Julie and Romeo

by Jeanne Ray

  “Sure,” Nora said, looking at her watch. “They’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  “And then they’re going to your house? Sandy has school tonight. You’re going to take the kids?”

  “Not tonight,” Nora said. “I have to show a new listing and Alex has a meeting. In fact, I need to get going.”

  “So let me understand this, you’re moving Sandy and the kids out because I’m an unfit influence, but you’re doing it at a time that is more convenient to you?”

  Nora started to say something, but then she thought it over for a second, raised her eyebrows, and nodded. “More or less.”

  “I won’t hold my breath.”

  “Think about what I said, Mother.” Nora was back in her yellow silk coat and sailing toward the door.

  “Oh, I think about everything you say. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  After Nora left I had about ten minutes to finish off my wine and stare vacantly at the wall in the kitchen, in which time I came up with the idea of painting everything pale yellow. Then Sandy and the kids came home. For whatever my girls had been plotting, they seemed at least to have had the decency not to tell the children about it. Tony and Sarah came flying at me like I had just come home from a tour in the Peace Corps.

  “We didn’t see you last night and then we didn’t see you this morning,” Tony said breathlessly. “We haven’t seen you in ages.”

  “Ages,” I said, kissing his head madly and then his sister’s head as well.

  “Mom said you were sleeping in this morning. I said I wanted to sleep in like Grandma, but she says, Nope, up, you have to go to school.”

  “She was absolutely right.” I looked over at Sandy, who was hanging back by the door. She had a guilty look on her face for having sicced Nora on me. No matter how mad she was at me, I think she realized the punishment did not fit the crime.

  “I drew you a picture,” Sarah said. “Because you were gone for such a long time.” She knelt down and extracted a drawing from her tiny pink Cinderella backpack. It was a stick figure with her hair in a flip, and she was holding a giant bunch of flowers. The flowers went from the floor to past her head.

  “It’s divine,” I said.

  “It’s you,” Tony said.

  After Sandy went to school, I shifted into total indulgence mode. I made popcorn balls with Karo syrup and played Go Fish with real enthusiasm (it’s not that one plays Go Fish, it’s how one plays Go Fish). We watched the video of Lady and the Tramp, a movie that I must say moved me almost to tears in my present circumstances. I identified with both Lady and Tramp. Since it was Friday, I extended bedtime by a full hour. In short, we partied. Maybe I was trying to secure my place in their hearts, but really I think that had already been done. I wasn’t going to risk my family. I wasn’t going to be bossed and I wasn’t going to be foolish. The trick was finding the line between those two things. I tucked everyone tightly into bed, read every book that was requested of me, and made a series of exhausted good nights. I believe I was asleep myself no more than seven minutes later.

  It was still dark when I felt a hand shaking my shoulder. I used to get up on my own.

  “Grandma?”

  I rolled over. “Tony, baby, what is it?”

  “Somebody’s stealing your roses.”

  I looked at the clock. It was five forty-five in the morning. “Are you having a bad dream?”

  He shook his head and hustled himself under the covers. “It isn’t a dream. It’s a lady. There’s a really old lady outside and she’s stealing the roses.”

  Tony’s bedroom was in the front of the house, just above the roses. “What does she look like?” I asked cautiously.

  “A witch.”

  I was up and in my bathrobe in a heartbeat, a fluffy pink chenille number that Mort bought me for my birthday on a year I had hoped for something romantic.

  “Don’t go down there,” he cried. “She’ll do something awful.”

  “Not a chance, baby. I know who it is. It’s a friend of mine. She’s just going to borrow the roses. I just want to go down and say hello to her.”

  “It’s too early.”

  “You’re absolutely right. I thought she was coming later. You sleep in my bed and I’ll come up in just a minute and we’ll sleep in together.”

  Again, I was running down the stairs, running through the door and into the yard. I had forgotten my slippers and the grass was cold and wet with dew between my toes.

  The old bat had attached my hose to my spigot, something I had yet to do this season, and was watering the roses. It was too early for blooms, but they had their leaves already and some nice little buds. I could see it all there, a spade, two empty, giant-size boxes of kosher salt. She had to use kosher.

  “Hey,” I said. “Turn my goddamn hose off!”

  She looked good for almost ninety, still tall and thin with a bunch of steel-wool hair. She was a little stooped, but then she had been digging. She looked at me with utter contempt, like I was coming into her yard instead of the other way around. “What are you doing up so early?” she said. “Rosemans are a lazy bunch, everybody knows that.”

  I ripped the hose out of her hand and threw it back into the boxwoods still running. I didn’t care how old she was, I was going to take her out. “Get away from my flowers. Get away from my family.” Since my yard, like all Somerville yards, was about the size of a half bath, I was very much in her face.

  “No, you get away from my family, you tart.” She took her bony finger and she poked it into a soft spot beneath my collarbone in a way that actually hurt quite a bit. You could tell she had poked a lot of people in this exact spot in her lifetime and she knew just where to aim. There was a blue Dodge idling in front of my house and when the old bat poked me, out flies yet another Cacciamani boy, this one not quite as big as the other two, which ruined my theory of the expanding sons.

  “Hey, you,” he said, raising his voice to wake every neighbor who had dared to sleep with their window open on a cool spring night. “You get your hands off my grandmother!”

  Old woman Cacciamani smiled and folded her arms, her rottweiler boy bounding up on me.

  “Do you have eyes?” I said. “Do you see who is poking who here?”

  “Whom,” the old woman said. “Who is poking whom.” She turned to Wolf Boy. “It’s appalling. They can’t even speak.”

  “Please,” I said. “Both of you, stay exactly where you are. Make yourselves comfortable on my lawn. This time I am calling the police.”

  “Everybody in town knows you’re a crummy florist,” the old woman said. “You probably think salt is fertilizer.”

  “Shouldn’t you be dead already?” I asked.

  “Hey,” Cacciamani Boy said, lunging again.

  She raised up the skeleton of her hand, which was draped in a layer of parchment paper so thin it let through the first rays of morning light. “Alan,” she said. “Wait for me in the car.”

  “I’m not leaving you alone with her. It isn’t safe.”

  “Alan. The car.”

  What a short leash these men lived on. He turned in miserable obedience and slunk back toward the Dodge. He didn’t get inside but leaned up against it, the muffler making a racket while going nowhere.

  “I’ve had it with you Rosemans,” she hissed. “I’m an old woman and I’ve lived to protect my family from the likes of you, your parents, and your whorish little girls. I will not leave this earth until I know that my people are safe from yours.”

  “For the remark about my daughters alone I should break your sorry neck, and I could, do not think otherwise. I am in a bad mood, Mrs. Cacciamani. You are pushing me too far.”

  “Come near my Romeo again and you’ll know all about broken necks.”

  I tried to control myself. This could be my big chance after all, my shot at the truth. “Since you have ruined my sleep, frightened my grandson, and killed my roses, will you at least do me the courtesy of explaining to me what the h
ell your problem is?”

  “You are unfit to be in the same room with my son.”

  “Fascinating. I mean before that.”

  “Your daughter tried to trap my Tony into a life of misery.”

  “Well, Tony surely contributed to that one.”

  “If he was going to marry her, it’s because she lied to him. She probably told him she was pregnant. She probably tricked him.”

  “Please,” I said, breathing deeply. “Before I am forced as a mother to cut your heart out, I want you to think back before the business with Sandy and Tony. Use the last few brain cells you have and try to think. What went on between you and my parents? I know this didn’t start in the previous generation because your crowd and my crowd did not run together in the Old Country.” My hands were shaking. Every fiber of my being wanted to grab her and throw her to the ground and jump up and down on her chest. An old woman! Where was my decency? I have never felt such seething hatred in my life.

  “Why should I tell you?”

  “Because this is madness! It’s insanity.” For the sake of my neighbors I tried to control my voice.

  She looked at me for a while. I hated to make eye contact; death seemed to be leaking off of her. “I owe you nothing.” She went to poke again, but I saw it coming this time and I stepped aside, at which point she fell face forward into my lawn.

  I backed toward my door, my hands raised as a clear sign that I had not touched her and would not touch her. Cacciamani Alan came running back and scooped the old pile of sticks up in his arms. I turned my back on the family drama, utterly disinterested as to whether she was dead or alive. I went inside and closed the door.

  chapter nine

  I OPENED SANDY’S DOOR. SHE WAS ASLEEP IN A CLOUD of curls. “Get up right now,” I said without much tenderness. “I need your help.”

  She sat up quickly. She was a mother. She was used to waking up in a hurry. “What is it?”

  “The roses,” I said. “We’ve got to move fast.”

  Nora would have rolled over and gone back to sleep, but Sandy knew by the tone of my voice that I wasn’t kidding around. This was a higher priority than whatever argument we were having. I went to the linen closet and got a stack of sheets and towels. I went to the kitchen and got a box of twenty-gallon lawn and leaf bags. I went to the garage and got two shovels. I was moving. There wasn’t much time. I didn’t know if there was any time at all.

  “What is it?” Sandy said, scurrying behind me. She slept in her sweats, so she was essentially dressed. All she had added were her glasses and her scuffs. I was still in my bathrobe. To hell with it.

  “That old Cacciamani bitch salted my roses!” When I threw open the front door I half expected the paramedics to be there performing CPR on what was left of her. I imagined the yard would be taped off as a crime scene, but in the first pleasant surprise I’ve had in I do not know when, I found that all the Cacciamanis were gone, swept away in the blue Dodge. The only trace that they had been there at all were the two empty boxes of salt. She had taken the spade, so I guessed she wasn’t terminal.

  “She salted the roses?” Sandy said, stopping to stare at me in utter horror. “That’s what Sherman did after he burned down the South. That’s like the lowest thing one human being can do to another.”

  “Sherman salted the roses?” I stuck my shovel in and heard a crunch. Sandy grabbed the other one and we were digging.

  “He didn’t just salt the roses. He salted everything. He wanted to ruin all the farmland so the people who came back after the fire wouldn’t be able to feed themselves.”

  Sandy had done very well in history. She had a long memory for facts. “Yeah, well, I think she was operating under a similar impulse.” I spread a sheet over the lawn. “Put all the dirt here. It all has to come up. We might have a chance, but it’s going to be tough. She took the time to water it in.”

  “She watered the salt?” Now Sandy was really throwing her back into the digging. She wasn’t hurt anymore. She wasn’t scared. She was mad. She was my girl. “Only a total sociopath would stop to water the salt.”

  “That’s not all,” I told her. “It turns out she salted my mother’s roses, too. Years ago. We didn’t know it, of course. We just knew they died and nothing could ever be planted in that spot again.” One good thing was the old woman wasn’t strong enough to dig very deeply. There were still full pockets of coarse kosher salt in the ground, little rocklike diamonds shining in the black dirt. You had to kind of admire her for doing it herself, for making Alan stay in the car while she marched up my walk like Sherman to repeat the crime she had committed God only knows how many times before.

  “How did your mother find out who did it?”

  “She never did. Romeo told me.” I pulled up the plants and gently loosened the dirt from their root systems, then wrapped them each in a towel. My Queen Elizabeth, my London Best, my Pink Lady.

  “You think about this, Mother. You think about the kind of family who would do this.”

  I thought about it. Eight mature rosebushes wrapped in towels on my lawn. I thought about it while I dug an even deeper hole beneath where the bushes had been to get out any salt that might have trickled down deep. The ground was heavy and wet and I felt like I was digging a grave. It gave me some perverse satisfaction to think of it as the old lady’s grave. “I’m thinking about it, Sandy. I’m thinking about very little else.”

  When we felt we had dug wide enough and deep enough to ensure clear margins, we went to the garage and began lugging out fifty-pound bags of dirt and fertilizer. As a florist I get incredible deals on these things; distributors sometimes give them to me as an incentive. We loaded up the ground with the best dirt money could buy. Then I rinsed off the roses’ roots in the street just for good measure and together Sandy and I planted them all back again. By the time it was over we were mud-caked, exhausted, and proud. The children, tired out from their night of fun, were still asleep. Sandy came to me and hugged me for a long time.

  “She didn’t win,” I said.

  “The grocery store is full of salt,” Sandy said.

  “Then I’ll dig them up as many times as I have to.”

  “What are you going to do, Mother?” Sandy said. We sat down together on the front porch, too tired to make it inside. “Really, what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said. I want to try and see it your way.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  Sandy looked down the street in both directions, maybe to see if we were really alone, if there wasn’t another one lurking in the hedge. “Did Mr. Cacciamani say anything about Tony?” she asked tentatively.

  Maybe this would hurt her, maybe it wouldn’t. I didn’t know anymore. All I was sure of was that I shouldn’t lie to Sandy about anything. “He never got married. He’s in Ecuador giving out vaccines.” I reached over and took her filthy hand in mine. “Romeo said he was so sorry about what he had done to break you up. He said that Tony had really loved you, that he never got over you.”

  Sandy kept her head down for a minute, and I didn’t know if this was going to start her crying again. “I know this is terrible of me,” she said finally. “But I think that’s the nicest thing that anyone has ever said.”

  Saturdays were always a juggling act. The store tended to be packed for the first half of the day and utterly dead after two o’clock. Usually we just brought Tony and Sarah with us, and if one of them had a party or a play date (I could not believe the social calendar these children had; Sandy actually had to write all their engagements down to avoid double-booking), then one of us would drive them over and hurry back to work. I liked having the kids in the store. It’s like taking children to restaurants or on planes or anyplace else where other people are loath to see them. If you do it right from the start and make it part of their normal lives, they were usually very well behaved. Certainly I had grown up in this flower shop, and I knew tha
t sitting in a corner for hours wrapping florist tape around wire gave me no end of pleasure. Tony liked to work in the back. The more tasks you gave him, the happier he was. While he was perfectly willing to sweep the floors and unpack boxes of ribbon, nothing gave him a sense of purpose like filling up stik-piks, which he accomplished to absolute perfection. What he wanted to do was strip the thorns off of roses, but I was twelve before my father let me have a knife. Sarah, on the other hand, was an up-front girl. She reveled in speaking to strangers. I believe that “May I help you?” was her first complete sentence. People were very charmed. That kid could have sold water to fish. When there were no customers around, she would check all the plants for dead leaves. She pinched them off gently, carefully, and stuck them in her pockets.

  The four of us worked briskly. Sandy and I were both invigorated by our morning’s triumph over the salt and our own tenuous reconnection. People loved to ask us questions about working together: “Is that your mother?” “Is this your daughter?” “Three generations? How wonderful!” This morning we all beamed our answers. “Yes, she is!” “Oh, she’s pretty incredible, all right.” “I’m very proud of her, yes.”

  But even in the midst of all the good feelings, I could not help noticing the man who was parked in an older black Ford across the street. He would sit there for a while and then drive away for an hour. When I thought he was gone for good, I would look up and there he would be again, sitting in his car reading. From time to time he got out and walked up and down the street a ways, but he never got out of sight of the shop. He’d stretch up on his toes and roll his shoulders, then he’d feed a couple quarters into the meter and get back in his car for more reading. Then he drove away again, then he came back. He was a heavy man in a black raincoat with a full head of close cropped silver hair. He looked Italian.

  Sandy didn’t see him. I know that for sure because if she had, she would have called the police. After days of threatening to call the police myself, I knew there was no point in doing it now. As much as I knew that man was there for me, I couldn’t bring myself to call and complain about someone who was parking, parking with an unexpired meter. As the shoppers came in and the traffic picked up, car after car would pull up behind him and turn their blinker on, waiting for him to pull out. But the man in black just stuck his arm out the window and waved them around.