by Jeanne Ray
Sandy smiled at me, her heart full of sympathy for my hangover. She closed the door quietly behind her.
I leaned over and called Gloria.
“Naked?” she said. “You met his son naked?” Again, she was laughing to the point of blind hysteria. I thought about hanging up on her, but she was my only ally.
“Shut up,” I said. “I mean it. I have no sense of humor this morning.”
She sputtered a few times, laughed a little more, and then cleared her throat. “Okay,” she said. “I’ve got this under control. I’m with you.”
“I wasn’t naked when I met him. I made it back to the cooler and put my clothes on.”
“So let me get this straight: You had sex before you met the son or after?”
“Neither. We never got there.”
“You went through all of this and you didn’t even get any?”
“You have to believe me, after I met the son, sex was no longer on the agenda. I don’t know if it’s ever going to be on the agenda again. I feel like I could coast through another five years of celibacy after last night.”
“He’s going to tell, you know. You might as well get ready for it.”
“Who? Romeo?”
“No, the son, Raymond. He’ll tell all those little Cacciamanis. You’re going to have some major repercussions from this, I’m afraid.”
“Poor Romeo,” I said.
“I’m not talking about Romeo. I’m talking about you. Those people hate the Rosemans, Julie. You watch your back.”
Gloria read detective stories. She liked to use phrases like “Watch your back.” I told her I would.
After taking the most cursory of showers, I pulled on a T-shirt and some jeans, put a smock over that, and headed to the shop. At the stoplight I had a fashion moment and pulled my hair into a ponytail. I should have spent the day in bed with cucumber slices on my eyes, but I figured work was the only way to take my mind off my problems. I thought I would call my distributor and see about ordering some azaleas. I couldn’t imagine where this thing was headed or how I would see Romeo again, but when the despair felt like it was going to strangle me, I would remember those kisses, in the car, in front of the house, by the orchids, in the cooler. Those kisses were my salvation. They threw a life raft into the sea in which I was drowning and pulled me up.
I parked the car and headed into the shop. Through the window I saw Sandy talking to a customer. Then I looked again. I knew Sandy’s every expression, and even from a distance I could tell she was cowering. I heard a loud voice. I stepped up my pace considerably.
I thought at first that we were being robbed. That a man without a gun had come in in broad daylight to simply scream at Sandy until she handed over the till. I was ready to jump him. I was in that kind of mood. A fistfight would have been right up my alley this morning, and if things didn’t go my way, well, I was feeling like a fatalist.
“Hey,” I bellowed, slamming the door behind me. “What’s going on here!”
Sandy slumped against the counter in relief, tears streaming down her face. “How could you?” she said to me, her voice breaking into sobs.
“How could I what?”
Then the man turned around. Who knew which Cacciamani he was, there were enough of them to fill a small town. Probably the military son had been flown in from Germany by some special envoy just to kill me. This one was bigger than Raymond. This one was huge. The seams of his T-shirt hardly seemed up to the task of holding the fabric together over so many muscles. He looked like the guy who played the killer in funny movies, the one who never speaks but bends iron bars into pretzels with his bare hands. Still, though, he had Romeo in his face, and I felt at once fear and a weird sort of fondness for him.
“So you’re Mrs. Roseman?”
There was no sense splitting hairs on my title. I told him I was.
“I was just telling your daughter here what a tramp her mother was. I guess it runs in the family. She didn’t catch my brother Tony, and you’re not going to get your hands on my father or our business.”
Sandy sank down into the little wicker chair we kept behind the counter, put her head down next to the cash register, and gave herself completely over to her grief.
“Look, Mr. Cacciamani,” I said. “I would like nothing better than to set things straight between our families, but this isn’t the way we’re going to do it. Now, I need to ask you to leave my store.”
He looked at me; maybe he looked a little puzzled or maybe I’m giving myself too much credit to think I could flummox him at all. “No, you look. You understand what I’m saying. I don’t want any of you, any of you, coming near my family. I can make you very sorry, Mrs. Roseman. My grandparents, my parents, they kept their little feud going with insults, the cold shoulder, a little bit of screaming every now and then. That was fine for them, but you’re dealing with a different generation of Cacciamani now, capisce?”
I opened the door. “Out.”
He leaned back against the counter and folded his arms, which barely made it across his massive chest. “Not till I know you understand what I’m saying. I know you Rosemans aren’t so quick.”
Maybe I should have been afraid of him, but I just kept thinking, No way is Romeo’s son going to slug me. This was all some ridiculous war that none of us understood, and it was up to me to not knuckle under to it. “Which son are you?”
He held up one finger to illustrate his rank. “Joe.”
“Joe, you take your threats against me and my family and get out of my store, or so help me God, I’m calling the police.”
“And tell them what? You’re a slut?”
“Where does this language come from?” I said. How could someone who still hadn’t had sex in over five years be a slut? No sense in trying to explain that one to him. “Out.”
“It’s okay,” he said, straightening himself to his impressive full height. “Maybe you do know what I’m talking about.” There were five pots of tiny daffodils on the counter and he leaned over and pinched off all their heads and held them in his hand. While he was stripping my plants, he leaned over and said to Sandy, “Tony was never going to marry you. He told me you weren’t any good.”
She didn’t even register it as far as I could tell. She kept her head down.
“Think about it, Mrs. Roseman,” Joe said as he walked through my store dropping a careful trail of daffodil heads in front of him as he went, like a flower girl at a wedding. When he finally made it through the door, I locked up behind him.
“Christ, what a gorilla!” I felt it all coming back, I will admit it. The flame of hatred for all things Cacciamani shot up in my chest. I did my best to turn it down. Joe Cacciamani didn’t understand, just as, until very recently, I had not understood. He probably wasn’t such a bad guy. He just had a different way of dealing with people. He owned a trucking company. It was a different milieu.
I walked back behind the counter and started rubbing Sandy’s back. Poor Sandy, it was a much bigger blow for her than it ever could be for me. “Sandy, are you all right, honey?”
“Don’t touch me.”
My hand stopped in mid-circle and I held it still. “Did something happen before I got here?”
She kept her head down. Her massive collection of tiny dark curls covered every bit of her face and shoulders, so that her head looked like a poodle sleeping on the desk. “He said you were chasing Mr. Cacciamani through his shop last night when his brother Raymond came in and made you stop. He said you were naked.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
Sandy flipped her head up. She wasn’t wearing her glasses and her contacts had probably been washed away in a flood of tears. “ ‘Oh, we were drinking Manhattans last night,’ ” she said in a high-pitched voice. “ ‘Gloria and I drank a whole bottle of pinot noir.’ Did you actually make it all up in advance, Mother? Did you figure out what wine you would tell me you’d been drinking?”
“No.”
“All I asked you was to not go out
with Mr. Cacciamani. I came to you first. I said, ‘Mother, this would really be hard for me if you went out with him.’ I thought you would understand. Everything”—she hiccupped and started to cry again—“everything about Tony, about that part of my life, that was really painful for me, and so I asked you please do not go out with him. It wasn’t like I was asking so much. I mean, you always hated his guts after all, you always called him ‘that greasy little Cacciamani weasel.’ Would it be so much for me to ask you not to go out with the greasy little Cacciamani weasel? It’s not like there aren’t a couple billion single guys on the planet for you to choose from. You couldn’t respect me that much? You had to just look me right in the face and lie to me? Poor, stupid Sandy, just tell her what she wants to hear and then go right ahead and do what you want to do. Is that the way it is for you, Mother?”
I looked at the little headless daffodil plants, their cheerful pink and blue tinfoil pot covers, their healthy green stalks pointing energetically to nowhere. I could see it both ways, her way and mine. Mothers don’t like to hurt their children, not even when all they’re doing is trying to have a life of their own. “Sandy, I am just so sorry I hurt you, and you’re right, I never should have lied to you. But if you could see it from my perspective …”
“I don’t want to.”
“Well, give it a try, anyway. When you were in high school, you loved Tony and your dad and your grandparents and I all took it very personally. We thought you were trying to hurt us. We thought you said you loved him just to make us angry. But I know now that wasn’t true. You didn’t care that he was a Cacciamani. He was just Tony, the boy you loved. It just happened that way. You can call it a coincidence or bad luck or whatever you want. We were wrong to tell you not to see Tony anymore. I wish I’d had more respect for your choices, because you’ve got to understand that where you were fifteen years ago is where I am right now. It’s not that I want to be with a Cacciamani. I’d like nothing better than to wake up tomorrow and find out he had a different last name. But it’s not going to work that way. I really like Romeo. You should understand that better than anybody. They’re good guys, at least some of them are good guys. I don’t understand about all this hate, but I have to tell you, I’m ready for it to be over.”
Sandy blew her nose on a piece of green floral tissue and took a deep breath. “That’s pretty much what I said to you when I was in high school. And you know what you said to me, Mother? You said, ‘Get over it.’ ” Sandy straightened up her shoulders and looked me dead in the eye.
“Get over it,” she said.
chapter eight
SANDY TOOK THE REST OF THE DAY OFF, WHICH WAS TO say she picked up her purse and walked out of the store, tears streaming, hair springing along behind her. How had I come to this in such a short time? I tried to retrace the events in my mind: a conference, a simple cup of coffee, would you like to take a walk? Yes, a walk, how lovely. I couldn’t understand where I had ventured down the path to war crimes. But things were bad and I could only guess that they’d get worse. I thought about Romeo. I wondered if he knew by now that Joe had come to see me. I couldn’t call him for fear of who might pick up the phone (would they recognize my voice—so soon?), and no doubt he was feeling the same way about calling me. The simple thing to do would be to knuckle under. It wasn’t as if I knew this man so well. How much would it be asking really for me to just give him up? But I didn’t want to give him up, and not just because I’m stubborn, which I am. The principle of the thing was reason enough to hang on, but it wasn’t my reason. It was Romeo. How could I even say such a thing? Did I even know him? I knew him. He was right; we had been enemies for so long that we had bonded together. All the passion of hate had become the passion of love. The ions that had bound us together from the start had simply reconfigured. They were the same in number, the same in strength, it was just that they now played a soft samba in my heart instead of a Wagnerian opera.
All day long I went through my responsibilities in the dullest way. I handled the flowers as if they were pencils or spatulas. Every arrangement I put together I tore apart again, remembering the perfect bouquet in Romeo’s cooler. I cleaned up every mess I made but I left the little headless daffodils in their place, even though all my customers remarked on them, touching the dried-out tips with their fingers. “These didn’t do very well,” they said sadly.
“No,” I said, as if I hadn’t noticed. “I guess not.”
I kept waiting for the other Cacciamani boys to come harass me. I thought it would be like a fairy tale. Each one who came would be bigger than the last, their threats would be scarier, until finally some fire-breathing Cacciamani boy nine feet tall and covered in hair would break down the door frame as he entered my shop. “Release my father!” he would shout, and his fiery breath would singe off my eyebrows. But even under such duress I would continue to hold my ground.
“Sorry,” I’d say to the fire-breather. “No can do.”
And when that happened, when I had stood up to the very worst of them, the spell would be broken. They would all be restored to regular guys, decent sons who would dance the lambada at our wedding. It would be explained to me then: We were all victims of some ancient curse having to do with a slight made to some witch two thousand years ago in Bimini, something terribly far away from us for which we could not possibly be held responsible. My daughters would love Romeo and I would love his sons. The phone rang and suddenly my heart was filled with hope.
“I’m waiting for you at your house,” Nora said. Then she hung up.
So the path to broken curses was going to be a little more treacherous than I had imagined. I flipped over the CLOSED sign and went to meet my fate.
I loved Nora, I know I have mentioned this before, but the sight of that Lexus in my driveway struck greater fear into my heart than the sight of Joe Cacciamani decapitating miniature daffodils ever could. I thought about that great old song, “You Always Hurt the One You Love,” and thought that the inverse was also true, The One You Love Always Hurts You.
“Alex and I have talked it over and I’ve told Sandy that she and the kids can come and live with us,” Nora said before I had both feet inside the door.
This before, Hello, Mother. This before, Heard you had a rough day.
“Nora, Christ, ease up on me, will you?”
“No, Mother, I will not ‘ease up on you.’ ”
Where these girls picked up this irritating predilection for mimicking, I do not know. It was not a habit of Mort’s or mine.
“When you look me in the eye and you swear something, I expect I can take you at your word,” Nora said, her tone a subtle blend of hurt and righteous condemnation. “What can we count on now, hmm? Can you tell me that? What else are you lying about?”
“Okay, you win. You were adopted.” This conversation was taking place in the entry hall. I was wearing my smock. My purse was in one hand, my keys were in the other. “Where are the kids?”
“Sandy thought it would be better if they didn’t see you just now.”
“Why, because I’m such an evil influence? I had a date, Nora, remember those? I don’t really, because I haven’t had one in thirty-nine years. A sixty-year-old woman goes on a date and the children have to be evacuated from the house?”
“This date, as you call it, isn’t the issue, though you have a hell of a definition of a date, from what I hear. The issue is—”
“Hang on to that thought for one second, sweetheart, your mother needs a glass of wine in the biggest way.” I dropped my keys into my purse and dropped my purse onto the floor. Then I headed for the kitchen. Nora followed close behind in her smart gray pantsuit. She’d been doing a lot of yoga along with her running and she was now impossibly fit, as supple and lean as a greyhound. I wanted to tell her I couldn’t argue with her while I was wearing dirt-covered jeans, not when she was dressed like that. It put me at a terrible disadvantage.
“The issue is trust,” she continued. “The issue is honesty.
The issue is family. The Rosemans do not keep company with the Cacciamanis. That was your guiding principle when we were growing up.”
I took the wine out of the refrigerator and held it up to her. She shook her head and so I poured for one. “I Made A Mistake,” I said. “Tell me if I can make this point more clearly. I’m sorry. No one knows what we did to them or what they did to us. What happened with your sister in high school could have happened to anybody, with anybody. Your sister is thirty-two years old now. It’s time to put that one behind us.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”
“Believe it.”
“So you’re telling me you’re going to see him again?”
I took a sip. For a minute there I really wanted to talk to her, to open up and tell her about the jam I was in. She was my daughter, after all. Why did we always tense our backs before we spoke to each other? “I don’t know. I’d like to. I’m just not sure if these are insurmountable odds. I’ve got you and Sandy to contend with, I’ve got his kids to contend with.”
“Sandy told me she was afraid this afternoon. She thinks he might really try to hurt us. I’m calling the police and filing a report, I can tell you that much.”
“You can’t,” I said. “You weren’t even there.” I took a longer sip. I took a drink. “I keep thinking this all might blow over and I could go out with Romeo. He’s so nice, Nora. That’s the thing you won’t believe. He’s the nicest man I’ve ever met.” I had tried talking to her one way, now I was banking on compassion. Never bank on compassion where Nora is concerned.
“So that’s your answer,” she said. “I’m taking the kids.”
“For what reason?”
“If you don’t see it by now, I can’t explain it to you.”
“Well, are they coming back tonight?” For all the times I’d wished that Sandy would pull her life together and get a place of her own, suddenly the thought of them leaving seemed so awful to me. No little Tony to do homework with? No Sarah wanting me to put her hair into pin curls? I was a good grandmother. Maybe I was proving myself to be a lousy mother, but I was one hell of a good grandmother.