Return to Shepherd Avenue

by Charlie Carillo

  She didn’t hug me back but at least she allowed it, and I clung tightly to her as I spoke again.

  “You have an open invitation to my house in Brooklyn. You and Kevin can stay the night if you want. I have an upstairs apartment that’s waiting for you.”

  I let her go. Her face looked years younger than it did in Starbucks.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said. She touched my cheek, and then she turned and walked away.

  And I began the long journey back to East New York.

  * * *

  “Well, Doc, I found out a stunning thing about my daughter.”

  I wasn’t even seated as I spoke those words to Dr. Rosensohn, who’d just finished watering his sagging plant.

  “Sit down and tell me all about it.”

  “Turns out she’s an alcoholic.”

  He put on his best professional face, the one they wear to show you they’ve heard it all before.

  “May I ask how you arrived at this knowledge?”

  “Her boyfriend came to see me. And get this—they met at an A.A. meeting.”

  “You sound skeptical, but this scenario isn’t as unusual as you might think.”

  “Two alcoholics hooking up in a church basement on the Upper West Side isn’t unusual? And maybe even a little bit dangerous?”

  “When people go to A.A., they open up. They’re being honest. Laying themselves bare, so to speak. Sorry, that didn’t come out right.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “Many happy unions have resulted from such encounters. The partners give each other strength.”

  “Or one falls off the wagon, and to keep him from feeling lonely the other one joins him.”

  “That’s a truly negative attitude.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, I like my daughter’s boyfriend. He convinced me to call her, so I did, and we had coffee yesterday.”

  “That’s wonderful! What’s she like?”

  “Smart. Stubborn. Sarcastic.”

  “Sounds like your genes came through.”

  I pressed hard on my eyeballs with the heels of my hands. “Spending time with Taylor made me realize I don’t know who the hell she is.”

  “You’re finding out! Detail by painful detail, you are finding out. Will you see her again?”

  “She and her boyfriend have an open invitation to come to Shepherd Avenue.”

  “Think they’ll take you up on it?”

  “Well, I told Taylor about my chickens, and I think her curiosity about a Brooklyn barnyard might actually get her on the J train.”

  “Okay, it’s a start. Good for you, Mr. Ambrosio. This is big. You’re reconnecting. And even if it doesn’t work, it’s a noble failure.”

  “I gotta tell you, Doc, if that’s a pep talk, it needs work.”

  “Look to the future, man! You could be a grandfather before you know it!”

  A grandfather. I suddenly felt dizzy. “Jesus, I guess you’re right. Never thought that far ahead.”

  He nodded. “Thinking far ahead isn’t exactly one of your strengths, is it, Mr. Ambrosio?”

  I had no answer.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  When the sack of corn ran out I switched the chickens to table scraps. Suddenly I had no more garbage. Stale bread, leftover macaroni, meat loaf—anything old or stale got chopped into bits, thrown into the yard and gobbled up.

  The birds were getting bigger by the day. One morning I was feeding them when I noticed that one chicken remained on her nest while the other five fed. She looked as if she might be suffering, but as I approached the coop to see what was wrong she stretched her neck, cackled and leaped up to join the others, leaving behind a dung-streaked egg.

  I reached in to get it, still warm from its mother. My first egg. The pleasure it gave me was almost perverse.

  The following morning three more eggs appeared in the nests. I upped their food supply.

  I brought that first egg to Atlantic Avenue to show it to Nat, who was not impressed.

  “Want to hold it?”

  “Why would I want to hold it? There’s shit on it!”

  “Is that all you have to say?”

  “I don’t eat eggs. Never liked ‘em.”

  “I don’t like them much either.”

  “So what the hell’s the deal with all these stupid chickens?”

  He had a point. I was about to have a steady stream of eggs with nothing to do but waste them.

  Then it hit me: My next-door neighbors, on either side of the coop! I’d been living here all these weeks, and I still hadn’t even met them! Maybe it was time to knock on their doors to officially introduce myself, and make a neighborly offer.

  Thanks to Rose, I knew a little bit about them. A black family, the Washingtons, lived in the house to the left of mine. The husband was a subway motorman, and the wife was a nurse who worked at Brooklyn Hospital. They had two small sons.

  That afternoon I rang the Washington doorbell. A plump, pretty woman in a nurse’s uniform answered the door and eyed me as if I were a Jehovah’s Witness.

  “Good afternoon. I’m your next-door neighbor, Joseph Ambrosio.”

  She nodded. “Bertha Washington.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Bertha.”

  She jerked a thumb behind her back. “Those are your chickens out there.”

  “Yes. That’s what I wanted to talk about. I hope they’re not disturbing you in any way?”

  She continued to stare at me. “Not yet.”

  “Anyway, they’ve begun laying eggs, and I just wanted to say that you’re welcome to as many eggs as you like.”

  She shook her head and chuckled. “Are you kidding?”

  “No, ma’am. I can leave them in a basket on your porch.”

  I suddenly ran out of words. I felt like an idiot. She broke her stare to look at her watch. “I gotta get ready for work.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “You keep your chickens in your yard, we won’t have no problems.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But we don’t need no eggs.”

  She closed the door before I could say another word.

  Tingling with embarrassment, I went to the house to the right of mine and rang the bell. Rose had told me an old man with a big moustache lived here, and that’s all she knew.

  I waited and waited, and just as I was about to give up and go home I heard the lock turn and there stood the old man—bleary-eyed, as if I’d just awakened him, and clutching the doorknob as if to keep from falling. He could have been Russian, or Croatian, or Hispanic. . . definitely not American-born, that’s all I could tell for sure. He swayed as if he were on the prow of a boat, in a high wind. I smelled beer on his breath. His handlebar moustache drooped over his mouth.

  I gave him pretty much the same rap I’d given the nurse. I don’t think a word of it got through. He just stood there hunch-shouldered, until a tiny chickadee of a woman appeared and nudged him aside, breaking his grip on the doorknob.

  “Whadda you want?”

  Another foreigner of indeterminate origins. I put on my best smile.

  “Hi. I’m your neighbor.”

  “You the guy with the chickens?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Better not be any roosters! We don’t need no crowin’ in the morning.”

  “No, no, they’re all grown up now, and they’re all hens. I was telling your husband—”

  “He can’t hear so good.”

  “Oh. Sorry. Anyway, I was telling him that they’ve begun laying eggs, and you’re welcome to as many as you want.”

  “We don’t eat eggs.”

  “Oh.”

  “And you won’t get no baby chicks from your eggs, not without a rooster.”

  The last thing I expected was an impromptu biology lesson, but in the interest of harmony I listened as this little woman laid it out for me.

  “See, without the rooster, the eggs are, whaddayacallit.”

  “Unfe
rtilized?”

  “Right. You want babies, you need a male.”

  “I get it.”

  She gave her husband’s shoulder a shove. He drifted sideways and did not complain.

  “This is my male,” she said. “Not what he used to be. Good luck with your chickens.”

  Before I could thank her she slammed the door, and as I walked away I could hear her yelling at the man for boozing in the daytime.

  So much for my neighborly efforts. In the end, Eddie Everything agreed to take the eggs off my hands.

  I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had a little fresh-egg business on the side, but that was okay by me. I still needed Eddie for one more major project.

  I wanted to turn my basement back to the way it was.

  * * *

  Eddie whistled at the sight of it, the way a mechanic does when he looks over a car in need of major repairs.

  “Boss, ain’t nobody done nothin’ down here for a long time. It’s like a damn bat cave!”

  “Well, it was a great eat-in kitchen back in the day, and that’s what I want.”

  Eddie’s eyes widened. “You talkin’ appliances?”

  “Sink, stove, refrigerator—”

  “I can’t do the stove, man, that’s gas.“

  “Plus, I want you to build a long table with built-in benches on both sides.”

  His eyes got even wider. “You talkin’, like, a picnic table?”

  “Exactly. I also want a new floor. We should do the floor first, right?”

  Eddie’s smile couldn’t have been wider as he silently added up the payments to come in his head.

  “Tell you the truth, boss, this room needs paint bad. That’s job number one. Wanna do that before we lay the floor, so we don’t be drippin’ on it.”

  “That’s all yours, Eddie, I’m all painted out.”

  He clenched his teeth in mock concern over the impending expense, pointing a callused finger toward the network of paint-flaking pipes in the ceiling.

  “Lotta prep work, lotta nooks and crannies,” he crooned. “You gotta know this ain’t gonna be a fast job.”

  “Time is what I’ve got, Eddie. Get to it.”

  * * *

  While Eddie painted the basement I got down to writing my final book. My agent had given up nagging me to “knock out” another one to take advantage of the publicity generated by my Brooklyn Bridge fiasco. Now she was stunned to hear from me and distressed when I told her it was going to be the last in the Sammy Suitcase series.

  “Don’t shut the door all the way!” she said. “Leave it open a crack.”

  “This is it,” I insisted. “It’s time for little Sammy to be home at last.”

  “Well, we don’t have to play it that way.”

  “There’s no ‘we’ in this deal,” I said, hanging up before she could reply.

  I set up a work table in the parlor, looking out on Shepherd Avenue. I always wrote the story first and followed it with the illustrations, but I was having a hard time with it. It’s easy to write about someone who’s in constant motion. If nothing else, you’ve got the new scenery to carry you along.

  What was I going to do when I had Sammy and his father settled for good in one place, the suitcase stored forever in the attic? And where would this special place be? I spent a lot of time staring out the window, watching people go by, waving when they looked my way. Nobody waved back.

  By this time it was late July, hot as hell, and Rose was coming over every other night. Sometimes I wondered if she was in it for the air-conditioning. With Justin away she stayed later each time, but she always left before dawn. It was important for her to wake up in her own bed. Maybe it helped her believe that whatever was happening between us was not really happening.

  Meanwhile, Justin was an absolute sensation. He tore up the Rookie Ball league in Arizona and was quickly promoted to the Mariners’ Double-A team in Tennessee, where he continued to pound the ball, and after just two months of pro ball the Mariners promoted him to their Triple-A team in Tacoma.

  He was eighteen years old and one step from the Major Leagues. True, it was a long step, but it was still just one step.

  And during his first two weeks with the Triple-A team, Justin led the team in batting, home runs and runs batted in.

  The New York papers reported his progress with an almost hysterical enthusiasm. He was the Natural and the Babe rolled into one.

  He was also cooler than Steve McQueen. Nothing seemed to bother him. Somehow Justin remained the same calm, polite kid who’d asked me if I minded him coming along on a morning run when I first moved to Shepherd Avenue.

  Eddie Everything, a baseball fanatic, could barely believe how well Justin was doing.

  “You believe this freakin’ kid?” he asked me. “What are they doin’, pitchin’ to him underhand? Ain’t nothin’ he can’t hit!”

  Justin phoned his mother every day, sometimes twice a day. He kept trying to get her to quit the job at the Laundromat and move someplace better, but Rose refused.

  I worried that I was keeping her on Shepherd Avenue, but quickly dismissed that idea. Rose put the I in independent. She wasn’t going to take anything from her son, and she was going to keep the only home he’d ever known until he came back.

  But was Justin ever coming back? That was the question that nagged at his mother.

  “I’m worried about him, Jo-Jo. It’s happenin’ so fast.”

  “He’s smart. He can handle it.”

  “You think?”

  “He’s doing great so far.”

  “Ain’t talkin’ about baseball. I’m talkin’ about girls. They’re gonna be all over him, and he don’t know nothin’. Probably marry the first one who lets him in.”

  That surprised me. “Are you saying Justin is a virgin?”

  “He was when he left. I’m pretty sure. Now?” She sighed, punched the pillow and started putting her clothes on. “I don’t know, I don’t know. I could be a grandmother before you know it.”

  “Funny, my shrink just told me I could be a grandfather before I know it.”

  “That’s how life is. Boom, here comes a baby, now you gotta worry the rest o’ your damn life.”

  “Want to come to the beach with me, Rose?”

  She looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. It was a crazy out-of-the-blue question for me to throw out there, but I knew she had the next day off, so I took a shot. I had a desire to feel sand under my feet and look at that limitless, watery horizon I’d first seen with my grandparents, fifty years earlier.

  Of course Rose didn’t know any of that. She just saw a crazy white guy with gray hair, making a wild invitation.

  “I’m tellin’ you ‘bout my son gettin’ trapped, and you’re talkin’ ‘bout beaches?“

  “Yeah. You need a break from your worries, and I need some inspiration if I’m ever going to write this new book. Rockaway Beach. Ever been there?”

  “No.”

  “It’s great. Used to be, anyway. Hope it still is. What do you say? A little swimming, a few hot dogs—”

  “I can’t be goin’ out with you, Jo-Jo!”

  “No problem. We’ll leave our houses separately, ten minutes apart. You can meet me at the subway station. I’ll wait on the platform.”

  “The train goes to the beach?”

  “Yeah. Isn’t that amazing? What do you say?”

  She stood there in the dark, buttoning up her shirt. I actually held my breath, awaiting her answer.

  “Always wanted to see the ocean,” she murmured at last, more to herself than to me.

  * * *

  It was jarring to see her walking toward the ocean in a one-piece blue bathing suit, in full sunshine. She couldn’t suddenly take off and run home. Like it or not, we were together on this trip. We were a couple.

  It was like having a beautiful, wild creature in captivity, and finally being able to study it as it paced the cage. But Rockaway Beach was no cage. It was without a doubt the biggest, mos
t wide-open space Rose had ever seen, and I knew it was blowing her mind as much as she was blowing mine.

  “Stop starin’ at me, Jo-Jo.”

  “Can’t help it. You are ridiculously beautiful.”

  “Get over it.”

  “I can’t.”

  It was true. I couldn’t quite believe that I was in the company of such a glorious creature. Rose’s skin was flawless, her belly was flat, and her face! My God, how it came to life in full sunlight and salty breezes!

  And here she was at the beach with a graying, thick-around-the-middle man. Anyone looking at us would have pegged me for her father, or an uncle, or a pervert.

  “You gonna stare at me all day?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I ain’t kiddin’, Jo-Jo—cut it out.”

  I obeyed, turning my gaze toward the water. It was a beautiful day, hot but not humid. We settled down about twenty yards from the surf and sat side by side on towels she’d brought. She let me apply sunblock to her back and shoulders, which were surprisingly muscular—tugging all that laundry out of washers and into dryers, day after day.

  “This is nice, Jo-Jo.”

  “I knew you’d like it.”

  “You came here when you were a kid?”

  “My grandparents took me once. I had this little plastic strainer to shake sand through. Found a bunch of coins. First money I ever made.”

  “No shit?”

  “Yeah, that was a good day. Should we go in the water?”

  She laughed, a cackling sound. “You crazy? I ain’t goin’ in the water!”

  “People go to the beach to go swimming, Rose. It’s actually the main reason they go.”

  She wrapped her arms around her knees and seemed to shiver, despite the heat.

  “You wanna go in, you go. I’ll watch.”

  “Let’s just get our feet wet.”

  “No!”

  I was startled by her tone, and then it hit me.

  “You can’t swim, can you?”

  She let her head fall. “No,” she said to the sand. “Never learned how.”

  I held out my hand. “Like I said, we’ll just get our feet wet. No big deal.”

  “Somebody’ll steal our stuff.”

  “If they knew how to steal, they’d be in the Hamptons. Come on.”

  Like a frightened child, she took my hand as we walked toward the water. With all our antics between the sheets it was odd to realize that this was the first time we’d ever held hands.