Julie and Romeo

by Jeanne Ray

  “I can’t fight,” I said. “I can’t keep on fighting. I’ve lost. I screwed things up enough on my own. This just polishes off what I started.”

  Gloria sat down on the floor and put her head between her knees. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  I put a sign in the window. ON VACATION. I had to make one up. I had never closed the store for a vacation before. Then I left a phone message for the gardenia bride. Poor, poor bride.

  I was going to tell Sandy what had happened when I got home, but she was on her way out the door to Nora’s with the kids as I was coming in. “Dad’s doing really well,” she said. “He and Lila are going home in the morning. I’m going to go over and say good-bye. Do you want to come? I know he’d like to see you. He’s asked about you a hundred times.”

  Tomorrow was Sunday. I didn’t have to tell her about the shop right now. “I don’t think so, honey. It seems like it would be better if I sat this one out.”

  “Come with us,” Sarah said, and held up her arms to be picked up. She had very little interest in walking anywhere. I picked her up.

  “You say good-bye to him for me, okay?”

  “You’d come if Lila wasn’t there,” Tony said.

  “Probably not. I’m awfully tired tonight.” I kissed the kids and helped them into light jackets. “Sandy, ask Nora to come by on her way home from the airport tomorrow. I’d like to talk to her.”

  “Another family conference?” Sandy asked suspiciously.

  “Not exactly. I just think I’m a little out of touch. Ask her to come over in the morning.”

  After they left I made myself a bag of microwave popcorn for dinner. I sat cross-legged on top of the kitchen counter eating the kernels one at a time and washing it down with a bottle of white wine. When that was over, I went to bed and went to sleep.

  It was after ten o’clock when the phone rang, and for a brief instant I was hopeful. But it was Mort.

  “Jules? Can you hear me?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why are you whispering?”

  “Sandy and the kids left a little while ago and everybody is going to bed. I’m down in the kitchen. I told Lila I wanted a glass of milk.”

  “You hate milk.”

  “She doesn’t know that. Listen, Julie, I was sorry I didn’t get to see you to say good-bye. We never seem to do a good job at ending things.”

  “Yeah, well, I wanted to say I was sorry about your head. I think it was largely your own fault, but I know that if it wasn’t for me it wouldn’t have happened.”

  “I threw the pot at the guy.”

  I was stunned into silence. What he said sounded almost like an admission of something, and that wasn’t Mort’s style.

  “Are you there?” he said.

  “I’m here.”

  “It’s just that I’ve had a lot of time to think, even with my sore brain and everything. I haven’t had this much time to think since I had my gallbladder out.”

  “So what do you think?”

  Now Mort was silent, but I was in bed in the dark. I didn’t mind waiting. “It’s been nice, being back. I’ve liked seeing the girls so much, seeing Tony and Sarah. You have them all the time, you probably don’t even notice, but they’re great.”

  “I notice.”

  “I just thought if things were more okay between us, then it would be easier for me to come back and see them. We don’t have to be in some huge fight all the time, do we?”

  I told him we did not.

  “That’s great, Jules. You’re a real trouper. And the Cacciamani stuff—”

  “Don’t even go there.”

  “Really, I have to say it. I think the guy’s an asshole, but I understand that it’s your business. We’re all entitled to throw away our own lives, right?”

  Sandy must have been working on him in his reduced state. It sounded like the same sort of logic she had come up with. “Don’t worry about it, Mort. Romeo and I are through. Nobody bounces back from a fight like that.”

  “I bounced back,” Mort said.

  “Well, you’re tougher than the rest of us.” Downstairs I heard Sandy and the kids come in the back door.

  “Shh, quiet,” Sandy said. “Don’t wake up Grandma.”

  “About the store,” he said, and I felt my heart freeze inside my chest. “I got a lot of work done before the fight, but you need to see an accountant. I’ll pay for it. I know you don’t want me to, but that store matters to me a lot. I don’t want to see it go under just because you don’t know what you’re doing.”

  My eyes filled up with tears. Mort would hear the truth later from one of the girls. As for tonight, let him have a good night’s sleep, let him think that Romeo may not be the worst thing in the world, let him get on that plane tomorrow for Seattle. “Okay,” I said. I had forgotten to pull the shades down on the windows and now I could see the moon setting off the tender spring leaves on the trees. It was a beautiful thing.

  “I don’t mean to say you haven’t done a good job. You’ve kept the place afloat. And the flowers look great. It’s just the books.”

  “I understand.”

  “I should go,” he said. “They’re going to find me down here. They’ve kept real tabs on me. You’d think I was an old man.”

  Then the tears were running down my cheeks. “Good night, Mort,” I said.

  “Good night, Jules.”

  When I opened my eyes and looked at the clock, it was ten-thirty in the morning and the room was flooded in light. I had not slept until ten-thirty since I was in junior high school. I leaned over and checked my watch on the nightstand, thinking the clock must be wrong, but it wasn’t. I got up, brushed my teeth, and got dressed. It was Sunday morning and the kids were downstairs watching cartoons.

  “We kept the volume down,” Tony said. “You’re sleeping.”

  I waved to them and wandered into the kitchen. Nora was there at the table with Sandy and they were drinking coffee and talking.

  “God, did I oversleep.” I rubbed my hands over my face. “I’m sorry I kept you waiting. You should have come up and gotten me.”

  Nora shook her head. She looked positively happy, as if the past was truly something that could be forgotten. Maybe she was just glad to have gotten rid of her houseguests. “I just walked in from the airport. Besides, you needed to get some rest.”

  “Did Lila and your dad get off okay?” I got myself a cup of coffee and joined them.

  “Not a hitch. Dad even made a fuss about carrying his own suitcase.”

  “Good,” I said. “That’s good.”

  “So now life gets back to normal,” Nora said. She reached over and gave me an uncharacteristic squeeze on the wrist.

  I looked at both my girls, smart and good-looking girls, girls who I loved even as they drove me insane. I wanted to remember them in the last peaceful moment I was going to see for a while. “Not exactly.”

  Both of them set their coffee cups down. They clicked against the table at the exact same instant. “I knew it,” Sandy said.

  “It’s Roseman’s,” I told them slowly because I didn’t want to repeat myself. “There were a lot of problems to begin with.”

  “What happened?” Sandy said. The two words were like heavy stones thrown off the side of a building.

  “All our flowers have been cut off. I’ve called every supplier I could think of. No one will deliver to us anymore.”

  “How is that possible?” Nora asked.

  “Cacciamani,” Sandy said. “They’ve ruined us. That’s it, isn’t it? They’ve frozen us out.”

  “I don’t know that,” I said.

  “But that’s it, isn’t it?” Sandy stood up from the table and walked over and closed the kitchen door so Tony and Sarah wouldn’t hear us. “You know what’s happened. You can figure this out.”

  “I can figure it out.”

  I wouldn’t have expected this. Sandy was ready to toss the kitchen table through the
window, but Nora was just sitting there staring into her coffee cup. “We’ll get around it,” Sandy said. “We are not going down over this. I don’t care if I have to drive to New Hampshire every morning and bring the flowers back myself. They are not going to close us down.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I know!” Sandy said, and hit the table with her fist. “Damn it, Mother, snap out of it. You’re going to have to fight them.”

  “We don’t have to fight them,” Nora said, taking a sip of her coffee. “We already won.”

  Sandy stopped and looked at her sister. She pulled her hair back behind her ears.

  “How did we win?” I said.

  Nora didn’t look smug. I’ll give her that much. There was nothing self-congratulatory in her tone. She just laid out the facts like she would on any other deal she had closed. She was a powerful businesswoman, my older daughter. I forgot that sometimes. “I bought the Cacciamanis’ building. I did some research. It turns out they never owned the place. They had rented it all these years. They had a great deal. A classic old Somerville deal where the owner seemed to forget they were there and never raised the rent.”

  “You bought the building?” Sandy said, sitting back down in her chair.

  “I sent them the eviction notice yesterday. They have two weeks to get out. The way I see it, they probably don’t have anything saved. There are too many kids for that. They’ll never be able to find another place for what they were paying. They’ll stumble, they’ll fall, they’ll never get up.”

  “Jesus,” Sandy said. “I hope you never get that mad at me.”

  “It’s business,” Nora said.

  I listened to her calculations. What surprised me was that I didn’t feel angry at Nora. I had to be fair. If I could see the reasoning behind Joe Cacciamani’s attempt to destroy me, then I had to be able to see the logic of Nora bringing down Romeo. This was where we had come to. This was who we were.

  “Come on,” I said. “Get the kids and get in the car.”

  “Where are we going?” Sandy said.

  “The Cacciamanis’.”

  “I’m not going,” Nora said calmly, and put both hands around her coffee cup as if that would anchor her there.

  “We’re all going,” I said. “All of us together. This is the last absolute dictate I will issue as your mother, but you are going.”

  Nora sat there for a minute and thought it over. I thought there was going to be a fight. Instead she walked to the sink, rinsed out her cup, and dried her hands. “All right,” she said.

  “Why do we have to go?” Tony said from the other room.

  “Because there aren’t any adults to stay home with you,” Sandy said.

  “Who are these people again?”

  “Friends of Grandma’s,” she said. “Sort of.”

  chapter eighteen

  SOMERVILLE, LIKE ROME, WAS A CITY BUILT ON SEVEN hills. I lived in Spring Hill. Romeo lived in Winter Hill. I had been to his house once before, years ago during the whole Sandy and Tony affair. There had been two meetings, one at our house, one at theirs. He lived on Marshall Street. I remembered it clearly.

  “What are you going to say?” Nora asked. Her car had been parked behind mine, so she was driving and I was in the front seat giving directions. Sandy and Tony and Sarah were in the back.

  “I just want to tell them it’s over. All the fighting, the undermining. The Roseman family is now officially out of the game.”

  “What about the building?” Nora said. “I’ve closed on it. I can’t give it back.”

  “Then you’ll rent to them. You’ll give it to them. I don’t know. You’ll figure it out. All I know is that I want us to be a certain kind of people. I want us to be decent people.” I felt a sense of lightness in my chest. In Somerville the irises and peonies were blooming with mad abandon. Everything felt so easy all of a sudden. We may not get our heart’s desire, but we could all be decent people. It absolutely had to be the answer.

  Sandy was quiet in the backseat. Tony was reading all the street signs to Sarah. Sandy must have been to this house before. She must have sneaked in a back door, an open window in the dark.

  On Marshall Street I told Nora to slow down. I was looking at all the houses. “It’s up there on the left,” Sandy said. “The one with the balloons on the mailbox.”

  “Balloons!” Sarah said. Sarah was mad for balloons.

  “Maybe they were expecting us,” Nora said.

  There was definitely something up at the Cacciamanis’. We had to drive all the way around the block to find a parking space.

  “Couldn’t we do this later?” Nora said. “When they aren’t having a party maybe?” She put the car in reverse and worked into the tight spot.

  “We’ll never come back. You’re right, the timing isn’t great, but I really think it’s now or never.” Even if we were interrupting something, we were doing so in the name of peace. They’d be happy to hear they hadn’t lost their store. That fact alone would counteract our presence at their party.

  “Never is not a bad option,” Nora said.

  “Do we have a present?” Tony asked.

  “Sort of,” Nora said, and opened up her door. “It’s called real estate.”

  Sandy and Nora and I made slow time up the block. Tony and Sarah kept racing ahead and then coming back for us.

  “Come on, come on,” they yelled, most likely figuring that where there were balloons there was usually cake. I figured we had almost no shot at the cake.

  The house was a double-decker with four units. It was a house that was meant to manage a large Catholic family. On one door there was a wreath of flowers, pink and white roses all the way around. It was so simple, so utterly charming, I knew it had to be Romeo’s. My heart rose and sank a hundred times just going up the walk.

  “I don’t know about this,” Sandy said quietly.

  “Thank you,” Nora said.

  “Are we going in or what?” Tony said. He ran ahead and pushed the doorbell three times and then ran back and stood behind us. The way we froze to the sidewalk, you would have thought he had pulled the pin out of the grenade.

  “Mother,” Nora said. “If you’re trying to teach me a lesson about taking responsibility for my actions, I have now learned it. Turn around with me and start running like hell.”

  I was about to agree when a tan young man I didn’t recognize swung open the door. He was wearing a pink paper hat that had 90! sticking out of the top. He had a beard and was wearing Birkenstocks, shorts, and a World Health Organization T-shirt. He looked at us for one second and then made what can only be described as a high-pitched sound of almost unbearable happiness. He ran to Sandy and picked her up by the waist. He swung her around and kissed her neck. He said her name over and over again.

  “Do we know him?” Tony said.

  “He was a friend of your mom’s a long time ago,” Nora told him.

  Tony Cacciamani put my daughter down. “My God,” he said. “How did you even know I was back? I only got here two hours ago.”

  “I didn’t know,” Sandy said. She put her hands on his chest. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. I’m so good now. You look so beautiful. You’re all grown up.” He looked at the rest of us. “Hey, Mrs. Roth. Hey, Nora.”

  “Hi, Tony,” I said. I didn’t know that Tony knew Nora. For the first time it occurred to me that my older daughter must have helped my younger daughter plan her trysts.

  “And who are you?” he said to Tony and Sarah. “Nora, are they yours?”

  “Mine,” Sandy said. There was, of course, some embarrassment in the introductions. When she had named her son Tony Anderson, she hadn’t seen Tony Cacciamani in years and figured she probably never would again.

  “Hello,” Tony said, shaking their hands. His voice was more serious now.

  “Sandy’s been divorced for three years,” Nora said. “Let’s just skip right ahead to that.”

  Tony brightened right
back up and invited us inside. For once I was grateful for Nora’s directness. “You came for my grandmother’s birthday party? Man, things really have changed since I’ve been gone.”

  “It’s Mrs. Cacciamani’s birthday?” I said.

  Tony nodded his pink hat and put his arm casually around Sandy’s shoulder, as if it had never left that spot. “Ninety today.”

  The living room was packed with Italians in party clothes, every one of them wearing pink paper hats with 90! sticking out of the top. There were tables full of sandwiches and vegetable trays. There was punch in a bowl the size of a large fish tank. There was a pink-and-white sheet cake that took up one whole card table. In the corner there was an accordion player grinding through “That’s Amore!” It was one hell of a party. Everywhere I looked people were laughing and drinking. No one seemed to notice we were there. I plowed into the room looking for Romeo and everyone I passed smiled and tried to scoot over to give me enough room to get through. They were regular people, decent people, just like we were.

  “Have you seen Romeo?” I said to a little boy at the punch table.

  “I think he’s in the kitchen,” he said, and pointed. “That way.”

  I thanked him and pressed on. I had lost my family in the crowd. I worked my way to the kitchen door.

  Plummy and her father were struggling with a bag of ice that had frozen together. The 90!s on their paper hats were touching. He didn’t look especially happy. There was a neat line of stitches in his forehead and near his lip just the way Plummy had described them. There was a plaster cast on his wrist.

  It was the moment I was most afraid of. I was afraid that he would not be glad to see me. I waited, taking a sad pleasure in watching him when he didn’t know I was there. I wondered if it was the last time I would ever see him. “Romeo,” I said.

  But Romeo looked up and when he saw me his mouth fell open and for a second he seemed to be caught just between laughing and sobbing. He smiled at me like his son had smiled at Sandy. He said my name over and over as if he wanted to hear the sound of it. He came to me and hugged me to him. He kissed me, held me out from him to look at me, then he kissed me again. “My God, you’re here!”