by Tony Romano
The three of them had spent a good part of that summer walking. Richie would slow down and Victoria would drop back, too, and together they’d watch Willie gain distance between them and she’d let Richie take her hand. A few times they’d gone out without Willie and stopped for a hamburger and a Coke and talked about college or what it was like to lose a brother. There was more than one way to lose a brother, and Willie had been lost to them from the beginning. She told him about Benito and the fever, knowing he’d understand. And for that entire summer there was never a mention of a backseat and no tough words to impress her and no standing on the street corner. Most of the guys she knew had a talent for standing on the corner. But Richie wasn’t one of them. With Richie there was only restraint. Victoria assumed he had a girlfriend back at school, someone to whom he was trying to be faithful. Probably some agreement had passed between them. Victoria never pressed him about this and he never offered explanation. For now she’d be satisfied with the hamburger and the Coke and the walking.
Richie waited for her outside the small frame house his family rented at the corner of Ohio and Marshfield. He fidgeted with the snaps of his windbreaker and examined the lining, looking everywhere but in Victoria’s direction, as if he wanted to be surprised by her arrival. When he finally looked up and saw her he ambled over and they made their way to Jimmy’s Beef on Ashland.
She imagined them sipping out of the same straw like she’d seen in a movie, but they sat across from each other with separate paper cups and separate straws and picked at the remaining fries in the basket between them.
“I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who’s gone to college,” she said.
He puffed his chest in mock pride and reared back as far as the booth allowed. “Well, you know,” he said. “They don’t just let anyone in.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“A little respect here maybe?” He tried his best standing-on-the-corner voice but sounded more like some constipated movie gangster.
She’d hoped for more serious talk, their last night together. Tomorrow he’d be back in some dorm room scrubbed down with powdered detergent that came in enormous gray boxes. This is what she thought about when she thought about college, tiny rooms and mildew. In time, she imagined, the room would start to smell like him, an outdoor smell that brought to mind turned dirt and sun.
She looked up at the menu board above the order window. “So, will you write?”
He chewed on a fry and swallowed and took a slow sip from his drink. “You would bring that up. I was hoping that maybe—I’m just not very good at, you know, and if I say I will and I don’t, I’ll feel bad and you’ll think…so I don’t know what to say.”
He definitely has a girlfriend, she thought. And she came the closest she would come to asking about her. But this was his last night. She didn’t want their first argument on his last night. “Well, if you get a chance,” she said. “If you remember. I won’t expect anything.” She tried to keep the hurt out of her voice.
After a while he fingered a fry and brought it up to his eyes. He shook his head and said, “I’ll miss these fries.”
Victoria tightened her lips into a smile.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“It’s nothing. Really.”
“Did I say something?”
“No.”
“I’ll try. I will. To write.”
“No, really. Don’t worry about that. I’m not good at writing either. I know how that is.”
“So nothing’s wrong? You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay.”
“Okay,” she said. She rubbed her oily fingers on a napkin and listened to the traffic on Ashland. “I was thinking about Willie. He’s used to you being around again.”
“Yeah, I talked to him some.”
Willie was safer ground, and she felt the tension drain out of her. “What did you tell him?”
“I showed him a picture of the school and told him I’d be living there and he said something about yellow pencils and I told him I’d bring him home some yellow pencils. Just for him.”
All summer she’d held back. She’d forced herself to take her Richie-thoughts and temper them with the knowledge that he wouldn’t be around that long. They’d have their one summer together—she’d take that, let those memories buoy her for a while, and then let them slip away like a firefly bursting out of her hand. But now, on his last night, she heard a screaming voice in her head. So! You’ll bring home pencils for Willie. What about me? What will you bring me? And while you’re at it with the pencils, sharpen one of them and write me a goddamn letter. You can write me how much you miss those fricking fries.
“Pencils,” she said.
“I thought he’d be upset. But all he wanted to do was listen to the radio.”
“Maybe he was more upset than he let on.”
“I don’t know.”
“I mean, he understands everything. Well, most things. Sometimes…” She waited for him to look at her, and when he did, she said slowly, “Sometimes people don’t know how to tell you what they really want.”
He looked out at her over his straw and worry crossed his eyes. He knew they were no longer talking about his brother.
“Sometimes,” she said, “when you tell someone what you really want, you ruin everything. You know what I mean?”
“I think.”
He sipped through his straw until the sucking sound came up from the bottom.
“But other times. Other times you only get a single chance to tell someone what you want, what you really want.”
When they first met, Richie had been quick to joke, maybe safe in the knowledge that Vicki was younger, that his real girlfriend was waiting for him back at school. Nothing would come of their jokes and their walking, he must have thought, especially with Willie tagging along. As the summer unfolded he remained his usual distant self, rarely planning when they’d meet again, yet something changed. His voice became softer, filled with hope, at least that’s how Victoria heard it. A trace of uncertainty crept through the edges of his sentences, and he was no longer as in charge of his emotions as he might have thought. Now, sitting across from Vicki at Jimmy’s Beef on an early Sunday evening, he’d been trying to regain some of his early confidence but was failing miserably.
“So what is it that you want, Richie? What do you really want?”
“You mean aside from world peace?”
“Yeah, aside from that.”
“I don’t know. It’s not something that I…put into, you know, words.” He glanced at the door. “What would you say? What do you want?”
“Maybe just peace. Plain old peace.”
He’d sidestepped her, but the question still hung in the stale air. She reached for her cup and let it swivel between her fingers and she waited. “So?” she said finally.
“What do I want? Let’s see…I want…so many things.” He shifted in his seat and looked hopeful suddenly. “The problem is that it’s kind of like the letter thing. If you say ‘I want this’ and you don’t get that thing, then—”
“If you don’t want to tell me, that’s okay. But tell me you don’t want to tell me. I can get a straighter answer from your brother.”
He hung his head and chewed on his straw. “Sorry,” he said. “You’re right. I’m not being—” He looked at her. “What is it you want to know?”
“I just want to know if you’re going to miss me. That’s all. If there’s a small part of you that’s going to miss my company. I don’t need any letters or promises of letters…or, or any things. I’d just like to know…” She worried she might cry, but she kept her voice steady and refused to give in to any tears.
“Of course I’ll miss you,” he said. He broke into an assured grin. “You’re—why, yeah. Why would you think…”
“Oh, I don’t know. Because I’m younger, I guess. That’s one thing. And I don’t k
now what we are. And that’s okay. I don’t need to know. I’m not saying I need to know. I definitely don’t. But it would be nice to know that there’s a chance I’ll be missed.”
“Well, that’s an easy one.”
“Because the summer flew by. I don’t ever remember a summer flying by so fast, and now you’re going back to school.”
“It did fly.”
“And like I told you, I don’t need a letter with a stamp on it and all that. But it’d be nice to know you had the thought of a letter in your head, that you had the idea of…that you had things you wanted to say to me even if you don’t end up saying them. And I’m sure I’m making absolutely no sense right now.”
“No no. I get it. I do. And I promise—”
“No promises—”
“I promise I’ll have the thought of a letter.”
“Stop. Please. Because you were right. Once you promise an actual letter I’ll be waiting. If there’s no promise I won’t expect anything.”
He considered this for a while. “So I was right? Now there’s a scary thought.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“I tell you I’m going to miss you and you tell me to shut up!”
“You know what? I’m glad you’re going away. ’Cause you’re a real pain in the neck.”
“Better than a pain in the ass.”
“I have to go.”
“Let’s go.”
“My mother’s going to kill me.”
He walked her to the end of her block as he’d done many times before, and they said their good-byes on the corner. For the first time he held her and kissed her, and if they hadn’t been standing on the corner, Victoria thought, they might have done more. She walked away and forced herself not to look back, and her thoughts drifted back as they sometimes did to Eddie Milano. She was certain that the kissing brought Eddie to mind since those were the only Eddie-thoughts she had anymore, the mad, pulsing thoughts about the physical. She still savored the long slow kissing in the alley behind Eddie’s house, the way he pulled her toward him. Even the two times in the backseat hadn’t been terrible, just hurried. And Eddie had never gone further than she would allow. All the physical warmth between them, though, never sustained her. When she got home after seeing Eddie she still felt alone. She still felt a gaping hole in her heart over losing Benito. Maybe it was unfair to judge Eddie on those terms. Maybe they’d met at the wrong time. But she never felt better with him. The only thing Eddie provided was raw, short-lived passion.
With Richie, she felt a sense of renewal, and she wasn’t sure whether to trust the impulse, but she gradually surrendered to it. Richie made her laugh, really laugh, like she hadn’t done in so long. He made her believe there were things to look forward to in this life. He helped her understand her grief. What he hadn’t given her at all until now was the physical. Walking away from him, she imagined Richie’s warm breath and his hands searching. She imagined his scent pressing up against her. She wanted to inhale that scent and lock it away for safekeeping and when she took it in again his scent would become her breath. She turned into the gangway of her apartment and swallowed and wondered what she would do now with this new yearning.
For weeks Santo had avoided going anywhere near the A&P. Just about anything he needed he could buy at the corner dime store that smelled like polished wood and sawdust. But then Vince sent him out one day. He needed an emergency bottle of vermouth—the delivery guy never showed up last week, Vince cursed—so Santo had no choice, leaving him to wonder whether the vermouth was a Vince or a store emergency. If Ella was working, he decided, he’d put down a ten spot for the bottle, grab his change, and exit without a word.
When he got to the A&P he stepped on the black rubber pad that automatically swung open the heavy glass door, leaned in to eye the registers, and breathed relief when he saw that Ella wasn’t there. He zoomed past canned vegetables, cereals, paper goods, dairy, and nearly stumbled over Ella in the pet aisle. She was transferring twenty-pound bags of Purina from a flatbed cart to a low shelf and stopped when she saw him. Down on one knee, she peered up at him.
“I’m looking for vermouth,” he said.
She pointed. “Last aisle.”
“I know. Thanks.”
When he got to liquor, he spent more time there than he needed picking out a thirty-two-ounce bottle of dry vermouth. Finally, he set the bottle in the crook of his arm and walked back toward the pet aisle. There was another route to the registers, but he decided it wouldn’t hurt to say good-bye. He slowed down some but not so she’d notice. “Found it,” he said.
“Good,” she said, and hefted the last bag onto the shelf. She straightened up and blew away a strand of hair that had fallen over her eyes. She kept her dog-food hands away from her sides.
Each time Santo saw her she seemed changed in some small way. She hadn’t gotten her hair set in a while. She wore no makeup that he could detect and her brown eyes appeared startled and smaller as a result, which made her seem vaguely remote, almost feline, but harmless, too. She sighed and Santo thought he detected an invitation to say more.
“Dirty work, the pet aisle?”
“Somebody’s gotta do it. Isn’t that what they say?” She looked spent, disheveled.
“Don’t they have stock boys or something to do that?”
“They only come in on Fridays, so we double up.”
“Ah.” He shifted his weight to his other leg and decided to cut short the conversation before he kept asking more questions he didn’t need the answers to. “Well, I’ll see you around maybe.”
He turned.
“Wait. Before you go. I wanted to tell you—I felt I—you know, like I was pretty rough on you last time. And I tried to think why you deserved it, but I couldn’t come up with anything, not really. Anyway, I wanted you to know, I’m sorry. I’m not usually—”
“Don’t worry—”
“Or maybe I am usually…I don’t know. Anyway…”
“It’s all right.”
She looked like she wanted to wash her hands.
“I better go,” he said. “My uncle’s waiting for his vermouth.”
She nodded and he turned again.
“And…” she said. “This is going to sound—not stupid but…”
“What?”
“I think maybe I owe you five minutes.”
Santo didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know whether he’d just had his five minutes or whether she was proposing five more.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. Over the last couple of weeks he’d built up his own resentment and found it hard to cut through that now. He motioned with the bottle. “I have to get this back.”
“Sure,” she said. She pulled the bottle from his arm. “I’ll ring you up.”
She led him to an empty lane, wiped her hands with a paper towel, and punched a few keys on the register. “Identification?” she said. The other cashier peered over, going right on tapping in prices.
He reached for his wallet and remembered he’d left everything from his pockets on the ledge near the sink at the store. Vince had handed him the car keys and a ten. Even as this dawned on him, he continued patting his pockets. “I think I may have left everything back at…I do have money, though.”
“I was kidding.”
“Really?” A first, he thought.
“I guess that’s hard to know with me sometimes. That’s all I do at home with my mother and she never…she doesn’t get it.”
He handed her the ten and watched the numbers rise up like toast inside the cash-register window, gold numbers on black tabs. The drawer slid open and he studied her fingers as they moved adroitly from one money compartment to another, as if she’d been working there her whole life. He waited for the change to be deposited into his open palm, considering what he might say next. If he walked out now, he knew he wouldn’t return soon. He took his change and cleared his throat. “Thanks,” he said. “You didn’t have to open a line just for this.”
“No big deal.”
He glanced over his shoulder, then back at Ella, and spoke more softly. “And thanks for what you said back there. I never meant to upset you.”
She nodded and tightened her lips as if embarrassed by her old anger. “I know.”
“Anyway, take care,” he told her.
She nodded again.
“And Joey, too,” he added. “Take care of Joey.”
That night, a Wednesday, Uncle Vince’s night out with Carmel, Santo told his dad he needed an hour break. Agostino looked out at him with his lazy eye that Santo could never read and waved him away with a shrug. A few minutes later Santo slipped out through the back, feeling his father’s steady gaze on him, wondering for the first time whether Ella had been right about the father moving in first and then the son…The thought disturbed him enough that he altered his route to the A&P several times, passing at corners and even doubling back once before moving ahead to the grocery store.
He waited in the parking lot without his uncle’s Cadillac, hoping Ella got off at seven and that no one else would show up to pick her up and that she’d offer a trace of a smile when she saw him waiting. He leaned against a light pole that hummed with electricity at his back. An old woman with a tight babushka filed out, pulling her two-wheeled shopping basket behind her. A mother hand in hand with her son followed, her other hand hugging a large brown sack with a loaf of Gonnella threatening to sag out the top. By seven-fifteen he’d counted fifteen other customers and debated leaving. There’d be other opportunities, other emergency liquor he’d need for his uncle. Five minutes later she finally appeared, looking even more forlorn than before, a small bag in one hand and her smock crimped in the other.
She didn’t see him until she was nearly upon him, and a question formed in her eyes, as if she couldn’t immediately place him. “What—” she muttered.
He remained rooted there, leaning against the light pole with his arms crossed. “Hi.”