Ask Again, Yes

by Mary Beth Keane

  After, Eddie propped himself up on his elbows and studied her. He wanted to know if it hurt. When she said it did, he wanted to know if it mostly hurt or if it hurt just a little. Did it also feel good? Kate said it did, though it did not. He seemed very sober despite all the sips from the flask the boys had been passing around back at school.

  “I love you, Kate,” he said.

  “Get outta here, Eddie. Cut it out.” She wondered what they were going to do about the sheets. Did the brother have his own washer and dryer, or would Eddie have to sneak them into the house?

  “I’m serious,” he said. “Don’t say it back if you don’t mean it, but I think you love me, too.”

  Kate rose up to kiss him.

  * * *

  She told no one. Not Sara or Nat. None of the friends she sat with at lunch. It didn’t seem that important, not nearly as important as people would make it. It was just a thing that happened, same as all other things that happened. The main difference was that Eddie stopped by all the time now, and no longer called first. She’d see the shape of him in the glass before he rang the bell and feel tired, wish she had five minutes of warning so she might hide. At Christmas he bought her a pair of earrings, and when she popped open the box and saw them, she knew she’d learned at least a little something because she didn’t blurt out right away that she didn’t have pierced ears. Sara and Nat had warned her that he’d probably get her a present, so she’d gotten him a book about football because football was his favorite sport and it was on display at the end of the aisle at the bookstore.

  “You like him?” her father asked one night. He was sitting in his recliner, a drink in one hand, the remote in the other, and for a minute Kate could pretend he was just home from work. There had been talk about him going back in a few months, an inside job he’d called it when she overheard him telling Lena, a desk jockey, they’d drum something up for him. But his eyesight was a problem, even with the prosthetic eye. He’d get his pension, and while he hadn’t been on duty when he got injured, they’d found a way that he could go out on the higher tier of disability so he’d get more. Sometimes men came to see him in pairs or groups of three, and Kate recognized them as cops from the moment they stepped out of their cars and looked around. Now, he muted the television before swiveling around to look at her.

  “Yeah, he’s fine,” Kate said.

  The room was silent. In the kitchen, Lena was mashing bananas for bread and watching an episode of Days she’d taped.

  “Kate,” Francis said simply, an admonishment and a question all wrapped into one.

  * * *

  And then her busha died. She had a cough, which turned out to be the flu, and then that turned into pneumonia. Kate’s lab partner had had pneumonia that fall but she’d returned to school after only a week, so it never crossed Kate’s mind that Busha wouldn’t return to her little kitchen, to the leftover bits and pieces of food she kept Saran-wrapped in her fridge for far too long. Lena went to stay in Bay Ridge for a night to help sort her things and figure out what to do about Nonno. As they planned the funeral and made decisions, Kate’s parents talked about money bluntly and openly, something that had never happened before, and for the first time Kate worried that they might not have enough. The price of a mahogany coffin. The price of food for the reception after, whether they could get away with cold sandwiches or if people would expect hot food, whether they needed a full bar or just beer and wine. Lena said she didn’t want her father to feel ashamed, and at that Francis had sighed. How much could Karol kick in on his bartender’s salary? And Natusia? “There can’t be any surprises now,” Francis said to Lena as they sat at the dining room table and calculated, recalculated. But how could a person head off what they don’t know is coming? Kate wondered. She remembered the expression on her mother’s face when she told her that she’d grown out of her cleats.

  If Kate could chart on a graph when she thought of Peter and when she didn’t, the week of Busha’s wake and funeral would have shown a seven-day-long peak. New York City was a big place, and Bay Ridge was only a small part, but still, she kept imagining him showing up at the church for the funeral Mass. She fantasized about turning around in the pew and spotting him standing at the back by the holy water font, but when the day came and she did turn around, the back half of the church was completely empty, the front half populated mostly by childhood friends of her mother, aunt, and uncle. After the funeral, Kate and Sara spent two nights at the apartment keeping their nonno company while Lena and Natusia completed paperwork at Busha’s little kitchen table. Whenever she had a chance to be alone—one day she walked down to the diner for an egg cream, the next day over to the water to look at the bridge and the birds—she thought, it will be a time like this. It will be an ordinary, overcast day, and he’ll just walk by. “Kate?” he’ll say, doubling back.

  * * *

  Eddie was waiting for her when she arrived home. His family had sent flowers to the funeral home, but now he was on their porch with a tray of eggplant rollatini from his mother. He hugged Lena. “Hey, Eddie,” Sara said and kept going past him to the front door.

  “Are you mad that I didn’t go?” he asked Kate when the rest of the Gleesons were out of earshot. “I wanted to go but my mother needed her car, and the bus and then the subway would’ve taken hours.”

  “Go where?” Kate said.

  “To the funeral.”

  “No, of course not. I was busy with my family anyway.”

  “Okay good.” He took a breath. “Guess what? I got off the wait list at Holy Cross.” He had the letter in his pocket. “Who knows, I might get a single. Maybe you’ll go there, too.” He took her hand and pulled her gently toward his car, no doubt so he could drive her over to his brother’s place. It was a weekend and Jack seemed to spend most weekends out of town.

  “Yeah, who knows,” Kate said, and for the first time in weeks felt a cool wave of relief wash over her. In a few short months he’d disappear to Massachusetts and once that happened, if she made sure to lie low over school breaks and holidays, she might never see him again.

  “Kate,” came her father’s voice from the door, which they’d left open except for the screen. Kate blushed and wondered how long he’d been standing there. “Your mother needs you.”

  Eddie, startled, dropped her hand.

  “I have to go,” Kate said to him as she slid past her father.

  Francis stayed put, and because Francis stayed put, so did Eddie, unsure of whether he’d been dismissed or not.

  “She’s great,” Eddie said finally. “Kate, I mean. We were just talking about—”

  “She’s the best,” Francis said, and continued to stand there, looking at the boy as if he were waiting for something. “She’s the best one.”

  Dana rode by on her bike, ringing the handlebar bell as she passed.

  “She’s been through a lot,” Francis said. “She’s still going through it even though it doesn’t seem that way.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Eddie said, a little impatiently. There was no need to tell him, of all people.

  nine

  NEITHER GEORGE NOR PETER ever answered the phone at the apartment because George said it was always people looking for money and if anyone really needed him they’d find him at work. Anne had never called, not one single time, though once every few months the social worker from the hospital left a message to let them know that Anne needed a sweater, or a pair of slippers, or a particular kind of soap because the hospital soap gave her a rash. They hadn’t filled out any official paperwork to let Dutch Kills know Brian had moved, to say that George was acting as Peter’s guardian, so when Peter needed a parent’s signature, George just went ahead and signed Brian’s name. The secretary at school had the number of both the Local 40 office and the business office of whatever job site George was at for a particular stretch of months. They played the answering machine tape maybe once a week, and would delete each message before the person had finished speaking. “Blah,
blah, blah,” George would mutter at the machine, and lean against the wall next to the phone like he couldn’t possibly stand there listening for one more second. Once in a very long while there’d be a message from Brian, shouting into the machine as if he were calling from Beirut with a bad connection, saying that he was sorry to have missed them, that he’d try back another day soon. George would let his brother’s messages play all the way out and then ask with an impassive expression if Peter wanted to play it again or save it. When Peter told him it was fine to delete, George would punch the button just like he had with all the others. The time stamp was always an hour when Peter had been in school, and for a long time he thought it careless of his father to have forgotten that he would never be home to answer on a school day.

  About a year after Brian left, the answering machine tape broke. It was rewinding so fast one evening that it snapped and jumped right off the spool. “Oh for the love of God,” George said, and threw the whole tangled mess into the garbage. Every few days George said he had to go buy a new tape, but never did. “Who are we expecting to hear from?” he’d ask, and shrug.

  In the fall of Peter’s junior year, Coach Bell began pointing out college recruiters at the big invitational meets: usually skinny men, former runners themselves, wearing sneakers with their khakis and dress shirts, standing a little away from the crowd with a stopwatch and a notebook.

  “I don’t want you to turn into a head case,” Coach Bell said after one meet, “but you’re having a strong season. They’ll notice.” But they didn’t approach him, so Peter figured Coach had read them wrong. Then, in the spring, Peter got a handwritten letter from the coach of a Division I school in Pennsylvania—just after he ran a personal best in the half and beat Bobby Obonyo, whose father had been an Olympic middle-distance runner, and who himself had run the fastest mile in the city that year. A week later he got another letter from a different coach along with a questionnaire about what he was looking for in college, what he hoped to achieve both athletically and academically. A week after that the coach who’d written to him from the school in Pennsylvania introduced himself at sectionals, told him he was impressed with his race, asked if he’d started thinking of college yet.

  “Are your folks here?” the coach asked, glancing over Peter’s shoulder at the stands, where other kids’ parents stood dazed and hungry, waiting around all day for their child to run a race that might last only thirty seconds.

  “Couldn’t make it today,” Peter said. “But we’ve been talking about college, sure.” Just that week Peter’s guidance counselor had asked him to make a list of jobs he might like to have when he grew up, and then they could begin to strategize where to apply. Her hands had flown like little birds around the wall of pamphlets displayed in the hall. She plucked from here and there until she had a neat stack to give to him.

  Once the season ended and summer came, the calls began. First among them was Coach Bell, telling Peter to fix his goddamn machine, that he’d tried Peter at home twenty times already, that he did not consider himself Peter’s personal answering service. George had gotten Peter an apprenticeship with the iron men that summer—he had to say he was eighteen even though he was only seventeen—and when Coach said practices would start in mid-July, Peter said he’d try to be there but it all depended on the shift he landed in a given week. He was making $9.20 an hour, way more than any of his friends were making at their summer jobs, and he planned on giving all of it to George. Coach was silent for what felt to Peter like a long time.

  “Okay, I’ll schedule practice around your shifts,” he said finally. “But, Peter, I beg you. Do not get injured. I’m not sure you understand what’s going on here.”

  “What’s going on here?” Peter asked.

  “What’s going on is you’re going to go to a pretty good college. I don’t want to get your hopes up, but there’s money in these programs. You play this right and you might not have to pay much more than you would for City College.”

  “How much is City College?”

  “I don’t know. Three thousand maybe?”

  Peter divided three thousand by nine twenty.

  “Jeez. How much is a private college?”

  “Doesn’t your guidance counselor talk to you about this stuff?”

  “Ms. Carcara always asks for my father,” he said, and then because he’d already said that much, and because he was beginning to sense that he’d need help, he continued. “My uncle went to the parent-teacher conferences this year and everyone assumed he was my dad, so he didn’t say anything. When the coaches send those questionnaires, I leave the family stuff blank. I don’t know what to put.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Coach said. “But where is your dad, Pete? I know your mom is . . . not available to talk. But I’ve met your dad, haven’t I?”

  “Maybe freshman year.”

  “Does he work long hours?”

  “He went away for a while. So if these recruiters need to talk to someone, they need to talk to my uncle.”

  At work, no one was interested in his half-mile time or his training schedule. They only shouted at him to do things—to get on the other end of that beam or get the fuck out of the way, to hold this, brace that, make a pot of coffee, run down to the deli and get a flat of Gatorades. They told him not to go too many stories up because he was so skinny the first stiff wind would blow him over. They asked him about girls, about what kind of girl wanted a guy without meat on his bones, and then someone reminded the gang that he went to a boys’ school, and they went on a tear about that. There were two guys on the job who were only a year older than Peter and were working full-time. One had a beard and a barrel chest just like George, and Peter would sneak looks at him to decide if they could really be just one year apart. These eighteen-year-olds had dropped out of high school and had a relative—a father, an uncle—get them into the union. They made double what Peter made and each one was saving for something big. They spent lunch breaks asking Peter what he thought college would get him, if he thought he’d end up in a mansion just because he went to college, and then no matter what Peter said, they’d look at each other like he was an idiot. They claimed the kids graduating from college now could only dream of making what they made per year, and on top of that they had to sit in offices all day, and on top of that they couldn’t hope to start making real money until they were done with school at twenty-two. “A waste of time,” they said as they tore into their chicken Parm heros and made plans for the evening. They each had serious girlfriends. After a few weeks Peter began to wonder if they were right.

  The men at work knew he was George’s nephew, and George, Peter noticed, was well liked. He was grumpy, maybe, but fair. They invited George out after work, but George always declined. He had no time for bars anymore, he told Peter, not since Brenda left, not since he had that lesson taught to him, as he put it.

  “Maybe it’s dumb to go to college,” Peter said one afternoon as they were getting into George’s car to drive off the job site. “I could go full-time with you after graduation and then I could get a place of my own and get out of your hair. That guy Jimmy was telling me—”

  They had not quite passed the boundary of the job site, when George slammed on the brakes so hard that Peter pitched forward, caught himself on the dash. “Jimmy McGree can’t add two and two with a calculator, Pete.”

  “He seems okay to me. He said he almost has enough saved to buy a Camaro.”

  George studied him. “Who gives a shit. You want a Camaro?”

  Peter let that sit with him, and agreed, mostly, that he didn’t care about cars. But maybe that was only because he’d never considered them before.

  “Okay, well, John says he almost has enough for a house he looked at on Staten Island. He said he’s going to ask his girlfriend to marry him.”

  George sighed. “John Salvatore should have gone to college. He might go, still. I hope he does. I’d hold a job for a kid like that. But, Peter, don’t make me regret
getting you on here. Maybe you should be making funnel cakes on Coney Island like I used to when I was your age.”

  George began driving again. “Don’t get me wrong. This is a great career. A good union. And it does something to you, seeing a building go up that you made. Picking that building out of the skyline and thinking you’re one of the reasons it’s standing there. You still want to do this after college, then I’ll do what I can.”

  “But what’s the point then, if I come back?”

  “The point is you’ll have gone and educated yourself. You’ll have seen a little of what things are like for other people and why they think the way they do. And you’ll meet people who have careers that we don’t even think of as careers. You know what I was watching the other day? A show about the people who make the sounds on television shows. When doors slam, or when something spills. When one guy punches another guy. Did you know there are people whose job it is to make all that sound real?”

  Peter was caught short by the strength of his uncle’s response and went quiet as he took it in.