Kiss of the Wolf

by Jim Shepard

  “What d’you mean, out? You mean for dinner? It’s four-thirty,” she said.

  “Hold on a sec,” he said.

  “Todd?” She clapped an open palm on her thigh in frustration.

  “What’s up?” Bruno said.

  “What’s up? You got my son all day, I don’t know where he is, and now you want to go out. I gotta feed him dinner,” she said.

  “Yeah, we’re goin’ out, get something to eat,” he said. “We’d ask you along, but it’s a guys’ trip.” Todd said something she couldn’t hear. “The guys’re gonna do some talkin’,” Bruno said.

  “Bruno, let me talk to him,” she said.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” he said. “Everyone remain calm here.” His voice got faint, and she imagined he was holding the phone out to Todd. “Your mother wants to say good-bye.”

  “’Bye, Ma,” Todd said in the same faint voice.

  “He says ’bye,” Bruno said.

  “Bruno—” she said. She was holding the receiver with both hands.

  “You said you weren’t calling about Todd,” Bruno said. “So what were you calling about?”

  She raised her toes and insteps so that she stood only on her heels, and then flopped her feet back down again. “I wanted to let you know we could go somewhere sometime,” she said. “Lemme talk to him again.”

  “Your mom and I are going on a date,” she heard him say. She winced. “That’s great,” he said. “How about this Saturday?”

  She thought about it, distracted. She still wanted to head off the baseball game. “How about tomorrow night?”

  “Tomorrow night? Tomorrow night I can’t. Tomorrow night I got the baseball game with my pal Todd here.” He coughed. “She wants me to go tomorrow night,” she heard him say to Todd.

  She waited. Out the kitchen window, she could see a neighbor hefting a huge black trash bag into a can.

  “For you, we’re flexible guys,” Bruno said. “Also, because we haven’t bought the tickets yet. But it’s gonna cost you. Todd says you gotta show me a good time.”

  “I didn’t say that,” she heard Todd say.

  “Put him on,” she said.

  “I’ll pick you up tomorrow night, six o’clock,” he said. “I don’t know what we’ll do yet, but I’ll think of something. I got connections.”

  “Bruno, put Todd on,” she said.

  “See you tomorrow,” Bruno said.

  There was the woolly sound of another phone exchange. “I’ll be back around six,” Todd said.

  “You gonna be all right?” Joanie said. “You got any money?”

  “No,” Todd said.

  “Well, you keep track of what Bruno spends so I can pay him back,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. He waited.

  “You mad about giving up the baseball?” she said.

  “We’re not givin’ it up. We’re goin’ on Tuesday,” he said.

  “Tuesday?” she said. A headache she’d been aware of for a few minutes felt worse. “I thought it was tomorrow.”

  “It is tomorrow. And Tuesday. It’s a three-game series,” Todd said.

  “Put Bruno on,” she said, gritting her teeth.

  “He says he’s already out the door,” Todd said.

  “Todd—” she said.

  “We gotta go,” he said. “See you soon.” He hesitated and then hung up.

  She held the receiver away from her and pitched it toward the kitchen table. The cord pulled it off the table and across the floor. It ended up near the dog’s dish, swinging back and forth on one end. The off-the-hook beep started.

  Audrey furtively climbed the stairs, probably assuming she’d done something wrong. Joanie stood there with her arms folded until the beeping noise annoyed her enough. Then she replaced the receiver, poured herself a glass of orange juice, and ate the sandwich she had made for Todd.

  Todd didn’t come home at six. He came home at eight. Joanie was watching videotaped footage of her wedding on the VCR when he came in. She’d been digging around looking for a tape they’d made of Todd as a baby—Gary holding him on his lap when he was eight months old and drumming his arms at high speed to Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing.” They called it “doing his Gene Krupa.” She loved the way he looked up at the camera and laughed his big, short, baby laugh.

  But she hadn’t found it, digging around on the closet floor. The tape she’d found that she thought might be it turned out to be her wedding tape, made by a relative with shoes so squeaky it sounded like someone was playing with a child’s toy throughout the ceremony. Once it was on, she let it go, a little stunned by the unpleasantness of watching it again. It opened with a misspelled greeting from the filmmaker: BONA FORTUNA GARY AND JOANIE. Then there was snow and a glimpse of something involving a knife that had apparently been on the tape first. Then guests arriving. A champagne bottle. Her own back while she flounced comically for her friends. Gary’s father standing by a tree, looking glum. The guests inside the church, the video golden and grainy. Gary and his best man waiting in the priest’s chambers, holding up a hip flask and mugging. Jagged pans, a disorienting swoop past something, overexposed stained-glass windows, someone’s feet. A group of Gary’s relatives who’d come from Pennsylvania. Behind them, off by himself, Bruno, looking grim.

  “What’re you watchin’?” Todd said behind her.

  She hit the stop button on the remote like she’d been caught with pornography. The regular programming appeared, a sitcom. He looked at her suspiciously.

  “Where’ve you been?” she asked. She’d coached herself on her tone while she waited: casual but concerned. It came out a little higher pitched.

  “I told you,” he said. He left the doorway.

  She got up and followed him upstairs.

  “We went out to eat,” he said, without looking back. Audrey was following her now, too, the three of them trooping up single file. He walked into his room and swung the door half shut behind him. She pushed it open.

  “Ma,” he said.

  She had her hands on her hips. “You were eating all this time?” she said.

  “I was with Bruno.”

  “I was worried,” she said. The dog sidled by her into the room and walked over to Todd.

  “Because I was late, or because I might tell someone?” he said.

  The dog lowered her head and walked back out of the room.

  He looked away. Joanie was staring at him. “Don’t you talk to me like that,” she finally said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He turned on the stereo atop his dresser and sat at his desk. There was already a record on the turntable.

  She watched the tone arm go up, over, and down. Some music she didn’t recognize started.

  “Did you talk about that at all?” she said. “Did he ask you questions about that night?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Todd.”

  “He didn’t. I’d tell you. Okay? I’m as guilty as you are.”

  “Todd,” she said, shaking her head.

  “I wanna listen to this.”

  She stood there. The music was turned way down.

  “Where’d you go?” she asked.

  “Spada’s.”

  She folded her arms. “You were eating all this time?”

  He turned up the stereo. She crossed the room to it and hit the cue button. The tone arm lifted.

  “Ma,” he said.

  “I said, were you eating all this time?”

  “I had to wait while he talked to this guy.”

  Outside the window, somebody’s starter motor made a grinding noise. “Who?” she asked. She was afraid she already knew.

  “Joey Distefano,” he said.

  She sat down on his bed. “Todd,” she said. “Listen to me. Something’s going on. I don’t know what.”

  “Are you gonna do this every time I go out now?” Todd shouted.

  She stared at him, her hands together in her lap. She closed her mouth.

  He shook his
head and wandered around his room. “Could I have my room?” he said. “Could I have my privacy?”

  “Todd,” she said. “This guy and Bruno are trying to find out what happened that night. I’m not sure why.”

  “Maybe they just wanna know who killed their friend,” Todd said.

  She was shaking. She took a breath. “Something else is going on. You can’t talk to them about it. You understand?”

  He went to the window and leaned on his outspread arms and lowered his head.

  “Do you understand?” she said, raising her voice.

  “Yes.”

  She sat there, unsatisfied. She wanted to let him alone. “You didn’t talk to him about that night at all?”

  He started to cry.

  She went to him immediately and tried to get an arm around him, but he pulled away. “Okay, honey, okay, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said, and backed out of the room. She was in the hall only a second before he shut the door behind her with a bang.

  He was gone the next morning when she got up. His bike wasn’t in the garage. She thought about calling Brendan’s house but imagined getting his mother again. The dog apparently had eaten something outside and had thrown it up on the living-room rug, a discreet greenish mess. She spent a half hour cleaning it up.

  Her mother called and invited her out to the mall. She didn’t want to go. Nina stopped by, anyway, and talked her into it. For three hours they wandered around. Joanie sniffed her hand occasionally, sure she could smell both the ammonia and the dog barf. They had lunch at Taco Bell. Across the atrium, she spotted Joey Distefano out of uniform, sitting by himself and having an ice cream.

  When they got home Todd was still out, but he’d been back. A plastic knife covered with peanut butter was in the sink. Otherwise, he’d cleaned up after himself. Nina asked where he was. Joanie said she didn’t know.

  They sat around talking for an hour. Joanie made coffee. Her mother sniffed the air and looked around uncertainly. You could still smell a little of the vomit. She sniffed her coffee cup.

  She asked what Joanie was up to tonight. Joanie shook her head, like it wasn’t even worth talking about. She didn’t mention the date with Bruno. She didn’t need to go through that. If her mother called later, let her find out.

  Her mother talked about what a pain in the ass her father had been lately. She asked whether Joanie had made any progress with the lawyer about Gary. She meant about instituting divorce proceedings and getting some child support in the meantime. Joanie answered with shrugs and grunts and sat there preoccupied until her mother finally left, saying she had things to do.

  Yet she went to the window and watched her mother’s car back into the street and felt nostalgic for her visit. She caught her reflection in the window glass: an unfriendly face, eyes she didn’t recognize.

  She made pasta fagioli for Todd and left it on the stove. All he’d have to do was warm it up.

  She went upstairs to get ready. She was tired, and defeated by her inability to even decide on what to worry about most. She held her hand in front of her to watch it shake and understood she was also a little excited.

  In the shower, she gave the conditioner extra time to work. It seemed to make a difference when she was drying her hair. She used a little mascara on her eyes and Coty Softest Pink on her lips. She decided on the black zip-up with the culottes and the pink flowers. She couldn’t find her shoes.

  She was ready by quarter to six. She went downstairs carefully, like the way she looked could be jarred loose.

  Todd was sitting in the kitchen. She walked in and sat down opposite him. He looked at her dress and makeup.

  “You see the pasta fazool?” she said.

  He nodded. She could feel a bleakness gathering around their day. They sat opposite each other with their hands on the table, like cardplayers without cards.

  They heard Bruno’s car pull in. This was what her life with her son had become, she thought: the two of them sitting in the kitchen, waiting for whatever happened next to happen.

  Todd’s shirt was dirty. His hair looked like a rat’s nest.

  Bruno looked great. He stood just inside the back door, like her date for the prom. She let her eyes work from his feet up, the way movie cameramen tried to be tantalizing. He was wearing a granite-colored Italian sports jacket. He was holding a bouquet of yellow roses in a white paper bag. “They were outta the red,” he said.

  “They’re great,” she said, getting up. She pulled a vase out of the cabinet for useless stuff and dumped the roses in it with some water.

  “How are you?” Bruno said to Todd. Todd sat there at the table with his back straight and his hands folded, as if to say, I’m good.

  “Let’s go,” Bruno said. “We gotta move.”

  “Where’re we going?” Joanie asked. She was trying to arrange the flowers.

  It turned out they were going to a B.B. King concert in Hartford. Bruno knew somebody who knew somebody, pulled a few strings at the last minute. First they had to go to the dealership and pick up the tickets; the guy was dropping them off there.

  “Why didn’t you go pick ’em up from the guy?” Joanie asked.

  “He owes me a favor,” Bruno said.

  They said good-bye to Todd. He was still sitting at the table, the roses spread out in front of him.

  “Don’t wait up,” Bruno said.

  “We won’t be that late,” Joanie said.

  But in the car she thought about it: the concert would probably go past eleven, and they had an hour’s ride back after that.

  “Everybody’ll still be there,” Bruno said. They climbed the ramp onto I-95. “You can meet the guys. There’s a treat.” She figured he meant at Goewey Buick.

  After he merged into traffic, he looked over at her.

  “You look very good,” he said.

  She murmured a compliment back. They went by an old Coppertone ad painted on the side of a building, a little girl’s bathing suit bottom pulled down by a terrier. The terrier’s head was missing.

  Bruno turned the radio on and then off. “Took a long time,” he said.

  She could see what a big deal this date was for him and she was touched. “Well, you blew your opportunities,” she said.

  “Ho.” He put his hand out. “Let’s back up here. Wait a second. I did not blow them. I did not blow them. What opportunities?”

  She shrugged. “Oprah says women have ways of letting you know.” Why was she saying this? What was the point of teasing him?

  “Where’d you hear that?” he asked.

  “Oprah,” she said.

  “Oprah,” he said grimly.

  “Oprah knows everything.”

  “Oprah knows dick. Pardon my French.”

  They got off 95 at the Kings Highway exit. At the bottom of the ramp a woman was peering at the stop sign from a few feet away through a camera with a huge lens.

  “This woman’s takin’ pictures of the stop sign,” Bruno said as they pulled up alongside. He looked at Joanie, and she shrugged. He rolled his window down. “Excuse me. What’s the interest here?” he asked the woman. She ignored him.

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” he said. “I’m sure I can’t say.” She looked at him briefly and went back to her camera, moving around to get different angles. “Maybe you see something I don’t,” he said. “Maybe it’s me getting jaded. This is possible.” He waited for her to say something, and then he drove off.

  “You like B.B. King?” he asked her.

  She said she did.

  At Goewey Buick three or four guys were standing and sitting around waiting for customers. She was introduced. One of them arched his eyebrows when he was shaking her hand and said, “Va-va-va-voom.”

  “Somebody leave an envelope for me here?” Bruno asked. The guys said Cifulo had it. Cifulo was out. “Maybe he left it in your office,” one of them said.

  They went to look. His office was partitioned with glass off the showroom floor.
While he rummaged through his metal desk Joanie looked around. Someone had pinned a Goewey Buick circular to the bulletin board next to her. She read a correction printed in a box under the headline, OOPS!: “Last week’s circular incorrectly states, ‘Free leather travel case with any test drive.’ The correct copy should read, ‘Free daily calendar with any purchase of a Skylark Executive Edition.’”

  The office was a mess. There was a big Mr. Coffee on the file cabinet, with a couple of mugs and torn blue packets of Equal around it. The garbage can was spattered with something and piled with little metal-handled Chinese takeout boxes. One still had the chopsticks sticking out of it. She straightened a framed poster with the title MY FIRST MILLION. It was a photograph of stacks of money. “That’s the previous guy’s,” Bruno said when he saw her looking at it. “I never took it down.”

  One of the guys she’d been introduced to poked his head in while Bruno searched. “Listen,” he said. “The Korean was back. He said you promised him ten percent.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Bruno said. He lifted the blotter on his desk and shook it. “Some people say one thing, some people say something else. The hell did he do with those tickets?”

  “This guy said he was gonna call the Better Business Bureau. What happens, he comes in with them?”

  Bruno pulled one drawer out of his desk and dumped it on the floor. Joanie jumped. “If he does, we deal with that then,” he said.

  They watched him turn his office upside down.

  The guy folded a piece of gum into his mouth. “Cifulo moved two Rivieras yesterday,” he said. “He tell you? He said to tell you he was gonna match your totals. He said he was gonna be making that trip with you.”

  “Tell him not to buy any new luggage,” Bruno said, distracted.

  “Is that it?” the guy asked. He pointed at an envelope on the floor.

  Bruno picked it up, checked inside, looked at the guy, and walked out. Joanie followed.

  “Hey,” the guy called after him. “You gonna leave your office like this?” Bruno waved, like he’d wished him a good trip.

  In the car he said, “Morons.”

  They were quiet on the way back to the highway. Bruno turned the radio on.

  She formulated questions about Joey Distefano.

  “So how you been?” Bruno asked.