My father had his arm across Lynn’s shoulders. Tears rolled down the face of Steady Eddie, and though Lynn’s eyes brimmed with tears they did not spill over. She was looking at me, in me, through me….
When I finished singing I just stood there, looking at them all. For a horrifying moment I feared there might be applause, but there wasn’t. There was silence, and I mean super-silence—no coughs, no throat clearings, nothing. After a few seconds I let my head fall and shut my eyes, and they all took it as a signal to disperse.
Two pats on my back. I turned to see Sully.
“Well done, lad,” he said. He wanted to say more but was too choked up to speak. Frankie McElhenny shook my hand, murmured an apology for our barroom brawl, and left.
Eileen Kavanagh gave me a peck on the cheek and couldn’t resist saying, “I hope you don’t get in trouble for this.”
“I took a chance, Mrs. Kavanagh. Figured it was worth it.”
She glared at me, then left in a hurry.
My father patted my back, and then Lynn said the oddest, rightest thing of all.
“You’re all grown up now, aren’t you?”
“I guess so, Lynn.”
“Thank you, Mickey. That meant a lot to me.”
I introduced Lynn to Patrick and Scarlett. Patrick had a smaller bandage on his nose but his black eyes were darker than they’d been the day before. He looked like a raccoon on steroids, big and strong and a little bit woozy, in the wake of his concussion.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said to Lynn, words he’d obviously rehearsed on the way to Eruzione’s.
John Flynn expressed his condolences to Lynn, then took her in a farewell hug before telling me and Patrick that we had to talk in private. He led us to the men’s room, an immaculately clean place of porcelain and white and black checkerboard tiles. His hand went to his pocket, and out came two wads of cash with rubber bands around them.
“Your money, guys.”
It was Friday, payday. We hadn’t been to work that day but Flynn wanted to take care of business.
It struck me as a crude thing to do at a wake, but what was even more jarring was the size of the bankrolls. They were way too thick. The man’s emotions had him too mixed up to count right.
“This is too much,” I said.
“Yeah, Mr. Flynn, it’s double the usual pay,” Patrick added, thumbing through the bills.
Flynn cleared his throat. “It’s a week’s severance on top of what I owe you guys.”
“Severance?”
Flynn nodded, his hangdog cheeks jiggling like a bulldog’s. “It’s all over, guys. Called all my customers today and told them I was through with the business. Growing season’s just about over, anyway.”
It took a moment to hit me. I was out of work, once again.
“Why?”
“Ahh, I’m tired, Mick. I know I don’t do much, but I’m tired o’ listenin’ to the customers complain, tired o’ chasin’ the money, tired o’ people tellin’ me the check’s in the mail…. I don’t know.” He rubbed Patrick’s hair. “It hit me yesterday when I thought this knucklehead was gonna get killed. Life’s too short. Me and Charlotte are headin’ for Florida, soon’s we sell the house.”
All Patrick and I could do was stare at Flynn. Then Patrick held out his hand, the one clutching the wad of money.
“I owe you for the lawn mower I wrecked, Mr. Flynn.”
Flynn ignored the money, cocked an eyebrow at Patrick. “You goin’ to Purdue, or what?”
Patrick took a deep breath, squared his shoulders like a Marine. “Yes, sir, I am.”
“Good. Then I won’t have to kill you.”
He turned and pointed at me the way a cop would. “Make somethin’ happen in your life, Mick. Hear me? Get the hell out of Little Neck.”
“I will.”
“You damn well better, or I’ll be all over your ass.”
He hugged Patrick, then he hugged me. “By the way,” he said, “that song was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.”
On those words, Flynn was gone. Patrick pocketed his money, then turned to me red-faced.
“No more work for us, huh, Mick?”
“Guess not.”
“So this is it, huh?”
“Guess so.”
He extended his hand for a shake. “Been great workin’ with you…. Will you write me?”
I shook his hand, then pulled him close for a hug. “Good luck, little brother. You go out there and show those Indiana jokers how the game is played.”
I kissed his cheek. He broke the embrace and left the men’s room, stifling sobs.
I went to the sink, threw cold water on my face and realized that a funeral parlor is as good a place as any to find out that your job is dead. The lights in the bathroom flickered on and off, a signal that the place was about to close.
I went outside and saw my parents standing with Lynn at the edge of the parking lot.
“Well, Michael,” my mother said, “I’d say the song worked out.”
“Uh-huh.”
She was rolling. She was calling the shots. She turned to my father. “Eddie, get the car. Michael, you’re staying at Lynn’s house tonight. She shouldn’t be alone.”
Lynn did not object to this plan. Me, I had no problem with it. I only hoped my mother’s instincts about the living were as good as her instincts regarding the dead.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Eddie and Donna say good night as if they’re dropping us off at the prom. We watch them drive off before going into the house.
“Drink, Mickey?”
“Great idea.”
Out comes the whiskey bottle. We sit together on the living room couch. I loosen my tie, take a tiny sip of whiskey, barely enough to wet my lips. My whole life is riding on this night, and I’m going to need all the brain cells I have.
Lynn sips some whiskey and holds it in her mouth before swallowing. I’m gathering my strength and my courage to pitch my plan for happily ever after, you and me and baby makes three, but she beats me to the punch with words of her own.
“I’m leaving in a few days. For good.”
I’m shocked, but I shouldn’t be. Lynn has been leaving ever since she’d arrived. “Where are you going?”
“Far from Little Neck.”
“What about this house?”
“As of tonight, it’s officially on the market.” She passes a business card to me. “Got this little souvenir from one of the so-called mourners. Remember her?”
EILEEN KAVANAGH REALTY. Yes indeed, I do remember her.
“Jesus, that’s a pretty crude thing to do.”
Lynn shrugs. “A wake itself is pretty crude. People gathering around a corpse, talking about where they’re going to eat later.”
“Why’d you go through with it?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. Your mother just kind of took over, and I let it happen. Guess it was nice to be taken care of, for a change. Been a long time since anyone…”
She can’t finish the sentence. She sips more whiskey, blinks back tears. “She’s all right, your mother.”
“You’re right about that. Took me my whole life to realize it.”
“You’re lucky. Most people never find out.’”
I spread my arms across the back of the couch, hoping Lynn will lean against me. She does not. She leans away. I look away from her, look around the room. It’s a cluttered house, a very cluttered house.
“Lot of stuff to pack up.”
“Nope. Everything stays, except for my clothing. That’s the deal I made with Eileen Kavanagh. It’s all her problem.”
“She’ll hold a yard sale.”
“Actually…no.”
“No what?”
Her face darkens with an odd look, almost an evil look. A storm is gathering in her soul. She starts nodding, as if in agreement with words being whispered into her ear by an invisible demon.
“I changed my mind,” she says. “There won’
t be a yard sale. There won’t be any kind of sale.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Lynn?”
She looks at me, as if deciding whether or not I can be trusted with what’s coming next.
“I’ve got a better idea,” she says.
She goes out the back door and returns a minute later with a big red can, a two-gallon can. She struggles under the weight of it, sets it on the floor, and unscrews the cap. Then she lifts the can and starts sloshing its contents along the baseboards.
It is gasoline, of course.
“Jesus Christ, Lynn, are you nuts?”
“Let me do this thing, Mickey!”
I wrestle the can from her hands. She tries to get it back.
“Everybody’s gone now!” she cries. “Let me burn down this fucking mausoleum!”
She can’t get the can from me, so she gives up and slaps my face once, twice, three times, losing strength with each slap. Then she collapses on the couch, defeated. The room reeks of whiskey and gasoline. Already the stuff is evaporating on the floor.
I screw the cap back on the gas can, carry it to the back door, and throw it as far as I can into the jungle of the backyard. Then I return to the living room and open all the windows.
“You’re not setting this house on fire,” I say, as calmly as I can. “There have been enough fires.”
“I’ll do it when you leave.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Actually, you’re right. I am leaving. But here’s the big news, baby. You’re coming with me.”
Her eyes are red and raw. It’s clear that the last of her strength is gone.
“Give up, Mickey, please. For both our sakes, give up. It’s just too late.”
“Just listen to me, baby. Listen to me this one last time….”
I have the photo of little Aaron right there in my shirt pocket, and I’m dying to show it to her, just hand it to her without a word, but before I can bring my maybe-son into the mix, I have to deal with Lynn and me, and the words I choose for this are pretty simple.
“Lynn. I want to be with you, right to the end of the line.”
She shuts her eyes tightly and shakes her head. “Let go, Mickey,” she says, oh so gently. “For your own sake, let go.”
But I can’t, any more than I can will myself to stop breathing.
“Listen to me. Flynn’s out of business. I’m free. See? We’re both free to go. This is meant to be.”
“You don’t even know where I’m going!”
“Anyplace away from Little Neck is all right by me.”
“Mickey. Please stop dreaming.”
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to do. I’m tired of dreaming about you. I want the real thing. We’re so close now, Lynn.”
She’s staring off into space, as if at a distant, dangerous star my eyes aren’t strong enough to detect.
“Lynn, look at me. I really couldn’t take it if you ran away from me again.”
She turns her gaze at me and continues staring, long and hard. Whatever it is she’s never told me no longer has a place to hide.
The distant, mournful whistle of a Long Island Rail Road train bound for Manhattan pierces the silence. Whenever you hear the train whistle that clearly, it means that the clouds are low, that rain is on the way, and sure enough the rain begins to fall, a gentle, almost crackly sound on the overgrown Mahoney lawn. It’s just the nudge Lynn needs to tell me what she’s been holding all these years.
“Mickey,” she begins, “did it ever occur to you that I was trying to spare you?”
“From what?”
“From a mess you didn’t deserve. A mess you couldn’t handle.”
“What I couldn’t handle was you taking off like I never existed.”
She’s trembling. “I’m sorry.”
“So am I, but we can get past that.”
She shakes her head, and the tears that had been brimming in her eyes splash down her face.
“Remember when you were saying how we had to know the crucial stuff about each other? Well, you don’t know my crucial stuff.”
I dare to stroke her hair. She does not bite.
“Just tell me, Lynn. This is the night. This is the time. Talk to me as if the world is going to end in the morning, okay? Because if I lose you again, that’s exactly what’ll happen to me.”
She stares at me, then pinches her nostrils. “I can’t take the stink in here. Let’s go outside. Take the whiskey and the glasses.”
We sit out on the front stoop, just like we used to. The rain has already stopped. Lynn pours herself more whiskey. She looks sort of like an actress from a 1940s movie, tough as nails, Bette Davis about to let somebody have a cold, hard truth right between the eyes.
That’s how she looks, but it’s not how she sounds. She speaks softly but clearly. Her voice is like a voice in a dream, a voice in a nightmare.
It’s the voice of a child in the dark.
Sometimes the ugliest things in the world begin almost casually. They don’t happen so much as they appear, reveal themselves, and there you are, trying to remember what life was like before it became a horror show.
By the time she was fifteen years old Lynn Mahoney had come to despise her father for the way he treated three of the most important people in her life—her mother, her brother Brendan, and me.
Walter Mahoney was not your everyday fireman, hoping to put in his twenty years and draw a pension without getting killed along the way. He had ambition. He’d parlayed his fame as the Burning Angel into a sterling career with the fire department. That prize-winning photo of him carrying that small black child to safety while his own body was on fire had been reproduced in publications around the world.
He rose fast through the ranks and was made captain when he was barely thirty years old. When feature stories were written about the Burning Angel, he always surrounded himself with his wife and children for the photo spreads. He was a big stand-by-the-wife guy, at least in print.
“While I’m putting out the fires,” he said, “she’s back here, keeping the home fires burning.”
It was great copy. Clever lines like that were second nature to him. Everybody loved it. And it was complete bullshit, from start to finish.
The Captain was an abusive husband, a borderline alcoholic and the kind of father who expected his children to do what they were told when they were told to do it, if not sooner.
His wife was there for meals, laundry, and sex, not necessarily in that order. They were the classic case of high school sweethearts who got married because there was no real reason not to get married. Walter spoke to his wife as if she were a lowly civil servant who could not be fired. And in a way, that’s exactly what she’d become.
Walter Mahoney was not happy, but he thought of himself as a good Catholic, so divorce was absolutely out of the question. Ruth had borne him five strong, healthy children. He was sticking with her, no matter what.
What never occurred to him was the idea that Ruth might not stick by him.
You had to admire her, a woman in her forties suddenly deciding she’d endured enough misery. She had a high school diploma and no marketable skills, but Ruth Brady Mahoney was ready to leave, willing to step out into the Great Unknown rather than grit her teeth through the rest of her time on earth with the Burning Angel. She’d taken one beating too many, physically and emotionally.
She actually packed her bags one night and was about to catch a bus to her sister’s house in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to begin her new life. By this time her three oldest sons were firemen and had moved into their own apartment not far from the Bronx firehouse where they were stationed. Lynn and Brendan, the two youngest, were the only children left at home. Once she found her feet in Scranton she’d come back and get them—a week or two, at most.
She was not kidding, and the Captain knew it. That’s when he put on the greatest performance of his life. He begged her to stay—not forever,
but just until his next promotion came through. Walter Mahoney was aiming high. He intended to land the top job, Fire Commissioner for the City of New York.
He wasn’t just after the glory of the promotion. He also wanted the money. It would be a huge hike in pay, which would result in a pension that would be enough to carry them through their separate lives after they split.
But they’d never give such a high-profile job to a man in the middle of a divorce. Until the promotion happened, they had to stay together just to keep up appearances.
Ruth agreed to the deal, but she had a condition of her own—one that was totally non-negotiable. The Captain would no longer share her bed. She’d cook and clean as usual, but sex was one part of the charade she would not be able to manage.
The Captain agreed. What else could he do? He set himself up in the basement with a cot, a battered bureau and a reading lamp. He could have taken one of his boys’ empty rooms but he didn’t want his three grown sons to know what was going on, in case they dropped by for dinner. They idolized the man and never saw his faults.
Only Lynn and Brendan knew what was going on. Lynn felt the old bastard was getting exactly what he deserved, but Brendan couldn’t help feeling sorry for his dad despite the years of torment he’d endured for being a reluctant boxer, a terrible baseball player, and an overall disappointment as a son.
“My other daughter,” the Captain would occasionally sneer when referring to Brendan.
Brendan remained as loyal as a collie, despite the Captain’s cruelty. When the Captain first moved down to the basement Brendan would go down at night to see if he needed anything, but Walter had usually whiskeyed himself into an early sleep. He was drinking more heavily than ever, showing up at work with hangovers that sometimes left him all but incoherent.
Walter Mahoney was not yet fifty years old, in splendid health except for whatever damage his drinking was inflicting. Another man painted into such a corner would have sought a girlfriend, but this was not even a possibility for Walter. No matter how careful he was, the word would get around. He’d be found out. He’d never make fire commissioner, not a man with a mistress on the side.
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