“Somebody smashed my jack-o’-lantern.”
“Little fuckers, they did that up and down the block. Listen, I thought you should know that Rose is comin’ back tomorrow.”
My heart leaped. “How do you know?”
“I got my sources, man, you know that.”
“Is she moving to Seattle?”
“How the fuck should I know that? All’s I know is, she’s gonna be at the Laundromat tomorrow, which means she’s comin’ home.”
“Thanks, Eddie.”
“Hey, no problem. Need anything?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Later, man.”
I felt rejuvenated. I was ready to face Rosensohn and anything he might want to talk about.
But before I saw him I had another task to accomplish in Manhattan, and time was running out.
Chapter Thirty
Rosensohn looked weary, and I was nervous. I had this session and one more after it to wrap up my probation period. If he didn’t sign off on me, I could actually face time behind bars.
Or so they wanted me to believe. It was ball-breaking at its best, but it worked. I just wanted it all to be over. Why was it taking so long? I was a guy who’d had a bad day and climbed to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge to scatter his dead father’s ashes at a time when the whole city was on edge, fearful of the next terrorist disaster. It was an unbelievably stupid thing I’d done, no question, but I hadn’t hurt anybody.
“Am I in trouble?”
I hit him with that question before I even sat down. He looked at me over the tops of his glasses, the way a teacher looks at a student he suspects of having farted.
“How are you today, Mr. Ambrosio?”
“Wondering if I’m in trouble.”
“For what?”
“Look, we meet one more time after this, and then you provide the authorities with some kind of evaluation of me, is that right? I just want to know where I stand.”
“For starters, why don’t you stop standing and sit down?”
That I could do. I sat down and for a few moments we just listened to each other breathe, while Rosensohn consulted his notes. He didn’t look happy.
“What do you do, make out some kind of a report card on me?”
“I guess you could call it that,” he said, keeping his eyes on his notes. “I see you missed gym class quite a few times.”
“Don’t fool around, Doc. On top of everything I’m paying for this, so what the hell is my grade?”
He put his notes aside, looked up and offered me a funny smile.
“Incomplete.”
I could feel the pulse in my throat. “What are you talking about?”
“We’re missing a key element here. Do you remember what I said to you, the very first time we met?”
I remembered. I saw where he was going. I’d been fearing this all along, without ever putting the fear into words.
“You said you suspected that my bridge adventure had more to do with my mother than my father.”
He pursed his lips. “That’s what I said, all right.”
“What am I supposed to do about that?”
He shrugged. “Prove me wrong, or prove me right. It’s time to really talk about your mother, Mr. Ambrosio. Don’t just tell me she died young. I already know that.”
I clasped my hands together to stop the shaking. “Ask me what you want to know.”
“It doesn’t work like that. Tell me what you want to tell me. Tell me anything about her.”
I licked my suddenly dry lips. “Want to hear about the last time I ever saw her?”
Rosensohn smiled, shrugged. “Nothing like an ending for a starting point. I’m listening.”
* * *
It was at the hospital. I knew something troubling was up when my mother asked my father to leave the room. She’d never done that before. We were a team, the three of us, and we’d drawn even closer as her illness progressed, and suddenly here she was asking for a little privacy with me.
My father seemed stunned by the request. “You sure?”
“Just for a few minutes, Sal. You can get me a Coke.”
My father detested sugary, carbonated soft drinks—doubly so, because he’d been forced to do ads for a few of them—but at this point Coca-Cola was the only thing my mother could keep down. So off he went to the Coke machine, two flights down. He’d be gone for a few minutes: My mother’s precious window of time.
“Come here, Joey.”
She patted the bit of mattress beside her hip, and even that little motion seemed to pain her. I obeyed, sitting on the edge of the bed. She ran her hand up my forehead to smooth back my hair, a hand that was little more than skin and bone.
“You need a haircut, young man.”
I nodded. She was smiling and friendly but I was actually afraid of the way she looked: pale as milk, and so drawn that her eyes seemed to be floating in their sockets.
But the eyes themselves shined with the same inextinguishable life and love I’d always known.
“Why’d you make Daddy go away?” I asked, aware that my voice was trembling.
“Well, there’s something I have to tell you, Joey.”
“You’re going to die. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s true, but it’s not what I wanted to tell you.”
What was this? Could there be bigger news than the fact that my mother was admitting the end was near? I was so stunned I couldn’t even cry.
“Mommy. You’re scaring me.”
“Oh, no, Joey, don’t be scared! It’s a wonderful thing! Want to hear it?”
I nodded. She put her lips to my ear.
“We’re going to meet again!”
I pulled away from her. She was smiling, her teeth looking longer than usual and her gums as gray as rain clouds.
I was baffled. “How?”
A truly blissful look came to her face, as if she’d just been injected with morphine. “In heaven, Joey. We’ll be together again in heaven.”
“You mean, after I die?”
“That’s right.” She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “I’ll be up there, waiting for you.”
“Heaven is in the sky?”
“Yes. Way up beyond the clouds.”
It was a lot to absorb, and I had to absorb it before my father returned. It was as if my mother had read my mind.
“Don’t tell Daddy. He doesn’t believe in heaven, but he’s wrong. He’s going to heaven someday, too.”
“He is?”
“Yes. It’ll be a wonderful surprise for him. It’s the place all good people go when they die. Nobody ever gets sick in heaven, and everybody’s happy forever.”
I swallowed. “Even Daddy?”
It was stunning to hear her laugh, but that’s what she did, maybe the last laugh of her life.
“Yes,” she said. “Even your Daddy will be happy in heaven.”
There was the thump of approaching footsteps, and moments later my father appeared carrying a bottle of Coke and a straw.
“One Coca-Cola, as ordered. A nurse had to get me a straw. Only took her about half an hour. Must be a union job.”
He popped the cap, stuck in the straw and put the bottle in my mother’s hands, cocooning his own hands around hers.
“So, did you two finish your secret meeting?”
“It wasn’t a secret meeting, Sal. Just a moment with my son.”
She put the straw in her mouth, sipped the soda and gave me a quick wink. Visiting hours were over. We kissed her cheek and left.
On the drive from the hospital my father approached it cautiously.
“Anything I should know?”
“About what?”
“Whatever it was your mother had to tell you.”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“So you have a secret.”
“It’s not a secret.”
“But you don’t want to tell me.”
<
br /> “Daddy—”
“Ahh, go ahead, keep it to yourself.” He gripped the steering wheel as if he meant to strangle it. “Fucking secrets.“
He was upset and he was exhausted. His face reddened and it looked as if his head might explode. I couldn’t stand it.
“She told me she loves me,” I blurted.
He looked at me, eyes wide. “That’s it?”
“Yeah.” I looked out the passenger window. I wasn’t much of a liar at that age and figured my eyes might give me away.
But I got away with it. My father believed me. “Christ,” he said, pulling into the parking lot of the diner where we always ate after hospital visits, “why the hell’d I have to leave the room for that?”
Her condition worsened that night. I wasn’t allowed to go to the hospital anymore. A week later she died, and I never told my father the truth about her last words to me.
* * *
Rosensohn sighed deeply when I finished talking, as if he’d been holding his breath for the duration of my story.
“My father totally flipped out when she died. It’s as if the moment her heart stopped beating, the world made no sense to him. He had to escape from his own life, wipe it clean. Quit the job, sell the house, hit the road.”
“And dump you off on Shepherd Avenue.”
“Yeah, well, he saved me for last. That was considerate of him, I guess.”
“Under the circumstances, maybe that wasn’t the worst thing in the world. He hardly seemed capable of taking care of you himself, but your anger toward him is totally understandable.”
By this time I’d actually grown fond of Dr. Rosensohn and I was reluctant to contradict him. But he’d left me no choice.
“Doc,” I said, “the one I was really angry with was my mother.”
“That also makes sense. When she died, she abandoned you. How else would a ten-year-old be expected to react?”
“No!”
Rosensohn was truly startled.
“What am I missing?” he asked after a long moment.
I leaned forward, gripping the edge of his desk. “She lied to me,” I all but snarled. “Fucking lied to me about meeting again, with that bullshit story about heaven.”
“But perhaps she believed it!”
“So what if she believed it? I don’t believe it. Do you believe it?”
“Me, personally? No. But I could be wrong! Maybe there is a heaven, or at least some kind of existence beyond this one.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it.”
Rosensohn chuckled. “Don’t you see? You are betting on it. We’re all betting on it. Deep down, whether or not you believe in God or heaven or whatever, it’s impossible for any of us to imagine not existing. We all have just enough vanity to buy into that idea of immortality. In your mother’s case, it took the form of devout Catholicism. Heaven and hell and angels and devils.”
“Exactly! Total bullshit!”
“Okay, let’s say it is. Maybe you should look at it another way. Maybe your mother didn’t believe it. Maybe she just wanted to leave her son with a comforting thought, knowing she wouldn’t be there to take care of you.”
“In that case, she was lying.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ, Joseph!”
It was the first time Dr. Rosensohn had ever summoned Christ’s name, or spoken my first name. He leaned way back in his chair to make that squeaky, creaky sound he knew I despised.
“You look pale, Doc. Maybe you need a little fresh air.”
“And maybe you should think everything through and give that poor woman who brought you into this world a break. Tell yourself she meant well! Give her the benefit of the doubt!”
“You’re getting pretty aggressive, Doc.”
“Time’s running out. This is crucial stuff.”
He leaned forward, causing a far deeper, more sinister creaking noise from under his chair.
“It’s pretty simple, though. Just grow the fuck up, Mr. Ambrosio. The sooner you do that, the easier your life will become.”
The session was over. I rose from my chair the weary way a boxer rises from his stool at the bell for the fifteenth round.
“You’ll be happy to hear that I’m about to do an extremely grown-up thing,” I said softly. “Something I’ve never done before.”
Rosensohn’s eyes narrowed. “And what would that be?”
“We’ll talk about it next time,” I said, heading for the door. “I want you to have something to look forward to in our final session.”
He called out to me but I ignored him. Fuck his final report, fuck his “incomplete” grade! If I was going down, I was going to do it in style.
In the elevator on the way down I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out a tiny blue box from Tiffany’s, tied with a white ribbon.
Rose didn’t wear rings. I was hoping she’d make this one her first.
Chapter Thirty-one
I was going to ask Rose to marry me. I’d gone to Tiffany’s before my shrink session and dropped more than two grand on a ring that probably would have cost half that much in the Diamond District on Forty-Seventh Street, but I was willing to pay for the dazzle of that robin’s-egg blue box.
It was time, I told myself. I was sixty years old and I’d never asked a woman to marry me before. I’d never even thought of asking any woman to marry me. A major life experience for most so-called normal people, and I’d avoided it as if it were a tar pit.
But now, suddenly, I felt as if I might fall into that pit if I lost Rose. What if she moved to Seattle? What would life on Shepherd Avenue be like for me without that late-night knock on my door?
If I pledged myself to this woman, really laid everything on the line, she’d let herself go and admit to the love that she’d been holding back from me, I told myself.
What I should have told myself was that sentences ending in “I told myself” usually didn’t live up to expectations.
But I had yet another “I told myself” nagging at me, and it was this:
Ignore her order to never, ever go to her house! She’ll respect you as a man if you bang on her door and ask her to marry you!
Or so I told myself.
The next night I showered, shaved and put on my best shirt. Then I went to the front parlor and sat there with the lights out, keeping an eye on Rose’s dark house. Unless Eddie Everything’s information was bad she was at the Laundromat, which closed at seven p.m., which meant I’d be seeing her at a few minutes past seven.
Eddie’s information was good. Here she came, walking slowly and looking exhausted in the November darkness. I realized her body was probably still on Seattle time.
Maybe this wasn’t a good night to pop the question. A cranky, jet-lagged woman who had just put in ten hours at a Laundromat wasn’t likely to be in the most romantic state of mind, was she?
On the other hand, it felt like now or never.
Now or never, I told myself!
I gave her ten minutes to settle in, then left my house and headed for hers like a guided missile.
I knocked on the door and was startled when it opened a heartbeat later. Rose squinted at me, a look that quickly turned wide-eyed. She grabbed me by my shoulders, pulled me inside and slammed the door shut.
“What the hell are you doin’ here, Jo-Jo?”
I couldn’t immediately answer. I was in a state of wonder, looking all around that tiny living room. It was nothing less than a shrine to Justin: trophies on every shelf, photos and plaques covering the walls. Everything from tiny Justin on a Little League team to a poster-sized photo of him swinging the bat for the Mariners.
That last one was not yet hung. It was leaning against the wall, a wall on which I couldn’t see another bit of space to hang such a thing.
I turned to Rose. Her arms were folded tightly across her chest—just as they were the first time she came to my house to confront me, six months earlier.
Were we back to that? I refused to believe it. I took a step toward
her. She took a step back.
“You mad at me?”
“Little bit.”
“Because I came to your door? How else can I see you, if you don’t answer your phone and don’t come to my house?”
“I was gonna come over tonight.”
“And now?”
“Now, I ain’t so sure.”
I slid my hand into the chest pocket of my jacket to feel the box with the ring, reminding myself of my mission. There it was, shielding my heart. I didn’t know much about marriage proposals, but I was pretty sure they didn’t have such rocky beginnings. I had to unlock Rose’s arms, if I had any hope of getting a ring on her hand. Would a friendly question do it? It was worth a shot.
“How was Seattle?”
She sighed, but the arms remained locked across her chest.
“It’s a beautiful city. Never seen nothin’ like it. Clean. Nice people. Justin bought a house.”
That stunned me. “Already?”
“He seen what he liked, and he bought it. I think he paid too much, but it ain’t my money.”
“I don’t think Justin has to worry about money for a while.”
Rose nodded. “Forever,” she said softly.
I could see she was exhausted, every which way. But then she startled me by dropping her arms and reaching for me.
“Could I have a hug, if it ain’t too much trouble?”
We embraced. I caught a whiff of bleach in her hair and knew she’d been washing restaurant linens. That was always her least favorite task: the heavy white tablecloths, the endless drying time, the complaints from other customers about the way the linens tied up the dryers.
“He wants me to move there, Jo-Jo.”
It was the bleach smell more than her words that brought me to my senses. Here was her son, eager to provide her with a brand-new life far from East New York. Rose had an ancient soul but she was still young, young enough for a fresh shot at everything that got messed up the first time around. With a second chance out west she could start again, marry again, maybe even have another child.
What was I offering her? A move across the street on Shepherd Avenue, to live out her days with an aging children’s-book writer whose own crazy life was approaching its final chapters. Like it or not, my funky years were looking me in the eye. I wasn’t a kid. Anything could happen. I could become debilitated by a stroke or a heart attack. Great life for Rose—the first half protecting an athletic marvel from the perils of the streets, the second half wiping an old man’s chin whenever he drooled the soup she spooned into his mouth.
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