Commonwealth

1

The christening party took a turn when Albert Cousins arrived with gin. Fix was smiling when he opened the door and he kept smiling as he struggled to make the connection: it was Albert Cousins from the district attorney’s office standing on the cement slab of his front porch. He’d opened the door twenty times in the last half hour — to neighbors and friends and people from church and Beverly’s sister and all his brothers and their parents and practically an entire precinct worth of cops — but Cousins was the only surprise. Fix had asked his wife two weeks ago why she thought they had to invite every single person they knew in the world to a christening party and she’d asked him if he wanted to look over the guest list and tell her who to cut. He hadn’t looked at the list, but if she were standing at the door now he would have pointed straight ahead and said, Him. Not that he disliked Albert Cousins, he didn’t know him other than to put his name together with his face, but not knowing him was the reason not to invite him. Fix had the thought that maybe Cousins had come to his house to talk to him about a case: nothing like that had ever happened before but what else was the explanation? Guests were milling around in the front yard, and whether they were coming late or leaving early or just taking refuge outside because the house was packed beyond what any fire marshal would allow, Fix couldn’t say. What he was sure of was that Cousins was there uninvited, alone with a bottle in a bag.

“Fix,” Albert Cousins said. The tall deputy DA in a suit and tie put out his hand.

“Al,” Fix said. (Did people call him Al?) “Glad you made it.” He gave his hand two hard pumps and let it go.

“I’m cutting it close,” Cousins said, looking at the crowd inside as if there might not be room for him. The party was clearly past its midpoint — most of the small, triangular sandwiches were gone, half the cookies. The tablecloth beneath the punch bowl was pink and damp.

Fix stepped aside to let him in. “You’re here now,” he said.

“Wouldn’t have missed it.” Though of course he had missed it. He hadn’t been at the christening.

Dick Spencer was the only one from the DA’s office Fix had invited. Dick had been a cop himself, had gone to law school at night, pulled himself up without ever making any of the other guys feel like he was better for it. It didn’t matter if Dick was driving a black-and-white or standing in front of the judge, there was no doubt where he came from. Cousins on the other hand was a lawyer like all the others — DAs, PDs, the hired guns — friendly enough when they needed something but unlikely to invite an officer along for a drink, and if they did it was only because they thought the cop was holding out on them. DAs were the guys who smoked your cigarettes because they were trying to quit. The cops, who filled up the living room and dining room and spilled out into the backyard beneath the clothesline and the two orange trees, they weren’t trying to quit. They drank iced tea mixed with lemonade and smoked like stevedores.

Albert Cousins handed over the bag and Fix looked inside. It was a bottle of gin, a big one. Other people brought prayer cards or mother-of-pearl rosary beads or a pocket-sized Bible covered in white kid with gilt-edged pages. Five of the guys, or their five wives, had kicked in together and bought a blue enameled cross on a chain, a tiny pearl at the center, very pretty, something for the future.

“This makes a boy and a girl?”

“Two girls.”

Cousins shrugged. “What can you do?”

“Not a thing,” Fix said and closed the door. Beverly had told him to leave it open so they could get some air, which went to show how much she knew about man’s inhumanity to man. It didn’t matter how many people were in the house. You didn’t leave the goddamn door open.

Beverly leaned out of the kitchen. There were easily thirty people standing between them — the entire Meloy clan, all the DeMatteos, a handful of altar boys plowing through what was left of the cookies — but there was no missing Beverly. That yellow dress.

“Fix?” she said, raising her voice over the din.

It was Cousins who turned his head first, and Cousins gave her a nod.

By reflex Fix stood straighter, but he let the moment pass. “Make yourself at home,” he said to the deputy district attorney and pointed out a cluster of detectives by the sliding glass door, their jackets still on. “You know plenty of people here.” Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t. Cousins sure as hell didn’t know the host. Fix turned to cut his way through the crowd and the crowd parted for him, touching his shoulder and shaking his hand, saying congratulations. He tried not to step on any of the kids, his four-year-old daughter Caroline among them, who were playing some sort of game on the dining room floor, crouching and crawling like tigers between the feet of adults.

The kitchen was packed with wives, all of them laughing and talking too loud, none of them being helpful except for Lois from next door who was pulling bowls out of the refrigerator. Beverly’s best friend, Wallis, was using the side of the bright chrome toaster to reapply her lipstick. Wallis was too thin and too tan and when she straightened up she was wearing too much lipstick. Beverly’s mother was sitting at the breakfast table with the baby in her lap. They had changed her from her lacy christening gown into a starched white dress with yellow flowers embroidered around the neck, as if she were a bride who’d slipped into her going-away dress at the end of the reception. The women in the kitchen took turns making a fuss over the baby, acting like it was their job to keep her entertained until the Magi arrived. But the baby wasn’t entertained. Her blue eyes were glazed over. She was staring into the middle distance, tired of everything. All this rush to make sandwiches and take in presents for a girl who was not yet a year old.

“Look how pretty she is,” his mother-in-law said to no one, running the back of one finger across the baby’s rounded cheek.

“Ice,” Beverly said to her husband. “We’re out of ice.”

“That was your sister’s assignment,” Fix said.

“Then she failed. Can you ask one of the guys to go get some? It’s too hot to have a party without ice.” She had tied an apron behind her neck but not around her waist. She was trying not to wrinkle her dress. Strands of yellow hair had come loose from her French twist and were falling into her eyes.

“If she didn’t bring the ice, then she might at least come in here and make some sandwiches.” Fix was looking right at Wallis when he said this but Wallis capped her lipstick and ignored him. He had meant it to be helpful because clearly Beverly had her hands full. To look at her anyone would think that Beverly was the sort of person who would have her parties catered, someone who would sit on the couch while other people passed the trays.

“Bonnie’s so happy to see all those cops in one room. She can’t be expected to think about sandwiches,” Beverly said, and then she stopped the assembling of cream cheese and cucumbers for a minute and looked down at his hand. “What’s in the bag?”

Fix held up the gin, and his wife, surprised, delivered the first smile she’d given him all day, maybe all week.

“Whoever you send to the store,” Wallis said, displaying a sudden interest in the conversation, “tell them to get tonic.”

Fix said he would buy the ice himself. There was a market up the street and he wasn’t opposed to slipping out for a minute. The relative quiet of the neighborhood, the order of the bungalows with their tight green lawns, the slender shadows the palm trees cast, and the smell of the orange blossoms all combined with the cigarette he was smoking to have a settling effect on him. His brother Tom came along and they walked together in companionable silence. Tom and Betty had three kids now, all girls, and lived in Escondido, where he worked for the fire department. Fix was starting to see that this was the way life worked once you got older and the kids came; there wasn’t as much time as you thought there was going to be. The brothers hadn’t seen each other since they’d all met up at their parents’ house and gone to Mass on Christmas Eve, and before that it was probably when they’d driven down to Escondido for Erin’s christening. A red Sunbeam convertible went by and Tom said, “That one.” Fix nodded, sorry he hadn’t seen it first. Now he had to wait for something he wanted to come along. At the market they bought four bags of ice and four bottles of tonic. The kid at the register asked them if they needed any limes and Fix shook his head. It was Los Angeles in June. You couldn’t give a lime away.

Fix hadn’t checked his watch when they’d left for the market but he was a good judge of time. Most cops were. They’d been gone twenty minutes, twenty-five tops. It wasn’t long enough for everything to change, but when they came back the front door was standing open and there was no one left in the yard. Tom didn’t notice the difference, but then a fireman wouldn’t. If the place didn’t smell like smoke then there wasn’t a problem. There were still plenty of people in the house but it was quieter now. Fix had turned on the radio before the party started and for the first time he could hear a few notes of music. The kids weren’t crawling in the dining room anymore and no one seemed to notice they were gone. All attention focused on the open kitchen door, which was where the two Keating brothers were heading with the ice. Fix’s partner, Lomer, was waiting for them and Lomer tipped his head in the direction of the crowd. “You got here just in time,” he said.

As tight as it had been in the kitchen before they’d left, there were three times as many people crammed in there now, most of them men. Beverly’s mother was nowhere in sight and neither was the baby. Beverly was standing at the sink, a butcher’s knife in her hand. She was slicing oranges from an enormous pile that was sliding across the counter while the two lawyers from the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office, Dick Spencer and Albert Cousins — suit jackets off, ties off, and shirtsleeves rolled up high above the elbow — were twisting the halves of oranges on two metal juicers. Their foreheads were flushed and damp with sweat, their opened collars just beginning to darken, they worked as if the safety of their city relied on the making of orange juice.

Beverly’s sister Bonnie, ready now to be helpful, plucked Dick Spencer’s glasses from his face and wiped them with a dish towel, even though Dick had a capable wife somewhere in the crush. That was when Dick, his eyes relieved of the scrim of sweat, saw Fix and Tom and called out for the ice.

“Ice!” Bonnie cried, because it was true, it was hot as hell and ice sounded better than anything. She dropped her towel to lift the two bags from Tom, placing them in the sink atop the neat orange cups of empty rinds. Then she took the bags from Fix. Ice was her responsibility.

Beverly stopped slicing. “Perfect timing,” she said and dug a paper cup into the open plastic bag, knocking out three modest cubes as if she knew to pace herself. She poured a short drink — half gin, half orange juice, from the full pitcher. She made another and another and another as the cups were passed through the kitchen and out the door and into the waiting hands of the guests.

“I got the tonic,” Fix said, looking at the one bag still in his hands. He wasn’t objecting to anything other than the feeling that he and his brother had somehow been left behind in the time it had taken them to walk to the market and back.

“Orange juice is better,” Albert Cousins said, stopping just long enough to down the drink Bonnie had made for him. Bonnie, so recently enamored of cops, had shifted her allegiance to the two DAs.

“For vodka,” Fix said. Screwdrivers. Everyone knew that.

But Cousins tilted his head towards the disbeliever, and there was Beverly, handing her husband a drink. For all the world it looked like she and Cousins had a code worked out between them. Fix held the cup in his hand and stared at the uninvited guest. He had his three brothers in the house, an untold number of able-bodied men from the Los Angeles Police Department, and a priest who organized a Saturday boxing program for troubled boys, all of whom would back him up in the removal of a single deputy district attorney.

“Cheers,” Beverly said in a low voice, not as a toast but a directive, and Fix, still thinking there was a complaint to be made, turned up his paper cup.

Father Joe Mike sat on the ground with his back against the back of the Keating house, staking out a sliver of shade. He rested his cup of juice and gin on the knee of his standard-issue black pants. Priest pants. The drink was either his fourth or his third, he didn’t remember and he didn’t care because the drinks were very small. He was making an effort to write a sermon in his head for the following Sunday. He wanted to tell the congregation, the few who were not presently in the Keatings’ backyard, how the miracle of loaves and fishes had been enacted here today, but he couldn’t find a way to wring enough booze out of the narrative. He didn’t believe that he had witnessed a miracle, no one thought that, but he had seen a perfect explanation of how the miracle might have been engineered in the time of Christ. It was a large bottle of gin Albert Cousins had brought to the party, yes, but it was in no way large enough to fill all the cups, and in certain cases to fill them many times over, for the more than one hundred guests, some of whom were dancing not four feet in front of him. And while the recently stripped Valencia trees in the backyard had been heavy with fruit, they never would have been able to come up with enough juice to sate the entire party. Conventional wisdom says that orange juice doesn’t go with gin, and anyway, who was expecting a drink at a christening party? Had the Keatings just put the gin in their liquor cabinet no one would have thought less of them. But Fix Keating had given the bottle to his wife, and his wife, worn down by the stress of throwing a good party, was going to have a drink, and if she was going to have a drink then by God everyone at the party was welcome to join her. In many ways this was Beverly Keating’s miracle. Albert Cousins, the man who brought the gin, was also the one who suggested the mixer. Albert Cousins had been sitting beside him not two minutes before, telling Father Joe Mike that he was from Virginia and even after three years in Los Angeles he was still shocked by the abundance of citrus fruit hanging from trees. Bert — he told the priest to call him Bert — had grown up with frozen concentrate mixed into pitchers of water which, although he hadn’t known it at the time, had nothing to do with orange juice. Now his children drank fresh-squeezed juice as thoughtlessly as he had drunk milk as a boy. They squeezed it from the fruit they had picked off the trees in their own backyard. He could see a new set of muscles hardening in the right forearm of his wife, Teresa, from the constant twisting of oranges on the juicer while their children held up their cups and waited for more. Orange juice was all they wanted, Bert told him. They had it every morning with their cereal, and Teresa froze it into Tupperware popsicle molds and gave the popsicles to the children for their afternoon snacks, and in the evening he and Teresa drank it over ice with vodka or bourbon or gin. This was what no one seemed to understand — it didn’t matter what you put into it, what mattered was the juice itself. “People from California forget that, because they’ve been spoiled,” Bert said.

“It’s true,” Father Joe Mike admitted, because he’d grown up in Oceanside and couldn’t quite believe the extent to which this guy was going on about orange juice.

The priest, whose mind was wandering like the Jews in the desert, tried to focus again on his sermon: Beverly Keating went to the liquor cabinet, which she had not restocked for the christening party, and what she found there was a third of a bottle of gin, a nearly full bottle of vodka, and a bottle of tequila that Fix’s brother John had brought back from Mexico last September which they had never opened because neither one of them knew exactly what to do with tequila. She carried the bottles to the kitchen, at which point the neighbors who lived on either side of their house and the neighbors across the street and three of the people who lived near Incarnation offered to go home and see what they had in their own cabinets, and when those neighbors returned it wasn’t just with bottles but oranges. Bill and Susie came back with a pillowcase full of fruit they’d run home to pick, saying they could go back and get three pillowcases more: what they gave to the party hadn’t made a dent. Other guests followed suit, running home, raiding their fruit trees and the high boozy shelves of their pantries. They poured their bounty into the Keatings’ kitchen until the kitchen table looked like a bar back and the kitchen counter looked like a fruit truck.

Wasn’t that the true miracle? Not that Christ had rolled out a buffet table from His holy sleeve and invited everyone to join Him for fishes and loaves, but that the people who had brought their lunches in goatskin sacks, maybe a little more than they needed for their family but certainly not enough to feed the masses, were moved to fearless generosity by the example of their teacher and His disciples. So had the people at this christening party been moved by the generosity of Beverly Keating, or they were moved by the sight of her in that yellow dress, her pale hair twisted up and pinned to show the smooth back of her neck, the neck that disappeared into the back of the yellow dress. Father Joe Mike took a sip of his drink. And when it was done the people collected twelve baskets of scraps. He looked around at all the cups on the tables and chairs, on the ground, many of which had a sip or two left in the bottom. Were they to gather up all the leftovers, how much would they have? Father Joe Mike felt small for not having offered to go back to the rectory to see what was there. He had been thinking about how it would look for a priest to show his congregants just how much gin he had squirreled away, instead of taking the opportunity to participate in the fellowship of a community.

There was a gentle tapping against the toe of his shoe. Father Joe Mike looked up from his knee, where he had been meditating on the contents of his cup, and saw Bonnie Keating. No, that wasn’t right. Her sister was married to Fix Keating, which made her Bonnie-Something-Else. Bonnie-of-Beverly’s-Maiden-Name.

“Hey, Father,” she said, a cup just like his held loosely between finger and thumb.

“Bonnie,” he said, trying to make his voice sound like he wasn’t sitting on the ground drinking gin. Though he wasn’t sure that this was still gin. It may have been tequila.

“I was wondering if you’d dance with me.”

Bonnie X was wearing a dress with blue daisies on it that was short enough to make a priest wonder where he was supposed to rest his gaze, though when she’d gotten dressed this morning she probably hadn’t taken into account that there would be men sitting on the ground while she remained standing. He wanted to say something avuncular about not dancing because he was out of practice, but he wasn’t old enough to be her uncle, or her father for that matter, which is what she’d called him. Instead he answered her simply. “Not a great idea.”

And speaking of not great ideas, Bonnie X then dropped down to sit on her heels, thinking, no doubt, that she and the priest would then be closer to eye level and could have a more private conversation, and not thinking about where this would bring the hem of her dress. Her underwear was also blue. It matched the daisies.

“See, the thing is, everybody’s married,” she said, her voice not modulated to reflect her content. “And while I don’t mind dancing with a guy who’s married because I don’t think dancing means anything, all of them brought their wives.”

“And their wives think it means something.” He was careful now to lock his eyes on her eyes.

“They do,” she said sadly, and pushed a chunk of straight auburn hair behind one ear.

It was at that moment that Father Joe Mike had a sort of revelation: Bonnie X should leave Los Angeles, or at the very least she should move to the Valley, to a place where no one knew her older sister, because when not juxtaposed to that sister, Bonnie was a perfectly attractive girl. Put the two of them together and Bonnie was a Shetland pony standing next to a racehorse, but he realized now that without knowing Beverly the word “pony” never would have come to mind. Over Bonnie’s shoulder he could see that Beverly Keating was dancing in the driveway with a police officer who was not her husband, and that the police officer was looking like a very lucky man.

“Come on,” Bonnie said, her voice somewhere between pleading and whining. “I think we’re the only two people here who aren’t married.”

“If what you’re looking for is availability, I don’t fit the bill.”

“I just want to dance,” she said, and put her free hand on his knee, the one that wasn’t already occupied by a cup.

Because Father Joe Mike had just been chastising himself about placing the propriety of appearances over true kindness, he felt himself waver. Would he have given two seconds’ thought to appearances if it had been his hostess asking for a dance? If Beverly Keating were crouching in front of him now instead of her sister, her wide-set blue eyes this close to his own, her dress slipping up so that the color of her underwear was made known to him — he stopped, giving his head an imperceptible shake. Not a good thought. He tried to take himself back to the loaves and the fishes, and when that proved impossible he held up his index finger. “One,” he said.

Bonnie X smiled at him with such radiant gratitude that Father Joe Mike wondered if he had ever made another living soul happy before this moment. They put down their cups and endeavored to pull one another up, though it was tricky. Before they were fully standing they were in each other’s arms. From that point it wasn’t very far to Bonnie clasping her hands behind Joe Mike’s neck and hanging there like the stole he wore to hear confessions. He rested an awkward hand on either side of her waist, the narrow place where her ribs curved down to meet his thumbs. If anyone at the party was looking at them he was not aware of it. In fact, he was overcome by the sensation of invisibility, hidden from the world by the mysterious cloud of lavender that rose up from the hair of Beverly Keating’s sister.

In truth, Bonnie had already managed one dance before enlisting Father Joe Mike, though in the end it wound up being not even half a dance. She had pulled the hardworking Dick Spencer away from the oranges for a minute, telling him he should take a break, that union rules applied to men who juiced oranges. Dick Spencer wore thick horn-rimmed glasses that made him look smart, lots smarter than Fix’s partner Lomer, who refused to give her the time of day despite the fact that she had twice leaned up against him, laughing. (Dick Spencer was smart. He was also so myopic that the couple of times his glasses had gotten knocked off while wrestling with a suspect he had been as good as blind. The thought of fighting a man who may well have a gun or a knife he couldn’t see was enough to make him sign up for night school, then law school, then ace the bar exam.) Bonnie took Spencer’s sticky hand and led him out to the back patio. Right away they were making a wide circle, bumping into other people. With her arms around his back she could feel how thin he was under his shirt, thin in a nice way, a thin that could wrap around a girl twice. The other deputy DA, Cousins, was better-looking, sort of gorgeous really, but he was stuck on himself, she could tell. Dick Spencer was a sweetheart in her arms.

That was about as far as her thoughts had progressed when she’d felt a strong hand gripping her upper arm. She’d been trying very hard to concentrate on Dick Spencer’s eyes behind his glasses and the effort was making her dizzy, or something was making her dizzy. She was holding on to him tight. She hadn’t seen the woman approaching. If she’d seen her, Bonnie might have had time to dodge, or at least come up with something clever to say. The woman was talking loud and fast, and Bonnie was careful to lean away from her. Just like that Dick Spencer and his wife were leaving the party.

“Going?” Fix said as they sailed past him in the living room.

“Keep an eye on your family,” Mary Spencer said.

Fix was on the couch, his older girl Caroline stretched out across his lap, sound asleep. He mistakenly thought Mary was complimenting him on watching his daughter. Maybe he had been half asleep himself. He patted Caroline lightly on the small of her back and she didn’t move.

“Give Cousins a hand,” Dick said over his shoulder, and then they were gone without his jacket or tie, without a goodbye to Beverly.

Albert Cousins hadn’t been invited to the party. He’d passed Dick Spencer in the hallway of the courthouse on Friday talking to a cop, some cop Cousins didn’t know but who maybe looked familiar the way cops do. “See you Sunday,” the cop had said, and when he walked away, Cousins asked Spencer, “What’s Sunday?” Dick Spencer explained that Fix Keating had a new kid, and that there was going to be a christening party.

“First kid?” Cousins had asked, watching Keating retreat down the hall in his blues.

“Second.”

“They do all that for second kids?”

“Catholics,” Spencer said and shrugged. “They can’t get enough of it.”

While Cousins hadn’t been looking for a party to crash, it wasn’t an entirely innocent question either. He hated Sundays, and since Sundays were thought to be a family day, invitations were hard to come by. Weekdays he was out the door just as his children were waking up. He would give their heads a scratch, leave a few instructions for his wife, and be gone. By the time he got home at night they were asleep, or going to sleep. Pressed against their pillows, he found his children endearing, necessary, and that was how he thought of them from Monday morning all the way to Saturday at dawn. But on Saturday mornings they refused to keep sleeping. Cal and Holly would throw themselves onto his chest before the light of day had fully penetrated the vinyl roll-down shades, already fighting over something that had happened in the three minutes they’d been awake. The baby would start pulling herself over the bars of her crib as soon as she’d heard her siblings up — it was her new trick — and what she lacked in speed she made up for in tenacity. She would throw herself onto the floor if Teresa didn’t run to catch her in time, but Teresa was up already and vomiting. She closed the door to the bathroom in the hall and ran the tap, trying to be quiet about it, but the steady sound of retching filled the bedroom. Cousins threw off his two older children, their weightless selves landing in a tangle on the bedspread folded at the foot of the bed. They lunged at him again, shrieking with laughter, but he couldn’t play with them and he didn’t want to play with them and didn’t want to get up and get the baby, but he had to.

And so the day went from there, Teresa saying she needed to be able to go to the grocery store by herself, or that the people who lived on the corner were having a cookout and they hadn’t gone to the last cookout. Every minute a child was howling, first one at a time, then in duet, with the third one waiting, then the third one joining in, then two settling down so as to repeat the cycle. The baby fell straight into the sliding glass door in the den and cut open her forehead before breakfast. Teresa was on the floor, butterflying tiny Band-Aids, asking Bert if he thought she needed stitches. The sight of blood always made Bert uncomfortable and so he looked away, saying no, no stitches. Holly was crying because the baby was crying. Holly said that her head hurt. Cal was nowhere in evidence — though screaming, be it that of his sisters or his parents, usually brought him running back. Cal liked trouble. Teresa looked up at her husband, her fingers daubed in the baby’s blood, and asked him where Cal had gone.

All week long Cousins waded through the pimps and the wife-beaters, the petty thieves. He offered up his best self to biased judges and sleeping juries. He told himself that when the weekend came he would turn away from all the crime in Los Angeles, turn towards his pajama-clad children and newly pregnant wife, but he only made it to noon on Saturdays before telling Teresa that there was work at the office he had to finish before the first hearing on Monday. The funny thing was he really did go to work. The couple of times he’d tried slipping off to Manhattan Beach to eat a hot dog and flirt with the girls in their bikini tops and tiny cutoff shorts, he’d gotten a sunburn which Teresa was quick to comment on. So he would go to the office and sit among the men he sat among all week long. They would nod seriously to one another and accomplish more in three or four hours on a Saturday afternoon than they did on any other day.

But by Sunday he couldn’t do it again, not the children or the wife or the job, and so he pulled up the memory of a christening party he hadn’t been invited to. Teresa looked at him, her face bright for a minute. Thirty-one years old and still she had freckles over the bridge of her nose and spreading over her cheeks. She often said that she wished they took their kids to church, even if he didn’t believe in church or God or any of it. She thought it would be a good thing for them to do as a family, and this party might be the place to start. They could all go together.

“No,” he said. “It’s a work thing.”

She blinked. “A christening party?”

“The guy’s a cop.” He hoped she wouldn’t ask the cop’s name because at that particular moment he couldn’t remember it. “Sort of a deal maker, you know? The entire office is going. I just need to pay respects.”

She’d asked him if the baby was a boy or a girl, and if he had a present. The question was followed by a crash in the kitchen and a great clattering of metal mixing bowls. He hadn’t thought about a present. He went to the liquor cabinet and picked up a full bottle of gin. It was a big bottle, more than he would have wanted to give, but once he saw the seal was still intact the matter was decided.

That was how he came to be in Fix Keating’s kitchen making orange juice, Dick Spencer having abandoned his post for the consolation prize of the blonde’s unimpressive sister. He would wait it out, showing himself to be reliable in hopes of scoring the blonde herself. He would juice every orange in Los Angeles County if that’s what it took. In this city where beauty had been invented she was possibly the most beautiful woman he had ever spoken to, certainly the most beautiful woman he had ever stood next to in a kitchen. Her beauty was the point, yes, but it was also more than that: there had been a little jolt between their fingers whenever she passed him another orange. He felt it every time, an electric spark as real as the orange itself. He knew that making a move on a married woman was a bad idea, especially when you were in the woman’s house and her husband was also in the house and her husband was a cop and the party was a celebration of the birth of the cop’s second child. Cousins knew all of this but as the drinks stacked up he told himself there were larger forces at work. The priest who he’d been talking to earlier out on the back patio wasn’t as drunk as he was and the priest had definitely said there was something out of the ordinary going on. Saying something was out of the ordinary was as good as saying all bets were off. Cousins reached for his cup with his left hand and stopped to roll his right wrist in a circle the way he’d seen Teresa do before. He was cramping up.

Fix Keating was standing in the doorway, watching him like he knew exactly what he had in mind. “Dick said I was on duty,” Fix said. The cop wasn’t such a big guy but it was clear that his spring was wound tight, that he spent every day looking for a fight to throw himself into. All the Irish cops were like that.

“You’re the host,” Cousins said. “You don’t need to be stuck back here making juice.”

“You’re the guest,” Fix said, picking up a knife. “You should be out there enjoying yourself.”

But Cousins had never been a man for a crowd. If this had been a party Teresa had dragged him to he wouldn’t have lasted twenty minutes. “I know what I’m good at,” he said, and took the top off the juicer, stopping to rinse the buildup of pulp from the deep metal grooves of the top half before pouring the contents of the juice dish into a green plastic pitcher. For a while they worked next to one another not saying anything. Cousins was half lost in a daydream about the other man’s wife. She was leaning over him, her hand on his face, his hand going straight up her thigh, when Fix said, “So I think I’ve got this figured out.”

Cousins stopped. “What?”

Fix was slicing oranges and Cousins saw how he pulled the knife towards himself instead of pushing it away. “It was auto theft.”

“What was auto theft?”

“That’s where I know you from. I’ve been trying to put it together ever since you showed up. I want to say it was two years ago. I can’t remember the guy’s name but all he stole were red El Caminos.”

The details of a particular auto theft were something Cousins wouldn’t remember unless it had happened in the last month, and if he was very busy his memory might go out only as far as a week. Auto theft was the butter and the bread. If people didn’t steal cars in Los Angeles then cops and deputy district attorneys would be playing honeymoon bridge at their desks all day, waiting for news of a murder. Auto thefts ran together — those cars flipped exactly as they were found, those run through a chop shop — one theft as unmemorable as the next but for a guy who stole only red El Caminos.

“D’Agostino,” Cousins said, and then he repeated the name because he had no idea where that particular gift of memory had come from. That’s just the kind of day this was, no explanation.

Fix shook his head in appreciation. “I could have sat here all day and not come up with that. I remember him though. He thought it showed some kind of class to limit himself to just that one car.”

For a moment Cousins felt nearly clairvoyant, as if the case file were open in front of him. “The public defender claimed an improper search. The cars were all in some kind of warehouse.” He stopped turning the orange back and forth and closed his eyes in an attempt to concentrate. It was gone. “I can’t remember.”

“Anaheim.”

“I never would have gotten that.”

“Well, there you go,” Fix said. “That was yours.”

But now everything was gone and Cousins couldn’t even remember the outcome. Forget the defendant and the crime and sure as hell forget the cops, but he knew verdicts as clearly as any boxer knew who had knocked him down and who he had laid out cold. “He went up,” Cousins said, deciding to take the bet on himself, believing that any crook stupid enough to steal nothing but red El Caminos had gone up.

Fix nodded, trying not to smile and smiling anyway. Of course he went up. In a certain stretch of the imagination they had done this thing together.

“So you were the detective,” Cousins said. He could see him now, that same brown suit all detectives wore to court, like there was only one and they shared it.

“Arresting,” he said. “I’m up for detective now.”

“You’ve got a death card?” Cousins said it to impress him without having any sense of why he would want to impress him. He might be a grade-one deputy DA but he knew how cops kept score. Fix, however, took the question at face value. He dried his hands and pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, fingering past a few bills.

“Fourteen to go.” He handed his list to Cousins, who dried his hands before taking it.

There were many more than fourteen names on the folded piece of paper, probably closer to thirty, with “Francis Xavier Keating” printed at the bottom, but half the names had a single line drawn through them, meaning Fix Keating was moving up. “Jesus,” Cousins said. “This many of them are dead?”

“Not dead.” Fix took back the list to check the names beneath the straight black lines. He held it up to the kitchen light. “Well, a couple of them. The rest were either promoted already or they moved away, dropped out. It doesn’t make any difference — they’re off.”

Two older women in their best church dresses and no hats leaned against one another in the frame of the open kitchen door. When Fix looked over they gave him a wave in unison.

“Bar still open?” the smaller one said. She meant to sound serious but the line was so clever she hiccupped and then her friend began to laugh as well.

“My mother,” Fix said to Cousins, pointing to the one who had spoken, then he pointed to the other, a faded blonde with a cheerful, open face. “My mother-in-law. This is Al Cousins.”

Cousins dried his hand a second time and extended it to one and then the other. “Bert,” he said. “What’re you ladies drinking?”

“Whatever you’ve got left,” the mother-in-law said. You could see just a trace of the daughter there, the way she held her shoulders back, the length of her neck. It was a crime what time did to women.

Cousins picked up a bottle of bourbon, the bottle closest to his hand, and mixed two drinks. “It’s a good party,” he said. “Everybody out there still having a good time?”

“I thought they were waiting too long,” Fix’s mother said, accepting her drink.

“You’re morbid,” the mother-in-law said to her with affection.

“I’m not morbid,” the mother corrected. “I’m careful. You have to be careful.”

“Waiting for what?” Cousins asked, handing over the second drink.

“The baptism,” Fix said. “She was worried the baby was going to die before we got her baptized.”

“Your baby was sick?” he asked Fix. Cousins had been raised Episcopalian, but he had let go of that. To the best of his knowledge, dead Episcopal babies were passed into heaven regardless.

“She’s fine,” Fix said. “Perfect.”

Fix’s mother shrugged. “You don’t know that. You don’t know what’s going on inside a baby. I had you and your brothers baptized in under a month. I was on top of it. This child,” she said, turning her attention to Cousins, “is nearly a year old. She couldn’t even fit into the family christening gown.”

“Well, there’s the problem,” Fix said.

His mother shrugged. She drank down her entire drink and then waggled the empty paper cup as if there had been some mistake. They’d run out of ice, and the ice had been the only thing to slow the drinkers down. Cousins took the cup from her and filled it again.

“Someone’s got the baby,” Fix said to his mother, not a question, just a confirmation of fact.

“The what?” she asked.

“The baby.”

She thought for a minute, her eyes half closed, and nodded her head, but it was the other one who spoke, the mother-in-law. “Someone,” she said without authority.

“Why is it,” Fix’s mother said, not interested in the question of the baby, “that men will stand in a kitchen all day mixing drinks and juicing oranges for those drinks but won’t so much as set a foot over the threshold to make food?” She stared pointedly at her son.

“No idea,” Fix said.

His mother then looked back at Cousins but he only shook his head. Dissatisfied, the two women turned as one and tipped back out into the party, cups in hand.

“She has a point,” Cousins said. He never would have stood back here making sandwiches, though he felt he could use a sandwich, that he wanted one, and so he poured himself another drink.

Fix returned to the business of the knife and the orange. He was a careful man, and took his time. Even drunk he wasn’t going to cut off his finger. “You have kids?” he asked.

Cousins nodded. “Three and a third.”

Fix whistled. “You stay busy.”

Cousins wondered if he meant You stay busy running after kids, or, You stay busy fucking your wife. Either way. He put another empty orange rind in the sink that overflowed with empty orange rinds. He rolled his wrist.

“Take a break,” Fix said.

“I did.”

“Then take another one. We’ve got juice in reserve, and if those two are any indication of where things are going most of the people here won’t be able to find the kitchen much longer.”

“Where’s Dick?”

“He’s gone, ran out of here with his wife.”

I bet he did, Cousins thought, a vision of his own wife flashing before him, the shrieking bedlam of his household. “What time is it, anyway?”

Fix looked at his watch, a Girard-Perregaux, a much nicer watch than a cop might be wearing. It was three forty-five, easily two hours later than either man would have guessed in his wildest estimation of time.

“Jesus, I should get going,” Cousins said. He was fairly certain he’d told Teresa he would be home no later than noon.

Fix nodded. “Every person in this house who isn’t my wife or my daughters should get going. Just do me a favor first — go find the baby. Find out who has her. If I go out there now everybody’s going to want to start talking and it’ll be midnight before I find her. Take a quick walk around, would you do that? Make sure some drunk didn’t leave her in a chair.”

“How will I know it’s your baby?” Cousins asked. Now that he thought about it, he hadn’t seen a baby at the party, and surely with all these Micks there were bound to be plenty of them.

“She’s the new one,” Fix said, his voice gone suddenly sharp, like Cousins was an idiot, like this was the reason some guys had to be lawyers rather than cops. “She’s the one in the fancy dress. It’s her party.”

The crowd shifted around Cousins, opening to him, closing around him, pushing him through. In the dining room every platter was stripped, not a cracker or a carrot stick remained. The conversation and music and drunken laughter melted into a single indecipherable block of sound from which the occasional clear word or sentence escaped—Turns out he’s had her in the trunk the entire time he’s talking. Somewhere down a distant hallway he couldn’t see, a woman was laughing so hard she gasped for breath, calling, Stop! Stop! He saw children, plenty of children, several of whom were pulling cups straight from the unwitting fingers of adults and downing the contents. He didn’t see any babies. The room was over-warm and the detectives had their jackets off now, showing the service revolvers clipped to their belts or holstered under their arms. Cousins wondered how he had failed to notice earlier that half the party was armed. He went through the open glass doors to the patio and looked up into the late-afternoon sunlight that flooded the suburb of Downey, where there was not a cloud and never had been a cloud and never would be a cloud. He saw his friend the priest standing still as stone, holding the little sister in his arms, as if they’d been dancing for so long they had fallen asleep standing up. Men sat in patio chairs talking to other men, many of them with women in their laps. The women, all the ones he saw, had taken off their shoes at some point and ruined their stockings. None of them was holding a baby, and there was no baby in the driveway. Cousins stepped inside the garage and flipped on the light. A ladder hung on two hooks and clean cans of paint were lined up on a shelf according to size. There was a shovel, a rake, coils of extension cord, a bench of tools, a place for everything and everything in its place. In the center of the clean cement floor was a clean navy-blue Peugeot. Fix Keating had fewer children and a nicer watch and a foreign car and a much-better-looking wife. The guy hadn’t even made detective. If anyone had bothered to ask him at that moment, Cousins would have said it seemed suspicious.

About the time he started really looking at the car, which seemed somehow sexy just by virtue of its being French, he remembered the baby was missing. He thought of his own baby, Jeanette, who had just learned to walk. Her forehead was bruised from where she had careened into the glass yesterday, the Band-Aids were still in place, and he panicked to think he was supposed to be watching her. Little Jeanette, he had no idea where he’d left her! Teresa should have known he wasn’t any good at keeping up with the baby. She shouldn’t have trusted him with this. But when he came out of the garage to try and find her, his heart punching at his ribs as if it wanted to go ahead of him, he saw all the people at Fix Keating’s party. The proper order of the day was returned to him and he stood for another moment holding on to the door, feeling both ridiculous and relieved. He hadn’t lost anything.

When he looked back up at the sky he saw the light was changing. He would tell Fix he needed to go home, he had his own kids to worry about. He went inside to find a bathroom and found two closets first. In the bathroom, he stopped to splash some water on his face before coming out again. On the other side of the hallway there was yet another door. It wasn’t a big house but it seemed to be made entirely of doors. He opened the door in front of him and found the light inside was dim. The shades were down. It was a room for little girls — a pink rug, a pink wallpaper border featuring fat rabbits. There was a room not unlike this in his own house that Holly shared with Jeanette. In the corner he saw three small girls sleeping on a twin bed, their legs crossed over one another’s legs, their fingers twisted in one another’s hair. Somehow the only thing he failed to notice was Beverly Keating standing at the changing table with the baby. Beverly looked at him, a smile of recognition coming over her face.

“I know you,” she said.

She had startled him, or her beauty startled him again. “I’m sorry,” he said. He put his hand on the door.

“You’re not going to wake them up.” She tilted her head towards the girls. “I think they’re drunk. I carried them in here one at a time and they never woke up.”

He went over and looked at the girls, the biggest one no more than five. He couldn’t help but like the look of children when they were sleeping. “Is one of them yours?” he asked. They all three looked vaguely similar. None of them looked like Beverly Keating.

“Pink dress,” she said, her attention on the diaper in her hand. “The other two are her cousins.” She smiled at him. “Aren’t you supposed to be fixing drinks?”

“Spencer left,” he said, though that didn’t answer the question. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been nervous, not in the face of criminals or juries, certainly not in the face of women holding diapers. He started again. “Your husband asked me to find the baby.”

Finished with her work, Beverly rearranged the baby’s dress and lifted her up from the table. “Well, here she is,” she said. She touched her nose to the baby’s nose and the baby smiled and yawned. “Somebody’s been awake a long time.” Beverly turned towards the crib.

“Let me take her out to Fix for a minute,” he said. “Before you put her down.”

Beverly Keating tilted her head slightly to one side and gave him a funny look. “Why does Fix need her?”

It was everything, the pale pink of her mouth in the darkened pink room, the door that was closed now though he didn’t remember closing it, the smell of her perfume which had somehow managed to float gently above the familiar stench of the diaper pail. Had Fix asked him to bring the baby back or just to find her? It didn’t make any difference. He told her he didn’t know, and then he stepped towards her, her yellow dress its own source of light. He held out his arms and she stepped into them, holding out the baby.

“Take her then,” she said. “Do you have children?” But by then she was very close and she lifted up her face. He put one arm under the baby, which meant he was putting his arm beneath her breasts. It wasn’t a year ago she’d had this baby and while he didn’t know what she’d looked like before it was hard to imagine she had ever looked any better than this. Teresa never pulled herself together. She said it wasn’t possible, one coming right after the next. Wouldn’t he like to introduce the two of them, just to show his wife what could be done if you cared to try. Scratch that. He had no interest in Teresa meeting Beverly Keating. He put his other arm around her back, pressed his fingers into the straight line of her zipper. It was the magic of gin and orange juice. The baby balanced between the two of them and he kissed her. That was the way this day was turning out. He closed his eyes and kissed her until the spark he had felt in his fingers when he touched her hand in the kitchen ran the entire shivering length of his spine. She put her other hand against the small of his back while the tip of her tongue crossed between his parted teeth. There was an almost imperceptible shift between them. He felt it, but she stepped back. He was holding the baby. The baby cried for a second, a single red-faced wail, and then issued a small hiccup and pressed into Cousins’s chest.

“We’re going to smother her,” she said, and laughed. She looked down at the baby’s pretty face. “Sorry about that.”

The small weight of the Keating girl was familiar in his arms. Beverly took a soft cloth from the changing table and wiped over his mouth. “Lipstick,” she said, then she leaned over and kissed him again.

“You are—” he started, but too many things came into his head to say just one.

“Drunk,” she said, and smiled. “I’m drunk is all. Go take the baby to Fix. Tell him I’ll be there in just a minute to get her.” She pointed her finger at him. “And don’t tell him anything else, mister.” She laughed again.

He realized then what he had known from the first minute he saw her, from when she leaned out the kitchen door and called for her husband. This was the start of his life.

“Go,” she said.

She let him keep the baby. She went to the other side of the room and started to arrange the sleeping girls into more comfortable positions. He stood at the closed bedroom door for one more minute to watch her.

“What?” she said. She wasn’t being flirtatious.

“Some party,” he said.

“Tell me about it.”

In one sense only had Fix been right to send him out to find the baby: nobody knew him at this party and it had been easy for him to move through the crowd. It was something Cousins hadn’t realized until now when everyone turned their head in his direction. A woman as trim and tan as a stick stepped right in front of him.

“There she is!” she cried, and leaned in to kiss the yellow curls that feathered the baby’s head, leaving a wine stain of lipstick. “Oh,” she said, disappointed in herself. She used her thumb to try to wipe it up and the baby tightened her features as if she might cry. “I shouldn’t have done that.” She looked at Cousins and smiled at him. “You won’t tell Fix it was me, will you?”

It was an easy promise to make. He’d never seen the tan woman before.

“There’s our girl,” a man said, smiling at the baby as he patted Cousins on the back. Who did they think he was? No one asked him. Dick Spencer was the only person who knew him at all and he was long gone. As he cut a slow path to the kitchen he was stopped and encircled over and over again. Oh, the baby, they said in soft voices. Hey there, pretty girl. The compliments and kind words surrounded him. She was a very good-looking baby, he could see it now that they were in the light. This one looked more like the mother, the fair skin, the wide-set eyes, everybody said so. Just like Beverly. He jostled her up in the crook of his arm. Her eyes would open and then close again, blue beacons checking to see if she was still in his arms. She was as comfortable with him as any of his own children were. He knew how to hold a baby.

“She sure likes you,” a man wearing a gun in a shoulder harness said.

In the kitchen a group of women sat smoking. They tapped their ashes in their cups, signaling they were done. There was nothing left to do but wait for their husbands to tell them it was time to go home. “Hey there, baby,” one of them said, and they all looked up at Cousins.

“Where’s Fix?” he asked.

One of them shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Do you have to go now? I’ll take her.” She held out her hands.

But Cousins wasn’t about to turn her over to strangers. “I’ll find him,” he said, and backed away.

Cousins felt like he had been walking in a circle around Fix Keating’s house for the last hour, first looking for the baby and then looking for Fix. He found him on the back patio talking to the priest. The priest’s girl was nowhere in sight. There were fewer people outside now, fewer people everywhere. The angle of the light coming through the orange trees had lowered considerably. He saw a single orange high above his head, an orange that had somehow been overlooked in the frenzy to make juice, and he raised up on his toes, the baby balanced in one arm, and picked it.

“Jesus,” Fix said, looking up. “Where have you been?”

“Looking for you,” Cousins said.

“I’ve been right here.”

Cousins nearly made a crack about Fix not bothering to try and find him but then he thought better of it. “You’re not where I left you.”

Fix stood up and took the baby from him without gratitude or ceremony. She issued a small sound of discontent at the transfer, then settled against her father’s chest and went to sleep. Cousins’s arm was weightless now and he didn’t like it. He didn’t like it one bit. Fix looked at the stain on the top of her head. “Did somebody drop her?”

“It’s lipstick.”

“Well,” said the priest, pushing out of his chair. “That’s it for me. We’ve got a spaghetti supper back at the church in half an hour. Everyone’s welcome.”

They said their goodnights, and as Father Joe Mike walked away he grew a tail of parishioners who followed him down the driveway, Saint Patrick marching through Downey. They waved their hands at Fix and called goodnight. It wasn’t night, but neither was it fully day. The party had gone on entirely too long.

Cousins waited another minute, hoping that Beverly would come back for the baby like she’d said, but she didn’t come, and it was hours past time for him to go. “I don’t know her name,” he said.

“Frances.”

“Really?” He looked again at the pretty girl. “You named her for yourself?”

Fix nodded. “Francis got me into a lot of fights when I was a kid. There was no one in the neighborhood who forgot to tell me I had a girl’s name, so I figured, why not name a girl Frances?”

“What if she’d been a boy?” Cousins asked.

“I would have named him Francis,” Fix said, yet again making Cousins feel he had asked a stupid question.

“When the first one was a girl we named her after Kennedy’s daughter. I thought, that’s fine, I’ll wait, but now—” Fix stopped, looking down at his daughter. There had been a miscarriage between the two girls, fairly late. They were lucky to get this second one, that’s what the doctor had said, though there was no point in telling that to the deputy district attorney. “It works out this way.”

“It’s a good name,” Cousins said, but what he thought was, Lucky you didn’t wait.

“What about you?” Fix said. “You’ve got a little Albert at home?”

“My son’s name is Calvin. We call him Cal. And the girls, no. No Albertas.”

“But you’ve got one coming up.”

“In December,” he said. Cousins remembered how it was before Cal was born, how he and Teresa would lie in bed at night saying names to one another in the dark. One name would remind her of a kid who got picked on in grade school, a kid who wore stained shirts and bit his thumbs. Some other name would remind him of a boy he never liked, a bully, but when they got to Cal both of them were happy. It was something like that when they were thinking up names for Holly, too. Maybe they’d spent less time on it, maybe they didn’t talk about it in bed, her head up on his shoulder, his hand on her stomach, but they’d picked it out together. She wasn’t named for anybody, just for herself, because her parents thought it was a beautiful name. And Jeanette? He didn’t even remember talking about a name for Jeanette. He’d been late getting to the hospital just that one time and if memory served he’d gone into the room and Teresa said, This is Jeanette. She would have been Daphne if anyone had asked him about it. They should talk about what they were going to name this new one. It would give them something to talk about.

“Name this one Albert,” Fix said.

“If it’s a boy.”

“It’ll be a boy. You’re due.”

Cousins looked at Frances asleep in her father’s arms. It wouldn’t be the worst thing if they had another girl, but if it was a boy then maybe they would call him Albert. “You think?”

“Absolutely,” Fix said.

He never did talk about it with Teresa but he was there in the waiting room when the baby was born and he filled out the birth certificate — Albert John Cousins — after himself. Teresa had never much liked her husband’s name but when would there have been an opportunity to bring that up? As soon as they were home from the hospital she started calling the baby Albie, Al-bee. Cousins told her not to but he wasn’t ever around. What was he going to do, stop her? The other kids liked it. They called the baby Albie, too.