Whose Number Is Up, Anyway?

by Stevi Mittman

  “What do you mean ‘used to be’?” he says, puffing out his chest.

  “Put himself through Brooklyn College as a handyman. When they say self-made man, they’re talking about my Jerry.”

  Jerry says that was a long time ago, when he was young and strong, and he gets up to look out the window. He waves and I hear the toot of a bicycle horn.

  “He should come in soon. It’s cold out,” Jerry says and looks at my coat, hanging behind me over the chair. “And you should be wearing something warmer.”

  “That’s my Jerry. Taking care of everyone. You should have seen him with Joey. Checking with the nurses, picking up his pills. Everything, he did.”

  “Stop,” Jerry says, waving her praise away and returning to my coat. “That jacket isn’t warm enough for October, Teddi, dear.”

  I tell him that today it’s surprisingly warm for so late in the year. “Not warm enough for a dip in the ocean, mind you…”

  Jerry laughs. “Why would anyone do that?”

  I tell them about Milt Sherman, who was on Joey’s bowling team and who’s died in a freak accident that the police are calling suspicious.

  “I told you,” Rita says, pointing her finger at Jerry and sputtering. “I told you it’s all fishy, but no, you think it’s all in my head. You think—”

  “I think you keep carrying on like this you’re gonna need a pill, Ritzala,” Jerry says, looking at me like I should back him up.

  “I do have some good news,” I say, trying to lighten the mood, and I tell them how I saw Max this morning and how he’s regained consciousness. I admit he isn’t exactly his old self, and that he’s got a lot of healing to do. “He can’t remember what happened, but the doctors say that’ll come back. And they feel he’s definitely going to make it.”

  “Good,” Jerry says. “That’s very good.”

  And then the talk shifts back to decorating their house and we discuss the pros and cons of wood versus carpet. At their age I really lean toward carpeting, as a fall on wood is sure to break bones.

  “We’re all getting older,” I say, including myself in the geriatric set. “Ailments happen.”

  “Like Joey,” Rita says. “And he was my baby brother.”

  “He ate like a pig,” Jerry says. “He was warned and warned, Ritzala. You know that.”

  “What did the doctor say?” I ask, finally getting to it. Only Jerry looks at me quizzically. “About his health. She must have thought the surgery would help him, right?”

  “It was supposed to fix everything, the angioplasty,” Rita says. “Put him through all that and then it didn’t work, did it?”

  My shrug is noncommittal, but Jerry is adamant. “She could have bought him maybe a few months more than he got, but it was a case of sooner or later with him. She should have told him to stop stuffing his face with trans-fatty acids and hydrogenated oils. We never eat that stuff.”

  I think about the dozen or so mini-pastries Rita wolfed down just the other day. “Good for you,” I tell him. “I know everyone is talking about her like she was a saint, but it seems to me that the good doctor owed you an apology.”

  “That’ll be the day,” Jerry says. “And open herself up to a malpractice suit?”

  “But I thought she did call you. Wasn’t it the day she died?” I put another spoonful of sugar in my coffee so that I don’t have to meet Jerry’s eyes.

  “What makes you think she called?” Jerry asks.

  I try to look confused, because I’m not exactly going to say that the police told me, now am I? “Didn’t we talk about it at my mother’s?” I ask Rita. “I guess you told her.”

  “Rita didn’t know she called,” Jerry says. We both look at him. “I mean, it would have just upset her if I told her.”

  “Well, you must have told Marty then,” Rita says, completely unperturbed. “And he told June. You know how these things get around.”

  “My dad,” I say, my hand proudly against my chest. “Don’t you adore him?”

  Jerry says that actually he doesn’t know him very well. Just as a client. And he’s sure he didn’t tell him about the doctor’s call because he can’t remember the last time he spoke to him.

  “Well, someone told someone,” Rita says, reaching for a muffin that really doesn’t look to me like it’s trans-fat free.

  “I guess so,” I say with a laugh. “Or else how would I know?”

  I LEFT DISAPPOINTED, having learned nothing about why Jerry is hiding the good doctor’s call, and now I get to spend the day at the alley, tracing wires and cursing my ex-husband, who swears it was nothing he did, and my partner, who through no fault of her own is sitting in for Mike’s receptionist, Marguerite, who, through no fault of her own had to go down to Bayside to take care of her mother. I hate it when things go wrong and you can’t be mad at the people you really are mad at.

  And I’m damned worried about the safety of poor old Jerry and Rita.

  Just before three, when I’m ready to rush back to the house to welcome the kids home from school, by which I mean make sure they all got there and no nineteen-year-olds are rolling up my driveway, I find the problem.

  “Look at this,” I say to Mark, who is putting the last of the chair rails back in place. I hold up two wire ends for him to see.

  “Cut,” he says, looking at the placement and seeing that it would have been easy for someone to slice the wire just at the corner where the moldings meet. “Run a little blade down here at the joint and the whole system’s shut down.”

  “Can you fix it?” I ask. “Without ripping the whole thing out?”

  He tells me that there may be just enough slack to splice the wires together, but he’s angry as hell. He just isn’t sure who to be angry at. As I said, I know that feeling well.

  “Gotta run,” I tell him. “Just a quick check of the kids and I’ll be back.”

  Mark nods grudgingly and waves me off as he kneels down to attend to the wires.

  AT HOME, Maggie May and I find Dana in an uncharacteristically good mood. Either she’s gotten over her lothario, or—more likely—he’s not as out of the picture as I’d thought.

  Maggie gets a biscuit and I even get a kiss on the cheek, something I haven’t gotten since Dana’s bat mitzvah, I don’t think.

  “What’s up, sweetie?” I ask her, trying not appear accusatory or suspicious. “Good day at school?” Like I care, at this point, how school is going.

  She tells me she got an A on her Spanish test and she has a paper due on Monday in social studies. “So I’m off to the library,” she says, then adds, “If that’s okay.”

  So do I say, aha! and tell her that no, it’s not okay, and ask just how stupid she thinks I am? Or do I pretend to trust her because mistrusting her gives her license to abuse my trust?

  Some days I really hate being the mom.

  While Jesse wanders in and out to get a Ring Ding and milk, avoiding eye contact with me and making a production out of giving Lys a snack as well, I ask Dana what the paper is on. She’s fully prepared to snow me with details.

  She explains the assignment, even pulls out a photocopy and asks my opinion on which topic she should choose.

  Honesty isn’t on the list.

  I tell her I have some research to do, too, and that we’ll go over together.

  “Okay,” she says, but some of the brightness goes out of her voice.

  Her cell phone rings and she turns away from me when she answers it. She tells the caller that she can’t really talk because she and her mother are going over to the library.

  Which now makes my going unnecessary.

  I sit down at the kitchen table and motion for her to join me.

  “You’re still seeing that boy.” I don’t ask, I tell.

  She stares at the table, picking at a spot I missed after breakfast.

  “What do you think about a nineteen-year-old boy who tries to see a girl who is only thirteen?” I ask. “A girl whose father has made it abundantly clear that
she isn’t allowed to see him?”

  “Juliet was only—” she starts.

  “And look how that ended up,” I say. “This isn’t drama, Dana. This is real life. And in real life there’s no rewind button and you can’t go back and change things if they don’t turn out well.”

  She glances up at me, but quickly looks away. “You and Daddy—”

  I know I ought to hear her out, but I can’t help myself. “Another example of things not ending well. Your father and I weren’t right for each other and we knew it from the outset. In some ways, I was spiting your grandmother, though if you tell her that, I’ll be forced to have your vocal chords removed.”

  A slight smile curls the edge of her lips.

  “Do you think that there is even the slightest chance that this boy is trying to see you now to get back at your father for hitting him?” I ask.

  She looks shocked at the suggestion. And then there is just the slightest, vaguest, littlest bit of doubt that crosses her face and I remember how she told me that Jared said he’d get even.

  “It would be easy to understand that at his age he doesn’t want to be told what to do by somebody’s daddy. But it’s not particularly admirable.”

  Dana looks at me like admirable is not the quality she’s looking for in a boy at this moment. I wasn’t either. Like Rio said, he understands this boy because he was this boy.

  And then a rather nasty thought occurs to me. “By any chance, does Jared carry a little knife?” I ask, thinking about the wires at the bowling alley.

  Dana is up in arms, jumping from the table, saying he would never, ever, in a million years hurt her.

  That thought hadn’t even occurred to me. Naturally, and convincingly, I sympathetically agree that of course he wouldn’t—thinking to myself that he wouldn’t because he will never see her again, even if that means locking her in her room until she’s seventy.

  And then I wonder aloud if he could possibly have sabotaged the job her father did at the alley.

  I don’t hear her denying it.

  I remind her that if the job isn’t finished by Friday, a month’s worth of work goes down the drain. My work. I don’t mention that so do the new Diesel jeans she wants, the movies, food.

  “If he did that, he hurt me.”

  “Maybe Daddy just did it wrong,” she suggests. “You know he doesn’t know too much about the security business. He’s just doing it to be near you, probably.”

  I agree that her father might have installed the system wrong. “And yet we saw it working, didn’t we?”

  She doesn’t answer me.

  Dana is a good kid. She may have more of my mother in her than I would hope, but she’s smart and good and I don’t see any other choice here.

  I mean, sure, I could forbid her from seeing this guy, but she’d find a way. I can’t watch her 24-7.

  “Look,” I say softly, coming up and putting an arm around her. “You have to make a choice here and it’s a hard one. I know it’s glamorous for an older man to be interested in you, but, as special as you are, don’t you think it’s a little odd? He could be dating eighteen-year-olds, women who are ready for what he is ready for.”

  Her back stiffens, like I’ve questioned her worth.

  “And then there’s his sense of responsibility. You and I both know it’s highly unlikely that a stone from the road kicked up and broke your window. But did he own up to it? No.”

  It’s hard for me to look at the hurt in her eyes, but no one ever said being the mother would be easy.

  “And, if there is even a chance that he is the one who cut the wires at the alley, risking several thousand dollars we need to live on, Dana…”

  “Maybe he didn’t even do that,” she says, her chin jutting out at the injustice of it all.

  I point out to her that she didn’t say he didn’t do it, but that maybe he didn’t do it.

  “So?” she asks.

  “So you have doubts. Weigh that against your father’s love for you.” I can’t believe I’m saying this, pulling out Rio’s love for her and holding it up like some shining beacon. But there it is. “Do you doubt that?”

  Dana doesn’t answer me.

  I sit back down at the table. “As I said, you’ve got a choice.”

  “Can I go to the library?” she asks me.

  Having painted myself into a corner, I really can’t say no. I nod my head.

  “Will you come with me?”

  Of course is the only possible answer and I tell her I will, but that I’ve got a couple of calls to make before we go. She heads outside to wait in the car and I dial up Mark to tell him that I’m going to be a little delayed. Beyond a groan, he’s understanding and accepting. Someone is going to be mighty lucky someday to snag him.

  Dana’s honking the horn frantically, as if one more minute will kill her, and I take my sweet time gathering up my things because sometimes I can be very childish. I mean, I can’t think of any other reason, so that must be the case.

  Anyway, I come outside and find Robert Kroll doing wheelies around my car, scaring the hell out of Dana. I know, I know, it’s terribly un-PC, but he scares me, too. The man is big and strong and has no sense of the boundaries that he crosses. He’s a lot older than he was the last time I saw him, though he was doing about the same thing then. Now his beard is going gray and his skin shows signs of every day he’s spent out in the elements.

  With a wave at Dana to stop honking the horn, which apparently only encourages him, I try approaching the man that scared the whole neighborhood when I was growing up. Of course, since he’s riding his bike in little tight circles, that isn’t easy. I remind myself that in all the years I’ve known about Robert, he’s never hurt a soul.

  “Stop, Robby,” I say, trying to sound completely calm while Dana cringes in the passenger seat. “I want to see the new bike your dad got you.”

  Robby stops an inch from running over my foot. “You know my dad?” he asks.

  “I sure do,” I tell him. “And I know you. I used to live around the corner from you before I got married.” I ask if he remembers the Bayers.

  “The big house with the green door,” he says. “I don’t live there anymore.”

  I smile and tell him mine was the stone house with the two pillars out front and that I don’t live there anymore, either.

  While we have this exchange, Dana cracks open her window just a little.

  “I like your new bike,” I tell him. “But when you ride it so fast so close to people, I think it might scare them.”

  Emphatically, he nods. “I like to scare people,” he tells me.

  The mean, small-minded side of me thinks I really don’t have time for this. But the good, responsible-mother side wins out and I think about what I’m teaching Dana—or could be.

  “That’s my daughter, Dana,” I say, pointing at her. I tell her to open the window so that I can introduce her to an old friend.

  “I don’t know you,” Robby says. “And I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”

  “Mo-om,” Dana whines at me. “He is like totally weird. We should go.”

  He asks me why she said he was weird. I tell him that she’s thirteen, and thirteen-year-olds think everyone is weird and he shouldn’t worry about it. I tell him I think he’s nice. And I force Dana to say she thinks so, too. Something about the whole conversation feels like he’s got a gun to our heads, that I’m diffusing some threat.

  “Is he going to kill us?” Dana asks, proving my point.

  “Of course not,” I say at the same time as Robby says, “My dad could kill your mom.”

  Dana’s eyes get wide and watery.

  I try to laugh it off. “Your dad and I are friends,” I say. “In fact, I saw him earlier today.”

  “We went to the ocean,” he says.

  “In the summer? To the beach?” I prompt.

  “Then, too,” he says, and he puts his foot on the pedals and rocks back and forth on his bike. “I have to go no
w.”

  “Goodbye, Robby,” I say as he makes one last circle around the car and then starts down the block. “It was nice to see you again,” I call after him.

  After I get in the car and take a few calming breaths, Dana asks, in usual thirteen-ese, “What is wrong with that guy?”

  I explain that he had some sort of illness—if memory serves, it was an infection which led to encephalitis—and his brain stopped developing.

  “So he’s like retarded?” Dana asks me.

  “Dana!” And then I realize that I’m just looking for a nicer way to admit that yes, he is. I want to say something wise and profound and all I come up with is that he’s mentally disabled, that he has the mind of an eight-or nine-year-old and he’ll never really grow up. And that just as we have to look out for children, we have to look out for people like Robby.

  She parrots the words, agreeing with them, processing them. “So in his head he’s not much older than Lys?”

  I nod.

  “But he’s got a beard and gray hair and all.” She looks over at me behind the wheel. “I know, I know. That’s outside, not inside. But he’s still creepy.”

  I wish I could disagree with her. Instead, I just say, “Nevertheless, or maybe all the more reason, he deserves our compassion.” It sounds hollow. Here was this great opportunity to teach my daughter a moral lesson and I’m blowing it.

  “You were really good with him, Mom,” Dana says. “It was really nice when you told him it was good to see him again.”

  I pat her thigh and put the car into reverse. On occasion, I do something right.

  “Even,” she adds, “if it was a lie.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Just as we tend to raise our children as we were raised, we tend to decorate our houses in the same manner as our parents did. Oh, our houses might be grander, but if the TV was in the living room in the house you grew up in, chances are it’s in yours, and vice versa. It’s human nature. But it may be time to cut the apron strings and take a look at what was automatic and what was purposeful. Do you really want the TV in the living room like your parents had? Do you want to sit at a desk in the basement to pay bills like your dad did? Do you want to stand at the sink to put on your makeup like mom, or sit at a dressing table in the bedroom by the window where the light is natural and divine?