Thieves Never Steal in the Rain

by Marisa Labozzetta

  Elliott spends an hour parked in front of the Ficola house, trying to turn off the lights. He wants to smash them with a tire iron, when he recalls how much his father-in-law loved the car. “Big deal. Let them burn out,” he tells Matthew. “I’ll buy you a new battery.”

  “Yes, let them burn out,” Myra concurs, at the same time enjoying the glee of a child watching fireworks for the first time. Standing at the end of the walk between the house and the curb, she wears neither a coat nor a sweater, and the late-autumn night temperature has dropped to just above freezing.

  “Come on, Ma.” Elliott puts his arm around his mother-in-law and leads her back into the house.

  ***

  All the time Marco was dying, he and Joanna never spoke of the inevitable. “Sit down. Stay,” he would say whenever she got up to leave, and she wished she had stayed so many times before when he was healthier and robust and he had asked the same of her. But she had run off to do some errand of little consequence, creating emotional distance between them, readying herself for that inevitable. Marco had made his own preparations by making Joanna privy to his financial holdings, reassuring her that all was in order for Myra’s support and the incidentals: the funeral, the meal afterward, the headstone, the church — dreaded instructions Joanna had entertained with resistance. Now she prepared herself by going alone to the funeral home to make arrangements. It was one of the most difficult tasks she had ever faced. The most difficult had been arranging her daughter, Jill’s, funeral. Because Jill’s death had been the result of a tragic accident, Joanna had floated through the days, anesthetized with tranquilizers that made the whole incident surreal; only later did reality come crashing down around her. This was different. The process was methodical, and tasks were dealt with as they would have been for a birthday party or a family reunion. These assignments she completed however with reluctance, as though every step was hindered by a wad of chewing gum that made it difficult to put one foot in front of the other. Something weighed her down, held her back, and stifled her speech — a sadness she had never wanted to feel again.

  Maybe that was why she had returned over and over again to the mystery of the promise. Whenever her mind was freed of hospice instructions, when the visitors were gone and the coffee cups washed and put away, the plates of cake sealed in plastic wrap and the counter washed down, the promise gnawed at her.

  “Mom, did you and Dad keep secrets from me?” She decided to ask her mother straight out as she prepared her for bed in Joanna’s childhood room. But there was no longer any direct line to her mother’s mind.

  “Who’s keeping secrets?” Myra responded.

  “That’s what I’m asking.”

  “All parents keep secrets.”

  “Are there any you’d like to tell me now? Any you think I should know?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “You snore. Last night when you slept here with me, you were snoring. You’ve always snored.”

  “Mom, I don’t snore, and I didn’t sleep with you last night. You slept alone.”

  “You know, you’re a bitch, Jenny,” her mother said. Jenny had been a high school friend who had stolen Myra’s first boyfriend and whom Myra had never forgiven. “And where’s my daughter? She hasn’t come home.”

  “I’m right here, Mom.”

  “You’re confused. My daughter is a little girl. I didn’t give birth to you.”

  On another day, when Joanna was paying her parents’ bills, she found herself rummaging through the cubbies and drawers of their Chippendale writing desk. Surely, there would be a letter of some kind, an engraved piece of jewelry, something to indicate the woman or man her parents had been sworn to secrecy about and the child that must have been involved — a brother or sister somewhere who would be remembered in her father’s will. She already knew about her father’s fascination with the man in Italy: in that unprecedented exchange between father and daughter, Marco had emptied his heart on the ride home from the oncologist on the day he was handed his death sentence, and had done so with the urgency of someone who had swallowed poison. It even crossed Joanna’s mind that she had been adopted, that her parents had lied to her all these years, and now her mother was begging her father to take the secret to his grave. But she couldn’t have been adopted. After all, Myra and Marco’s names were on her birth certificate; besides, she looked just like her father.

  When she thought her father was dozing, she went into his cufflink drawer. Finding nothing, she rifled her mother’s jewelry box, the repository of every piece of evidence in mystery novels. Again, nothing except gaudy pins, strings of dingy fake pearls and clip-on, earrings that her mother hadn’t put on in decades. The good stuff was in the safety deposit box at the bank. She turned to her mother’s dresser where, along with panties, girdles, and bras, she found a rotting banana, two oranges, and an apple. Lately her mother kept toothpaste and cosmetics in the refrigerator; she combed her hair with a fork.

  “What are you looking for, nosey?” her father murmured, eyes closed. He was having a good day, as opposed to those he slept away.

  “Just admiring Mom’s jewelry.”

  “Trinkets,” he said. “Garbage.”

  “I guess so.”

  “I don’t know why women want them. Joanna — ”

  “What is it, Dad?” she asked eagerly.

  “I’m thirsty.”

  Later that night, while they lay exhausted in their own bed at home, Joanna turned to her husband. “Elliott, if you had an affair, would you keep it from me?”

  “Depends.”

  That was not the answer she had been expecting. “What do you mean?”

  “Some things, once they’re over with, are more menacing than when they were alive. Didn’t you ever hear the expression: Let dying dogs lie?”

  “But you might tell me and make me promise not to tell anyone. And if Jill were still with us, you would certainly not want her to know.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “But you didn’t have an affair, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Are you telling me the truth?”

  “Joanna, there’s another expression you have trouble remembering: Don’t beat a dead horse.” He winced. “I’m sorry,” he quickly offered. He waited for a lecture on insensitivity, or for Joanna to turn completely sullen on him. After all, injuries resulting from a fall from a horse had caused their daughter’s death.

  “It’s all right, Elliott,” she reassured him.

  Heartened that they seemed to have turned a corner in their relationship, he closed his eyes and breathed easily.

  “Elliott, do I snore?”

  “Yes. Sometimes,” he mumbled before drifting off.

  ***

  Marco wore a ski cap to preserve his body heat. Bald from chemotherapy, he reflected that Ficola men never lost their hair but carried a lush white carpet of it to the grave.

  “Well, you like to be different,” Joanna told her father as she lay on top of the covers alongside him. She stroked his hand, aware of its warmth and the pulse beating beneath the wafer-like skin spotted from too much sun and IV needles. She sought to emblaze in her mind the sensations of life that inhabited his body but that would soon leave him cold. On bad days she spent the night with him in order to be there when he needed to use the bedpan or take a sip of water or be helped onto his side. She cradled him in her arms and sang to him the way he had to her when she was a little girl burning up with scarlet fever or enduring the pain of mumps or the itchiness of measles. They reminisced about the time he had gotten out of bed and come downstairs in his bare feet — he was never without shoes except when he slept — to chew out a boyfriend of hers who had brought her home too late — despite the fact that Joanna had been 22 at the time and a college graduate working her first job. She made her father laugh. She did all the things for him she wished she
had been there to do for Jill when she died. She was not going to miss her father’s last breath and the chance to comfort him on his passage from this life to the next.

  “Nah,” her father whispered with some effort.

  He was right; he didn’t like to be different. He was a straight shooter.

  “Is that my watch you’re wearing, Joanna?” he asked about the dime store bargain he found years ago that was still ticking.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s too big on you, cara.”

  “I like wearing it.”

  He smiled.

  “Where’s your mother?” he asked.

  “She’s sleeping, Dad.”

  “In your old room?” It was important that he knew where she was sleeping now that his illness had forced them to spend their nights apart.

  “Yes. In my room.”

  “Take care of her.”

  “I will. Don’t worry.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise, Dad.”

  But that was a promise her father asked her to make. What had been the promise her mother had asked her father to make? What could he possibly do for her now, or when he was dead?

  “Did Mom ask you to make me promise to look after her?” she asked.

  “You kidding? She doesn’t think she needs looking after. That’s the problem, Joanna. Your mother never asks for anything.”

  Then what did she ask you for the last night you climbed the stairs? she wanted to say. But asking this would have been wrong; it would have been as if she’d asked to watch her parents making love. Either he would have to volunteer the information or she would have to find out on her own.

  ***

  “I want Frank Sinatra played at the Mass,” Myra told Joanna on one of the days she had gone out to make the arrangements while the sweet hospice aide cared for her father.

  “Mom, I told you, the priest said no. Only one other speaker besides himself, and no secular music.”

  “Then go somewhere else.”

  She had. She’d talked to the pastor at Good Shepherd and also at Saint Agatha’s. Both had given her the same answer.

  “It’s a monopoly, Mom.”

  “Then go to a different kind of church. Go to a synagogue.”

  “He’s not Jewish.”

  “But I am.”

  “You converted 54 years ago.”

  The news stunned her. “I still want Frank Sinatra,” she said.

  How was Joanna to deal with a dying father and a mother whose brain was also dying but whose body was alive enough to drive Joanna mad with unreasonable demands? After one of his better days, she approached her father and brought up the funeral.

  “Dad, do you have any requests for — you know?”

  “The funeral?” He said what she couldn’t.

  “Yes.”

  “No. I told you a long time ago I don’t believe in any of it anymore.”

  “Not even reincarnation that we talked about?”

  “I know you think Jill’s come back in the body of that child you met in Italy. I say seeing is believing, or in this case dying is believing.”

  “She wants Frank Sinatra.”

  “Who?”

  “Mom. She wants Frank Sinatra singing at your service, but the priests say no.”

  “Then find a way. Give her what she wants. That’s what I care about. That’s what matters to me.” Then he added: “I think I’d like to be cremated. Yes. I want to be cremated.”

  And so Joanna went to the Unitarian Society and back to the funeral home and made the tentative arrangements.

  ***

  Joanna’s cousins Rosemary and Angie arrive together at Marco’s house on the day of his death. Both have come from western Massachusetts, Angie with her husband, Roy, and their 15-month-old son, Michael, and Rosemary with her young gay housemate, Avery. They’ll stay with their respective parents in the Medford homes of Raymond and Sal Ficola. Barbara’s family will be divided between Joanna’s and Nancy’s houses. The brother who never left Italy will not be leaving now for his brother’s funeral. Could they send him a video of the service? he asked, weeping into the telephone.

  As they all sit around the large dining room table, eating the lasagne and salad brought over by Marco and Myra Ficola’s neighbor on one side, supplemented by pastries and cookies from the neighbor on their other side, Joanna interrupts the conversation to ask if anyone would like to speak at the service or have Joanna say something for them. “Or maybe there’s something you’d like to tell me in private, even if you don’t want me to repeat it publicly. Anything at all you’d like me to know about my father.”

  Silence reigns. Mystified at first by her rambling, they soon disregard the statement, chalking it up to Joanna’s grief and exhaustion, and the sounds of forks scraping dishes, crusty bread being broken, soda bottles being opened, and chewing resumes. She will get no secrets from this crowd, or so she thinks.

  “Joanna has something to show you all,” Elliott announces.

  “I do?”

  “Yes. The portrait.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Elliott. It’s not quite finished.”

  “It’s terrific. I’ll get it.”

  She has finished it. While she never returned to the images of the Virgin after the incident at St. Mary’s hospital, she found that from that day on, she saw everything more deeply, perceived every moment more clearly. When her father was diagnosed with cancer, she had felt compelled to paint him, no longer terrified to depict the human condition.

  “It’s very nice,” Myra says politely when Elliott returns with the unframed canvas and places it on the buffet for all to see. “Who is it?”

  “It’s wonderful!” Jean-Georges says, throwing up his hands and dropping them back down with gusto onto the table. His right hand lands on Angie’s, who’s sitting beside him. “Pardon,” he says, removing his hand and calling attention to a crimson Angie.

  “God, Jean, you probably broke her hand,” Nancy says.

  “Did I hurt you?” A contrite Jean-Georges (his charming accent deepening his regret) takes Angie’s hand in his and gently examines the fingers. “Maybe Elliott should have a look.”

  Before Elliott can take a step toward Angie, she jumps up, claiming she needs to check on her napping son, and runs out of the room.

  “But I am so sorry,” Jean-Georges says to Nancy, convinced now that he has really injured Angie.

  “I think she’s fine,” Elliott says, exchanging a knowing glance with Nancy.

  “He looks frightened,” Barbara says, shifting attention back to the painting. “But then, that’s understandable, given his illness.”

  “I don’t think he looks frightened at all,” Avery says. “I think he looks like he has a secret.”

  “You should talk,” Norma mutters.

  “What did you say, Aunt Norma?” Rosemary asks.

  “Stay quiet,” Joe says to his wife. “Always have to put in your two cents.”

  “No, Norma is right,” Rosemary’s mother, Frances, says. A timid woman, she’s the oldest of the sisters-in-law and generally avoids conflict.

  “Well, it’s about time,” Nancy’s mother, Vita, says, congratulating her sister-in-law on expressing an opinion on her daughter’s situation.

  “Mannaggia!” Joe curses what his wife’s indiscretion has led to.

  “No, no.” Avery waves his hand in the air. “I deserved it. It isn’t fair to leave you all in the dark. But I want you to know that I have told Rosemary why I went to prison. I killed someone.” He stares at Rosemary, sending a chill across the table. “Not intentionally, of course. Out of negligence. But it was murder all the same. I had too much to drink one night. I had an accident — a head-on — and the woman in the other car died.” He takes a moment, then whispers: “She had two young child
ren.”

  “How awful,” Joanna says. “For all of you.”

  “I also want to say that I appreciate the kindness this family has shown me. I’ve never had a large family — or a close one, for that matter. I’ll be moving out of Rosemary’s place.”

  “It’s not because of what he did,” Rosemary says. “I’ve known about it for quite some time. I’d just like to live alone now. Avery and I will still be good friends, of course.”

  They shift in their seats. When Angie returns to the table, she’s greeted by a new sobriety. As she takes her place between Nancy and Jean-Georges, she avoids looking at either of them. Nancy reaches over to Angie’s lap and pats her hand the way she used to when they were in grade school and Angie was the object of some cruel boy’s ridicule. That Angie finds Nancy’s husband attractive does not concern or surprise Nancy. What troubles her is that her cousin torments herself over it. Angie’s vulnerability has always set her apart from others.

  “What did my brother have to say about his portrait?” Joe asks Joanna, shifting everyone’s focus back to the painting.

  “Gregory Peck I’m no longer.”

  They chuckle softly, as though they can’t allow themselves a hearty laugh. Joanna doesn’t tell them that after saying this, her father cried because — she knew — she had captured the complexity of his soul.

  ***

  Just as she wanted, Myra wears her blue two-piece outfit to the wake and the funeral, and Joanna thinks her mother looks lovely on the crisp, colorful fall morning. The blue brings out Myra’s eye color, still clear and sparkling for her age. What does black have to do with death? Joanna wonders. Her cousin Rosemary is wearing lime green, Barbara red. Joanna finds their choices uplifting. She gets in her car and dashes back to Cambridge to change into a white knit sheath. Basic black might be classy at weddings and cocktail hours, but it’s not something to wear when celebrating her father’s life, she decides.