by Marc Aronson
Sampson’s laugh was more of a “humph,” then he said, “Don’t think your mother’ll let her sit at the dinner table.”
Morris almost shrugged but caught himself. “We’ll see.”
“We’ll see.” Sampson gave another humph.
“We’ll see,” Morris said, although he couldn’t imagine that this woman, cosmetologist, Nadira, would accept an invitation to lunch, let alone to his mother’s house for dinner. He smiled. His father might like it.
Sampson shook his head, then shoved a typed page at his nephew. “Here’s the deceased’s obituary. The mother was too distraught to deal with it, so his sister wrote it. Young girl. But she did it.” He nodded toward the office. “Sit down. Look it over. Make sure it’s, you know, spelled correctly. Tells the story.”
The sister had used a big font, just like he used to when he ran out of sentences to fill essay paragraphs. Her brother, in his nineteen years, had accomplished more than Morris had, but that came as no surprise. Morris, at eighteen, had just had his first real conversation with a female other than his mother. The girl’s dead brother had graduated from high school—Morris’s high school, in fact. He ran cross-country. Did one year of York Community College and had held a few part-time jobs.
Morris read the sheet again, not knowing what he was looking for, besides misspelled words: a there instead of a their, a plural verb that should be singular. He certainly didn’t feel he was the right one to correct the grieving girl’s account of her brother’s life. As short as the obituary was, it made the deceased a guy. Real. Male and a brother. Loved by a mother and grandmother. Missed by the cross-country team.
He placed the obituary on his uncle’s desk. Nodded and said, “It’s fine.”
The family arrived at seven minutes after nine.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Morris said to the tall woman in the middle. A woman near his mother’s age. The mother of the deceased. She was accompanied by an older woman who resembled her but had an ashen face and was stooped over. The grandmother of the deceased. And there was the sister. His age. No. A year or two younger.
The older woman, who had been supported by her granddaughter, grabbed his arm. Her fingers were long and formed quite the grip. Morris led the family slowly down the carpeted hall and into the office. The chairs had already been arranged for their visit. Sampson rose and greeted the family once they entered the office, while Morris awkwardly helped the grandmother into her chair. Only then did she release his arm. Morris wanted to rub the feeling back into his arm but didn’t. Besides, he felt the girl staring, perhaps waiting to see if he would.
When he took his place in the corner nearest Sampson, as his uncle had instructed him, he noticed that the deceased’s sister’s eyes were still fixed on him. He didn’t know where to look, but wherever he turned, he felt her.
Sampson had their file on his desk. The deceased’s name, last, then first, printed neatly on the folder’s tab. Morris fought to remain alert, interested, while Sampson guided the mother of the deceased through the details of casket choice, funeral cars, programs, prayer cards, and fan selections. July. The height of summer. Fans were a must. Morris was mildly surprised that his uncle could be gentle. He admired the delicate way Sampson went about inquiring into the insurance policy and the “final place of repose.”
Through it all, the sister’s eyes never left Morris. So Morris did what he never would have done before. He refused to drift away. He was determined to stay. Fill himself with himself. Instead of looking off somewhere safe, Morris returned the girl’s stare. But she was better at it.
A little more than an hour earlier, he had had his first real conversation with a girl. A woman. Now he was the staring target of a dead guy’s sister. If her stare was like a sophomore girl’s gaze at a senior, he’d be flushed with a good discomfort that said, Today is a good day. Today Morris Adler entered his life. But her stare was hardly a gaze.
Eventually he backed down and looked again at the folder on the desk with the tab sticking out and the deceased’s name written in black felt-tip in Sampson’s heavy-handed slant. Then he looked back up at her. Her eyes. Her face.
And now he knew whose body he had collected, driven, and rolled down the ramp that led to the workroom down below. How could he not know? He’d seen that face, more or less, on a much taller guy. Yes. He knew the deceased. Or knew of the deceased. The brother. So, in a way, he knew the sister without actually knowing her.
When the sister was certain of this, she gave him a small nod while Sampson and the mother continued making arrangements. She nodded again.
Across from her, there sat Morris Adler, staring into open eyes that made up for the ones that were closed, down below. He didn’t have to see her brother’s face or read the obituary to know who he was. Even if he could drift away, there was no point. What else could he do? He nodded to her. A small nod between them.
MICK GALINDO sat on the porch swing, clipping his toenails. As porches went, his (okay, Mama’s) was rather narrow, with sagging steps and weathered posts and rafters that creaked beneath his weight. That didn’t much worry him, though. His mother, who topped the scales at close to three hundred, had rocked in this swing without incident for years. Mick doubted his hundred sixty-eight pounds would bring it crashing down.
It was late July, and anywhere else it would be hellhole hot. The whispers of a breeze managed to cool the late afternoon just enough to make it bearable. Inside the house, Mama hovered in front of a big fan, attempting “Ave Maria.” Her low notes reverberated pleasantly enough, but when she reached too high, the sound was very much like a screech owl. In pain. Probably half the reason Papa took off when Mick was eleven.
The years without him were, at once, better and worse. Better because though he had kept Papa’s Latino surname, Mick was almost as fair as Mama, and most people assumed he was of Italian descent. Worse because Mama was forced to work, too hard for a woman of her age and bulk, as a housekeeper and nanny for a moneyed penthouse dweller in the city. Her mood, already sour with Papa’s desertion, grew testier with every forced smile and phony “Happy to, sir.”
“Miguel!” Mama called. “Come in here.”
“No soy Miguel, Mama. Me llamo Mick.” He wasn’t Miguel, the Spanish equivalent of Michael. His name was Mick. He liked that better. It reflected Mama’s heritage. She was Irish, so why did she insist on sounding south-of-the-border? Then again, he had just answered her en español. Too much of Papa remained.
He went inside, blinking away sun glare. “What is it, Mama?”
She sprawled in her lopsided easy chair, the guts of the Sunday Daily News surrounding her. “Did you see this? Did you know him?” She jabbed at the obituary page. “Right there.” She tapped. “Kevin.”
Nicholas, Kevin. Age 19. Died at York Hospital, July 19, 2012.
There was a lot more. “Survived bys” and the few highlights of Kevin’s few years. Graduated high school with honors. Captain of the cross-country team. Majored in business at York Community College. Part-time jobs at Starbucks and the campus bookstore. Wow. They made the guy sound squeaky clean. If they only knew.
Still, he was way too young to die.
There but for the grace of God . . . Mick swayed slightly. “No, Mama. I hadn’t heard.”
“But you knew the boy, didn’t you?” Expectation glimmered in her heavy-lidded eyes.
“Yes, Mama. We were . . . friends.”
Truth be told, he hadn’t seen Kevin in a while. The cross-country-star business major had not exactly been happy about Mick taking an interest in his little sister. Junior or no, Lydia was incredible, with the face of an angel, haloed in a shine of black hair, and eyes like a storm-shadowed sea. An ocean you would drown in happily. It had probably been in poor taste to admit how often he’d thought about seeing her naked. “Touch my sister, and I’ll show you the way to hell” were the last words Mick would ever hear from Kevin now.
But when they were kids, oh yes, he and Kev ha
d been tight. It had started with altar-boy duty. Mick’s parents had agreed on one thing—raising their son as a strict Catholic. If he had a dollar for every Hail Mary he’d been forced to repeat, he’d be living on Park Avenue. After they’d left the stench of the landfill behind, the first thing Katherine Galindo had done was to pay a call on the local priest.
Father Holbrook was not an imposing man of God by any means. In fact, he was elf-like—miniature in height and frail as a wooden matchstick. Mick, a slender ten-year-old, could have taken him at arm wrestling. Except, of course, Mama would have had none of that.
She’d introduced him like this: “Meet my son, Michael.” Not Miguel. Father Holbrook’s parish was .27 percent Hispanic. “He’s a good Catholic. Perhaps a priest one day. Meanwhile, he wants to become an altar boy. Next year, when he’s old enough to learn the requirements.”
At that point in his life, Mick had considered himself a fair enough Catholic. He enjoyed Mass, and when he went forward to celebrate Communion, the presence of God came over him, brought comfort. He prayed diligently to Jesus and Mother Mary, was semifaithful to the rosary. But it had not crossed his mind that he wanted to be an altar boy. That was Mama’s dream. Regardless, it was one he was destined to fulfill. Fate, he decided, was synonymous with his mother’s desires.
The year that followed was difficult. Papa found work on a fishing boat. It paid well enough, but he hated “spending every day kneeling in slime and groping guts.” All to please his wife, who wanted “the finer things in life.” Their neighbors were either stuffy or nosy, and neither type suited Mama, who grew grumpier, it seemed, by the day. This led to frequent arguments with Papa. And when they weren’t fighting, they didn’t speak at all.
Mick started fifth grade in a school where he knew no one. As a dedicated introvert, he wasn’t exactly a friend magnet and spent his after-school hours with his nose in a book. Words! The bigger, the better. Those he didn’t know, he looked up. He absorbed them like mashed potatoes mopping up gravy. They gave him power, fueled his imagination, made him smarter than your average Joe (not Jose). Not that anyone noticed.
Mama was too busy being miserable. Despondent. Melancholy. Mick liked that word especially. Reminded him of cauliflower, his favorite vegetable, at least when it was smothered in cheese.
Papa mostly cared about the World Cup. “Why don’t you play soccer?” he asked one day, midmatch and mid-six-pack. “You’re not a little girl, are you?”
Never mind that on the local youth soccer team, girls played right along with the boys. “No, Papa. It’s just . . . I’m not . . . interested in sports.”
Papa clucked his tongue. “Every boy worth a decent boner likes sports. Get your ass over here.”
Reluctantly, Mick joined his father on the thirdhand sofa. Papa offered him a sip of Pabst, but Mick shook his head. “Smells like pee.”
Papa laughed. Guffawed. Then he reconsidered. “You like girls, don’t you?”
Mick didn’t particularly like anyone, female or male. But that wasn’t the answer Papa wanted. “Sure, I like girls.”
“Especially girls like those, no?” Papa pointed to the TV, where two women with giant chests, made obvious with too-tight tank tops, talked up their favorite players.
Mick knew what Papa wanted him to say. “Mmm. Nice breasts.”
“You mean tits. Scrumptious tits.”
“Oh, yeah.”
Color commentary over, the fuzzy station rejoined the game. Mick suffered the next two Pabst/pee-perfumed hours cheering or sighing, on Papa’s cue. But he hadn’t joined the soccer team that year, or any other.
That summer, Mick began his altar-attendant training. There wasn’t much to learn, really. When to ring the bell. How to swing the cloying incense so it wouldn’t overwhelm the presiding priest. Father Holbrook introduced the kids who would participate in the biweekly lessons: “William Benedict. Michael Galindo. Candace Lomack. Kevin Nicholas.”
Mick knew Will from school—he was another quiet loner, which is probably why Mick had noticed him. Candy and Kevin were older, so went to middle school. Kevin’s charisma was magnetic, and he immediately claimed the role of leader. He was tall, with the same dark eyes as his sister and a feral smile that concealed the angry energy he harbored inside. That he smiled at Mick at all seemed a surprising invitation to kinship. By then, Mick hungered for a friend.
“Where you from?” was how Kevin broke the ice.
“Swedesboro. Jersey. Left ’cause of the landfill. You know, the smell.” Why’d he say that? You know, the smell.
Kevin let it go. “You gotta lose the accent. These hoity-toities around here think they’re better than Jersey.”
Of course. The accent. Without it, maybe he’d assimilate better. “Thanks. I’ll work on it.”
“There’s something else there, too. Galindo, right?”
Mick’s face flushed. “Yeah.” Jersey all the way. But did Papa also leak through?
“That’s cool. But try for Yankee.”
For whatever reason, Kevin took Mick under his wing. He showed him the best pizza spots. The best places to skate in the park. Whose backyards to avoid cutting through and, if anybody called the cops, which uniforms you could talk to and which you should run from. They even discussed the possibility of becoming priests one day. By summer’s end, Mick started to feel assimilated.
The outside activity came with an added benefit: he could escape his parents’ relentless bickering. It was a tide, lapping at the foundation of their marriage. At some level, Mick knew the wall was doomed to disintegrate. What he didn’t realize was how soon.
In the fall, Mick moved to the middle school, and there he had a solid ally in Kevin Nicholas. This bolstered both his courage and his ego. Though he wasn’t exactly sixth-grade top dog, he made his way into the midlevel pack. And that rocked.
On Saturdays, Mick hung out with Kevin, skating and looking for hot girls. Mick wasn’t exactly sure what hot meant. It had something to do with breasts, right? Or tits? Maybe they weren’t all sticking out of bikini tops, but you could tell they were there. Anyway, what did it matter? It wasn’t like he and Kev were going to hook up with hot girls, or any girls. Still, he didn’t want Kevin to think he was a total dork. “You know who’s kind of hot? Candy Lomack.”
“The altar girl? I guess I never noticed.”
Mick insisted, “Well, she is. She’s got awesome tits.” He wasn’t exactly sure that was so, because she kept them pretty well covered. What he did know was, unlike some other girls her age, she definitely had them.
“I’ll check ’em out tomorrow at Mass.” Game on.
It was an interesting Sunday. Both Mick and Kevin spent way too much time trying to assess the state of Candy’s boobs, a hard thing to do when they were well disguised beneath vestments. The altar service suffered as a result. Only Candy, who was somehow unaware of the boys’ gazes, managed to do the right thing at the right time. Father Holbrook was livid.
“May I see you two for a few minutes?” he asked once the church cleared.
They followed him to his office. Waited as he took a big key ring from his desk drawer, unlocked the sacristy door, and de-robed.
“Hope he’s got something on under there,” Kevin whispered. “Last thing I ever want to see is Father H naked.”
“Totally!” agreed Mick, stifling a laugh. Just barely.
Father Holbrook returned, fully clothed, relocked the sacristy, and put the keys back in his desk drawer before saying, “Your inattention today was not appreciated, and I saw where your eyes kept wandering. Don’t neglect confession this week.”
They didn’t. But no amount of penance could keep Kevin from hatching a plan to see Candy’s tits totally uncovered. It was a brilliant plot, really, except for one major detail, and it might not have gone down at all. But then Papa went away. Came home midday. Showered off the fish guts. Packed a few clean clothes. Left a note as his good-bye: Going back to Jersey. I prefer my air dirty. My women, too.
Anger, hurt, and a smidgeon of guilt (what if he’d decided to play soccer?) weighted Mick. He carried that burden in the clench of his jaw, the slack of his shoulders. It went with him everywhere—school, beach, church. Candy noticed it there during eight a.m. Mass. Afterward, she said, “I heard your dad left. That must be really hard. Do you want to talk about it?”
Her voice was maple syrup, her eyes the blue of summer-lush hydrangea. And yes, beneath her tight angora sweater, there were mounds. Breasts. Maybe even tits. He was moved, but with something much more primitive than love. And then it struck him. Perhaps that major detail had just resolved itself. “Yes,” he said. “I would really appreciate talking about it. You don’t have to be home right away, do you?”
Candy shook her head. “My parents are out of town. I’m staying with my grandma. She won’t care if I’m late.” Providence.
Mick went to find Kevin. “Candy wants to talk. I think the cemetery might be a good place. Can you handle the rest?”
Kev’s eyes lit up. “As soon as the ten o’clock begins. No-brainer. I’ll meet you there.”
It was 9:43. Mick went back to Candy. “Let’s take a walk.”
People crowded the front doors, so Mick took her hand and pulled her toward the side exit. He had never touched a girl before. Well, not like this. Not with deviltry in mind. They stepped into the autumn morning, and Mick inhaled a deep breath of air, scented heavily with burning leaves. “Smells like death.”
“What do you mean?”
“The death of a season. Soon, another year. Come on.”
He led the way toward the back of the church and across the parking lot, which was full of cars but emptied of people. Into the tangled woods, whose branches were only beginning to drop their burdens. Fall light dappled through a curtain of tangerine and auburn. The leaf mosaic shimmered overhead.