One Hit Wonder

by Charlie Carillo

  “You asshole,” I began.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Patrick was stunned by my words. I’d never spoken to him that way before.

  “Mickey?”

  “Don’t fuck with me, Patrick. I know what you did.”

  He spread his hands. “What did I do?”

  “You didn’t really lose your balance. You went down that hill on purpose.”

  “Oh, yeah, right!”

  “Patrick. This is me. Come on. No bullshit, now. What the fuck happened on the hill?”

  He tried to stare me down, but I was better at it than he was. I held my gaze until his eyes got shiny with tears. He covered his face with his hands.

  “I’m all fucked up, Mickey,” he wailed through his fingers.

  I put a hand on his shoulder. He was quaking.

  “You should understand,” he said. “You of all people. I love that girl. I can’t leave her. I won’t.”

  “That’s up to you.”

  “Yeah?” He sniffed back snot. “Sometimes it seems to me like it’s up to everybody else. My parents. Mr. Flynn. My coach.”

  “Scarlett,” I added. “Don’t forget Scarlett.”

  His eyebrows went up. “What do you mean?”

  “She’s trying to run your life, too, isn’t she?”

  His face went as white as the bandage. “Hang on, hang on. We are totally in love, Mick.”

  “I know you are. But sometimes love makes you do crazy things.”

  “You think I wanted to get hit by that truck?”

  “In some deep-down, crazy way…yeah, Patrick. That’s what I think. You figured that if you hurt yourself, maybe got your knee racked up, you wouldn’t be able to play football. Right? You wouldn’t have to make a tough decision. You could just stay here in Little Neck, a fucking cripple.”

  He pointed a thick finger right at my face. “What do you know?”

  “Hey, you’re right. Who am I to be giving advice? Look at me. Look at how fucked up my life is. I made a fortune, and I lost it. I’m living with my parents, still moanin’ over a girl I lost twenty years ago.”

  “So you know how I feel!”

  “Yeah, Patrick, I know how you feel. You burn hot, just like I did. I lost the girl, and I fell apart. It happened. I can’t change that.”

  I was surprised to feel tears in my eyes, which I took a moment to blink back.

  “But I did one good thing, Patrick—I sang my song. I wrote it and I sang it and it’s all mine, and it always will be, no matter who owns it. I’m a loser, but I did do that one good thing, and only I could have done it.”

  “It’s a beautiful song,” Patrick said, almost fervently.

  I nodded, licked my lips. “Thing is, I got this feeling that football is your song. It’s what makes you special. So I guess what I’m saying here is, don’t you want to sing your song? And how are you going to feel if you don’t even try?”

  Patrick stared at me, long and hard.

  “Scarlett won’t run away like my girl did,” I said. “If it’s real, she’ll hang in there. Look, you’re going to make up your own mind about this, but I just wanted you to know what I thought.”

  Patrick embraced me, almost hard enough to puncture a lung.

  “You are not a loser,” he whispered.

  “Yeah, well, some might disagree. Ease up, Patrick, I’m about to black out, here.”

  Just then Patrick’s parents arrived, and I was shocked to see that they weren’t much older than me. Patrick’s father was a thickset six-footer with thinning blond hair and a hard handshake that told me he’d probably played some football himself.

  I was surprised to see that Patrick’s mother was short and dark, and I thought she didn’t resemble her boy at all until I noticed the way her ears stuck out.

  “My boy!” she kept crying as she embraced him. “Ohh, my boy!”

  “I’m all right, Mom,” Patrick said, but she just wouldn’t believe him. While his parents smothered him with hugs, I waved good-bye to Patrick and slipped out of the emergency room and into the parking lot.

  I needed air. I needed a painkiller. I needed Lynn.

  And suddenly it hit me that here I was, right at the place where they’d brought her mother.

  I went around to the front of the hospital and walked straight past the front desk, as if I were late for an appointment. Nobody stopped me. I kept going, all the way to Mrs. Mahoney’s room.

  And if ever I was to believe that God has a strange sense of humor, this was the time, because just as I entered the room, they were stripping the bed where she had lain.

  An exhausted-looking Lynn, tears streaming down her face, sat almost primly in the chair she’d spent so many hours in over the past few days, filling out a form on a clipboard.

  There’s a bit of paperwork involved when your mother dies.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  We fell into each other’s arms. Even if she didn’t want me, Lynn Mahoney had nobody else. My arms would have to do.

  She felt frail and feverish, and quaked like a newly hatched chick.

  “I’m so sorry, Lynn.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Come on. Let’s go home.”

  “Your home?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good ol’ Donna, huh?”

  “Lynn, I hate to say it, but this is her specialty. She knows just what to do.”

  “Do?”

  “The body. The funeral.”

  “Oh….”

  We left the hospital and began the walk to Glenwood Street, holding hands. She noticed my bandage.

  “What happened to your elbow, Mickey?”

  “Hurt it on the job. No big deal.”

  We were still holding hands when we entered the kitchen, where my mother stood peeling carrots at the sink. She turned to face us and then put the peeler down, as if to show Lynn that she meant her no harm.

  I didn’t allow any time for awkward silences.

  “Mom, Mrs. Mahoney just died.”

  My mother put a hand to her throat. “Oh, my God. Lynn. I’m so sorry.”

  “Me too, Mrs. DeFalco.”

  She came to us and spread her arms for a double embrace.

  “Lynn…Michael…”

  She took us both, one in each arm, and startled me by planting a gentle kiss on Lynn’s cheek.

  “Do you still hate me, Mrs. DeFalco?”

  My mother hesitated. For a moment I thought she was going to deny that she’d ever hated her, but it was a time for truths.

  “Not anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  My mother shrugged. “What would it help?”

  Lynn swallowed. “That’s pretty big of you.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s the right thing. Sooner or later I get around to doing the right thing. Usually later.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. DeFalco.”

  “Call me Donna. I’m not that much older than you anymore.”

  She was right. We were all adults now. We all knew what it was like to get knocked down, and how hard it was to get up.

  But you do get up, don’t you? What else can you do?

  My mother pressed her hands gently against Lynn’s cheeks. “I’m sorry about your mother. She was a good lady.”

  Lynn put her face to my mother’s shoulder and wept. My mother stroked her hair.

  “It’s all right, dear. I’m going to take care of everything.”

  Most people are paralyzed when a loved one dies. What do you do? How does it all work? My mother knew how it all worked. She was the one who made it work, the grease that kept the cogs spinning in the intricate machinery of mourning. She made Lynn lie down on the living room couch, pulled off her shoes, covered her with a light quilt and then said she needed me in the kitchen.

  “Finish peeling those carrots for me, would you, Michael?”

  I did as I was told while she worked the phone like a stockbroker, arranging everything from the coffin to the headstone in a rat-a-tat-tat
manner. It wouldn’t cost Lynn a dime, she told me on the sly, because she was going to make sure it all fell within the insurance budget allowed for firemen’s widows.

  “Don’t you worry,” she said with a wink. “I’ll take good care of your girl.”

  My girl.

  By the time I’d finished the carrots Lynn was fast asleep, like a kindergarten child at naptime. I sat on the arm of the couch and stroked her hair, gently enough not to wake her. In the kitchen I could hear my mother say, “You can do better than that,” and I knew she was dealing with the local florist, knocking down his price for a mixed-color carnation display for the final farewell to Mrs. Mahoney.

  In the midst of this madness was a baby somewhere in Massachusetts, a baby whose mother was dead and whose father might have been me.

  I couldn’t tell Lynn about that. Not yet. Not yet.

  Soon.

  The wake.

  Ruth Brady Mahoney lay in the coffin, wearing a plain gray dress, her face set in a smile I never saw when she was alive. There weren’t a lot of visitors, and the people who did show up to pay their final respects came and went as if they were double-parked. Truth was, Mrs. Mahoney was a little bit of a curiosity. The obituary in the local paper identified her as the widow of the legendary Burning Angel and the mother of four firefighters who’d died in the same dreadful blaze.

  And so-near strangers dropped in to get a glance at this human reservoir for grief and suffering, the way people slow down to gawk at a good car wreck.

  Lynn sat before the coffin just as she’d sat by her mother’s hospital bedside. She seemed strangely calm, and I wondered if she might have taken a tranquilizer.

  I sat down next to her. At that moment we were the only two in the room, not counting the body.

  “Can I get you anything?”

  She shook her head, turned to look at me. “Nice suit.”

  I was wearing a charcoal-gray suit that I’d last worn in high school. The pants were a little short, until my mother adjusted the cuffs.

  I shot my jacket cuffs, the way a gangster would. “You really like this suit?”

  “Looks damn good on you.”

  “I was going to take you to the junior prom in this suit.”

  Her eyes widened. “It’s that old?”

  “Can’t you smell the mothballs?”

  “Who did you take to the prom?”

  “Lynn, I never went to any prom.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “Well, I’m sure we didn’t miss much.”

  She turned her gaze toward the coffin. “Weird, isn’t it? None of my brothers ever got married. My mother had no daughters-in-law, no son-in-law, no grandchildren. I’m it, Mickey. The last of the Mohican-honeys.”

  She stroked my cheek. “Let me be by myself for a minute, would you, Mickey?”

  I did as I was told, bumping into Carmine Eruzione in the hallway. “Mickey!” A ghastly, ghostly smile lit up his face. “Long time no see!”

  Eruzione was as lean as a greyhound. His eyes were like yellowed Ping-Pong balls deep in their bony sockets, and his cheeks had the sucked-in, sour look of a man who expects the worst from people. The few strands of gray hair left on the sides of his skull were slicked straight back. He could have been sixty, and he could have been ninety.

  You’d look at him and swear he had a week to live, except that this was how he’d looked for the past twenty-five years. Death, it seemed, was going to leave this undertaker alone. Professional courtesy.

  He put out his hand to shake and it was all bones, like reaching into a bag of clothespins. I hoped he couldn’t feel me shudder.

  “How are you, son?”

  “I’m doing all right, Mr. Eruzione,” I lied.

  My voice quaked. I couldn’t help it. Even now, he scared the shit out of me. His odors enveloped me like a fog—a rich, fruity cologne and the peppermint reek of his breath fresheners. As bad as he looked was as good as he smelled. He put a hand on my shoulder.

  “What a shame, huh?”

  “Yeah, it’s a shame.”

  “Ah, well. We all gotta die sometime, am I right?”

  “You would know.”

  “Hey, you wanna hear somethin’ funny? Not ha-ha funny, but, like, odd?”

  “Sure.”

  “She died on the same date her sons got killed. Eleven years later, to the day. Remember when they got killed, those four firemen? Madonna, that was crazy. Place was jammed. I had to rent extra chairs. TV crews all over the place…You weren’t here for that one, were you, Mickey?”

  He might have been talking about a memorable ball game.

  “Missed it,” I said.

  “Anyway, it’s just one of those ironic things.”

  “Don’t mention it to Lynn, if you haven’t already.”

  “Don’t worry. I only noticed ’cause I checked the family records. I won’t say a word.”

  He made a zipping motion across his lips, gave me a horrible wink, and smiled so broadly that I could see how far his gums had receded from his long, horsey teeth. Then he glided off, and I was sort of surprised that he wasn’t wearing a cape or carrying a sickle. He’d buried six Mahoneys, and there was just one to go. Christ!

  I walked off blindly, bumping straight into my mother.

  All night long she’d been doing everything—carrying cups of water to mourners, slipping Kleenex to the weepers, adjusting floral arrangements….

  “Mom. How do you do this?”

  She cocked her head in puzzlement. “What do you mean?”

  I gestured at the black pressboard sign with white letters she’d pressed into place earlier in the day, letters spelling MAHONEY, with a little white arrow pointing the way to the corpse.

  “This, day in and day out. Doesn’t it get to you?”

  “Of course it gets to me.”

  “Then why do you do it?”

  “Because I can, and most people can’t.”

  I stared at her. She was either brilliant or insane, cold as a fish or warmhearted beyond the limits of my comprehension, a soldier who kept marching, no matter what. But beyond all that, she was my mother. I’d come out of her, like it or not, and I might as well like it.

  “Go see Lynn,” my mother said. “She needs you.”

  I went to the room and saw Lynn from behind, resting her head against the shoulder of a man who had his arm around her. I felt a stab of jealousy until I realized the man was my father.

  Steady Eddie looked smart and handsome in his jacket and tie, but he was uptight. This was his wife’s turf, and he was just a reluctant visitor.

  He stuck a finger inside his collar, gave it a tug. “This tie is killing me,” he told Lynn. “How do people wear ties?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. DeFalco.”

  “Eddie. Call me Eddie, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Okay, Eddie. I don’t know how people wear ties.”

  “It’s a noose, I swear to God. I can’t see any point in wearing a tie. Guess that’s why I never made it at the executive level.”

  Lynn actually giggled, nuzzled against his chest. I knew what was going on. She felt safe with my father. He was making her laugh, distracting her from this dreadful thing we were all going through.

  He was doing the things I should have been doing, the stuff I should have been smart enough to do. He was being a man.

  Suddenly there was a hand at my elbow, and my mother was leading me to a corner of the room, near the visitors’ register.

  “Is it almost over, Mom?”

  “Almost.”

  “Does a priest say a prayer or something?”

  “Not tonight. You’re going to sing your song instead.”

  She said it as if it were the most sensible, logical thing in the world.

  “Mom. Are you nuts?”

  “Did I ever tell you how much I liked your song, Michael?”

  It was a hell of a question. In all those years she’d never actually ventured an opinion about “Sweet Days.”
She’d talked around it, saying I’d inherited my musical talent from her side of the family and things like that, but she’d never actually said anything good about the song itself.

  “Come to think of it, Mom, you never did.”

  “Well, that was wrong of me, Michael. Your song is wonderful. It’s tender and touching and it speaks for loss far better than any old priest could.” She touched my cheek. “So sing it. Sing your heart out.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can. You’ve got your heart back, now, so use it. Sing.”

  “Mom—”

  “Trust me. Just trust me.”

  “There’s no music.”

  “I think it will work a capella. The lyrics are almost a prayer. What do you think, Michael?”

  I wasn’t thinking at all, anymore. I was just being. My mother corralled the mourners into a common area, a sort of chapel-shaped space near the funeral parlor’s entrance. She raised her hands to silence the murmurs.

  “Normally, we end these evenings with a prayer,” she began. “But tonight, we do it with a song from my son.”

  She beckoned for me to join her there in front of the crowd. She took me by the shoulders to position me just right, like a school photographer setting a timid student in place for the camera, and then she was gone.

  They were waiting. I cleared my throat and began to sing the song I’d refused to sing for Rosalind Pomer, the song I’d refused to sing for Eileen Kavanagh’s “dying” grandson, the song that made and destroyed me.

  My voice was deeper and hoarser with the years, and for the first time ever I wasn’t afraid that I’d forget the words. How could I? The words were me.

  Everybody stared. Just then Patrick Wagner arrived in a jacket and tie, hand in hand with Scarlett. John Flynn showed up, too, with his arm around Charlotte. And Eileen Kavanagh was there as well, taking it all in with her apprasing eye. It was as if my singing voice had summoned them all, just in time for the final farewell….

  And who were those two men, both oddly familiar? Why, it was Sully the bartender and Frankie McElhenny, who was barely recognizable in a state of relative cleanliness. It seemed hard to imagine them existing outside the walls of the Little Neck Inn, but there they were, and it occurred to me that this was the first time I’d ever seen Sully’s stubby little legs, always hidden behind the mahogany.