by Tom Perrotta
“No,” she said, looking up with the sweet, earnest expression he had memorized a long time ago. “Thank you.”
After they’d eaten, everyone lined up for the picture Richard was looking at now. Seven men in a row, of varying heights, weights, body types, ages, and skin colors, each of them grinning at the camera as if competing to see who could look the happiest. Claude, Marcus, Walter, Roberto, Richard, Earl, and Fred. In front of them, Carla on one knee, her arms spread wide, as if she were trying to embrace the world.
“Wow,” said Richard. “That was a great day.”
“It sure was,” said Carla. “Now tell me about the panties.”
Bertha’s jaw kept flapping all the way home from the hospital, telling Ronnie not to feel bad, that his mother had gone to a better place, that she no longer had to suffer the aches and pains of lonely old age in a town where everybody hated her.
“Nobody hated her,” he said, breaking his vow to just sit quietly the whole way home, not to utter a single word to the toxic old bitch. It was bad enough that he had to breathe the same air as her, that his own sister wouldn’t even offer him a ride home in her minivan on the day their mother died, like he was going to foul the seats just by touching his ass to them, like he’d leave an invisible slime of sex offender germs on the surfaces her kids had to touch on the way to school every day. Well, fuck her. One day she’d wake up and her precious fucking Mercury Villager would just be a smoking hulk in her driveway.
Oh, gee, Sis, sorry to hear it. Too bad you weren’t sleeping in it.
The thing that really pissed him off was that she hadn’t even hugged him good-bye. She thought about it for a second, he saw it, saw her move toward him and then suddenly draw back, as if realizing what she’d been about to do. She patted him on the shoulder instead, patted him the way you’d pat an ugly dog, standing as far away as you could, looking away so you wouldn’t have to smell its rotten breath.
“She was an old woman,” Bertha said, shooting him an accusatory sidelong glance. “She had no business fighting off intruders in the middle of the night. No business at all.”
“I have a broken arm,” Ronnie reminded her, shifting on the seat to show her his cast. “There was nothing I could do.”
Bertha shook her head, and Ronnie couldn’t help marveling at how pickled she looked, even after a day spent in the hospital. You could almost see the fumes rising off her skin, like she was a sponge soaked in cheap wine.
“She seemed so strong this morning.” Bertha dabbed a Kleenex at her eyes. “She was awake and alert, her vital signs were good. And then God called her.”
Ronnie shut his eyes and pretended his ears were clogged with melted wax. He reminded himself that he’d never have to spend another minute with Bertha in his life, never have to arrange his schedule around her daily visits.
Everything would turn out okay, he was pretty sure of it. His mother had set things up so that he could remain in the house for as long as he wanted. If he and Carol decided to sell it someday, they would split the proceeds, just like they would split the money in her bank account and the CDs and the annuities. The way he figured it, he’d have at least a year before he needed to worry about money, even if he went ahead and splurged on a new computer like he planned. A guy in prison had told him about some web sites he was interested in checking out.
“They’re from Amsterdam,” he’d said. “Those fucking Dutch people are sick, man.”
It was amazing to think about, a computer of his own and no one to bother him. He could just surf the web all day, look at whatever he wanted.
The cab pulled up in front of his house. He reached for his wallet, but Bertha told him his money was no good, not today.
“I’ll get it,” she said. “I promised your mother I’d keep an eye on you.”
Yeah, right, Ronnie thought, you and the Gallo Brothers.
“Oh wait,” she said. “I almost forgot.”
Bertha reached into her purse and handed him a folded sheet of paper that had been ripped from a spiral notebook.
“Your mother wrote it this morning. She wanted me to give it to you.”
“What do you mean, she wrote it?”
“She wrote it,” Bertha insisted. “I held the pen between her fingers and the nurse held the clipboard. But she did all the letters. She fell asleep right afterward. And then she had the hemorrhage.”
Ronnie stuck the paper into his shirt pocket and slipped out of the cab, glad not to have to look at Bertha’s nasty face for a second longer.
“See you at the wake,” she called out, as the cab pulled away from the curb.
Inside the house, Ronnie unfolded the note. The letters were big and sloppy but he could tell the handwriting from a single glance. His eyes filled with tears as he read the brief message, a mother’s final plea to her wayward son.
Please, she begged him. Please be a good boy.
As much as she hated to admit it, Mary Ann was rattled. Isabelle had gone to sleep according to plan, under the covers by seven, asleep by quarter after, but Troy had rebelled, pitching a kicking and screaming fit on the living room floor, the likes of which she’d never seen before.
“I’m not tired!” he shrieked. “Get that through your stupid head!”
She decided to ignore the insult for the moment.
“I don’t care if you’re tired or not. When it’s our bedtime, we go to bed.”
“Why?” he demanded. There was a wild look in his eyes, an expression Mary Ann might have called terror if it hadn’t sounded so ridiculous. “Why do I have to go to bed if I’m not tired?”
“Because I say so,” Mary Ann replied calmly. “And your father does, too.”
She cast a pointed glance at Lewis, who was sitting on the couch reading National Geographic, an activity she would have approved of under less pressing circumstances (she’d gotten him the subscription for Christmas, but he usually just let the magazines gather dust on the coffee table). He looked up with a carefully neutral expression, as if to say, You’re on your own, honey. He had never been as supportive about enforcing bedtimes as she would have liked.
Troy seemed emboldened by his father’s failure to intervene.
“None of the other kids go to bed at seven,” he declared, spreading his arms wide in a plaintive demand for an explanation.
“And you know what?” Mary Ann shot back. “None of the other kids are going to get accepted into Harvard, either. But you are. And do you know why? Because we do things differently around here, understand?”
She grabbed him roughly by the arm and marched him upstairs to his room, watching from the doorway as he crawled beneath the covers, muttering softly into his pillow. Mary Ann turned off the light.
“Good night, honey.”
Instead of answering, he rolled onto his side, face turned to the wall. She moved closer to the bed.
“Troy Jonathan, I just spoke to you.”
After a tense moment of defiance, he flopped onto his back.
“Mommy? Will you read me a story?”
“No,” she said. “I most definitely will not. Mommies don’t like it when little boys call them stupid.”
Sarah unwrapped a Hershey bar and handed it to Lucy, whose eyelids were beginning to droop. The little girl accepted the treat without a word of comment, despite the fact that her mother normally enforced a strict no-chocolate-after-dinner policy. She took a tiny bite and chewed with unusual deliberation, keeping her vacant gaze glued to the TV screen like a pothead contemplating a lava lamp. Sarah couldn’t tell if she was mesmerized by the movie—Dick Van Dyke was leading his fellow chimney sweeps in their big broomstick number—or simply too tired to turn her head.
“Mommy’s going upstairs for a couple of minutes,” she said. “Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep. You keep those little eyes open, okay?”
“Okay, Mommy.”
Sarah got dressed with what she considered to be admirable efficiency given the circumstances, trying on only three outfits before
settling on the stretchy black skirt and cropped white T-shirt (which she’d pretty much known she was going to wear all along). She brushed her teeth, put on a little makeup, and was back downstairs by eight-forty-five.
But she was too late. Lucy was conked out on the couch, the barely nibbled Hershey bar clutched to her chest like a stuffed animal, the chocolate already beginning to ooze between her fingers. She made sweet little puffing noises as she slept, as if she were reading a book consisting only of the letter “P.”
This was not good.
Sarah had gone to great lengths to avoid just this scenario, doing everything she could think of short of force-feeding her daughter a double espresso to keep her awake past the nine o’clock deadline, but it was all for naught. Lucy’s sleep schedule had gone haywire ever since she’d stopped napping with Aaron.
Sarah turned off the TV and considered her options. She could call Jean, ask her to come over and keep an eye on Lucy while she ran a quick errand, but the last thing she wanted was to bring Todd into the house on tonight of all nights and have to introduce him to her chatty next-door neighbor. It was theoretically possible to have him wait in the backyard or something, but Sarah knew Jean well enough to know that the payment she’d extract for a half hour of last-minute baby-sitting was an hour-long conversation about her husband’s shortcomings, how crabby and forgetful he’d become, and how difficult it was to buy him clothes now that he’d put on so much weight. It was trying enough to suffer through these monologues on a normal night; to know that every tiresome word out of Jean’s mouth was another second without Todd would be nothing short of torture.
Of course, none of this would have mattered if she’d been able to contact him and notify him of the change in their plans. It hardly seemed possible at this point in human history that you could try all day and not find a way to reach a person living less than a mile away to pass along the simplest bit of information—come to my house, not the playground—but that was precisely the position in which Sarah found herself.
He hadn’t come to the pool that afternoon, which eliminated the possibility of direct communication—a stolen conversation, a passed note, or, at the very least, the transmission of some sort of warning signal. Sarah called his house five times during the day from different pay phones—his home system was equipped with caller ID, supposedly to flush out solicitors—but each time the mother-in-law picked up, her voice growing harsher and more suspicious with each subsequent episode.
“Who’s there? Stop calling here. Leave us alone.”
Sarah considered breaking the cyber component of her promise as well, but that seemed even more dangerous. An e-mail in the wrong hands could have ruined everything. She believed she’d exercised heroic restraint in not exposing them to that risk, but it left her without any alternative beyond parking in front of Todd’s house and hoping to catch him if he left the house without his bodyguard. Unfortunately, it was an oppressively hot day, and all the shady spots were taken. Lucy’s complaints put an end to the stakeout after a mere twenty minutes.
For a fleeting second, Sarah thought about letting her daughter sleep. She wouldn’t need much more than fifteen or twenty minutes, would she? All she had to do was rush over to the playground, collect Todd, explain the circumstances, and bring him back here for the night (it wasn’t a seaside motel, but she was pretty sure he’d understand). Chances were, Lucy would sleep straight through till morning, and never even know her mother had been gone.
It was a tempting solution, but Sarah knew better. Every so often—a little more often than you’d expect—you’d hear these stories about tragic fires, very young children playing with matches, left alone in an apartment without adult supervision (the baby-sitter out looking for crack or whatever), or toddlers wandering across busy intersections with no shoes on their feet, their mothers subsequently arrested for neglect or endangerment (always the mothers, of course, hardly ever the fathers). And aside from these melodramatic risks, Sarah simply couldn’t stand the thought of Lucy waking up and spending even a couple of minutes trying to figure out where her mother had gone, why she’d been left all alone in an empty house.
Waking her up wasn’t such a great alternative, either. The last thing Sarah wanted on the way to what was supposed to have been the most romantic assignation of her life was a cranky and confused three-year-old whining in the backseat. Her only hope was to somehow transport Lucy out to the car, drive to the playground, pick up Todd, and carry her back inside without waking her. She was a deep sleeper; it could be done.
Sarah thought of everything. She opened the house and car doors beforehand, and removed a small plastic dog from the car seat. After prying the chocolate bar from Lucy’s grip and wiping her fingers clean with a wet paper towel, she slipped both hands under her daughter’s warm and compliant body and lifted her off the couch. Lucy stirred in her arms, uttering a drowsy syllable or two of protest, but she didn’t wake. Sarah carried her out the front door, pulling it shut behind her, and tiptoed down the stairs and across the lawn to the Volvo. As carefully as if she were transporting a ticking time bomb, she tilted her daughter’s body to avoid the door-frame and lowered her into her seat, pressing her head gently backward while she lowered the safety restraint and clicked the buckle into the slot. Lucy kicked her legs a couple of times, as if trying to free herself from tangled blankets, then let her head loll heavily to the right. Sarah released a deep sigh of relief and satisfaction.
Yes.
Everything would be all right now, she just knew it. She would get to the playground on time—well, maybe a couple of minutes late—and Todd would be waiting. They’d come home, put Lucy to bed, and go right to bed themselves, celebrating the beginning of a whole new phase in their lives. She couldn’t help it, she touched herself between her legs as she drove, just letting her hand rest there lightly, nothing too distracting. “Hey,” came a tiny, unhappy voice from the backseat. “Where my chocket?”
With a groan of disbelief, Sarah checked the rearview mirror. Lucy’s eyes were wide-open, as if it were the middle of the day, as if sleep were the furthest thing from her mind.
“It’s home,” Sarah said. “You can eat the rest of it tomorrow.”
“I want it now!”
“I don’t have it,” Sarah explained.
Lucy squeezed out an angry face for the mirror. Sarah braced herself for the inevitable tantrum, but somehow it passed. The little scowl softened; it looked more curious than angry.
“Where we going?” Lucy asked.
“To the playground,” Sarah told her. “But not to play.”
After all those years of being watched, first by the prison guards, and then by your mother, you would have thought it would be nice to be alone for once, nobody looking over your shoulder, making sure you were keeping out of trouble, but it was actually kind of weird and even a little scary. All these thoughts racing around your head, these impulses you no longer had to control.
It wasn’t that Ronnie didn’t want to be a good boy; he would have liked nothing better than to make his mother proud, to live a normal healthy life, be a solid citizen with a car, a good job, and a loving family. He could coach Little League, take his players out for ice cream after the games…
Yeah, like that was gonna happen.
He just wished he had the computer already. Then maybe he could look at a few pictures, keep himself occupied that way, maybe figure out how to navigate through those chat rooms you heard so much about. But right now he was in limbo. He tried to stick to the usual routine, dinner at six, the news, Wheel of Fortune, but it wasn’t the same without his mother sitting next to him on the couch, muttering about Dan Rather’s jowls or Vanna’s crazy getups, studying the puzzles like they would reveal the mystery of life rather than a stupid proverb or the name of a celebrity no one had thought about for decades.
“Abe Vigoda!” she’d shout in triumph. “The heart is a lonely hunter!”
It was the phone he kept staring at, as if
it held some sort of magnetic attraction. He wished there was somebody he could call, a friend or a relative, somebody who’d want to hear his sad news, somebody he could invite over for a cup of coffee, a little company. But there was only one number in his head, a number he hadn’t used in years.
Don’t do it, he told himself, but his finger was already pressing the buttons. Don’t be stupid.
It rang three times, his heart going absolutely bonkers in his chest, the way it always did.
“Hello?” He could tell right away it was the mother, Diane Colapinto. He remembered seeing her on TV after the girl had disappeared, those black rings of grief encircling her dark eyes. “Hello?”
She sounded good, actually—cheerful, almost, like she’d given up crying over spilled milk and had finally gotten on with her life. He could hear laughter in the background, and realized that Holly’s two younger siblings weren’t so young anymore. The sister would be eleven, the brother ten, older than Holly was the day she got into his car.
“Hello?” Diane said again, this time more tentatively. “Who’s calling?”
It would have been easy to do it, to whisper what he used to whisper after sneaking out to a pay phone in the middle of the night, when he’d startle her out of a deep sleep, enjoying the confusion of terror and hope in her voice. I know where she is, he’d taunt. But I’m never going to tell you.
Not tonight, though. Out of respect for his own dead mother, if for nothing else.
“Sorry,” he said. “Wrong number.”
He hung up, feeling sweaty and light-headed. There was one more person he could call, come to think of it. He had the number in his wallet, scribbled on a sticky note. She wasn’t home, though—probably out on another blind date, boring some guy silly. All he got was her spacy voice on the answering machine. This is Sheila, please leave me a message. Ronnie waited for the beep, which took way longer than it should have.
“You are one loony bitch,” he told her. “Why don’t you put that in your personal ad?”