Julie and Romeo

by Jeanne Ray

  “Well, at least you know how it feels,” I said.

  Sandy cleared her throat. “Mom, Dad, you know this is fascinating for me, but if you don’t mind, I think I’m going to go now.” Somehow she had made it all the way over to the door without our noticing.

  “Ah, honey,” Mort said, “you shouldn’t get so touchy. Your mom and I are just talking.”

  “Talk all you want,” Sandy said, “I just don’t want to hear it.”

  She went through the door like a bullet, setting the bell off into a veritable symphony of jangles. I stood and watched her pack of curls bounce away in the sunlight. Sandy’s hair went a long way toward giving her levity. No matter how hard she tried to storm away, she always bounced.

  “Sandy’s right,” I said, “we shouldn’t be talking like this, especially not in front of her.”

  But Mort just waved his hand. “Both of those girls need to toughen up. They’re too sensitive.”

  “Nora needs to toughen up?”

  “You don’t understand Nora. She’s all jelly on the inside.”

  I had certainly never considered that possibility before, and I wasn’t sure I liked the picture. “Maybe I don’t understand.” I went over and moved two pots of hydrangeas out of the late-morning sun. “But you’re not the one to explain it to me.” I stopped and looked at Mort, my husband for more than half my lifetime. Mort, whom I had known at twenty. Mort, who to this day believed I had lost my virginity to him. “Mort, just go, okay? We’re only going to get into a horrible fight. We’ve about gotten to the point where there’s some serious water under the bridge between us. We’ve both gotten on with our lives. What’s the good of opening things up again, fighting over the flower shop or the girls? We’ve already had all those fights. If you go now, you and Lila can have a nice vacation in Boston. See the kids, don’t see me, tell Nora whatever you want to tell her. That isn’t such a bad deal, is it?”

  “So you’ll stay away from the Cacciamani, is that what you’re telling me?”

  I sank down into the little wicker chair. “How in the world could that be what I’m telling you?”

  “Because that’s what this whole thing is about. Not the store and not the girls. Your father didn’t keep his promise to me, but I’m keeping my promise to him. He told me that Rosemans and Cacciamanis had to keep away from each other. It was my job to make sure they did. You know that whole business with Sandy nearly broke your parents’ hearts. I know it took five years off your father’s life.”

  “I told you not to tell them.”

  “You don’t understand the way the world works, Jules. This Cacciamani bastard isn’t just some guy I don’t get along with. I’ve seen him operate for years, first with his old man and then with his rotten pack of boys behind him. These aren’t your average bad people. They’re despicable. I think they’re probably mafia.”

  “The Flower Mafia, Mort? Give me a break. What did the Cacciamanis ever do to you? Do you even have any idea what this whole feud is about?”

  “What it’s about?” Mort said. “What it’s about? Julie, what rock have you been living under all these years? It’s about business. It’s about them smearing our name all over town, saying we used old flowers for weddings. Saying we went to the cemetery and picked up our bouquets after funerals, for Christ’s sake. They kept me out of Rotary. They used some pull to keep us out of the phone book one year. The phone book! Do you even know what that means? And like I said, it didn’t start with Romeo. Not hardly. It goes back to his old man and that evil, evil bag he was married to, may they rot in hell.”

  “Not so fast. She isn’t dead yet.”

  “Is that possible?” Mort shrugged. “Then they’re waiting for her. They’re sharpening up the pitchforks. Those people undermined us in every way that was possible. They’d call our big accounts and say we had canceled, that they were going to be doing the flowers. And God forbid a Monday morning ever rolled by when I wasn’t here to meet the shipment. Every rose in the bunch would have its head twisted off.”

  Okay, that one I believed. I had seen a Cacciamani behead a plant before. “So if this is true, some of it, any of it, how many of those exact same things did my dad do right back to them? And what did you do? Do you expect me to believe the Cacciamanis threw all the punches and the Rosemans stood there and took it?”

  Mort looked like he couldn’t possibly be hearing me right. Normally I’d be upset if I didn’t have any customers on a Monday morning, but today I was relieved. “Is that what you want to believe? Is that what you’d want your family to do, never hurt your precious Romeo? Of course I went after them. So did your folks. When we got hit, we hit back. That’s called life, Julie.”

  “Life, fine, but then after a couple of generations who throws the first punch? Are you reacting or are you going out there to nail them?”

  “What in the hell difference does it make? These are Cacciamanis we’re talking about. All that matters is that we get them before they get us.”

  “But don’t you see, Mort? It’s a game. They played dirty, we played dirty. Everybody hates everybody. But if we decide to stop it, if both sides choose not to fight anymore, then the game is over. It’s that simple.”

  “That simple if you were playing with fair-minded people, which you’re not. Consider a hypothetical here. Say Sandy started writing letters to a murderer in prison. Say after some time she came to us and said, ‘Mom, Dad, Spike has changed and he’s a wonderful guy now and I’m going to marry him in prison.’ Wouldn’t you jump in front of a train to try and stop that one?”

  I wanted to say that I would trust my daughter’s good judgment, but the scenario didn’t seem completely implausible to me. “Yes, but if what you’re saying—”

  “What I’m saying is that love blinds us.” For a second his voice was soft. He came over and leaned against the counter. Mort looked like he was as tired out by this whole thing as I was. “We don’t always see the whole picture. That’s why the people who love us, the people who are responsible for us, have to step in and save us sometimes.”

  “Oh, Mort, I don’t expect you to understand this, but I don’t need saving. When you ran off with Lila, I thought the same thing. I didn’t believe she wanted what was best for you. But it was your life and you were entitled to your own mistakes.”

  “I’m not going to let this drop, Julie.”

  “You’re going to have to. You live in Seattle, and sooner or later you have to go home. I really don’t want to fight with you. I just want you to go.”

  Mort sighed and looked around the shop. Without a moment’s hesitation he picked up the best pot of purple cyclamen from a bunch of pots on a low platform and put it next to the cash register. “Got to get them up to eye level. You know that Lila and I have a shop now. At first I didn’t think it was right, I thought I needed to move on to something else, but I’ll tell you, you can’t walk away from flowers, not after you’ve been doing it your whole life. It gets in your blood.”

  I asked him how business was doing.

  “It’s a trade-off. A lot more money out there, but it’s all a lot more expensive, too. One fancy party for Microsoft and we make more money than this store brought in in a month. Lila picked up on the business fast. She has a real good head for flowers.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  Mort went back to the cooler and pulled out the bucket of Siberian irises. “You should be moving these.”

  “I just got them today.”

  “Irises just don’t last. You have to turn them over.”

  I wanted to stop him, but he was right. Besides, it was a relief not to be fighting for a minute.

  Mort put his hands on his hips and surveyed the store, the lord of all he saw. “This is a great place, do you know that? The space, the light. You couldn’t find a place like this in Seattle. It could use some updating, but the whole feel of it … I always had a real connection here. From the first time you brought me in, I really believed that one day
this was all going to be mine. I loved this shop.”

  “I know you did.”

  “Let me see the books, Julie. I know you’re running the whole thing into the ground.”

  “It’s my store now. Forget about it.”

  “I know it’s your store, but I still have feelings for the place. I’m not asking for so much. Just give me a couple of hours.”

  “Look, Mort, I’m trying to get you out of my business, not deeper into it.”

  Mort rubbed his eyes. “If the place was on fire, would you turn away my bucket of water?”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “No, you don’t be stupid. I might be able to help you put out the fire. Why don’t you try loving Roseman’s more than you hate me.”

  It was only my vanity that stopped me. I wanted Mort to think I was shooting out the lights. But the truth was that he was great with the books and I was turning them into soup. He knew things about working out orders that I had never come close to mastering. He was right, we were going down. I did need help. “Okay,” I said finally, waving him back toward the desk. “You know where everything is, anyway. Nothing has changed.”

  “Oh, Julie,” he said, with what I thought was some sadness in his voice. “Everything’s changed.”

  chapter fifteen

  THE ONE GOOD THING ABOUT HAVING MORT LOOK over the books was that it took his mind off of Romeo. “Jesus!” he would yell while I was waiting on customers.

  The customers would look toward the back of the store. Some appeared frightened, others were simply confused. “He’s trying to move the desk,” I said calmly. “It’s very heavy.”

  At one point Mort tore open the curtain that separated the front of the shop from the back. “What are you trying to do?” he said. “Kill us? Lose everything?”

  “Kill me,” I said, pointing to my chest. “Not us. It’s mine to lose.”

  “Well, congratulations on your newfound liberty because you’ve lost it.”

  “How was I supposed to know what to do? For thirty-four years you never let me in the store, and then you up and run off to Seattle with Lila. There wasn’t time to take a course in accounting. I had to get to work.”

  “That’s why you pay people, Julie. They’re called accountants. They’re for people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing.”

  “With what, Mort? You got the money, remember? That was the deal. The house is mortgaged up to the gutters. I’ve got a loan on the shop.”

  “You took a loan against Roseman’s!”

  I hadn’t meant to tell him, but in the next thirty minutes or so he would have found out, anyway. I felt my eyes welling up with tears. I was overcome with shame and guilt because I knew what he was saying. I had mortgaged my parents’ store, borrowed against the very thing they had worked their whole lives to pay off. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “You should have called me.” Mort was seething. Tears had no effect on him.

  “I wasn’t going to call you. You know that.”

  Mort closed the curtain again and went back to work. I did a little watering and made a note to myself to order more floral life. What would happen if I lost Roseman’s? Who would I be without the flower shop? Nora was always going to be fine, and she didn’t care a thing about flowers anyway, but I wanted it to be there for Sandy if she wanted it. She might not want to be a nurse or she might get tired of being a nurse someday. She could make the business work. I wanted it to be there so that one day she could give it to Tony and Sarah. They’d make a perfect combination. Tony would run a tight ship in the back and Sarah would charm the socks off of everybody up front. To think I could have frittered away the only legacy my family had out of sheer incompetence, it absolutely killed me. I went into the back. “Just forget about it,” I said to Mort. “You can’t fix it. Go home to Lila. She must wonder where in the hell you are.”

  Mort didn’t look up. He was punching on a calculator just as fast as his fingers would go. He had a pencil behind each ear. “Leave me alone.”

  “I’m serious, Mort. Forget it. It isn’t your problem.”

  “It is my problem. Now get out there and sell some goddamn flowers.”

  I closed the curtain. I felt very weepy now. The way I saw it, I had lost or would eventually lose my marriage, my business, my daughters, and Romeo. Somewhere my parents were looking down on me and shaking their heads in despair.

  Despite the lack of flowers, the lack of Sandy, and my generally glum demeanor, business was pretty good. At one o’clock Mort asked me to go out and get him a sandwich and said he’d watch the store. I didn’t even have to ask him about lunch. I knew full well he wanted roast beef with horseradish on an onion roll, extra pickles, no chips, and a diet Sprite.

  I walked the extra block to the sandwich shop that was careful to trim the fat.

  “Why can’t Lila ever get this straight?” Mort wondered aloud, looking into the sack. Then he went back to work.

  I bought myself a yogurt but then didn’t even have the appetite for that. I stuck it back in the cooler behind some daisies and resumed my worrying.

  There was always a convenient lull around two when Sandy usually left, and then a short flurry of activity from five to six when husbands and boyfriends stopped in for a ready-made bouquet on their way home from work. To make a sweeping generalization, women bought flowers during the day and men bought them once the sun started to go down. From two to five was usually when I worked on the books, but Mort was still back there, swearing and moaning under his breath. Today the bell rang at two-thirty and in walked a very nervous looking Romeo Cacciamani. He was wearing gray pants and a nice white shirt with rolled-up sleeves. He looked almost unbearably handsome.

  “My God,” I said, my voice automatically dropping to a whisper. “What are you doing here?”

  “Your friend Gloria said this was when Sandy went to pick up her kids from school. Is this all right? Is Sandy here?”

  I glanced behind me and moved quickly to the front of the store. I kissed him. I couldn’t help it. I was so glad and so sorry to see him. “She isn’t here, but you have to go. Really. She could be back any second.”

  “I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t have come. I’ve been driving around the block for half an hour telling myself not to come. But I had to see you.”

  “I loved the vegetables.”

  “Did you? I just didn’t know what to send. I wanted to buy you something big, like, say, California, but there wasn’t time.” He put his arms around me. It felt like heaven. “What about dinner tomorrow?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I can work something out, but you have to go now.” I couldn’t believe I was getting the words out of my mouth. I wanted him to stay and stay. I wanted to tell him everything that was happening. I wanted to tell him everything that had ever happened to me in my life.

  “Is everything all right? You seem so upset.”

  “It’s a stressful time,” I said, and then, as if to prove my point, Mort came out from behind the curtain with three spiral ledgers. He dropped them.

  “Cacciamani!” he yelled. “Get your lousy mitts off my wife.”

  Wife? I thought. Where was Lila?

  “What’s he doing here?” Romeo asked, his tone more curious than alarmed. He kept his mitts firmly on me.

  “None of your goddamn business what I’m doing here. Now get out before I set you on the curb in pieces.”

  Romeo seemed to smile a little in spite of himself. “I haven’t heard that one in a long time.”

  “I swear to God, Cacciamani, get out of here now. You do not want to get into it with me.”

  “Of course I don’t want to get into it with you. What in the hell is your problem, Mort?”

  “My problem? My problem? You’re my problem, buddy. You always have been. Except when I was here, you knew enough to stay away. Now I’m gone and you’re sniffing around my wife, ruining my business.” Mort shook the few papers he was still holding in his hands. Somehow
it seemed the two problems had become conflated in his mind. Now it was Romeo’s fault that Roseman’s was sinking, Romeo’s fault that I wasn’t sitting at home. The Red Sox’s inability to play in the World Series—that was probably Romeo’s fault as well.

  Romeo scratched his head. “Your business? Your wife?”

  “Well, they sure as hell aren’t yours.”

  “Listen, Mort, enough with the tough-guy talk. We never got along. So what? This isn’t a turf war.”

  “This is a turf war, if that’s your terminology. I want you off my turf.”

  Romeo took a small step away from me, toward Mort. “You don’t live here anymore, unless I’ve gotten the story wrong.”

  “Let me tell you, Cacciamani, you’ve got everything wrong.” Mort came out from behind the counter.

  “Look,” I said. “This is a ridiculous mistake. Mort is visiting and Romeo is leaving. Let’s just drop it.”

  “I’m not leaving,” Romeo said. He looked somehow mesmerized, as if he was staring into the swinging watch of a hypnotist and couldn’t turn away. Mort was taller than Romeo, but Romeo was built like somebody who could throw an ox through a wall, or at least he could have twenty years ago.

  Mort nodded, the veins coming up. “Well, good. That’s really fine, because you’re the one I’ve been wanting to talk to, anyway. You just saved me a trip.”

  “Mort,” I said in a tone used to soothe nervous Doberman pinschers. “Settle down.”

  “Stay out of this, Julie. You,” he said, pointing at Romeo, “need to stay away from my family. I thought I had made that clear in the past, but maybe we need to go over it again. You stay away from Julie. You stay away from my girls. You stay away from my store.”

  “You can’t tell him to stay away from me, Mort, or the store.” It wasn’t that I was completely against him at that moment. He had spent the day trying to rescue my books. He was tired and hugely frustrated, and I liked to think that had this meeting taken place at another time it might have gone better.