by Ray Daniel
The kitchen was a small rectangle. The kitchen window peered out from over the sink and gave a view of the back yard. The kitchen’s back half-wall stopped three feet from the ceiling. In normal Campanelli ranches, this allowed light to fill the house. My mother had clogged her half-wall to the ceiling with books. Light never reached here.
The sink, range, and oven, however, remained clear of clutter. A covered quart pan of marinara sauce (gravy to my mother) bubbled on the stove over low heat. Next to it, water boiled in a larger pan.
My mother dumped a box of ziti into the boiling water and stirred. The ziti frothed for a moment and settled down. “I waited for you to get here before I started the ziti.”
I thought about how steam permeates paper to create mold and looked around at the piles of books in the kitchen. My mother had gotten them from yard sales, library fundraisers, and trash cans. In addition to the books on the half-wall, piles of books sat on the floor and on the kitchen table. Some of the books were shredded where mice had gnawed homes for themselves. These were mostly near the floor.
My mother said, “What’s the matter? Aren’t you hungry?”
I said, “Sure I’m hungry. Can we use my room?”
She smiled and said, “Yes. Yes, of course. Let’s eat in your room. You open it up and I’ll bring in the food.”
I wound my way down the goat path to the door of my room and worked the combination lock. The room was just as I had left it. I turned on the light and found two small folding tables to put in front of our chairs.
My mother liked to eat in front of CNN, so I brought it up on the HDTV. The economy was in the shitter. The Middle East was devolving into a missile fest. A celebrity had adopted an Asian baby and tried to return it. Somebody had been arrested for mistreating a horse. I couldn’t believe my mother ate in front of this garbage. No wonder she was crazy.
My mother bustled in carrying two steaming bowls of pasta on a tray. She put a bowl on each table, smiled at me, and went back out again. When she came back she had a bottle of wine, one from Trader Joe’s with a rooster on the label, two wine glasses, and a wine opener. She handed the wine and the opener to me and I did the honors.
My mother sat next to me but popped up again and went into the kitchen. She came back carrying a small wedge of cheese and a cheese grater. She held the cheese in one hand and the grater in the other and grated me the perfect amount of cheese. She always got it right. Then she grated some for herself, settled into her chair, and said, “Isn’t this nice!”
“It is. Thank you for dinner,” I said. I forked ziti into my mouth, tasting the gravy.
My mother’s gravy was perfect as always. I had tried to re-create it and failed. When I was married, Carol tried to re-create it. She failed. Determined to succeed, she asked my mother for the recipe but was stymied by directions such as “chop some garlic,” “add enough oregano to make it taste good,” and “add two bay leaves, unless they’re small, then three or four.” She watched my mother make it and tried to copy the steps and ingredients, but it never tasted the same. My mother’s gravy, like the gravy of all Italian mothers, was her unique gift to me. I was thankful for it.
Our meal together transported me back to the family dinner table. We had occupied three sides of the rectangle. My dad sat at the head. My mother sat kitty-corner on a long side of the rectangle. I sat across from her on the other long side.
A crusty Italian bread on a scarred breadboard waited in front of my dad. He would cut the bread, give the end to me, and the next slice to my mother. A big bowl of pasta sat on the stove. My mother would fill our plates with spaghetti and meatballs, grate cheese onto them, and serve them. We’d eat pasta and talk about nothing and everything: Ronald Reagan, Uncle Walt, my Auntie Rosa’s latest drama—all were grist for the mill at our dinner table. At the end of the meal, we’d sop up the last gravy with our Italian bread.
I pointed at the ziti with my fork and said, “This is delicious.”
My mother said, “Good. I’m glad you like it.”
“It reminds me of dinner with Dad.”
At the mention of my father, my mother’s face tightened and a line formed between her brows. She asked, “Is it true?”
“About the house in Pittsfield?”
“Yes.”
“It’s true. I’ve been there myself. Dad’s pictures are all over it with Cathy Byrd and JT.”
“Who is JT?”
“John Tucker Jr. Dad’s son with Cathy Byrd.”
My mother ate a forkful of pasta and said, “I always thought she was too friendly with your father. I never imagined that he would stoop so low as to sleep with the little whore.”
“I never would have believed it without the pictures.”
We stabbed at our ziti. The TV droned on about some indefinite threat that could only be solved by immediate, but undefined, action. My mother drained her glass of wine and refilled it. I joined her and we finished the bottle.
Emboldened by wine, I said, “We have to do something about that search warrant.”
My mother said, “I don’t see why. There is no reason for them to search this house.”
“I know, but Lee’s going to get a warrant anyway. He thinks there are clues in those notebooks.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Even so, he says he’ll be here tomorrow. If we don’t want him to search, we need to give him the notebooks. He needs something to explain how Dad bought a house in Pittsfield for cash.”
Our plates were empty. My mother stacked them and carried them into the kitchen. I took the empty wine bottle and the glasses and wound my way through the piles with them. I handed my mother the glasses and said, “They’ve got to be here somewhere.”
She took the glasses and said, “I don’t have anything for that detective.”
My relationship with my mother had been punctuated by a long string of failures and mistakes. There were events that I should have remembered but forgot, wrongs that I should have forgotten but remembered, things that I should have done but didn’t, and things that I did do but shouldn’t have. There were fights and absences, disagreements and slights, hurt feelings and mangled emotions. Yet none of those mistakes would match the one that I made at that moment.
I suppose I was driven by the right reasons. I was trying to protect her. I was trying to keep strangers from coming into the house to do exactly what I chose to do when I left that kitchen: climbed off the goat path and waded into my mother’s piles.
My mother heard the crunching paper and came out of the kitchen. She asked, “What are you doing?”
“I’m looking, Ma. I’m looking for the notebooks in this pile of crap so I can give them to Lieutenant Lee and keep him from clearing out your house.”
I remembered that the piles had started in the corner of the living room nearest the front of the house, away from the front door. I worked my way back there, stepping around stacks of newspapers, junk mail, books, magazines, and the other detritus that most of us ejected from our lives on a daily basis.
My mother said, “Get out of there!”
“They’ve got to be back here,” I said. “In a file. In a box. Somewhere.”
“Get out!”
The light from my room spilled into the living room. Still I couldn’t see. A lamp was pressed against the front wall, buried by papers. It hadn’t been turned on in ages. I turned it on, thinking the light would make it easier to see. The cacophony of printed material got no clearer.
My mother started to pace on the goat path. She yelled at me, “Goddamn you! Get out! Get out of there! You’re ruining it! You’re ruining everything. I’ll never be able to find anything!”
“Find anything? Find what, Ma, what? What piece of crap is back here that you could find? The police are going to tear this place apart. Don’t you get it? All this—this—this crap, this
shit, is going to get dumped into the front yard and then thrown into dumpsters. All of it, unless I can find something. Those notebooks, or a bank account slip, or a betting receipt, or a cancelled check—something that Lee can use to chase down Dad’s money trail.”
“There’s nothing there!” My mother sobbed. “Nothing there from him. I don’t keep it there.”
“For God’s sake, there must be something.”
“Get out! Get out! Get OUT!” my mother shrieked. She ran along the goat path and into the kitchen. I looked down into a pile, saw a manila folder, and pulled on it. It was stuck. I pulled harder and it moved. Something in it looked official. One more pull and the folder came free as its pile gave way and fell across the living room.
My mother screamed behind me as the paper hit the ground. I turned. She had left the goat path and stood right in front of me, holding a kitchen knife in a trembling hand.
“Get the FUCK out of my house! Get out of my house, you goddamn son of a bitch! You bastard! Get out!”
I raised my hands at the sight of the knife, holding the manila folder in my right hand. I said, “Okay. Okay, Ma!”
“Don’t call me that! Just get out!”
She backed up onto the goat path, holding the knife in front of her. I climbed out and stood in front of her with the manila folder. I took a step toward her.
“Get out! Get away from me!” She said, tears running down her cheeks, her voice skipping along the edge of hysteria.
I said, “I just want to lock my room.”
“NO! No! Get out! The room is mine. It’s my house. My house! I’m tired of giving you that space and not having enough room for everything I want, having to rent space, use the yard. It’s my house and my room. You get out!” She waved the knife at me, and I backed up. She took a step forward.
I said, “Put down the knife.”
“Get out!”
“C’mon. Please. Put down the knife before you hurt yourself.”
My mother’s voice was icy cold as she said, “You and your father have ruined me. Now, get out.”
I was at the front door. I pulled on the door and got it open to its limit. Then I squeezed out and pulled the door shut behind me. The lock clicked and my mother yelled, “Don’t you ever come back!”
Forty-One
I stood in the front yard, trembling, stranded in a suburban wasteland. My mind cranked in a continuous loop, playing and replaying the transition from a pleasant domestic scene of pasta and gravy to a nightmare of knives and screaming.
I didn’t want to upset her any further, so I got off her front lawn and stood in the street. Cars and trucks thrummed on the nearby Mass Pike. Trees hid the highway; without the sound, you’d never know it was there.
The neighborhood had no sidewalks here, but it had no traffic, either. The one lane led to a larger cross street after five driveways. I found the cross street and stood on the corner under a street lamp where Jael would see me. I pushed the memory of my knife-wielding mother out of my mind and opened the manila folder. It was the only piece of information that I had been able to wrest from the black hole that was her house.
The folder had twelve slips of paper in it. Pay stubs from the year before my father died. I angled the papers in the street lamp’s light to read the numbers. Like other engineers at GDS, my father made a comfortable upper-middle class income, hovering somewhere around six figures.
The income on all the pay stubs was identical. Apparently GDS gave their cost-of-living raises at the beginning of the year. The money was divided among taxes, a 401k, Medicare, Social Security, and my parents’ checking account. All the money went into that one checking account, and my mother paid all the bills. There was no way that my father was slipping money out of his pay to cover the expenses of a second family in Pittsfield. This had been a waste of time.
I looked up and down the street. Jael wasn’t due for half an hour. I opened my Droid and searched for Lucy’s phone number. The picture I took of her at Fenway smiled out at me. That day seemed like it was years ago.
I realized that I hadn’t spoken to Lucy today. Funny that she hadn’t gotten back to me. I called her cell. She answered immediately.
“How’s the face?”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Thank you for helping me out last night.”
“It didn’t seem right to say, ‘Oh look, my date got beat up. Time to go!’ ”
“Still, it was good of you get me back to my bed.”
“Was your other friend still there when you woke up?”
“What, Jael? Oh yeah. We’ve been busy today.”
“She’s beautiful in an exotic sort of way.”
Doh! It finally occurred to me why Lucy hadn’t called.
I said, “Jael and I aren’t dating or anything.”
Lucy said, “It’s really none of my business.”
“No. Seriously. She’s a friend of mine who’s—well—”
“Yes?”
“Who’s really good with a gun.”
“You have a friend who’s really good with a gun?” Lucy sounded skeptical.
“You don’t?”
“No.”
“I highly recommend it.”
Lucy was silent for a moment, and I let the silence linger. I was happy to be talking with Lucy. The conversation was pushing my mother further and further out of my mind.
Finally Lucy spoke. “How are you feeling tonight?”
I said, “I feel good. The stitches don’t hurt much.”
“Would you like to come over to my house for a visit?”
My stomach flipped. Imagined images of Lucy’s naked body flooded my brain. I took a deep breath and said, “Boy, that sounds great.”
“So you’ll come over?”
“Sorry, but I can’t. I have to be somewhere tonight. I won’t get home till late.”
“Whatcha doin’?”
I’m meeting a mysterious defense contractor engineer in the woods in Western Mass next to a white dot on the satellite picture. Jael’s getting her sniper rifle. It’ll be great.
I said, “You don’t want to know.”
Lucy asked, “Are you going to get beat up again?”
I said, “I doubt it. How about dinner tomorrow? We could go into Cambridge.”
“Sure!”
We made plans. As I hung up, Jael’s Acura MDX glided down the street. Bobby Miller sat in the passenger seat. I opened the back door and climbed in.
Forty-Two
Jael pulled away from the curb.
“Put on your seat belt,” said Jael.
“Yeah, Tucker, put on your seat belt,” said Bobby.
“Fuck you,” I said.
Bobby turned to Jael. “Somebody is a cranky pants.”
Bobby had the seat pushed all the way back, leaving no room for my legs. I slid over behind Jael, grabbed the seat belt, and clicked it into place. “Hey, Bobby, how come you get to ride shotgun?”
“Because I brought a shotgun.” Bobby reached down between his legs and pulled up a black weapon. He asked Jael, “Should we give Tucker a gun?”
Jael said, “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because the last time he held a gun he nearly shot someone.”
“Really?”
“He does not practice proper trigger safety.”
Jael was talking about my tendency to let my finger slip over the trigger when I held a handgun. Apparently, that’s bad.
“We can probably teach him trigger safety.”
“I have tried. He has a mental block.”
I said, “I wish you two wouldn’t talk about me behind my back.”
“I can see that,” said Bobby to Jael, ignoring me. “He’s kind of a theoretical academic.”
Bobby and Jael’s yammering kept drivi
ng spikes of irritation into my brain. The spikes brought up images of my mother threatening me with a knife, and the whole concoction felt like nitroglycerine.
“Screw you, Bobby. You go out and talk to Patterson if I’m so theoretical.”
“He only wanted to talk to you. I’d get nothing.”
“Then maybe I’m not so theoretical after all. Maybe I’m useful. Was that why you broke up my date with Lucy?”
“What are you talking about?”
Jael had navigated all the side streets, zoomed down Route 9, and was merging onto the Mass Pike heading west. I was pressed against the side of the SUV as she tore down the entrance ramp.
“If JT’s murder is Lieutenant Lee’s case, why were you in front of my house? Why call me?”
Bobby said nothing. The car remained silent. I slumped in the back seat and let my mind wander. It meandered over to the question that hung in the air, picked it up, and started poking at it. Why was Bobby at the murder scene, and why had he called me out of a Red Sox game to look at a dead guy? I turned the question over, probing it, twisting it, trying to make it fit into the rest of the puzzle.
Now that I thought about the problem, it made no sense that Bobby would have called me. The Boston Police must have been called at the gunshot. Lieutenant Lee was investigating the murder. The FBI doesn’t investigate random Boston murders. The FBI investigates bigger things.
What had Bobby said to JT’s manager, Paul Waters? He had said that there were “serious concerns regarding the security of the Paladin project.” I had assumed that he started investigating those serious concerns because JT had been murdered, but how would he have known about the murder so quickly? He couldn’t have. He must have been investigating the serious concerns earlier. He already had serious concerns about JT. He said that he thought JT was a spy. What had Bobby said when we learned that Patterson was sharing a password with JT? He had said, “Figures.” The final Tetris piece fell into place and I knew why Bobby had called me.
“You’re an asshole!” I shouted toward the front of the car.