by F. P. Lione
The moon walk was across the street from my apartment, maybe sixty feet up from us. I could see Josh, Joey, and Stevie take little Gracie and Romano’s daughter and walk into the entrance to the moon walk. I saw the guy say something to the kids as they passed. Michele and Donna were behind the kids, walking over toward the ride. They stopped about ten feet from the entrance, talking to Sandy across the street. The kids disappeared into the moon walk, just a bunch of bouncing heads, and I couldn’t see them from where I stood.
Michele and Donna looked deep in conversation as I watched the guy walk past them over to the moon walk, going behind it.
“Take this,” I said, handing the spatula to Marie, who was the closest person to me.
“Where are you going?” she snapped.
“Just watch the burgers,” I said, already walking away.
Romano must have been watching him too, because he was already walking toward the ride.
“You see that guy?” Romano asked.
“Yeah, he’s up to something.”
We caught him behind the ride, trying to talk to the kids through the netting.
“Can I help you?” Romano asked, stomping toward him.
“No,” he said, starting to walk away.
“Hey,” I said. “We’re talking to you. Who are you here with?” I said it pretty loud, and he stopped.
“What?” he asked, trying to look nonchalant.
“Don’t ‘what’ me,” I said. “I asked you a question. Who are you here with?”
“No one, I just came to see what the party was for.” Maybe it was me, but the closer I got to him, the more he looked like a perv.
“I think you should leave now,” Romano said.
“I’m not doing anything wrong,” he said.
“It’s a private party,” I said. “And I want you to leave, and I don’t want to see you here again.”
He walked slowly up the street, and when he got to the corner he turned around to see if we were still watching him. I noticed both Romano and I were standing the same way, feet apart, arms folded across our chests.
We stared at him until he turned around and kept walking.
“It’s scary, Tony, there’s so many nuts out there. Sometimes it keeps me up at night worrying about my daughter,” he said.
“Nick, just do the best you can,” I said. “You keep an eye on your daughter, teach her not to go near strangers, and pray for God to protect her.”
“You sound like Joe,” he chuckled.
“Yeah, well, you spend enough time with Joe, you start to sound like him,” I said.
“I know. I pray that psalm he gave me.” Romano pulled Joe’s old mini Bible out of his back pocket.
“You carry that around?” That surprised me.
“Yup. I carry it everywhere I go. I even know the whole Psalm 91 by heart,” he said.
“Joe would be proud—Hey!” I yelled at Stevie, Josh, and Joey when I looked into the moon walk. The three of them had put little Gracie in the middle of them and were slamming down on the moon walk and bouncing her up in the air.
“Cut it out, you’re gonna hurt her.”
“No, Tony,” Joey said. “She loves it.”
It was true. She squealed every time they catapulted her up into the air, laughing hysterically as she came back down.
We walked back over to the grill. Denise was cooking now, adding cheese to the burgers.
“Denise, you look good in red,” Pina was saying.
“Red makes me bad,” she said with a smile aimed at Romano.
He smiled back at her, then caught my father throwing him a death look and lost the smile.
Denise and my mother had brought out the rest of the food and set out the paper plates, napkins, and plastic forks and knives. We sat down to eat, squeezing chairs into every available space at the table. We had Gina’s eggplant parmigiana, a tomato onion salad, Denise’s bacon-and-scallion potato salad, and Aunt Rose’s dill potato salad. Personally, I liked Denise’s better. Fiore’s mother had made sausage, peppers, and onions, and we had a table full of pastry. Michele made cookies, and there were a couple of trays of Italian cookies from the bakery.
Stevie sat on my lap, taking bites of a hamburger. He wasn’t really a picky eater, but he liked what he liked. I was the same way when I was a kid.
“So, Brother, how’s work?” my father asked.
“Why do they call him Brother?” Michele asked me.
“Because he’s Paulie’s brother,” I said.
“Actually, Tony, it was Paulie that used to call Gino Brother when he was little, and it stuck,” Aunt Elena said.
I liked Aunt Elena. When I was a kid I had a mad crush on her because she was gorgeous. She was still pretty and well kept in that married-to-the-Mob kind of way. She had the cars, the houses, and the hair, nails, and jewelry that Mob wives get. She was nice, though, and didn’t butt in to anyone’s business.
“What do you do for a living, Brother?” Michele asked.
“I’m a bond broker,” he said.
Whatever that is. Brother was the only one of Elena and Mickey’s kids that actually graduated high school. Paulie paid someone to take his GED for him, and Little Gina stopped going to school in the tenth grade. By some fluke of nature, Brother actually went on to college and now works on Wall Street.
“He’s a financial whiz,” Aunt Elena said.
Which means he finds inventive and lucrative ways to launder money for the family business.
“Hey, look who’s here!” Grandma said, standing up.
I looked up to see her friend Lucy Dellatore approaching the table.
“Sit, sit,” Lucy said to my father, who stood up to kiss her. “Oh, it’s hot today.” Lucy speaks broken English, so it sounded more like “Oh, itsahot todaya.” She had her gray hair pulled back in a bun and was wearing black pants and a white sleeveless shirt.
Lucy sat next to Grandma and whispered something in her ear. Grandma nodded toward Michele, and Lucy gave Michele a calculating look. It’s not like the family’s never been with Lucy before, but never outside Grandma’s apartment. I had a feeling why she was there, and I could feel the anger rising up inside me. Lucy said something again to Grandma, and she laughed and said, “A mali estremi, estremi rimedi.”
“What are the desperate times, Grandma?” I said.
“What?” Grandma said, embarrassed that I heard her.
“You said desperate times call for desperate measures. What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You speak Italian?” Michele asked, shocked.
“Mostly curses,” I said, distracted. “But I understand a lot of it.”
“Say something in Italian,” Michele said, looking thrilled. “But not a curse.”
“What?” I asked. I couldn’t believe Grandma would do this to me, and I was so mad at her I almost told her to leave right then and there.
“Say something for me in Italian,” Michele said again. She realized I was upset and touched my arm. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” I focused and smiled at her. “You want to hear something in Italian, huh? Um, how about, E state amore a prima vista.”
“Oh, please,” my father said. “I’m gonna puke.”
“Very nice,” my mother said.
“What’s it mean?” This was from Michele.
My mother smiled. “It means, ‘It was love at first sight.’”
“Really? Oh, I love it.” She hugged me and whispered in my ear, “I want you to talk to me in Italian on our honeymoon.”
“I won’t be talking on our honeymoon, babe,” I whispered back, “and neither will you.”
I went back to straining to hear what Grandma and Lucy were saying. I couldn’t hear a lot of it, but I heard Lucy say “Medegon,” which is slang for American, and it’s meant as a slur. They were probably calling Michele a medegon, meaning she’s not Italian. Then I heard Grandma telling Lucy that she reads the obituaries every day looking for someone’s name.
“Why, Grandma?” I asked, confused.
“Because she better be in the box first for what she did to me,” Grandma spat. “I told God I don’t care if it’s only an hour. I want her dead first.”
I wondered if all the years I thought she was a sweet old lady were an illusion or if she had dementia or something now.
I noticed Lou Fiore was watching them, and like me, he saw Lucy pull out a small vial and a little dish out of her pocketbook, like the ones they give you in the restaurant to dunk a piece of bread into olive oil. Grandma had a bottle of water, and I saw her pour some into the dish. When Lucy opened the vial to pour it in, I walked around the table and knelt down next to her.
“Listen,” I said quietly, looking at her and Grandma. “You’re not gonna do this here. Now give me the oil.” I put my hand out in front of her. She looked at Grandma, and I said, “I’m not kidding. I’ll take it out of your hands if I have to, now give me the oil.” Lucy put the stopper in and handed it to me. I walked across the street and threw it down the sewer and went back over to the table.
“Were they doing what I think they were?” Lou asked me.
“Yup,” I said, furious. “My grandmother thinks Michele is putting the horns on her, and since Lucy is psychotic enough to think she can heal the malokya, she was gonna put the olive oil in the water and do her Italian voodoo prayers to show someone here was giving her the evil eye,” I said, disgusted. “And of course they were gonna say it’s Michele.”
I don’t know if it bothered me more that Grandma would bring someone to my home to say my fiancée was putting the horns on her or that she actually believed Michele could do it.
“That beer looks good, huh?” my mother said as she saw me watching Vinny drink one.
“Oh yeah,” I said. “How about to you, is it looking good to you too?”
“I went to a meeting yesterday, knowing I had to be here today. I guess it helped,” she said. “I got to say I was sorry to a few people without running to the liquor store.”
“Yeah, and had your apology thrown in your face,” I said, fuming at Vinny and just about everyone else in my family.
“It’s funny, I thought you and Denise would have been the ones to throw my apology in my face. But you can’t hold it against Vinny. He has a right to feel how he feels.”
“But you’re his mother!”
It’s funny, but Vinny used to be the nicest out of all of us. He was the peacemaker; he couldn’t stand to see anyone mad. I don’t even know him anymore.
“Tony, my part of this was to apologize. I’m not saying I’m happy about it. I would have liked to sit and talk to him the way I did with you and Denise, but he won’t let me. I can’t control how other people feel, I have to make amends and accept the consequences of my alcoholism. I apologized and cleaned up my side of the street as much as possible, the rest is up to him.”
She put her arm around me and put her head on my shoulder. “But I’m concerned about you. You have a lot going on in your life right now, and the temptation is there.”
“Michele told you I’ve been wanting to drink,” I said.
“Yes, she did,” she said with a nod. “I’m not going to lie to you. She wanted to know what she could do to help. Are you upset that she told me?”
“No. I know if I had said not to mention it she wouldn’t have,” I said. “I just don’t want her worrying about it. I really haven’t drank in over a year, Mom. I had a couple of beers last Christmas and didn’t start drinking again. I think I could handle it now. You know, just have a beer every once in a while like a normal person.”
“And how would that beer change anything?” she asked.
“It wouldn’t be to change anything, just to have a nice cold beer. I didn’t say I was gonna drink, I said I was thinking about it.”
“Stinkin’ thinking,” she said. “Relapse always starts with thinking, not with drinking. Once you taste it again, it’s like an old friend. Trust me, Tony, when I went into rehab wasn’t the first time I quit.”
“Really?”
“Sure. I tried plenty of times. I never got help, I just tried not to drink and drove myself insane thinking about it all the time. Now I get myself to a meeting every day if I have to.”
“And what does that do?” I asked.
“Why don’t you go to a meeting? If you want we could go together.”
“Yeah, mother-and-son AA meetings. Just like the Cleavers,” I said. “Should I get you a corsage?”
“Tony, I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“I think you’ll get a little more understanding about what people are feeling. What compels them to drink and what helps them stop. What about you? What is it that’s making you feel like crawling into a bottle?”
I couldn’t tell her that I felt like I didn’t fit anywhere, that I wasn’t good enough for Michele and Stevie, that I’d never be as good as Fiore, and that my family were a bunch of psychos—well, she knew that part. Work was on my mind too. I didn’t know about going upstairs to get my shield. I mean, I knew I was a good cop, but maybe I wouldn’t be a good detective, and I guess that was on my mind. Then I had the weddings coming up, and I didn’t want to go to church. All this stuff was swirling around me, and all I wanted to do was get through today without a bloodbath.
But all I said was, “Maybe if the family wasn’t this way. You know, like if we had a normal family that helped each other instead of all the crap that goes on, we wouldn’t all be so screwed up.”
She laughed. “I used to think that if your father wasn’t the way he was I wouldn’t have drank. And I’m not saying that wasn’t part of it. I mean, I let him butcher my self-esteem. But I had to learn not to drink in spite of everything that happened and not use it as an excuse to drink.”
I just shrugged because I didn’t know what to say to that.
“A meeting might help. Go to one, see if you can relate to what they say.”
“Mom, the last thing I need is to be in a room with a bunch of ex-alkies telling war stories about their drinking days. I’d probably hit the nearest bar once I got out of there.”
We shut up because Romano was coming toward us with his daughter on his shoulders.
“Tony, I’m gonna drop Alexa off and come back,” he said.
“It was nice meeting you, Alexa,” I said.
“Bye, Alexa. Can I have a kiss?” my mother asked her.
Alexa nodded, and Romano leaned in so my mother could kiss her.
“How about me?” I asked, and Alexa kissed me too.
“She’s adorable, Nick,” my mother said.
“Yeah, what a little sweetheart,” I said. “She’s so friendly, Nick, where does she get that from?”
“I have no idea, definitely not her mother,” Romano said and stopped when he saw my mother shaking her head no.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Don’t talk about her mother in front of her, Nick. It’ll only confuse her.” I guess my mother realized she was butting in, because she said, “I’m sorry, Nick. It’s none of my business, but that’s her mother, wrong or right, and you shouldn’t do that. It undermines her feelings for her mother, and it’s confusing to children. They love both their parents. The best thing you can do for your daughter is respect her mother.”
“But she doesn’t respect me,” Nick said. “She always talks bad about me to Alexa.”
“Two wrongs don’t make a right. I’m sorry,” she said again, putting her hands up and taking a step backwards.
“If you want we can talk about it later,” I said, not wanting to add any more drama to the day.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” she said when he left.
“Why not? It’s true. Dad used to do it all the time, and it messed with our heads,” I said. “We didn’t trust you because of it.”
“My drinking also gave him a lot of ammunition, Tony. He was right about a lot of what he said.”
When we
walked back over to the table, my father and Lou Fiore were in the middle of a heated conversation.
I heard my father say, “Listen, buddy, the day you’re born God stamps a date on your backside [he didn’t say backside], and when that day comes, the jig is up.”
Michele looked panicked and said lightly, “Come on, you know what they say, the two things we’re never supposed to talk about are politics and religion.”
“And why is that?” my father challenged.
I could see Michele’s face getting red as she said, “Well, because everyone has a different opinion and we don’t want an argument.”
“Are you saying we like to argue?” Marie said as her eyebrows shot up. She turned to my father and nodded toward Michele. “She thinks who she is, this one.”
“Why don’t you stick up for me?” Michele said quietly, looking hurt.
I didn’t know what to say, because I didn’t understand it myself. It’s just the way it is. You don’t mess with the family, even if they’re messing with your woman. This was new to me.
“Cut it out,” I said to Marie. “She doesn’t think who she is. She’s trying to be nice, and you wanna fight.”
“Tony, the kids wanted to get their faces painted,” Michele said. “I’m taking them over.”
“I’ll go with you,” I said.
“I’m sorry.” I looked at Michele once we were out of earshot.
“Is this almost over?” Michele asked, half smiling.
“I wish they’d all leave,” I said, meaning it. I was exhausted, and the day was already ruined. I was just waiting for the brawl that I knew was gonna come. My father and Vinny were both looking to start, and Marie’s always ready.
I waited while the kids got their faces painted. Stevie and Josh got green camouflage, and Joey got a full-face tiger. Donna and little Gracie had ladybugs painted on their cheeks; Gracie wiped hers off before it was dry. And Michele got a butterfly.
The fire truck pulled in up at the corner, and the kids went running for it. We stayed there about a half hour, letting them climb on the truck and listen to the firemen talk about fire safety. They had the kids singing, “Stop, drop, and roll,” while they snapped their fingers and showed them how to get out if there’s a fire. It was nice. Plus, the kids were learning something. When cops meet kids, the parents always tell the kids if they’re bad we’re gonna put them in jail. Then they wonder why the kids grow up to hate cops. Aside from that, the kids always want to know if we ever shot anybody.