“I’m scared, Jo-Jo.”
“Relax. We’re just going to stick our toes in the water.”
“Don’t let go!”
“I won’t.”
Her grip tightened as we waded in, and she let out a cry of excitement as the foam broke around our ankles.
“Hey, it’s cool!”
“Feels good, doesn’t it?”
“Oh yeah!”
“Want to go a little deeper?”
She stopped walking and tugged on my hand. “No tricks.”
“Absolutely not. We’ll stop whenever you want.”
She studied the surf. “Maybe a little deeper.”
We inched our way forward, up to our calves, up to our knees—then a wave rolled in and soaked us to our necks. Rose screamed with delight, still clutching my hand as if she were never going to let go.
“Let’s go back, Jo-Jo!”
“Hang on, Rose. Give me your other hand.”
Her ponytail dripped seawater and her eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“Just do it.”
We were up to our waists at this point, and the ocean was in that calm state between waves. I held out my free hand, but Rose ignored it. She looked like a frightened child who was trying to be brave. I’d never seen her so vulnerable. She believed her life was in my hands.
“Whachoo gonna do?”
“Just trust me. Do you trust me?”
She shook her head. “Trustin’ people ain’t worked out too good for me.”
“Just this once, trust me.”
She took my hand. Now we were facing each other, clasping hands. I sidestepped to the depth of our chests, forcing her to come along.
“Hey, where we goin’?”
“We’re there. Just let your feet go back.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind, I’ll do it.”
I walked backwards, forcing Rose to float on her belly. She let out a shriek.
“Jesus, Jo-Jo!”
“Easy, you’re doing great.”
I continued walking backwards, keeping her chin above water as I pulled her along. The look on her face was pure rapture.
“Oh my God, oh my God, it’s like flying!”
“Great, isn’t it?”
“Don’t let me go, Jo-Jo!”
“I won’t!”
“Hang onto me!”
“I’ve got you!”
“Shit, this is amazing! Come on, you can go faster than that!”
“You’re going to give an old man a heart attack!”
“Don’t go dyin’ on me, I want a hot dog and a beer!”
“You shall have it!” I shouted, running backwards as fast as I could.
* * *
On the subway home Rose was quiet. She was reliving her first-ever time in the ocean, but I knew it was more than just that.
I’d done a wonderful and a terrible thing, taking her to the beach. I’d given her a great adventure along with a glimpse of the many pleasures she’d missed out on, with the lousy hand she’d been dealt.
“Jo-Jo?”
“Yeah?”
“It was a nice day. Thank you.”
“Glad you liked it.”
“Listen, I gotta be by myself tonight, okay?”
I was expecting that, the way you expect the rumble of thunder after a flash of lightning.
“I understand.”
“You ain’t mad?”
“I’m a little sunburned, but I’m not mad.”
“You shoulda let me rub the lotion on your back.”
“I hate those chemicals.”
“Estupido. Stubborn.” She looked around the subway car before daring to rest her head on my shoulder. “Wanna know somethin’? You’re too nice.”
“Never been accused of that before.”
“You sure you ain’t mad?”
“Swear on my life. It’s been a big day. I’m going to feed my chickens, and then I’m going to collapse.”
“Me, too. I just gotta . . . think about things, you know?”
“I know.”
I also knew it was the beginning of the end for us. I stroked her head, feeling the sweet sorrow that comes whenever you realize that something good can’t possibly last.
We got off at the Cleveland Street station. I gave Rose a five-minute head start in case anybody on Shepherd Avenue was watching, and then I went home and fed my chickens.
At least they weren’t going anywhere.
Chapter Twenty-three
Eddie Everything took three days to paint the basement. There was a lot of prep work, the scraping and sanding of old paint on the walls and the pipes, and then every surface needed two coats of semi-gloss white paint. When he was done the place was practically gleaming.
Next up was the floor, a cheap layer of scuffed green linoleum worn through to the black. I told Eddie I wanted a checkerboard pattern of tiles, red and yellow, which was the floor I remembered from my grandparents’ days. Eddie measured the floor and we drove to a tile shop on Atlantic Avenue, where I spent $900 on the best tiles they made.
We had to make two trips in Eddie’s station wagon to bring all those tiles home, along with big cans of adhesive and trowels with serrated edges to apply the stuff.
“Floor’s pretty flat,” Eddie remarked on the second trip home. “We’re lucky with that, at least.”
“I’ll be your helper on this job, Eddie.”
He seemed surprised. “Ain’t you got a book to write?”
“Yeah, but right now I’m blocked.”
“What’s that mean? Like, constipated?”
“Exactly. Can’t find the words, so I might as well help you. Sometimes physical labor loosens up the words.”
“Gonna stink pretty bad downstairs for a while, Mr. A., I gotta warn you. This adhesive we’re usin’ is nasty stuff.”
“We’ll open the windows.”
“Won’t help much.”
We rolled on in silence for a few blocks, and then Eddie, almost casually, asked: “How was the beach?”
I looked at him. He was grinning, the kind of grin people grin when they’ve got the drop on you.
“Pretty good,” I said.
“Yeah? You go with anybody special?”
“What the hell are you up to, Eddie?”
He shrugged his shoulders, a little too dramatically. “Hey, I don’t mean no harm, man. I just noticed that you got a tan, and Rosie Suds, she’s got a tan, so I gotta wonder if maybe youse bumped into each other at Rockaway.”
Rosie Suds. I never knew she had a nickname. Rosie Suds, because she worked at a Laundromat. I wondered if she knew she had a nickname. I wondered if I had acquired a Shepherd Avenue nickname. (Crazy Joey No-Bars?)
I felt myself sweat. “Eddie, I’d really appreciate it if you kept this to yourself.”
“What am I, WINS news? You give me twenty-two minutes, I’ll give you the world?”
“I’m serious, Eddie. I’d like to keep this private.”
“Hey, your life is your life, man. I mean, I know you’re givin’ me all this work, and I appreciate that, but it ain’t just business here, is it? We’re friends, too, right?”
“I’d like to think so.”
“Well, let me tell you something, friend. That is a beautiful woman and a good mother, and you must be a pretty good man to get her, ‘cause I asked her out many times and always got shut down.”
Holy shit. Where was this going? Proceed with caution.
“I wouldn’t say I’ve got her, Eddie. I really don’t know what we’ve got going. It could end any time.”
“She’s callin’ the shots, am I right?”
“You are right.”
He chuckled. “Jesus, man, they’re all crazy! Women, I mean. My advice to you is, enjoy yourself while it lasts. Justin’s gonna be a millionaire any minute now, and he’s gonna take her away. Buy her a mansion somewhere. Won’t see Rosie Suds no more.”
He spoke those final words just as we pulled up to
park in front of my house. I didn’t bother telling Eddie how Justin had already tried to get his mother to move away, and she’d refused.
He knew too much already.
* * *
The basement floor was worse than Eddie thought. We pulled up the old linoleum and the surface beneath was full of rough patches that had to be smoothed, and that took time. We started at eleven in the morning and didn’t wrap it up until six p.m., with no break for lunch.
And Eddie was right: The stink from the adhesive was awful, enough to make me dizzy. I wanted to bail out an hour into the job, but I’d already declared my intention to help lay the floor and quitting would have been unmanly, to say the least.
So I hung in there, spreading adhesive and carefully laying the tiles in a checkerboard pattern. Whenever I reached a wall or a corner Eddie took over to trim the tiles to fit.
“You’re doin’ good, boss.”
“I’m getting a nice buzz from this adhesive.”
“Yeah, but the good thing is, it’s like you’re in a dream, you know? You go to bed tonight, you forget all about it. Then tomorrow morning, you come down here and see you got a brand-new floor, and it’s like . . . how the fuck did that happen?”
I had to laugh. “Eddie, you’re a poet.”
“Bullshit, man, I didn’t say nothin’ that rhymed!”
Eddie had done an excellent job measuring the floor—we had just three tiles left over when the job was complete. I paid him and tipped him an extra fifty bucks.
Neither of us mentioned Rose. I knew she wouldn’t be knocking on my door that night, and even if she did, I probably wouldn’t have heard her. I simply collapsed with exhaustion on top of my bed, without even showering.
And the next morning, sore in the back and the knees, I staggered down to the basement, and it was just as Eddie Everything said it would be.
I had a brand-new floor of yellow and red tiles, brilliant in the morning sunshine, and how the hell did that happen?
I didn’t have time to dwell on it, because somebody was knocking on my front door. I’d ordered a sink, a stove and a refrigerator to be delivered that week, and figured one of those items had arrived.
But when I opened the front door it was my Uncle Victor standing there, a baseball cap on his head and a bulging brown paper bag in his hands.
“Jesus, Vic!”
“My father always brought bagels and cream cheese on Sunday morning. Remember?”
I remembered. “It’s Saturday, Vic.”
“Sue me.” He shoved the bag into my hands. “Here’s your housewarming gift. You gonna invite me inside, or what? I could get mugged out here. That’d be some headline, right? Mugged For His Bagels?”
I embraced him. He didn’t hug back. He brushed past me and stepped into the house, breathing hard, like a child alone in a haunted house. He took a moment to gather himself and then walked bravely to the kitchen, stopping dead in his tracks at the stove.
“Don’t tell me this is the same one.”
“Yeah. The only relic in the whole house that survived from the old days.”
“Holy shit.”
“They knew how to build ‘em back then, huh?”
He ran his hand over the surface of the stove, and I knew he was thinking what I was thinking the day Rico Valdez let me into the kitchen. The countless meals it had cooked, the oceans of coffee that had percolated on its surface . . .
Suddenly the strength drained from Vic’s legs. He caught himself on the back of a chair and sat down. He took off his baseball cap, pushed back his hair and looked at me for a long moment before sobbing silently into his hands.
I stood behind him and squeezed his shoulders, as if he were a fighter who’d just finished a tough round.
“Goddamn, Joey,” he said, over and over. “Goddamn.”
* * *
I made a pot of coffee and served it up the way he liked it, light and sweet. We each had two bagels with cream cheese, and I remembered how much my uncle liked to eat. The optimism of his appetite always made me wonder about the pessimism of his words.
“The times we had in this house,” he said softly. It was a statement that required no response, a you-hadda-be-there-to-know-what-I-mean statement.
He pointed at the stove. “My father tried to make coffee the morning I left to play baseball in Charleston, and he spilled it all over the stove. Couldn’t do shit in the kitchen, my old man.”
“He never had to.”
“He did that morning, because my mother wouldn’t say goodbye to me. Remember? Stayed in her bedroom, because she didn’t want me to play ball. Wanted me to go to college. That was a lousy way to start my professional baseball career, don’t you think?”
“She wanted you to play it safe.”
“Yeah, safe. I played it safe, all right. Lost my college scholarship offers after I turned pro, so I drove a city bus for thirty years. They gave me a plaque, a sheet cake and a bottle of Champale for my years of dedicated service. Pension check comes right on the first of every month. Lot to be proud of, huh?”
With a shaky hand he lifted his coffee cup to his mouth, and as he drank I noticed how chubby he’d become, his jowls covered with white beard stubble he hadn’t bothered shaving for at least three days.
And that reminded me of the jet-black beard he’d grown when he washed out as a ballplayer and came home to Shepherd Avenue, lean as a cat and mad at the world, until he met a beautiful Greenwich Village painter named Jenny Sutherland and ran off to move into her studio apartment on Sullivan Street, to the horror of his parents.
I’d always wondered about that girl. I had a wild crush on Jenny and even begged her to let me move in with her and Vic, but of course that couldn’t happen, especially after Vic woke up alone on Sullivan Street one morning to find that Jenny had taken off in the middle of the night, God knows where.
Did I dare to ask him about the girl who’d broken his heart, half a century ago?
Well, shit, if not now, when?
“Hey, Vic. Whatever happened to that Village girlfriend of yours?”
“Who?”
“Who. The one you moved in with when you came back home, after—”
“After my baseball career went in the toilet?” he said, falsely chirpy. “Good old Jenny Sutherland! Haven’t thought about her in about fifty years.”
Bullshit, I thought, as I watched the blood flush into his face, red as a rose behind his whiskers.
Vic poured more coffee for himself. “She was a nut job, Joey, plain and simple. A true bohemian.”
“I had a wild crush on her.”
“Of course you did! Everybody did! She was pretty, she was full of life, she was crazy. And bad luck followed her around. Remember the day we were supposed to be taking care of you, and you got hit by a car?”
I remembered. I was spending a day in the Village with them and we were on Sixth Avenue, across the street from the Waverly Theater when I spotted my father—who’d been gone all summer—heading down the subway steps. I ran after him without looking, got winged by a car and wound up at St. Vincent’s Hospital, where I was treated for minor injuries and told repeatedly how lucky I was to be alive.
“That wasn’t Jenny’s fault,” I said. “I saw my father and I ran after him.”
“What are you, defending her?”
“Take it easy, Vic! We’re two old farts, talking about something that happened in 1961! I just wondered if you ever heard from her again.”
“Never. Never looked for her, either. Got any more questions about Jenny Sutherland?”
I had a hundred questions about Jenny Sutherland, but the tremble in my uncle’s voice quelled them all.
“No, sir.”
“Good.” He got to his feet and squared his shoulders. “All right, I’m ready to see what the hell you’ve done to this goddamn house.”
We started the tour in the front parlor, which contained my desk and my drafting board, but Vic’s gaze was fixed on the gleaming parquet
floor.
“Christ, that’s a beautiful floor!”
“Yeah. Sanded it down and gave it a coat of shellac.”
He shook his head. “Who knew it was under there, huh? And new paint everywhere. You’ve been bustin’ your ass, Joey.”
“Just taking it a step at a time.”
He pointed toward the ceiling. “You got a tenant?”
I shook my head. “Keeping it empty, in case Taylor ever wants to spend the night.”
“Yeah? Not a bad idea. You don’t want her goin’ home from here after dark.”
“I think she’d survive.”
“Seen her lately?”
“Yeah. She’s got a boyfriend.”
“You like him?”
I hesitated. “He’s a recovering alcoholic. So’s Taylor.”
Vic’s shoulders sagged. “Jesus, nothin’s ever easy in our family, you notice that, Joey?”
“I noticed.”
“Hard to imagine little Taylor on the booze!”
“She’s not little anymore, and she’s been dry six months. Got a feeling this guy’s good for her.”
“Hope you’re right. Hey, I’m sorry I reacted like that, Joey. Just when I figure the Ambrosios are all through with the dramatics, God thinks up another one for us. Come on, let me see our old room.”
But he seemed reluctant to enter that room. Back in the day we’d slept on two narrow beds, mine by the window, his against the wall, and now my king-sized bed pretty much gobbled up most of the room.
Vic chuckled. “The other bedrooms are bigger.”
“I wanted this one.”
“Nostalgic, huh?”
“I guess.”
A clucking sound reached us from the backyard, luring Vic all the way into the room. He looked out the window at the chickens and turned to me wide-eyed.
“Oh, gimme a break, Joey. Are you serious?”
All I could do was shrug. “Just like the good old days.”
“I think you’ve lost your mind.”
“They’re good layers, Vic. I get fresh eggs every day. Want to go outside and see them?”
“I can see ‘em from here. Don’t need chicken shit on my shoes. So what’s the deal, here, your neighbors don’t complain?”
“What are they going to complain about? No roosters, so there’s no crowing.”
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