Cast Me Gently

by Caren J. Werlinger

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  www.ylva-publishing.com

  OTHER BOOKS BY

  CAREN J. WERLINGER

  Turning for Home

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  So what possessed me to write a book set in Pittsburgh in 1980? I have no idea, except I lived there in the early ’80s during a very turbulent and formative time in my own life. It seems impossible that that was thirty-five years ago.

  If we were to believe the news and literature these days, it would seem that all LGBT people are out and that all families and employers welcome them with open arms and that all is well in our world (unless you live in a state in the US with a religious freedom law). It isn’t like that for everyone. I was in the middle of writing this book when I received a message from a young woman who had just finished another of my novels. She confided to me that she is still questioning, and part of what keeps her questioning rather than seizing her identity is a painful confrontation she had with her mother, who guessed what many of our mothers guessed about us. There are still so many for whom family, religion, work—you fill in the blank—any number of obstacles keep them firmly in the closet or keep them from pursuing any relationship at all.

  Books such as Cast Me Gently helped me find my way when I was young, and I hope this book and others like it will continue to guide others along their way.

  I owe several people a debt of gratitude for helping to make this book what it is. To Lisa T., your level of attention to detail astonishes me. To Sandra Gerth, who wasn’t supposed to edit this book at all but ended up going through it three times with me, thank you! To Gill McKnight, I appreciate your thoughtful comments (and the snorks). To Michelle Aguilar, thank you for such a thorough polishing of the manuscript. To Astrid Ohletz of Ylva Publishing, you may have created a monster as Ylva keeps growing, but it’s a wonderful monster. And to my partner, Beth, I wouldn’t be able to write at all if not for you.

  The soundtrack for this book was almost exclusively a Sara(h) list of songs: lots and lots of Sara Bareilles, especially “1000 Times” and “Breathe Again,” Sara Ramirez’s “The Story,” and Sarah McLachlan’s “Answer,” which gave me the title for this novel.

  Thank you for reading. I never take that for granted.

  DEDICATION

  To Beth, you will always have my heart

  CHAPTER 1

  The sky had lightened, but the sun was not yet peeking over the surrounding roofs when Teresa unlocked the store’s front door from the inside. The musical tinkle of the door’s bell served as a prelude to the metallic screech of the security grate as she unlocked it also. It rattled upward on its rollers, revealing the storefront behind. She stepped out onto the sidewalk, the odor of fresh espresso wafting out with her. She knew the grate was necessary at night, but she much preferred the friendliness of the store’s old-fashioned façade, with its gold and black hand-lettered signage:

  Benedetto’s Drug Store

  Est. 1898

  Fine Italian candies, Espresso, Leather Goods

  Wielding a stiff broom, she began vigorously sweeping the threshold of the store and the sidewalk in front. Each pass of the broom raised a small cloud of dust and grit. In an hour or so, when the sun rose high enough to reach the storefronts, the grit would twinkle like glitter, tiny metallic motes covering everything. On either side of her, other shops’ security grates slid aside and other shopkeepers began the daily ritual of sweeping away Pittsburgh’s steel grit.

  “Buongiorno, Teresa,” called the old woman to the right of the drug store.

  Her open door let the aroma of baking breads and pastries tumble out into the street. It made Teresa’s mouth water.

  “Buongiorno, Mrs. Schiavo.”

  On the drug store’s other side, a little man, already wearing a scarred leather apron, hung an oversized leather boot on a bracket next to his door. “You’d never know the steel mills are closing, eh?” he said with a heavy Italian accent. “They forgot to take their dirt with them.”

  Teresa laughed as she pulled a rag from her pocket and began wiping down the front window and sill. “I think you’re right, Mr. Campagnolo.” She paused her cleaning to stare at her store’s lettering. She used to daydream about what it must have been like for her great-grandparents, leaving Italy with nothing but a few dollars, their dreams, and each other. She didn’t know if she could ever be brave enough to do that. She tilted her head, and her eye was caught by the reflection staring back at her—a stocky woman, doing exactly the same thing she had done nearly every morning of her life for the past ten years. With a sigh, she gave the sill one last swipe.

  Up and down the waking street, people appeared. Some of them materialized from lumps of rags tucked in alcoves and recessed stoops as the homeless woke from wherever they had bedded down. Other people, better dressed and not clutching bags of their belongings, began making the rounds of the shops, asking for work.

  “No work today,” they mostly heard. And occasionally, “I got a job for you.”

  Mrs. Schiavo brought out a tray of three-day-old bread and was immediately mobbed by people.

  Teresa watched, shaking her head in pity.

  A scuffle broke out between two women clutching the same loaf of bread. Mrs. Schiavo hit them both with her tray, scolding them in rapid Italian. She snatched the loaf back, ripped it, and gave them each half. The homeless people tore the bread apart, stuffing it into their mouths before anyone could take it from them. Others tucked their loaves under their jackets to take home to hungry families. The little mob scattered, and Teresa’s gaze was drawn to a man she had never noticed before. She couldn’t have said later what it was about him that caught her attention, but she would always remember that first day she saw him—“It was the day I met Ellie”—and the two things were forever linked in her mind.

  He was in the alcove of the Italian grocery shop across the street, sitting on an unzipped sleeping bag that was pulled up behind him, wrapped around both him and the dog next to him. To Teresa, all dogs were pretty much alike, and this brown dog was no different except its ears were up as it watched the people. The man wore a hood over what looked like an old army cap. He and the dog had observed the scuffle across the street but made no move to join the people crowding around Mrs. Schiavo. Most of his face was covered in beard, but his gaze met Teresa’s, and they stared at each other for a long moment before Teresa turned away and went back inside the drug store, locking the door behind her.

  She punched a button on the cash register, which opened with its musical ping, and counted the cash drawer, even though she’d been the one to close last night and had counted it before she’d left. “Always count your drawer last thing and first thing,” her father had pounded into her head for years. She then spent the next half hour re-stocking the pharmacy shelves.

  The back door opened, and her parents’ voices drifted over as they came in.

  “How was your drawer?” her father, Lou, asked as he headed into the office.

  “On the penny.”

  Her mother slipped an apron over her head and went to look out the front window before starting to rearrange the candies in the glass case. “She fed them again, didn’t she?” said Sylvia from inside the case.

  “Yes.” Teresa went to the door and hung the open sign as she flipped the lock. The man with the dog was gone. She peered up and down the street, but there was no sign of them.

  “I’ve told her a million times she shouldn’t do it,” said Sylvia. “But does she listen? No.”

  “The bread’s just going to go to waste,” Teresa said
.

  “Then let it go to waste,” Sylvia said. “Better not to encourage them lazy bums to hang around here.”

  “Ma, they’re not bums. They’re out of work. They have families.”

  “Same thing,” Sylvia insisted. “They should go to school, get a real job. Those steel workers thought they were so high and mighty, with their union. Getting above themselves. Never thought they would start bringing in cheaper steel from overseas. Wouldn’t negotiate. Look where it got them. And now, we’re all paying the price.”

  “Jesus fed the masses with a few fish and loaves,” Teresa said.

  “Mrs. Schiavo isn’t Jesus. And don’t blaspheme.” Sylvia quickly made the sign of the cross.

  Teresa rolled her eyes and wandered the store’s shelves, straightening the shampoo bottles into neat rows and making a mental note that she needed to restock deodorant.

  From behind the candy counter, Sylvia’s voice continued. “That Jimmy Carter was the worst thing to happen to us in ages.” Teresa sighed and silently mouthed along as her mother said, “Now Ronald Reagan! When he’s elected, he’ll get us back on the right track.”

  From the office at the back of the store, Teresa’s father called her name.

  “Here, Pop,” she said, poking her head around the door.

  Her father’s salt-and-pepper head was bent over the open ledger on the desk. Without looking up, he held out a heavy moneybag. “Here, take this to the bank,” he said as he continued to make entries.

  “Pop, I have to handle the pharmacy today. Why can’t you take it? Or Gianni?”

  “Because he’s working alone at the Morningside store.” He shook the bag. “C’mon. I got to get to the Oakland store today.”

  “Why?” Teresa took the moneybag and tucked it into a cloth sling that she draped across her chest. She pulled a baggy men’s sweater off a hook on the wall and buttoned it over the sling.

  “Your cousin needed today off,” he said.

  “On a Wednesday?” Sylvia asked as she bustled into the office. “What does Dom need to do on a Wednesday that he can’t be at work?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

  “Lou,” Sylvia said, putting her hands on her ample hips. “You pay your sister’s son good money to manage that store for you, and you don’t ask why he needs a day off in the middle of the week?”

  “What’s to ask?” Lou replied. “The man asked for a day off; I gave him a day off.”

  Teresa sighed. She checked her reflection again, this time in the office mirror while her parents continued their argument. What she saw looking back at her was her father’s nose and her mother’s hips—not a good combination, she thought, and now I look like I have a third boob. She slung a purse over top of her sweater and headed for the door. Why couldn’t it have been the other way around? The nose and hips, not the third boob. Lou had been a good-looking man when he was young—an athlete’s build, thick black hair, a strong profile. He had a belly now, courtesy of Sylvia’s cooking, but his hair was still thick; his Roman nose had become more prominent over the years—not such a bad feature on a man, but not particularly attractive on a woman. Sylvia had been a beauty, with delicate features and flawless skin. She was still pretty, though she, too, had put on weight as she’d grown older. Teresa’s three siblings—her older brother, Robbie, her younger sister, Francesca, and Gianni, the baby—had all inherited Sylvia’s fine facial features, “and then there’s me,” Teresa often lamented.

  “You have brains and a big heart,” Sylvia always replied when Teresa voiced her woes.

  “And a big butt,” Gianni usually added, ducking whenever Teresa threw something at him.

  Today, though, Teresa was glad of her powerful hips and legs as she walked quickly through the cool September morning, up and down Pittsburgh’s hilly streets, avoiding eye contact and feigning deafness as she passed people asking for a handout. Suddenly, she remembered the man with the dog. What would prompt someone who had nothing to keep a dog? Funny, how sharply he was etched in her mind. Most homeless people—the ones who drank or used drugs anyway—had flat, dull eyes and seemed blurred around the edges as if they were fading away, bit by bit. But this guy, the way his eyes had bored into hers… She shook her head.

  As she walked through Bloomfield into Polish Hill, the storefronts and flags and snatches of conversation gradually changed from Italian, so that by the time she got near the bank, it was like being in a different country. She passed a church whose sign was all in Polish, but she didn’t need to be able to read it. Each of these neighborhoods had its own Catholic church, just as they had their own restaurants and shops.

  She slowed a bit in front of one diner where the smells of simmering kielbasa and pierogi tugged at her. Those men lucky enough to still have jobs had been by hours earlier, picking up their lunches for the day. Her stomach rumbled as she sniffed and looked through the window.

  “That’s all you need,” she muttered to herself and kept walking.

  Despite the autumn chill, she was sweating slightly by the time she got to the bank. She stepped inside and twisted her purse behind her back before unbuttoning the sweater to pull the moneybag out of the sling. Spying an empty teller window, she stepped forward. Teresa and her family had been coming to this bank for years, and they were on a first-name basis with all of the tellers and managers, so it was with some surprise that she found herself looking at an unfamiliar face.

  “Good morning… Ellie,” Teresa said, reading the nameplate next to the window.

  The teller looked up and smiled. “Good morning.” She took the moneybag and dumped out the contents. “Miss Benedetto?” she added as she glanced at the store name on the deposit slip.

  “You’re new here.”

  Ellie nodded. “I transferred here a couple of weeks ago from our Squirrel Hill branch.”

  “Morning, Teresa,” called the bank manager, who emerged from one of the offices along the right side of the lobby.

  “Hi, Bill,” said Teresa while Ellie began counting the change.

  “How are your parents?” he asked.

  Teresa stepped aside to chat with him while Ellie continued counting. By the time she turned back to the teller window, Ellie had finished counting the deposit and had zipped the receipt into the empty moneybag.

  “Thank you,” said Teresa, tucking the bag back into the sling and buttoning her sweater over top. She shifted her purse back into position.

  “I like your security measures,” Ellie said, watching the procedure.

  Teresa shrugged. “I like to walk, and it’s safer this way. Especially these days. If someone grabs my purse, an empty bag is all they’ll get.”

  “Have a nice day, Miss Benedetto.”

  “It’s Teresa.”

  “Teresa,” Ellie repeated. “I hope we’ll see you again soon.”

  “You’ll see one of the Benedettos soon,” Teresa said with an apologetic smile.

  She took her time on the walk back to the store.

  Five old women were emerging from the church where Mass was now over, their heads covered in scarves, speaking to one another in Polish and cackling at their own jokes.

  Teresa smiled in greeting and walked on.

  Despite the filth and the unemployment and the poverty and all the problems Pittsburgh was facing, she loved this city. She loved that five blocks’ walk in just about any direction could take her almost to a different country—the Poles here, the Irish in Upper Lawrenceville; Ukrainians and Serbs and Germans. They all had their own enclaves within the city, with their own churches, their own foods and languages. Of course, her parents never understood why she would want to be anywhere but the Italian sections of the city. They had worked hard to expand what her great-grandparents started with the original store. They saved for years to buy their large house in Bloomfield and had set up stores in strategic loc
ations to take advantage of cultural loyalties.

  “It’s heritage,” Sylvia often said. “Our people miss what they had in Italy.”

  “It’s good business,” Lou answered. “They’ll pay a lot to have what they miss from Italy.”

  When Teresa got back to the store, there were a couple of customers browsing the aisles.

  “What took you so long?” Sylvia asked. “Mr. DiBartolomeo dropped off two prescriptions. Since you weren’t here to fill them, I told him you’d bring them to him.”

  If you wouldn’t keep sending me on errands, I’d be here to fill the prescriptions. But Teresa didn’t say it. It never did any good to argue. She did anyhow, sometimes, just to get her mother riled up, but she didn’t have the energy for it today.

  She went to the office where she stripped off her purse, sweater, and the sling with the moneybag and hung them on the wall. She took down her white pharmacist’s jacket from another hook and donned it as she stepped behind the tall pharmacy counter to check the dropped-off prescriptions.

  With a sigh, she began counting pills. It was boring, but there was some comfort in the routine nature of her work. Occasionally, she glanced up to the street beyond the store. She liked to watch people going by, wondering where they were going and what it would be like to go somewhere different.

  “Where would you go? What would you do?” Sylvia used to ask indignantly when Teresa wondered aloud what it would be like to be going somewhere. “This is somewhere. Our store, our home. Be glad you have somewhere to belong.”

  Teresa never had a response to that. As much as she loved Pittsburgh, lately there had been a kind of restlessness stirring in her, as if the hills of the city were closing in on her. But when she tried to think of where else she’d like to be, she couldn’t think of anyplace. Still, she felt as if she was stuck in between.

  “In between what?” her friend Bernie had asked when Teresa voiced this feeling, but, “just in between” was all Teresa could say. She wasn’t sure how to explain it, but aside from her own siblings and cousins and now their families, it felt as if all the young people were fleeing Pittsburgh. She knew it wasn’t actually so. The city’s handful of colleges and universities were full of young people. “You’re not that young anymore,” Teresa reminded herself whenever she got nostalgic for the social life she used to have when she was attending Pitt for undergrad and then pharmacy school. Thirty-four in a couple of weeks, she was too old for the college crowd, too young for her parents’ generation, too single to want to hang around with the married people in her family with their demanding children.