by F. P. Lione
I woke up to the sound of the phone ringing and bolted to the kitchen to grab it, catching my knee on the corner of the cabinet.
“Hello,” I said, groggy.
“Hi, it’s me,” Denise said. “You ready to go to lunch?”
“What time is it?” I yawned and looked at the clock. It was 11:10. “Wow, did I sleep that long?”
“I guess so. How about we go to St. George to that little place across from the ballpark.”
“The ballpark? Oh, right, the bar there.”
“It’s a restaurant, Tony, it just happens to have a bar. Plus, you loved the zucchini there, remember?”
“No, that sounds good. What time?”
“Pick me up on your way down. How about twelve o’clock?”
“Yeah, I can be to you by twelve,” I said.
I showered and shaved and changed into jeans and an Urban Pest Control T-shirt that’s about a hundred years old.
When I pulled up, Denise was waiting outside her apartment, dressed in faded jean shorts and a black tank top, talking on her cell phone.
“Heard you caught a lot of fish,” she said, kissing my cheek. “How about you come for dinner this week. I’ve got a bunch of tuna in my freezer.”
I looked at her. “What’d Romano go to your house last night?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Is he living with you?” I thought he might be. He’s there every time I call.
“Not really. He needs a room for when his daughter’s at his apartment. I live in a studio. I don’t even have a bedroom.”
Parking was crazy in St. George. Between the courts, the DA’s office, central booking, and all the other local agencies, you never get a spot. I parked at the 120, the St. George precinct, and threw my plaque in the windshield. The plaque was for my precinct, but I doubted anyone would bother me.
The restaurant was tucked into a side street between Richmond Terrace and St. Mark’s Place, and if you got a table by the window, you had a view of the harbor and the Verrazano Bridge. The view always makes me a little homesick. Growing up we had the same view off our deck, just a couple of miles closer to the bridge.
“Pretty soon you won’t be seeing this anymore,” Denise said, reading my mind.
“Yeah, I know. The beaches are beautiful in Long Island too,” I said. “But you can’t get this view anywhere else.”
“I’m thinking about moving,” Denise said.
“Where?” I asked, surprised.
“I don’t know. Once you go, there’ll be no one else here for me.”
I almost said, “What about Dad and Grandma?” but she barely talks to them now.
“Mom’s in Pennsylvania, Vinny’s moving to Jersey next month, not that he’s talking to me anyway since I beat up his girlfriend. Sorry, his fiancée,” she corrected, rolling her eyes. “You’ll be moving out east in November, and Carla’s all involved with Benny, so aside from Nick, why would I stay?”
“Who’s Benny?” Carla was Denise’s best friend since they were kids. Personally, I thought she was a bigmouth who slept around too much, but Denise was always with her.
“Benny works for her father, collecting vig,” Denise said.
Vig is the interest payment on a loan from a loan shark. Carla’s father is probably somewhere in the middle range with the Mob. I think his specialty is loan sharking, and if Benny collects vig for him, he’s a moron with a lot of muscle.
“What does her father say?” I couldn’t picture her father liking one of his workers sleeping with his daughter.
“He doesn’t know. Neither does Benny’s wife,” Denise said.
“Good way to get dead,” I said. “She’s out of her mind.”
“I know, that’s what I told her,” Denise said. “But she won’t listen to me. We’re not even talking.”
“So where are you thinking of moving?”
If she was gonna stay with Romano, she couldn’t go far. I was hoping she wouldn’t say upstate, because then I’d hardly ever see her. Once I lived in Long Island it would be easy enough for me to stop in Staten Island on my way home, but if she went upstate it was too far.
She shrugged. “Nick was talking about transferring to one of the houses in the Bronx and moving upstate. The houses are cheaper up there, and he could stop in Staten Island and get Alexa every other weekend and then bring her back when he comes back in before work.”
“He’s gonna leave his mother and grandmother?” His mother never remarried after his father was killed, and the grandmother was his father’s mother. I couldn’t see Nick just leaving them alone.
“His brother took the upstairs apartment, so he’s right there,” Denise said, reminding me that Romano’s mother owned a two-family house.
“Is this what you want, Denise?”
“Yeah, I think it is,” she said, nodding.
We ordered the fried zucchini and a couple of burgers and watched the water traffic. It was a beautiful, clear day without a cloud in the sky. I watched the tankers as they came in and went out of the harbor and saw a couple of tugs and smaller boats.
“What do you think is in this?” I asked, dipping zucchini in the creamy garlic sauce. It was thick, and I didn’t taste sour cream, so I was guessing it was mayo, but there were a lot of spices in it.
“I have no idea. The chef wouldn’t tell me, and I couldn’t find anything like it on the Internet,” Denise said. “If I knew how, I’d get it analyzed so I could figure it out.”
I paid the bill, and we started walking down toward Richmond Terrace. Instead of turning left at the corner, Denise grabbed my hand to pull me across the street.
“What are you doing?”
“Come on, let’s take the boat like when we were little,” she said, dragging me across the street.
“Denise, I don’t want to go into the city, I have to be there tonight.” “We won’t get off the boat, just turn around and come right back. It’ll only be an hour.”
“I had enough boat yesterday, I was on the water for sixteen hours.”
“Please, Tony, when’s the next time we’ll get to do something like this? You’ll be married soon, and you’ll never come back here.”
“I’ll come back.”
“Not like this.” She looked like she was gonna cry. “Not just me and you.”
I waited a beat. “Sure,” I said. “Let’s take the boat.”
When we were kids we’d cut out of school and wait till after rush hour so nobody’s parents would see us, and we’d take the boat and hang out in the city. We’d make fun of the old guy who walked around with his wooden box saying, “Shine, shoe shine,” with an accent I probably still couldn’t place. Sometimes on the weekend if our parents were going at it, we’d take the boat back and forth to pass the time, sometimes hopping on the 1 train to go up to Midtown to walk around.
We waited ten minutes for the 1:30 boat, sitting on the hard wooden benches that have been here since before I was born. The terminal is dusty and the bathrooms are filthy, and most people sit and read the paper, with a few congregating by the doors leading outside with their eyes on the overhead clock. At 1:29 we walked toward the doors. If this were rush hour we’d be smashed in the crowd of people and pushed out once the doors opened. We walked through the boat to the front deck, facing downtown, looking for the shoe shine guy as we went.
The boat blew its horn as we left St. George and headed toward lower Manhattan. From the ferry you get a great view of the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and Governor’s Island, with the Twin Towers shooting up into the sky. Denise threw money in the two-eyed telescope thing as we passed the Statue of Liberty and let me look through it after a couple of minutes.
“Are you gonna miss Staten Island?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said with a shrug. “My life is different now. I don’t hang out with any of the guys anymore.”
“That’s a good thing,” Denise said. “Your friends were sick, sadistic perverts.”
I laug
hed. “No, they weren’t.”
“Yes, they were, Tony, and so were you when you were with them. Don’t you remember what you did to me that Halloween when you took me to Ichabod Crane’s grave and left me in the cemetery in the middle of the night? I almost died of fright.”
I’d forgotten about that. Denise must have been about fourteen years old. I told her we found Ichabod Crane’s grave, and she wanted to see it. I don’t know if that’s where the writer got the name, but there’s an actual Ichabod Crane buried in the cemetery on Richmond Avenue near the old Henny’s Steak House. I remember it said on his tombstone that he was born in 1787 and died in 1857 and that he served his country for forty-eight years. Mike Ellis, Marty Burns, and I took Denise to the cemetery at midnight on Halloween, brought her to Ichabod Crane’s grave, and tore out of there, leaving her screaming.
“I guess there’s some stuff I’ll miss about living here,” I said. “Mostly the food, you can’t get good bread like here. And I’ll miss the neighborhood, even the one I live in now.”
“I think the family’s pretty much done now,” Denise said. “Do you think anyone will come to your wedding?”
“I don’t know that I want them to. If Michele ever talks to me again, we’ll see what we want to do. I don’t want them there if they’re gonna ruin my wedding.”
“What a mess,” she said.
The thing about the ferry is that as it approaches the dock, Manhattan sucks you in. Especially at night when the water is black and the lights of the city seem to swallow you up and pull you into the middle of it. No matter where in the world you come from, everyone recognizes New York. Most of the time the city’s just part of the scenery, but when you’re coming in on the boat, you always look at it in awe.
We stayed on the boat as it docked at South Ferry. Actually, we held on to the side of the boat as it smashed into the pilings. Aside from smashing as you dock, the ferry is pretty safe. The only accidents happened when ferries got hit by tankers in the fog a couple of times. One ferry was sunk that way about a hundred years ago.
The boat ride is probably twenty-five minutes each way, and we got back to Staten Island at 2:25.
Denise didn’t want to go home, so we drove down to South Beach and walked the boardwalk and then went to the arcade on Sand Lane and played skeeball for an hour. We had a bunch of tickets for the high scores, but not enough to win any of the good prizes, just the cheap plastic stuff.
I dropped her back at her apartment at 5:00 and got home in time to eat dinner with Alfonse and Julia at 5:30.
I checked my machine when I got home. Both my mother and grandmother called again, but no Michele. I called my mother back and almost hung up before she answered on the fourth ring.
“I was outside with Aunt Patty,” she said.
“Tell her I said hello.”
“I will when I go back outside. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said. “How ’bout you? You recovered from the block party yet?”
She laughed. “It was interesting. I thought it’d be the last time I saw Ron, but he came back yesterday to have dinner with me.”
“He seems like a nice guy,” I said. I liked the way he looked after my mother, making sure no one got near her during the fight.
“He is. I’d love for you and Michele to come up with Stevie and have dinner with us. Next weekend is the hot air balloon festival, and for the last two years a hot air balloon landed in the field behind my house.”
Stevie would go nuts if he saw that.
“I’m off next weekend. But I haven’t talked to Michele since Saturday, so I don’t know what’s going on there. I left her about five messages and stopped by the house, but she hasn’t called me.”
“Give her time to cool down. She loves you, she isn’t going anywhere.”
We talked for a couple of minutes about school. My mother is taking her general courses for the nursing program at the community college near her house. One of the classes is psychology, so I guess she can get an understanding about all the family pathology.
Alfonse was grilling the tuna went I went outside. Julia had set the picnic table with real dishes and was pouring Pellegrino.
“This is good, what’s on it?” I asked when I tasted the tuna.
“Basil, olive oil, garlic, balsamic vinegar, and pignoli nuts. They’ve been marinating all day,” Julia said.
I was glad that the block party never came up in conversation. They told me about their daughter, Tina, who told them over the weekend she was getting a divorce. It was pretty quick, they’d only been married about a year. Apparently, the husband had been cheating on her with his secretary since before they were married and she just found out about it.
“At least they didn’t have kids,” Julia said. “It’s hard for kids.”
“She’s young, she’ll get married again,” I said.
“Please, twenty-five thousand dollars for a wedding that didn’t even last a year,” Alfonse said. “Don’t talk to me about another wedding.”
I went back downstairs at 7:00 and set my clock for 9:00. I was tired and knew if I didn’t get some sleep I’d be shot tonight.
I showered again before I left. I probably could’ve shaved too but didn’t see the point.
I called Michele again even though I’d told myself I wouldn’t.
“It’s me,” I said when the machine picked up. “You know, for all your talk about wanting to be honest right from the start, you’re not doing such a good job. Why don’t you pick up the phone, and let’s be honest here.” I waited another ten seconds to see if she’d pick up. I pictured her standing there smirking at the phone.
The roads were clear through to Midtown, and the air was nice and cool, around 70 degrees.
I got to the precinct early enough to change and talked to Vince Puletti for a few minutes before roll call. He said his daughter got engaged to some shem, which is short for shemanooda, which means he’s an idiot.
I told him about Alfonse’s daughter not even being married a year and they’re already getting a divorce and how the wedding cost twenty-five grand.
“I know! How am I gonna pay for this? I can’t retire now. At this rate the undertakers’ll take me out of here,” Vince said, hoisting up his pants and shaking his head.
O’Brien and Rooney were talking to Terri Marks over at the desk, telling her about the fishing trip. Rooney was yapping about the now 250-pound tuna that got away.
Joe came upstairs with Bruno, and Bruno threw in, “Terr, wherever Tony and Joe fished, that’s where the fish were.”
“Even the fish can’t resist you, Joe.” She sighed. “When are you gonna leave your wife and marry me?”
Joe shook his head and changed the subject. “Hey, Terr, did Mike tell you his uncle Brendan discovered America in a rubber boat?”
“Oh, come on,” Rooney said, shaking his head. “That’s not what I said.”
“Tony, Joe.” Hanrahan gave me and Joe a “Come here” signal as he headed into the muster room.
“Hey, boss.”
“Roll call screwed up notifying the day tour to come in early for the election duty tomorrow. There’s about an hour OT, and I figured I’d throw it to you and Joe first.”
“I’ll stay, boss,” I said. “What about you, buddy?” I said to Joe. “I’m driving out after work anyway, I’ll drop you off.”
I figure if I’m sleeping in her bed, the future Mrs. Cavalucci will have no choice but to talk to me. The way I see it is that to have a good fight, you need good strategy, and I was already thinking of all the Scriptures I could throw in her face, like “Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry,” and “Love keeps no record of wrongs.” Plus, I’ll pick up some flowers and a box of Godiva. She loves the truffles. Michele may be smart, but I’m much less principled. I’ll fight dirty if I have to.
“Sure, I’ll stay, boss,” Joe said.
“Okay, take a four thirty meal. The polls open up at six o’clock. You
’ll be over at Norman Thomas High School on 33rd Street. The day tour should relieve you by eight thirty,” Hanrahan said before he gave the attention to the roll call order.
“The color of the day is yellow,” he said. He gave out the sectors and foot posts and the return date for C-summonses and finished it up with, “There’s a couple of openings for about an hour of OT for the morning. If anyone wants to take it, see me after the roll call. After that it’s mandatory.”
15
We stopped at the deli on the corner and threw Bruno out of the car for coffee and the papers. We drove up to 44th and 8th, across from the Milford Plaza, and sat with Bruno until we finished our coffee.
“We got a four thirty meal, so you’re gonna have to get yourself back to the house later,” I told Bruno.
I made a left on West 45th Street, and Central came over with “South David.”
“South David,” Fiore answered.
“We got a person harassing passersby at three-one and eight.”
“10-4,” Fiore said.
Technically, 31st and 8th is South Charlie’s sector, but we heard them answer a job at 34th and 7th for a pedestrian struck.
We drove down 30th Street, past the French apartments and up 8th Avenue. I rolled along the row of parked cars on my left, and we could see a drunk sitting on the southeast corner of 31st and 8th, next to the pizzeria where I got the Italian ice for the block party.
Something was going on across the street. I saw people coming out of the Garden. I read that the Rangers were gonna be holding training camp there, so maybe that was it.
The drunk was sitting on the corner, leaning up against a chain-link fence with a parking lot behind it. He was wearing a button-down shirt opened to the waist, dirty shorts, black socks, and sneakers. He was pacing back and forth, almost getting in front of people as they walked by while he yelled and made kissing sounds to the women as they walked past him.
A woman who looked about thirty, wearing jeans and a white shirt with those thin straps, walked by talking on her cell phone, and he started with the kissing sounds again. She threw him a nasty look, and he yelled, “Hey, I might not be the best looking guy here, but I’m the only one talking to you, baby.” He slapped his leg and cracked up while she rolled her eyes.