The Crossroads

by F. P. Lione

  “What does your family have to do with this? It’s your life.” “I only know her six months.” It felt longer than that, but my family wasn’t giving her the warm welcome I’d hoped. I wanted them to get to know her and like her a little more before I got engaged.

  “Rooney said he married his wife a week after he met her,” Joe pointed out.

  “Yeah, he was on a binge in hedonism and didn’t remember getting married.” By the time they sobered up, they figured they’d give it a shot and see how it went. That was a couple of years ago and they’re still married, so I guess it worked out okay.

  “Rooney’s not Italian. If I ever did something like that, my family would never talk to me again,” I said.

  “I’m just saying it’s not like you met her a month ago and got married. If you want to get engaged, it should be your decision, not influenced by what they’d think.”

  “I don’t know if she’s ready yet either.”

  “That’s different, as long as it’s you two who aren’t ready and not your family.”

  We finished up the night without any more jobs. After we got changed, I gave him a ride to Penn Station. I wished him a Merry Christmas and gave him two wrapped packages, one for him, one for his father.

  “Wait till Christmas morning,” I said.

  “You too.” He smiled, pulling a gold wrapped box out of his gym bag.

  I got Joe 100 Years of Major League Baseball, in hardcover. I got his father two ESPN videos from the Brooklyn Dodgers series. One was “The Jewel of Flatbush: The Duke Snyder Story,” and the other “The Quiet Ambassador: the Pee Wee Reese Story.” Pee Wee Reese was Lou Fiore’s favorite all-time ballplayer, and as far as Joe or I knew, Lou didn’t have any of the series.

  He waved me off, and I drove north to the diamond district at 46th Street. I put the present under my seat so it was out of sight. I parked on the corner outside Lichtenstein’s Fine Jewelry.

  My old partner, John Conte, showed me the place when he got engaged to his wife. Over the years, I’ve come here whenever I’ve bought a piece of jewelry. The owner, Sol Lichtenstein, has always done the right thing by me.

  Sol was behind the counter and already had a couple of customers. He was somewhere in his sixties, trim and professional in a conservative blue suit. He was Jewish, he wore a yarmulke but didn’t have the curls and hat like a Hasid. He had short gray hair, blue eyes, and a clean-shaven face.

  The store had waist-high, glass jewelry cases along the right wall and a glass island in the middle, with an attractive older woman waiting on a customer.

  “Tony, how are you?” He smiled as we shook hands.

  “Pretty good, Sol, how about you, been busy?”

  “Thank God, business is good. Let me show you the earrings.” He held up one finger before he went into the back of the store. I stole a look at the display with the engagement rings.

  He came out with the half-karat diamond studs I picked out last week. He took them out of the box by the backs, handing them to me to look at.

  “These are beautiful, Sol, thanks,” I said. Michele was gonna love them.

  “Let me wrap them for you, Tony, we do a beautiful job.”

  He handed them to the woman in the center island, asking her to wrap them in white and gold.

  “Soooo,” he smiled. “When are you going to see me about an engagement ring?”

  I shrugged, “Hopefully soon.”

  “Is she a nice girl?” He had a strong accent, it sounded Eastern European to me.

  “She’s nice, she’s beautiful, and a God-fearing woman.” I figured he’d like that in a woman considering he’s religious and always says “Thank God.” The way he says it, it comes out in one word.

  “So what are you waiting for?”

  I thought he was kidding, then I realized he was waiting for an answer.

  “I only know her for six months,” I explained.

  He waved me away, “Six months, six years, what difference does it make? A matchmaker matched my wife and me, and we’ve been married for forty-two years—we have nine children and forty-nine grandchildren!” His face lit up when he said it, the skin crinkling around his eyes.

  “Nine kids and your wife’s still alive?” I joked. I knew his wife was alive, she worked there.

  “Esther!” he called toward the back room of the store. Esther came out, looking too good to have had nine children and too young to have forty-nine grandchildren.

  “Come here, tell Tony about our children and grandchildren. He’s met a nice girl.”

  “Should I be showing him the engagement rings?” She smiled at me, and I felt myself turning red.

  “He says he only knows her for six months,” Sol said, smiling at her.

  “Six months is only too short if you have doubts. When it’s right, it’s right.” She gave me an indulgent look. “Is it right?”

  I nodded yes. “Just not right now,” I said. “But soon.”

  “Then I hope you come back and let us find a beautiful ring for her,” she said, smiling again.

  “I wouldn’t go anywhere else,” I said honestly. “Have a good holiday, Happy Hanukkah.” I hoped Hanukkah was the right holiday, but I had the feeling I didn’t get that right. They thanked me anyway and wished me a happy holiday and a good appetite. They were nice people. They were similar to Italians when it came to family and business, only Italian food was better. Let’s be honest, if you had to choose between a matzo ball and a meatball, what’s it gonna be?

  3

  I took the West Side Highway, getting all the way downtown without any traffic. The Staten Island bound side of the Verrazzano Bridge was unusually clear, except for the E-Z pass lanes where everyone has to move over to the pay tolls. The Staten Island Expressway was already bumper-to-bumper as far as the eye could see.

  I took the South Beach Exit, drove to Greeley Avenue, and parked outside my apartment. I moved in here in September, after my family’s house was sold. It was an old colonial that sat at the end of Harbor Road, right on the Narrows of New York Bay. My parents got divorced when my father ran off with a civilian who worked in the precinct where he was a detective. My parents had what was called a “verbal agreement”—that he would keep his pension and my mother got to keep the house. My mother was stupid enough to trust him to keep his word, but he and his barracuda wife took her to court and a judge forced her to sell it. I heard he called from the courtroom and listed it with a real estate agent. My brother, Vinny, and I had renovated the house and tied up a lot of our money doing it. To give her credit, my mother gave us both what we put into it when they sold it, but I was hoping to buy it myself.

  So now I live in a basement apartment that Vinny found for me. His boss’s brother owned the house, and the brother’s son lived there until last summer when he got married. It sat at the end of the block, next to Miller Field, the old airfield that’s now part of the Parks Department. My block is a dead end street with an opening in the fence that runs along Miller Field, giving me access to the park.

  The house is a white brick ranch, with a staircase on the left side that leads down to my apartment. There’s a huge garden, now cleaned up for the winter. There are two fig trees, cut back and wrapped in flannel-backed tablecloths. The trees are tied tightly with twine, and buckets are placed on the tops of them to keep any water out. There’s a grape arbor, now bare, over a small patio. My landlord makes his own wine and gave me a bottle of last year’s vintage, which I poured down my sink and told him was delicious.

  The house to our right is only a couple of feet away. A couple in their fifties lives there. The husband is a big shot with the MTA, and they have three grown kids. They’re a nice enough family, but their bathroom is across from my bedroom, and I can hear the drainage pipe when they flush their toilet. I can also hear one of them, I don’t know if it’s the husband or one of the sons, hocking up phlegm in the morning. It’s pretty gross.

  I unlocked the door to the apartment and flipped on the
light. I tossed my keys on the counter and plugged my cell phone into the charger. I had gotten a cell phone about a month ago so Michele could get in touch with me while I’m at work. I forgot to charge it before work, and my battery had died halfway through my tour. I looked through my refrigerator for something to eat. I defrosted a roll and put a cold chicken cutlet on it with some ketchup. I drank a glass of water, brushed my teeth, and went inside the bedroom to sleep. I set my alarm for 4:00 and closed the blinds to darken the room.

  I heard the alarm at 4:00 but hit snooze twice, getting up at 4:18. There was a message from Michele on the answering machine.

  “Tony, it’s me.” She sounded nervous. “I’m leaving now, it’s three-fifteen. Please be awake, I don’t know what I should wear. Tony?” She sighed and waited a minute. “I guess you’re still asleep. I’m on my way.”

  I showered and shaved by 5:00. I made coffee and waited for Michele. By 6:00 I was starting to get a little nervous. I had tried to get Michele on her cell phone, but it was shut off and I got her voice mail. The phone rang at 6:15. It was my grandmother asking if I was okay. I told her Michele was stuck in traffic and they should start without me.

  “Can’t you just tell her to meet you here?” Grandma sounded annoyed.

  “No, Grandma, if you want to start without me, go ahead, but I’m waiting for Michele.”

  I hung up the phone and tried to tell myself that my grandmother being annoyed had nothing to do with her not liking Michele. This would be the third or fourth time that Michele was with my family, and each time the reception they gave us got a little cooler. I didn’t think my grandmother would ever actually be rude to Michele, but I had the feeling she didn’t approve of her.

  The truth was Michele had a couple of things going against her as far as my family was concerned. First, she wasn’t Catholic, second, she had a kid and wasn’t married, and third, she was only half Italian.

  Michele knocked on the door at 6:30, carrying a stack of presents and looking stressed.

  Michele and Stevie were dressed up for the holiday. Michele wore a long, black silk skirt, black heeled shoes, and a sleeveless silver top. Michele was tall and slim, almost five foot seven, with light brown hair and big brown eyes. She has that clean ivory soap look, a natural beauty that doesn’t need makeup. Stevie wore blue pants with a blue and red plaid shirt under a blue Izod sweater. His blond hair was spiked up on top, showing off his big blue eyes. I dressed casually, beige dockers, black sweater, and my black leather jacket.

  “Traffic was horrendous,” she said as she set the presents down on the kitchen table and kissed me hello. Stevie was wound up, glad to be out of the car after his long ride.

  “Where’s your Christmas tree?” He ran through the rooms, looking for it.

  “I don’t have one,” I said, grabbing him as he did a running leap at me. “Can I use yours?”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m sorry, now we’re late. I should have left earlier. Traffic was bumper-to-bumper all the way here.”

  “Here,” I said, giving her the wrapped white and gold box with her earrings in it. “I wanted to give this to you before we went to my grandmother’s.”

  Stevie got all excited, “Where’s mine?”

  “You’ll open some up when we get to Grandma’s,” I told him. “These are for Mommy.”

  “Let me help!” he said. His little hands were clumsy with the paper, but Michele let him rip it off.

  “Oh, Tony, these are beautiful,” Michele said, trying to get them out of the box. “What did you do? These must have cost a fortune.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I got a good deal on them,” I said. She was staring at me, smiling.

  “What?” I barked.

  “Nothing, I love you,” she said.

  “I love you too, but we better get going, my grandmother already called,” I said, and then her smile faded.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “Nothing. I guess we better get going,” she said. “We don’t want to hold up dinner.”

  “Thanks for wrapping those,” I said as I took the presents for my family off the kitchen table. We took Michele’s car. We got caught in traffic on Clove Road and wound up getting there at 7:20.

  Everyone was already there when we arrived. My grandmother had made dinner for 7:00. It felt like it was a hundred degrees in the apartment. It has the old steam radiators, the kind that leave condensation on all the windows. The oven had been on most of the day, adding to the closeness of the apartment. Stevie was getting tired. He usually goes to bed at 8:00 and had been in traffic for three hours with Michele on the ride in from Long Island.

  I could feel the undercurrents of tension when I walked in—it was like I knew they were discussing us before we got there, and then they tried not to show it. My sister, Denise, got up when we got there, grabbing Stevie in a hug and kissing him while he tried to squirm away.

  “Let me see!” Denise said, asking to see the diamond studs I gave Michele.

  “They’re beautiful.”

  “Thank you,” Michele said, smiling as she touched the earrings.

  My brother, Vinny, and his fiancé, Christie, were sitting on the couch. They were both dressed in jeans and sweaters. Christie’s was a Christmas sweater with St. Bernard dogs on it, Vinny’s was dark green. Christie gave me a subdued greeting. She’s cute, about five foot two, with dark brown hair and brown eyes. She looked uncomfortable in the company of Michele and Denise, they both looked like models. Marie, my father’s wife, is a looker too, but once she opens her mouth she gets ugly.

  My grandmother went into the kitchen without saying anything, bringing in the platters of food. They’d obviously been waiting for us to eat. Grandma had her hair done. It was curled on top of her head, tinted that unlikely peach color, and sprayed till it was stiff. She was wearing black pants and a black sweater with little mirrors on it. She had on her shiny gold shoes that she wears for special occasions.

  My father didn’t look up when we came in, not a good sign. I could smell his cologne as I got closer to him. He gave me a kiss and quick hug without actually looking at me, and he nodded and gave half a smile to Michele and Stevie. He was dressed in black pants with a cream-colored sweater. He always reminds me of Robert DeNiro in the movie Midnight Run. He has piercing blue eyes and dark hair greased back to camouflage the gray. He works out to keep himself in shape. At fifty-two he’s in better shape than a lot of guys my age.

  Marie looked like she was on the prowl. Her dark hair was longer now, straightened to frame her face. She was heavy on the makeup: dark gray, almost black eye shadow, with black eyeliner. Her lips were painted with light brown and looked wet and glossy. She wore black pinstripe pants and a white sweater that showed off cleavage that hadn’t been there last time I saw her. This had to be surgically enhanced, she was straining against her sweater so much that I resisted the urge to cover Stevie’s eyes. I said hello to Marie, and she nodded. I almost asked her to introduce me to her two friends, but thought better of it.

  “Just sit down so everyone can eat,” my grandmother said a little sharply. I looked at Grandma, surprised at her tone.

  Michele looked at me, stalling as she took off her coat. She looked like she wanted to bolt, and in the midst of such a tough crowd I couldn’t blame her. She took Stevie’s jacket off and held his hand as she went to the table.

  The glass oval dining-room table has those swivel captain’s chairs that I remember spinning around in when I was little. Stevie sat down and started to spin a little, hitting the table and jarring the dishes. My grandmother, my father, and Marie all jumped on him at once.

  “Oh, don’t do that, honey,” Marie said curtly.

  “Come on, Tony,” my father said instantly, “don’t let him do that.”

  “Those are my good dishes,” Grandma clucked disapprovingly, checking the dishes to make sure none were cracked.

  “Nothing broke, Grandma,” I said shortly.

&nb
sp; I saw the color creep up into Michele’s cheeks, and she pulled Stevie onto her lap, putting her arms around him protectively.

  My grandmother’s apartment is so different than Michele’s tasteful ranch home. Grandma’s reminds me of a Bensonhurst five-and-dime, complete with a red velvet couch and plastic slipcovers. There’s a green area rug under the couch and coffee table that gives the room a year-round Christmas feel. There’s an oblong, smoked glass coffee table on a gold base, with a centerpiece of red plastic roses. The end tables match the coffee table, except that they have wrought iron lamps with hanging smoked crystals dangling across the top. On the wall across from the couch is a fake marble fireplace, guarded on either side by three-foot-high ceramic lion statues.

  There was a two-foot white Christmas tree with red balls hanging from it, the kind that are made of string tightly woven around them. A couple of them were partially unraveled and had shredded somewhat since last year. An ancient piece of gold garland wound around the tree and bunched neatly at the bottom. There were colored lights around the inside of the window that faced the parking lot of the apartment building, and a plastic Santa Claus was tacked into the molding with push pins.

  There was a white wrought iron fence, like the kind used for outside railings, separating the living room from the dining area. The centerpiece on the table was a white ceramic bowl full of plastic fruit. It’s been there as long as I can remember, and I used to love pulling off the grapes and using them like suction cups on my tongue.

  My grandmother may live on a fixed income, but she spares no expense on food and wine. I saw a bottle of 1994 Brunello Di Montalcino that probably cost forty bucks, two bottles of Merlot, and a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. She made the traditional fish dinner that she makes every Christmas Eve. Shrimp cocktail, fried fillet of flounder, fried calamari, broiled lobster tails, scallops sauteed in garlic, lemon, and butter, and fruita di mar. The fruita di mar is a cold fish salad with calamari, shrimp, crab, and scungilli, marinated in garlic, celery, lemons, parsley, and olive oil. The pasta was linguine with clams, mussels, and shrimp in a white wine and garlic sauce. There was a platter of roasted vegetables, a tray of eggplant parmigiana, a tossed salad with oil and vinegar, and Italian bread.