. Then proceed with laundering as usual. Frank had seen Arla many times plodding, limping into the scrub between Aberdeen and Uncle Henry’s, lugging a heavy bucket of water in one hand and her stout wooden cane in the other.

And the funny thing was that Arla was never particularly religious, even though she’d been raised on a steady dose of rosaries and CCD and had acquiesced to her mother’s demands for a church wedding, enjoying the beauty and artistry of the old cathedral, where she still stopped to light a candle whenever she went into St. Augustine. But that was it. They didn’t go to Mass. They never said grace. Frank had never seen a rosary in the house. It amused and puzzled him, that Arla would pay such strict attention to the laundry rites, take so seriously the idea of consecrated particles and Precious Blood and proper disposal and blah, blah, blah, when the routine of her everyday life was anything but pious. Arla played pop music as she ironed the linens, sometimes watched soaps or daytime trash-talk shows while doing the folding, a tumbler of Chablis at her elbow. She’d cuss like a trucker when she burned a hole in one of the corporals, and she’d sometimes even lie about the item count when she returned a package missing a robe or a credence cloth she’d stained or torn.

“Oh, I don’t know that God’s fussing about the details,” she’d say to Frank when he was young. “He’s more concerned with the big picture.” Later, after Will was gone and after Dean had left, she’d not bring up God at all but would grow silent and pensive when the subject came up, would wrap the linens in sheets of brown paper without a word, and Frank wondered if she’d concluded that God wasn’t, in fact, particularly concerned with the big picture, either.

Through the open front door behind him, another box of books hit the pavement. Frank hoisted himself over the top of the old Steinway, slid down on the other side. “Sofia!” he called up the stairs. “You don’t quit throwing shit out the window, you’re going to be next!”

He climbed the stairs, running his hand up the thick oak banister he and Carson had installed on the interior wall of the staircase, intending to give Arla two banisters to hold instead of one as she maneuvered the levels of the old house. He entered the front bedroom, where Arla sat in a tattered wingback chair, looking on with annoyance but forbearance as Sofia threw more books into another cardboard box. At Frank’s entrance, Arla looked up.

Arla. There were times, even now, when Frank was struck by his mother’s appearance, times when he came through a doorway or around a corner and saw her, as he did now, for the impossibly imposing woman she was, or perhaps had once been—her skin still pale and flawless, her features classic, the breadth of her shoulders looking peculiar and off balance, given the atrophy of her left leg and the strange foreshortened shape of her foot. He blinked at the sight of her. If she hadn’t been his mother, and if he hadn’t seen her nearly every day of his life, he’d be doing a double-take right now, so unique was her appearance, so lovely and strange and rare.

“Oh, Frank!” she said, mock-brightly. “There you are. Welcome to my bedroom.
My
bedroom, Frank. Sofia is just doing some tidying up, evidently.” At sixty-two, Arla’s hair was still mostly red, threaded through with gray, cut short and wavy around her head. She wore jeans with an elastic waistband, a sleeveless yellow T-shirt. She kept one hand on her cane, and with the other she gripped the arm of the chair to push herself up.

“Sofia,” he began.

“Frank,” Sofia snapped. “Don’t try to stop me. Do
not
. Do you see this place? Could you please look?” She gestured around Arla’s bedroom.

He did, casting his eyes around the bedroom with the same feeling of dismay and—admit it—
disgust
that had dogged him most of his childhood, when it came to considering matters of his mother’s housekeeping. The room was a landfill. Half of Arla’s double bed was covered in books, clothes, towels, and random detritus; the other half was kept eerily clear, and Frank could see his mother slept on this half, leaving the other to collect as much junk as possible. Along the bedroom walls were various tables, chairs, and dressers, but no piece of furniture was particularly distinguishable for the piles of rubbish they bore: discarded blouses, plastic grocery bags, prescription bottles, newspapers, empty boxes of Little Debbie snack cakes.

He pressed his hands against his temples. His head was pounding. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. Sofia was staring at him, her face flushed and sweating.

“We had an agreement,” she said. “To clean this house
today
. And now she’s going back on her word.”

“I don’t see why she has to be in my bedroom,” Arla said. “Do you, Frank?”

“I can’t live like this anymore,” Sofia muttered. She shook open a plastic garbage bag and bent to gather up items on the floor. An empty coffee tin. A stack of eight-track tapes, rubber-banded together.
Eight-tracks?
Frank shook his head. Outside the open window, Biaggio started to whistle.

“Should we at least close the window?” Frank said. “It’s hot as hell out there.”

“It wouldn’t matter,” Sofia said. “It’s hot as hell in here, too. The AC’s busted.”

“Since when?” Frank said. He walked to the AC unit parked in the bedroom’s second window, fiddled with the knobs. Nothing.

Sofia straightened up, cocked her head to one side. “Since like three years ago,” she said. She thrust her thumb at Arla. “She wouldn’t let me tell you. Because she didn’t want you to see what it looks like up here.”

“My space is being invaded, Frank. My very refuge,” Arla said. “Is nothing sacred? A woman’s own boudoir?”

“Oh, boudoir, my butt, Mother,” Sofia said. “It’s a pigpen, is what it is. The whole house. We agreed, Mother. We agreed we would clean it up today.”

Frank walked over to the open window. Below, Biaggio was sitting on the front steps, flipping through a copy of
Life
. Frank looked northward, scanning the horizon for smoke.

The fryer. The fryer. The fryer. It could be combusting at this very moment, sending a shower of sparks through the kitchen, a wall of flames licking at the cardboard boxes of paper towels under the prep tables, spreading out to the burlap window shades in the dining room, the unfinished wainscoting in the foyer, the thick yellow pine of the bar, the bar, the
bar
—my God! He hadn’t had enough coffee for this. And how early did the games need to begin, anyway?

“You do realize it’s not even seven-thirty in the morning, Sofia?” Frank said.

“Yes, of course I do,” she said. She looked at the huge pink watch parked on her wrist. “We started early. You know I have to get to Uncle Henry’s by eight,” she said. He did know, of course. Sofia was Uncle Henry’s one-woman housekeeping and sanitation staff—and she was an admittedly astounding phenomenon, as far as Frank was concerned—wielding the force and grace of a Lipizzaner with the speed of an Olympic sprinter, but she took it on herself, day after day after day. She’d started almost twenty years ago, not long after Frank himself had taken over the place, in fact, and now she showed up at the restaurant every morning, rain or shine, on the
dot
(my God, the
dot
!) of eight o’clock to spend exactly three hours cleaning up the crumbs and crusts and chaos of the night before. Frank could set his watch by the sight of Sofia steering her bike up through the restaurant’s parking lot, her long hair pulled back, an expression of grim expectation on her face as she prepared to face the wreckage of another night’s business at Uncle Henry’s. In by eight, out by eleven. Every day. Every single blessed day.

Now that he’d mentioned the time, he felt his sister getting antsy. She glanced at her watch again, then around at the rubble on the floor.

“And you do both realize the piano is in the middle of the hallway, right?” Frank felt compelled to point this out. Sofia literally put her foot down.

“That’s gotta
go
,” Sofia said. “It’s full of termites.”

“It’s an heirloom,” Arla said. “It’s my grandmother’s Steinway.”

“It’s a breeding ground for
vermin
. It’s out of here,” Sofia said.

“Over my dead body,” Arla said mildly.

Sofia’s face was turning a deeper red. She turned to Frank, near tears. “Do you see?” she demanded.

The heat was nearly suffocating. His head pounded.

“Look,” Frank said. “Why don’t you just put this off a bit, Sofia? I mean, does it have to happen today?”

“We had an agreement,” she began.

“I know, I know,” Frank said. “But today? Of all days?” He saw her wavering. So he went for the jugular, glancing at his watch as he said it. “And isn’t it getting close to time for you to go?”

Sofia glared at him. She looked at her own watch again. Then she turned and left the room. A moment later, her bedroom door slammed, and he knew she’d be getting ready to leave for the restaurant.

“My Lord,” Arla said. “I swear.”

“Just relax,” he said to Arla, “the two of you. Don’t aggravate the situation when she gets like this, Mom.”

“She’s single-handedly dragging my piano out of my house, Frank. How is that
me
aggravating the situation?” She picked up the plastic garbage bag at her feet and began pulling items out of it. “What kind of woman can drag a piano out of a house, anyway, Frank? I mean, you see what I am dealing with here?” She pulled a dusty silk nosegay out of the wastebasket, shook it off, and put it back on the table at her elbow. Next she retrieved a pincushion shaped like a giant strawberry. “Nothing wrong with that,” she muttered.

“Maybe you should get out of here for a bit. You’re just at each other’s throats in the house here. Come up to the restaurant later,” he said.

Arla dropped the bag, put her hands up in the air, pushed them down again. “I don’t want to come over there.”

“Come up—you and Sofia both.”

“Forget it,” Arla said.

“There’ll be music.”

“I hate music.”

Frank was rankled. “You do not.”

“How do you know?” she said. “You don’t know everything.”

True. He didn’t know everything. He didn’t know, for example, how any of them were going to survive if the restaurant were, indeed, burning down at this moment, but he didn’t bother to broach this topic with Arla.

“You’re coming,” he said. “You need to get out of here once in a while. I’ll get Carson to pick you up for the fireworks. And one of us will take you home afterward.”

“What if I say no?”

“Look, Mom. I was woken up out of a sound sleep this morning to come over here”—he left out, of course, the part about his dream, the fact that he wasn’t in fact woken from a sound sleep but had been awake and aroused already, thinking about Elizabeth— “to come over here and get in the middle of this, and what I find when I get here is two people hell-bent on making each other crazy.”

“One of us already is,” Arla said.

“That’s debatable.”

“Oh, trust me, she’s crazy.”

“No, I mean it’s debatable whether it’s one of you, or both of you.”

Arla turned to him, glaring.

“I’m the only thing keeping her from going completely off the deep end, Frank.”

“Well, you’re going to send yourself there, you’re not careful,” he said. “You’re coming to Uncle Henry’s tonight. Both of you.” He didn’t like the insistent tone of his own voice, but he was pissed. This was ridiculous.

“I don’t like being bossed around, Frank,” Arla said.

“Well, there’s a lot of things I don’t like,” Frank said. “But I just do them anyway.”

She sighed, struggled to her feet. “Come on downstairs,” she said. “I haven’t even had any tea yet.”

They walked downstairs, and when they got to the base of the stairs they stopped at the Steinway.

“Biaggio and I need to move this,” he said.

“Leave it there,” Arla barked. “Sofia put it there, she can put it back herself.”

Frank clambered over the piano first, then turned to take Arla’s cane and help his mother maneuver the climb. Arla slid down heavily, and he handed her back her cane. He followed her into the kitchen.

“I don’t need tea,” he said. “I’ve got to get over to the restaurant. And Sofia can ride with me this morning. Since I’m here already.”

“Pfftt,” Arla said. “Good luck with that. I’m sure she’s going to change her routine for
you
, Frank. Since she’s so accommodating to everyone else. Her mother, for instance.”

She clomped across the kitchen and filled the teakettle. “Have you spoken to Carson?”

Frank had not spoken to his brother in weeks, but he didn’t particularly want to have to analyze this point, or the reasons why, with his mother, so he dodged the question.