A Day in June

by Marisa Labozzetta

  “You like it here, don’t you, Faye?”

  Faye smiles.

  “This is my life now, darling. I like it enough.”

  Ryan doesn’t hear from Tiffany much since she moved to Brackton, where she’s finally found her niche running Licks and Relics with Danni. They invited Ryan up for Thanksgiving, but it was too soon after the contest for her to make another appearance. Besides, she wanted to spend it with Faye. Lauren and Joe drove to Boston, and for the first time they all had Thanksgiving dinner out—at Durgin Park, one of Faye’s favorite old haunts still in business. Seated beside complete strangers at a long table covered with a red checkered cloth, they washed down their butternut squash soup, roast turkey, baked ham, prime rib, baked beans, and mashed potatoes with mugs of spiked mulled cider, finishing off the feast with pumpkin pie and apple pandowdy.

  Next week is Easter, and Faye has agreed to make the trip to Long Island with Ryan for Joe’s traditional feast. She hasn’t even put a qualifier on the journey, like Depends how I wake up, or If I’m still here, or her grandmother Toscano’s favorite, God willing, which irritated the hell out of Faye, who found it utterly morbid. Faye is set on going, and Ryan is convinced she’s about to turn that corner Ryan’s been waiting for her to encounter.

  Ryan’s new roommate, Mehool, a grad student from New Delhi who is getting his PhD in chemical engineering at Northeastern, will also be joining them. He’s never been to New York before, and Ryan plans on going a day early and taking the Long Island Railroad with him into the city to the parade. He’s most keen on seeing the Brooklyn Bridge, been obsessed with it ever since he was five and an Italian tourist gave him a pack of gum with a picture of the red iconic structure spanning the wrapper.

  Mehool is quiet and considerate, cooks great Indian food, minds his own business, and doesn’t care to socialize much either in school or out, which suits Ryan just fine, because she’s been working overtime to tie up loose ends at the law center before she starts her MFA program this summer at Emerson College. She made up her mind during therapy sessions with a woman adept at helping her clients tap into what truly makes them joyous. Just as Jason always knew, creative writing uplifts her; legal writing does not. One of the writing samples she submitted was the story she finally finished about the naïve young mother whose decision to rent a room to a disturbed vagrant causes her seemingly perfect marriage to unravel. The second was a new story about a young woman who appears from nowhere in a small Vermont town—a woman without voice or identification who rides around all day and night on a rusty two-wheeler, a person everyone calls Bicycle Girl.

  She and Jason keep in close touch: They are finally what they were destined to be—best of friends. In several months, he’ll take his vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. He is ready for that, and for the next three years of academic work at Fordham or Loyola or St. Louis, working as a scholastic or a brother to prepare him to teach in a school and live in a Jesuit community in yet another two years of Regency at a Jesuit institution.

  If he still wants to pursue the priesthood and be eligible to administer the sacraments after that, he’ll enter the Theology stage of study that might bring him back to Driscoll and Boston for three years. Then ordination. And after fifteen years as a Jesuit, he’ll embark on his Tertianship, his final months of reaffirmation and spiritual renewal, studying early and recent documents of the Society and its mission. Unlike his first vows, in which he will have offered his life, the final vows will be a confirmation by the Society itself of his Jesuit life, an endorsement of the man and a lasting commitment to him as one who has walked in the deepest waters of the Society of Jesus and surrendered to that Society of God.

  He tells her this in his emails and occasional phone conversations, and says that he prays daily for her, for the country, for the world, and for himself. It used to make her feel uncomfortable to hear her name mentioned in his litany of spiritual requests, as if she were dying or falling prey to some lethal addiction, but now she accepts it, even likes it: I’ve got your back, it says. Never hurts to cover all your bases.

  And by the way, he emails her, I’m going to see the Pope when he comes in September. I mean really see him. A group of us have tickets to his Mass at Madison Square Garden.

  That’s great, she emails back. It is great for him, greater than attending any basketball game or rock concert there could ever be. I’ll look for you on TV. Let’s see what he has to say.

  She hasn’t dated much—no time. Well, not true. More like little interest. But just as she’s optimistic for Faye, she senses that she too may be turning a corner. Faye has a simpler explanation for it: spring fever. Ryan checks Eric Boulanger’s Facebook page from time to time to see if he’s put up a photo in place of his anonymous thumbnail, one that would give some indication of how his life is going: The cover photo changes—always a breathtaking New England landscape in different seasons; no exotic location to suggest travel; no woman who might be a girlfriend; no thumbnail photo. Eric only shares information with his friends. If you know Eric, send him a message. She does not. She hesitates to ask Tiffany anything about him. Tiffany never mentions him.

  Ryan’s relieved not to be pushing upstream in a measured but ineffective breaststroke. There are limits to control—and selfishness. She luxuriates in the return of Daylight Saving and the fact she can hop on the Green Line at Park Street after work on Thursdays, when the museums are open until 9 p.m., and pay a visit to Isabella. Ryan finds her on the third floor in the Gothic gallery of sacred art, her shapely figure draped in full-length black with a strand of pearls (and a few rubies). She’s waiting for Ryan, arms and cleavage bared, head strategically placed against the print of a Renaissance fabric that forms a halo around her brunette head and that presents her as a pagan deity among the images of the holiest of holies in the room.

  Ryan is filled with admiration and gratitude for this life-sized vision of Sargent’s in a gilt frame—for the generosity of this woman of means and foresight who knew what brought her pleasure in life and cared enough to preserve and share it. She wonders why she and her mother have never come to this museum together, why she has never brought anyone else here. Because it’s a private retreat that she intends to keep as her own? How contrary to Isabella’s intent. Her mother would love this museum.

  Bring her, Isabella beckons. Time passes only too quickly in a world of uncertainty. You know that now.

  She’ll take it from me.

  She gave it to you.

  I’m afraid I’ll lose it.

  What good is it to possess something you love if not to share it with others?

  I have trouble sharing.

  Does a good writer keep her thoughts to herself?

  I wish you were my mother.

  You choose death over life?

  You aren’t selfish.

  Ha! Oh, but I am. Look at what I amassed for my own pleasure.

  But you’ve left it for us.

  Could I take it with me?

  Come on. You always intended to share.

  Yes.

  It is our common ground.

  Then open your heart. Open your eyes. Find your common ground.

  Chapter 32

  Saturday, June 6

  MARIE BOULANGER HUNG on longer than expected, through the hottest summer on record into an unprecedentedly mild and colorful fall, refusing to participate in ending the suffering that included short but frequent hospitalizations, and only reluctantly acquiescing to hospice care when her defiant body was just about to quit on her, or she on it. Nothing about Eric’s ordinary mother was ordinary.

  He couldn’t work after Marie died. The precious time he had wished for during the months of her illness now lay stretched ahead of him. How could he have felt so bereft, after having had so much notice, so much time to prepare? After days and nights of reading the Book of Psalms to her at her request because it calmed her, how could the solace he had at first taken in knowing she no longer suffered have turned into s
uch emptiness? But it had.

  He was empty and lonely and sad, floating through his days without direction or purpose. The evil foreman of sickness, who had provided structure to his days and nights, told him when to punch in and out for three years, had closed up shop and moved on to another unfortunate house to dictate to new employees the structure of each minute and hour. He woke up the morning after his mother’s funeral paralyzed—a little boy lost—his eyes timidly scanning the perimeters of the room, his ears straining for a familiar call for help, and he asked himself: What do I do now? He had returned to Brackton for her, but now she was gone. And he was free. Yet death seemed to have shrunk all other needs.

  * * *

  This spring morning he sits alone in an Adirondack chair on the deck in a pair of shorts, feet bare, his laptop on the glass of the wroughtiron table. He is reminded of the morning of Danni’s wedding, of the Contest, and he smiles. He longs to talk to his mother. Just touch her again. She’s there, he knows: in every blade of grass the wind bends, in the scent of the hyacinths and tulips she planted, in the new young owner of the house next door who, in denim capris and a red bandana, stands high on a ladder stripping gray paint off her old Victorian.

  Bicycle Girl too is gone. When Marie took a turn for the worse, her father placed her in a group home in Burlington. It was something her doctor had been urging Bicycle Girl’s father to do for a long time: It was safer for her; it was best; her father wouldn’t be around forever. But her dad knew that if he had moved her sooner, the girl would have become even more lost without Marie. And neither he nor Eric wanted to deprive Marie of Bicycle Girl.

  He scrolls through his contacts in an effort to create a mailing group to which he’ll send a notice about his new one-man show of mirror-image photos he has lined up at the Brattleboro Museum in July. He’s added quite a few new pictures to the collection that he’s been working on since Marie died, in between his paying jobs. They may be—he thinks—his best ones, for he has begun to see more clearly, is able to envision the possibilities in advance, without rushing to achieve an end purpose, delighting in the serendipity of the results.

  He hesitates when he comes to the name Ryan Toscano. With a decisive click followed by a fleeting pang of regret, he deletes her information and obliterates her from his world of cyber relationships—from his life. He puts on his running shoes and heads over to Michael’s house. The two will take turns pushing the jogging stroller he gave Becca and Michael when Jack was born up and down hills, around the pond, trying to beat their best time. Jack was a good name, and while Michael and Becca refuse to admit that they named their son after Jackie Robinson (probably from fear of putting any weight of expectation on him), Eric is sure of it.

  And what about Eric? Baseball practice began a month ago. Has he tied himself to Brackton—to these boys—indefinitely? That is what his mind asks when he goes to bed each night and when 2:20 in the afternoon rolls around and he heads to the field. But then they gather: arrogant, timid, frustrated powder kegs of testosterone, eager to prove themselves, frightened to fail. They need him to succeed. Without him there is no hope for a winning season, no release from lives fraught with the heartache of unrequited love, overbearing parental expectations, domestic dysfunction, and shame.

  He feels the weight of that power but he is not burdened. His fantasy team may be in place, but it is this team that has his heart. For how long? He pushes away questions that serve only to disarm him. Perhaps this will be his legacy to Brackton. He laughs out loud at the absurdity of his tenacity. Play ball, the breeze tells him. For God’s sake, Eric, will you get out of that damned head of yours and just play ball?

  When he returns from his morning run with Michael, he finds a white legal-sized envelope with no return address in his mailbox among the medical bills he’s still receiving and junk mail he thumbs through. He takes the stack of mail into the kitchen and drops it on the table, takes a quart of dark green vegetable health drink from the fridge and gulps from the bottle. He showers, grabs his camera, and heads down to Woodstock to see what happens when he turns the Taftsville covered bridge upside down. He’ll drive home by way of Burlington and get a few bikers on the Island Line Trail to ride toward him, then reverse direction and ride away. He’ll shoot trees so that they will look as if their canopies were rooted in Lake Champlain.

  He won’t open his mail until late that evening, when he fixes himself some spaghetti and mixes it with leftover slices of sirloin from Buy One Get One Free Night at Baby’s, and finds in the hand-addressed white envelope a ticket to a 3 p.m. game at Fenway Park on June 14th. Red Sox vs. Yankees. A box seat behind home plate.

  Sweet! What good fortune! It’s not even his birthday, he’ll exclaim to himself. Someone really wanted to make it worth his while to take a trip to Boston. Someone, he’ll imagine, who will be sitting that Sunday in the seat next to him.

  Acknowledgments

  I AM FOREMOST grateful to the indefatigable and brilliant Michael Mirolla and everyone at Guernica Editions. To my patient and stellar editor, Chris Jerome, for making me look much better than I am. And to my niece, Amanda Medori Hallauer, who first planted the seed for this story in my brain.

  All manuscripts need fresh eyes before they are even handed over to an editor. I would like to thank the following readers for their time and insights: Michael Wohl, Joann Kobin, Betsy Hartmann, Roger King, Mordicai Gerstein, Susan Harris, and Zane Kotker.

  And many thanks to those who graciously provided time and details, and to those who may be surprised to find a page or line from their own lives: Ellen Augarten, Pauline Bassett, Lawrence Biondi S.J., Neil Broome, the late Enzo Finardi, Barry Feingold, Margi Gregory, Craig Kirouac, the late Pat McDonagh, Lorraine Mangione, the late William Neenan, S.J., Jeanne Ransome, Jeff Ross, Ariana Wohl, Carina Wohl, and Marcie Yoss.

  Special thanks to Elysa Piccirilli, Ellen Augarten, and Brionna Burke for help with the cover.

  And, as always, to my husband, Martin Wohl, who has made all the difference.

  About the Author

  MARISA LABOZZETTA is the author of Thieves Never Steal in the Rain and Sometimes it Snows in America, both Eric Hoffer Award finalists; At the Copa, a Binghamton University John Gardner Fiction Award finalist and Pushcart Prize nomination; and Stay With Me, Lella. Her short stories have received the Watchung Arts Festival and the Rio Grande Writers’ first prize, and honorable mention for Playboy’s Victoria Chen-Haider Memorial Award. Her work has appeared in The American Voice, Beliefnet.com, The Florida Review, VIA, Italian Americana, The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing, Show Me a Hero: Great Contemporary Stories about Sports, Celebrating Writers of the Pioneer Valley, KnitLit, and the bestselling When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple, among other publications. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

  For a Reading Group Guide to A Day in June,

  and to contact Marisa Labozzetta for a speaking engagement visit:

  www.marisalabozzetta.com.