Kiss of the Wolf

TODD

Last night I watched a movie called I’ll Take Sweden with Bob Hope and then one called Boeing Boeing with Tony Curtis. They were both terrible.

Audrey got sick again and I cleaned it up, but you can still see the spot. I don’t know what’s wrong with her.

I tried calling my Dad by using Information in these cities: Spokane, Seattle, Olympia, Tacoma, Yakima, Walla Walla, Sacramento, Redding, Chico, Eureka, Santa Rosa, Yuba City, Crescent City, Denver, Durango, Boulder, Buena Vista, Fort Collins, Greeley, Grand Junction, Glenwood Springs, Steamboat Springs, Pagosa Springs. A lot of them I found in an atlas of his called These United States. If you call the regular operator and give the city and state, they’ll give you the area code.

I have a map where I put a pin in the city after I call.

When my father was still here, one of the things he liked to do was go to Yankee and Met games. We went like twice a year. He went to the World Series in 1986, when the Mets played the Red Sox, and saw the ball go through Bill Buckner’s legs. I don’t know how he got tickets. He had friends. He said he wanted to take me, but I was only four and my mother thought I was too young. She said she didn’t think I would have even remembered going. I would have remembered.

He threw the ball around with me a lot. When he threw me ground balls, he called me Luis, after Luis Aparicio, a player he liked when he was a kid. I looked him up in Bill James’s Baseball Abstract. He’s in the Hall of Fame.

I called the police again and hung up again. I’m never going to do anything with that. I might as well just stop.

My mom came back at one in the morning from her date with Bruno. I don’t know how long the concert was supposed to go, but I doubt it was that long.

Last night I had a dream so bad I don’t even want to talk about it.

Toward the end, Sister Justine came into it. Sister Justine last year was one of the ones who’d watch us during Mass to make sure we were singing the songs right. Sometimes kids would make up their own words to try and crack you up. Sisters hate that.

Sometimes you really didn’t know the words, though, and you didn’t bother reading along in the Missalettes. She came down the row once and grabbed me by the elbow, and I didn’t even know what I did wrong. I was singing, “‘Oh, my soul, praise Him, for He is our health and salvation. Christ the high priest bids us all join in His feast, victims with Him on the altar,’” and I thought those were the right words. She scared me.

At the end of the day on Monday, she made us all keep our seats and she announced that Todd Muhlberg was going to sing a hymn the right way for us and we were all going to listen to the right way before we went home. She kept the class after, because I didn’t know the words. This made me even more popular.

She made me go up to the front of the room. She picked a different song and she didn’t let me use the Missalette. I don’t know why she picked a different song. Maybe she figured I might have practiced the other one.

Then, when she had me up there, she made me wait until there was perfect silence.

I remember standing there with my hands folded, everybody looking at me, everybody ready to go. Their schoolbags were all on their desks.

She made me sing the whole thing. She made me repeat one part of it, because I messed it up. And the whole time I was singing I was looking at her, and here’s what I was thinking: I was thinking, You’re not making me a better person; you’re making me a worse person. I felt better, thinking that. What she made me sing still goes through my head at weird times:

For the sheep the Lamb has bled,

sinless, in the sinner’s stead.

Christ the Lord is risen on high.

Now He lives, no more to die.

BRUNO

Here’sa kinda jobs I had when I was a kid, these other guys were out with their seven iron at Fairchild-Wheeler: Laying asphalt. Spreading asphalt. Humping dirt for road crews, that whole Route 8 extension. Passivating. You want to see a shit job: this is a job people don’t even do anymore. Now they got machines, and they gotta replace those every few years. I was however old, twenty-two, I finally got hooked on at Vadnais Metals over on East Main Street, the first day I’m there the guy I’m supposed to report to doesn’t know what to do with me. Big, red-faced Polack; always looked like whatever you asked him was funny. Mr. Kuntz, I gotta take a leak. That’s funny? Mr. Kuntz, where do I punch out? That’s funny? I’m there bright and early Monday morning, got on new wool pants ’cause my uncle says, Light work. Mr. Kuntz is baffled. Mr. Kuntz has never heard of me. He says to the guy he’s with, We could put him on the passivator, and they give each other these looks, and I go, Oh, shit.

They take me down like seven levels of cellars. I’m thinking, Oh, this is lovely. We come to this concrete room, I can’t describe it. For light, there’s one bulb, handmade, Thomas Edison. Nothing on the walls. It’s a huge holding area where all these hollow metal cabinets are piling up. The size of small refrigerators, hollow, soldered together. One side of the room is this big stainless-steel pit, like a giant sink. Two feet deep, ten or twelve feet around. Drain in the middle. There’s a Puerto Rican in rubber hip boots and rubber gloves in the pit. He’s got this wand in his hand, wired to a portable generator. There are these big plastic tubs with screw-on tops next to him. One says WATER. One says HYDROCHLORIC ACID.

The Puerto Rican is introduced to me. The voices in there with the metal and the concrete, you can’t hear anything. Hector’s wearing safety glasses and his clothes are dotted with yellow, like somebody exploded a mustard bottle in front of him. There’s a little vent fan in the ceiling.

Here’s the drill: Vadnais Metals is making its own metal cabinets, for who knows what. They solder the things together, the solder discolors the metal. They show me, with one of the cabinets waiting to be done. Even in the bad light I can see it: the little rainbow patterns around the joint, like the sun on oily water. That has to come off. Since it’s stainless steel, nobody’s sanding anything. What you do is you find some guys on the bottom of the food chain, Puerto Ricans from Father Panik Village or guineas from Kissuth Street who don’t know any better, and you show them how it’s done. How it’s done is these guys take a wand that’s charged with juice from the portable generators and they wrap the wands with gauze and rubber bands. Then they dip them into the hydrochloric acid. Then they swab the discoloration. Then the discoloration goes away, magic. Then they rinse off the cabinet with water. Then they do it again.

Except the electricity breaks down the gauze. So you gotta keep rewrapping the wand. And to do that you gotta take off your rubber gloves. And you rinse your hands afterwards but the acid doesn’t feel like anything until a minute goes by, and then it feels slick, and then it burns. And the acid eats through the rubber. And stuff gets sprayed around. And the fumes are a solid thing pressing into your face.

Just standing there, I was leaning back from the fumes. I said, Hey, turn on the vent, and Hector said, the first thing he said to me, It’s on.

I’m looking at this and I go to Mr. Kuntz, When do I start? and he goes, Start now. I go, In these? and put my hands on both sides of these new wool pants. Pathetic.

The headaches. The burns, when the shit got down into your gloves between your fingers. You’d go to rub your eye and you’d think, Oh. Very nice. That wasn’t close, was it?

They left me there, that first day. I heard the door shut and heard them go all the way up the stairs. They were metal stairs. Near the top, Mr. Kuntz said something and the other guy roared. Laughed so hard he had to stop on the stairs to get his breath. Hector went on without me for a little while. The first thing I did was fold up the cuffs on my pants. I remember realizing this Puerto Rican felt sorry for me.

He showed me how to get into the clammy rubber waders, how to check the gloves for prior damage. Everything that was wet, I thought, Acid. It was nine-twenty-five. I already had a headache from the fumes. I pulled over my first cabinet. It flexed and boomed with that sheet-metal sound. There was nowhere for the sound to go. Hector hit the light cord tipping his cabinet over, and it circled our heads, swinging shadows around like we were in a mad scientist’s lab.

Those wool pants that first day had the ass eaten out of them. My shorts underneath were yellow and mealy, like wet Kleenex. You could roll pieces off them with your fingers. I punched out that day with a hole in my pants, like somebody in a vaudeville show. I stood there and punched out. My ass was cold. It was funny to Mr. Kuntz and funny to everyone else. Get a load of this, you gotta see this. Standing there at the time clock looking for his card, a wop with his ass hanging out.

Hector got moved out after three weeks, complaining of headaches. The day Hector left, I went upstairs and said, Hey, I got headaches, too. Mr. Kuntz said, Hey, kid, I got prostate. Sally’s got a drinking problem. Hermie’s got a stutter. What do you want from me? Two weeks after that I had to stay out a day, I got acid in my eye, the son of a bitch fired me, no questions asked. I had nothing, twenty-two years old, I’m holding my hand on my ass.

I run into a lotta women attracted to me, it’s the same story: Bruno, there’s something different about you, I don’t know why I’m so interested. Bruno, I’m thirty-five years old, unmarried. I live with my mother, she’s a burden on me, I’m not unattractive, I still have my looks. Bruno, I never know what you’re thinking. Meanwhile, their eyes: they’d hate me if they could.

Love. Everybody’s thinking about love.

Two years after that job, I drove up to the University of Hartford and found the dorm where Mr. Kuntz’s daughter was a college coed. Eighteen years old, small ass, bobbed hair, in her room she did stretching exercises, legs out to here. They locked the dorms at eleven o’clock, but that was a joke. Her room was on the fourth floor. She left her fire-escape windows open.

I sat on the top landing by some storage rooms and listened to their stereos. Neil Young. Jackson Browne. Two hours of pissing and moaning: “Oh, Lonesome Me.” One by one, the rooms shut down under me; I could feel it. It was three, four o’clock. The security guy, probably a hundred and four, went by in his little cart. I wanted a disguise that was an insult. I punched two holes in a grocery bag and tore a smiley face in it. I tied it around my neck with my tie. I went down the fire escape.

I stood at her bed and waited for her to roll over, that’s how sound a sleeper she was. When she was on her back I put my hand on her mouth and she woke up. She understood not to scream. She got out of bed and squatted in a corner of the room. This all took a very short time. She was still holding the edge of her quilt. She dragged it all across the floor. She didn’t even look eighteen, with the light from the window. I didn’t rape her. I made her take me in her mouth.

JOANIE

We used to get assigned saints and martyrs to read and think about for a week, and the girls always got assigned girls who were martyred because they refused to do something impure. The stories were never clear on what. Usually the Romans were involved. The most they’d tell you was that so-and-so wanted to ravish her. I imagined a woman lying back on a sofa with her arms behind her head. After that I drew a blank. They were always clear as to what happened after she refused. We weren’t sure what the Romans wanted in the first place, but we were real clear on what happened when you didn’t give it to them.

The stories always ended the same way: the guys doing the terrible things and killing were amazed to see, as St. Whoever checked out, that her expression was so calm. Sometimes she blessed them. Sometimes they’d convert right there. I liked to think about them feeling bad afterward. Those girls were heroes, the stories would end up, because their spirit had conquered their flesh. But it always seemed to us they were heroes because their spirit had conquered the guys’ flesh. You heard only that the girls had had something they had to overcome.

When Bruno dropped me off and I came into the kitchen, Todd was still in his chair, like he hadn’t moved in six hours. I asked him what he was still doing up, and he said, “Nina called. I told her where you were.”

He went to bed while I was brushing my teeth. Standing there at the sink, I said, “You gonna say good night?” And he said, “Good night.”

It was hot, and I lay there in bed and tented the covers. The catechism always talked about duels between the spirit and the flesh — bad news for me, because one I knew was strong; the other I wasn’t so sure about.

We always thought: something out there was so bad it was better to have boiling oil poured down your throat. It was better to have your hands cut off and fed to dogs in front of you. What was it? We were dying to know.

They told us about sins of the flesh way before they told us about sex. Sins of the flesh were almost irresistible, and that was the end of the subject. You couldn’t think of a better way to keep our attention on something. It wasn’t all our fault. It was all sexy, all of it. Grace, sin, martyrs, everything. Protestants didn’t get that: they had a cross with nobody on it.

But it made us independent. All this talk about guys and how out of control they were and what you had to protect: at least it meant we weren’t on the bottom.

It gave us some distance. To this day, sometimes I think the hardest part about sex is keeping a straight face.

There are a lot of good things you get out of being Catholic. It’s just the hard way to get them.

Back then, we were thinking, Suppose the Romans came for us? The thought crossing your mind: that wasn’t a mortal sin. That was the devil tempting you. You were supposed to fight it. The trick was how long it had to be in your mind before it was a mortal sin: Five seconds? Thirty seconds? Two minutes? Then we thought, Was worrying about it the same as thinking about it?

Mortal sin sent you to Hell forever and venial sins sent you to Purgatory. There weren’t too many venial sins on sex. They tended to go to mortal right away. So we’d lie in bed or, worse, kneel there in church and think those thoughts, and remember that not only did mortal sins send us to Hell; they also pounded nails into Christ’s body. You saw a lot of girls looking up at the crucifix, ashamed.

I was up all night the night Bruno dropped me off. I ended up sitting at the living-room window.

When they talked about sex and the devil tempting us, what they never figured out, or maybe they did, was that we weren’t worried about the devil; we were worried about ourselves. I always imagined God facing me after I died, and going, Don’t try and blame this on the devil. You were the one who wanted to think about it, weren’t you?

NINA

Thirty-three years she’s been around men, she hasn’t come close to figuring them out yet. Not close. She married one of them when someone with the brains of a squirrel coulda seen he was a washout first time he walked into the house. Stood around in his little bicycle-racing outfit, mad at her because she was gonna make him late. He sold commercial time for TV, so he was supposed to be a big shot. With me it was like, Mrs. Mucherino, how are you? How’s the family? Like that was the way you got around Italians, you talked about their family. He was snapping at her even then. She said, “Ma, he’s under a lot of pressure.” Who’s not under pressure? She said, “Ma, he feels bad about it, too.” So what? How many years, he was mad at the way he treated her, he took it out on her?

So she gets hurt. She won’t do nothing about it; she won’t try and force the stugazz to help support his own kid. So at least he’s gone, right? How much trouble can she get into, then? Few months later, she’s running around with Mr. Bacigalupe himself. What am I supposed to say to her? How stupid can you be?

You talk; they don’t listen. I talked till I was blue in the face about the cavone she went with after high school, Lawrence. Next to him, Bruno looked good. Dirty, with the long hair and who knew what else, no job, no ambition, what a mouth he had on him. I heard twice from Lucia that he was telling the neighborhood what Joanie would and wouldn’t do. I told her: he’s not coming around this house anymore. You’re gonna go off and meet him under a bridge somewhere or in the park I can’t stop you, but he’s not coming here. Ooo, that guy. I hated him so much I hated the saint he was named after. I heard after they broke up that Bruno beat him up so bad he put him in the hospital. I know this: I ran into him a month later, he had his fingers in a splint; he wanted nothing to do with me.

I warned her a thousand times about Bruno. She knows him better than I do. And I sit there and talk and it’s like talking to the wall. Her eyes are out the window, on the dog, everywhere but me. I tell her, Joanie, I’m only looking out for you. I’m not telling you this for my benefit.

It’s like she thinks that what’s behind her is gone, so she can either choose this or get nothing.

I asked Sandro to talk to her. He’s her father, he should talk to her. I wait for him to think of it, I’ll be ninety-nine years old.

He thinks I worry too much. Whatever it is, I worry too much. He still thinks the other one is coming back.

I told him: Civil War songs are coming back. Soupy Sales is coming back. Your mother, God rest her soul, is coming back.

That was the end of that discussion.

The first one, as far as I was concerned, was the kind of nightmare with no surprises. You marry Gary, you know exactly what you’re getting yourself into. Bruno I didn’t even want to think about.

Oh, was I wild when I heard Joanie was out with him. I called to ask if she wanted to see a movie, Todd tells me she’s out on a date with Bruno. I said, Bruno. Don’t think that little stinker didn’t know what he was doing. Sandro gave up trying to calm me down. But he’s been working on me since: What good’s it gonna do to come in her house yelling? What good’s it done up to this point? Why not surprise her and not push it and try to work on her that way?

I’m her mother. I’m supposed to be looking out for her. I want to tell her to get a life, a real life. Though I don’t know what I’d say if she said back, Ma. Get yourself one.

Todd dreamed about the time he was almost hit by the car on Margerita Lawn: the slow motion, the pale-blue sky with the one cloud, the horn, the chrome fender. He never told his parents about it. He’d been in third grade and ran across the street to avoid being touched by Lori Malafronte. Lori Malafronte’s scream had shocked him. The dream turned into a memory of pushing snow down the curve of a car body, and he woke up feeling guilty.

He could hear Nina downstairs. It was raining. He sat up and swung his legs to the floor. He felt weak and fuzzy. He rubbed his ear until it was hot. He found a sock. It had dog hair on it and an unpleasant damp feel. He listened for arguing but didn’t hear anything. His mother’d be mad he told about Bruno. He pulled on the sock and his little toe slid through a hole in the end. He wiggled it and imagined being dead, the Mass said for him. Girls would be crying. His father would be sorry for what he’d done. He imagined funeral bells, the flowers on the altar, people filing in. Maybe he’d been a martyr somehow.

He stood up and stretched with both arms out in front of him, like a water-skier. He wandered over to the window. An animal that looked like a Davy Crockett hat wandered across his yard. A raccoon? Muskrat? Divorce, he thought. Separation. Remarriage. Stepson. By thinking of things you could understand them.

He finished getting dressed and tramped downstairs. “Here he comes,” he heard his grandmother say.

He went into the downstairs bathroom instead and stood pointlessly over the toilet, listening to them murmur in the kitchen. The new shower curtain had a surprisingly intense smell that he couldn’t track down. Then he could: pool liner. A kid’s pool, a wading pool.

“You want coffee?” Nina called from the kitchen. “We made coffee.”

“Ma, let the kid take a leak,” his mother said.

He flushed the toilet and came into the kitchen. Nina was wearing a white sweat shirt with FBI in big red letters across it. Underneath the red letters it said FULL-BLOODED ITALIAN in little green letters.

His mother gave him a big smile as he sat down.

“What’re you smiling at?” he asked.

“Listen to you. What a mouth on you,” Nina said.

His mother put an English muffin in the toaster for him. “So, Ma,” she said. “You wanna go to this pottery demonstration or not? ’Cause I’m goin’.”

“That’s terrible,” Nina said. “Who’d want to demonstrate against pottery?”

His mother waved her hand once, like there were gnats around, and told her it wasn’t that kind of demonstration.

They went on talking. He still didn’t have his coffee. He kept feeling he had to wash his face. He imagined he projected a bitter silence, but they didn’t seem to be noticing. His grandmother finished a story she’d been telling about an escape artist on the news. They’d put him in a box and put dirt and cement on the box and the box had collapsed and crushed him. Could they imagine? It was horrible.

“How was your date?” he asked his mother.

They both stared at him. The English muffin popped up.

“I don’t think that’s much of your business,” his mother finally said quietly.

He got up and hunted around the cabinets the way Audrey hunted in the tall grass. He left the muffin where it was.

“You looking for anything, you let me know, now,” his mother said.

“I’m gonna go over Brendan’s,” he said.

“You gonna eat your muffin?” she said.

“No,” he said.

“You gonna have any breakfast at all?”

“No.” He left the kitchen.

Brendan was still a little pissed at him, but he came around. Todd brought over the lacrosse helmet, and Brendan ignored it. They were sitting in the kitchen and Brendan’s mother kept giving Todd sympathetic looks that puzzled and annoyed him. Brendan’s little brother, Taylor, was playing guns outside with two friends.

Brendan’s mother hunched to look out the window. Across the yard, Taylor was sitting on one friend and beating him on the head with a plastic gun. Brendan’s mother called to him and wanted to know why they had to play so violently. Why didn’t they play where they didn’t shoot anybody?

“How do you play cops and robbers and not shoot anybody?” Taylor called.

His mother looked a little stymied by that. “Why don’t you just question Mickey?” she finally said.

There was a silence outside, while the kids apparently thought it over. Brendan rolled his eyes at Todd.

“Aw right,” Taylor called. Then he said, in a quieter voice, “But if he doesn’t listen, then we can kill him.”

Brendan snorted. Brendan’s mother finished cleaning the counter and then she left.

Brendan emptied two packets of presweetened Kool-Aid into two cans of Coke Classic. They could hear his brother making the sound of machine-gun fire outside. They sat there slugging the Cokes.

“I can feel my teeth like dissolving,” Todd said.

Brendan nodded. “Isn’t it great?”

They walked down to the park near Milford Beach. Todd wanted to tell him what was going on. The rain had stopped and the sun was out. The grass was still wet. Their sneakers were soaked. Todd’s were the Nikes his father had bought him, and the soles were separating at the instep.

They sat on two big tree roots and watched little kids play football. They knew one of the kids, a fourth-grader named Woods. Woods was wearing his PEE WEE jersey and his name was sewn on the back upside down, so that it read SPOOM.

“You left the lacrosse helmet at my house,” Brendan said. He was wearing a CLYDE THE GLIDE T-shirt that reminded Todd of his JUDGMENT DAY tank top.

“You can hang onto it,” Todd said. He never thought he’d get out of the mess he was in, except by some magical luck. He felt the need to be kind while he waited for that to happen, as if the world would recognize it and take care of him.

The kids in the football game ran a sweep. It looked like recess getting out. Both teams milled around for ten yards and fell in a heap. Todd looked over at Brendan’s T-shirt every so often, glum about the way everything seemed an ironic reference to his secret.

“I’m goin’ to Yankee Stadium tonight,” he said. Then he realized it sounded like bragging.

“Yeah?” Brendan asked.

“You coulda come, but we couldn’t get another ticket,” Todd explained.

Brendan nodded, watching the game. “We got Ad Altare Dei tomorrow night,” he said.

Woods, with his red PEE WEE jersey, was running toward them. He planted to cut and was piled on from behind. He yelled and got up and hopped around on one leg. Todd flinched, remembering soccer tryouts the year before, his knee twisting with a little crick that sounded like someone a few feet away cracking a nut. The sound scared him down to his feet. His father had taken him to the doctor and the doctor had handled his leg casually while he talked, like a length of hose.

“He all right?” Todd said.

It looked like he was. He was walking around on both legs like he had a sliver in his foot. “Remember, before confirmation, when we heard we were gonna get slapped in the face by the bishop?” Brendan said. “And we joked about like a fight breaking out?”

“Or that he’d belt us across the face,” Todd said.

“We didn’t get anything like that,” Brendan said. He ripped up some of the wet grass and piled it on top of his sneakers.

Todd watched Woods stand on one foot and swing his other like it was a pendulum. You’re a great son, he thought. Here you’re supposed to be so upset about your father leaving and how often do you think of him?

“What’s the worst thing you ever confessed?” he asked Brendan.

The ball bounced over to them and Brendan kicked it back with his foot. “I don’t know,” he said.

“If you did something really terrible, would you confess it?” Todd said.

Brendan looked at him. “Why? You do something? What’d you do?” He sounded enthusiastic.

Todd told him nothing, but by then his face was red and he’d given himself away. Brendan stayed after him and made fun of him, and when Todd got up and said he had to get back, Brendan followed behind, guessing what it could be: Stealing? Sacrilege? Praying to Satan? It was only after Todd got home and waved good-bye and repeated that he had to go in, he had all this stuff he had to do, that he realized that none of Brendan’s guesses were as bad as the real thing.

He sat out in the front yard an hour early, waiting for Bruno to show up. He had his glove with him for foul balls. His mother was in the living room with the window open, on the other side of the screen. In the afternoon sunlight she was just a shadow that came and went.

“When’s the game start?” she asked.

He shrugged. He was matching Japanese maple leaves to one another. He’d pulled them off the little tree she’d planted.

He heard her clunk something around in the living room. “I’m still not sure this is a good idea,” she muttered.

He checked his wallet. He had only five dollars.

You have enough money?” she asked.

“I have enough money,” he said. Across the driveway, near the telephone pole, sparrows trooped around on the weedy part of the lawn.

“It’s like you’re out almost all the time now,” his mother complained.

“I’m not gonna say anything,” he finally said. She left the window.

Bruno’s Buick turned onto the street and pulled up the driveway. Bruno got out and flipped him a new Yankees cap. It sailed end over end and landed in the grass. “You wear it,” he said. “Me, I’m not committing myself till we have a five-run lead.”

He asked if Todd had his glove. Todd held it up. “Joanie?” he called.

He was looking at the side of the house and listening for an answer. Some birds cheeped. “Where’s your mother?” he finally said.

Todd said she was in the house.

Bruno looked disturbed at the news. “We’re goin’. Good-bye,” he called. He waited another minute and gestured Todd toward the car. When they got in, he looked like he was deciding something and then started the car. “Your mother mad at me?” he asked as he backed down the driveway. “She say anything to you?”

Todd said she hadn’t. After a little while he volunteered, “I don’t think she wanted me to go tonight.”

“You got that right,” Bruno said.

“J’ou eat yet?” he asked a few minutes later.

Todd nodded. He hadn’t, though. Why he did stuff like that, he had no idea.

“We’ll grab something, anyway,” Bruno said.

Todd spread out on the leather seat. It was a dealer car and had the new-car smell.

Bruno yawned so widely his eyes watered. He made a loud chewing noise and straightened up. “When’s your birthday?” he asked. “I had a good idea for a present.”

“It’s already over,” Todd said. “May eleventh.”

“The eleventh? I was born the eleventh, too.”

“The same day?”

“The same day.”

They got up on I-95, heading south. Traffic was heavy. “It was like two weeks after my dad left,” Todd said.

“Happy birthday,” Bruno said.

“Really.”

A big red Jeep Cherokee swerved alongside them. The windows were open, and the bass whoompf of the stereo was amazing even from there.

“What a day,” Bruno sighed.

“You didn’t sell anything?” Todd asked.

“It’s not the not buying,” Bruno said. “It’s the bustin’ ’em off that gets you.”

Todd looked back at the road. He didn’t know enough to talk about it.

“One guy today, he comes back in: ‘Hey, this Skylark option package you just sold me, I just saw it in the paper a lot cheaper at Valley Motors.’ I need these comparison shoppers, right? Next he’ll be kicking the tires. I go, ‘Valley Motors, jeez, you know, you’re welcome to comparison shop with them, but it’s only fair to warn you we had some dealings with them, we found some serial numbers filed off, you know what I’m saying?’”

He hit the turn signal, and they headed off the Sears exit in Bridgeport.

“What’s that mean?” Todd said.

The Buick rolled down the ramp and stopped at the light. It was idling funny and shook. Bruno pumped the gas. He said the numbers filed off usually meant the cars were stolen. Somebody’d probably hijacked a truckload of new ones and sold them to the dealers.

How could he just tell people that about them? Todd asked. Wouldn’t they complain? Bruno said not if it was true. Todd thought about it and asked how he knew it was true.

Bruno shrugged and told him he wasn’t getting all the trade secrets tonight. The light changed and he went straight a block and hung a right. He hit the automatic door locks. Someone broke a bottle in an alley they passed.

“Where we goin’?” Todd said.

“Little diner,” Bruno said. “You’ll like it.”

They were in a lousy part of Bridgeport. Todd was still thinking about his story. “Does Valley Motors know you’re doing that?” he asked.

Bruno shrugged again. “Hey, the buyer’s gonna go, ‘Hey, I hear you have stolen cars here’?

“See, what Valley Motors gets, they deserve, because stealin’s wrong. Am I right?” Bruno asked. “What’d you, lose your voice?”

“No, it’s wrong,” Todd said. He was afraid to look up.

It was starting to get dark. They were driving along under the highway. There was nothing around but an abandoned car and a chain-link fence. A page of newspaper rose in the wind and floated in front of them. Todd was getting a clogged feeling in the back of his throat from swallowing so much. “Why’re we goin’ here?” he asked.

Bruno pulled over next to a concrete highway support that went up into the darkness and out of sight. He cut the engine.

“Why’re we stopping?” Todd asked. He had one hand on the seat next to him, the other on the door handle. His glove was on the seat between them.

“I wanna talk, before we get to the diner,” Bruno said.

Todd rubbed his face with the flat of his hand and tried not to panic. “Won’t we be late for the game?

“Don’t worry about the game.”

Todd could hear the traffic high above them. He looked around. He could make out a streetlight opposite the car, but the light on its cross arm was smashed. “Is it safe here?” he asked.

They’d be all right, Bruno said. Nobody was going to touch this car.

Todd asked why not. They heard a noise. Two black kids paraded by, eyeing them. Bruno waited until they were past. Then he settled in his seat, facing Todd. He spoke slowly, like Todd was going to have trouble following. He said, “Here’s the deal. I need for you to talk to me about what happened the night you drove home from your confirmation party.”

Todd froze. He had four fingers curled around the door handle. His eyes were on the dashboard. The traffic way above his head made a threshing, regular sound.

“The night Tommy Monteleone was killed. I need for you to talk to me about what happened.”

Todd made a show of concentrating. He sat forward in his seat. He folded his hands between his thighs as if he were praying.

He looked straight out the windshield in front of him, terrified. He said, “We just drove home.”

It was completely quiet. The number changed on the digital clock. Bruno folded his arms, like he was going to try a different tack. “Let me explain something to you,” he said in a low voice. “What we’re involved with here is a serious thing. A guy was robbed, and he was killed. And I’m giving you an opportunity. What is your opportunity? Your opportunity is the opportunity to tell the truth.”

Todd opened his mouth and Bruno held up one finger. “Don’t”—he paused—“tell me something if it’s not the truth. The truth is what we’re here for. Capiche?”

Todd nodded. He was crying. “We just drove home,” he said.

“You can help me right some wrongs,” Bruno said. He held his index finger and thumb up together in the darkness in front of Todd’s face like he was holding a spice for Todd to sniff. “It’s not right to the guy who was robbed and killed. And it’s not right to the other guys who invested in him. You hear what I’m sayin’?”

“How do they know there was money?” Todd said.

“What’re you tellin’ me?” Bruno said. As he got angrier Todd got more scared. “You want to see the police records? You want to go down see the police records?”

Todd interlocked his fingers in his lap and sniffled. He leaned hard into the door.

“Then what is this ‘How do they know’ shit? What is that? Where’d you learn that? In school?”

“I’m sorry,” Todd said. He rolled down his window and rolled it up again. “Is the diner near here that we’re goin’ to?”

Bruno licked his lower lip and scratched the razor stubble on his chin. Todd could hear it. “You don’t want to talk about it,” Bruno said. “This is a traumatic thing. This I understand.”

“We didn’t do anything,” Todd said miserably.

“You’re what,” Bruno said. “You’re eleven years old. What do you think’s gonna happen to you? It’s an accident, you’re driving along, bip, there he is. Nothin’ you could do. You got out, see if you could help, there was this envelope.”

“No,” Todd said.

“You tell me, or you tell the cops. You tell me, I tell the cops something else.”

Todd wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand.

“You know what I see when I look at Todd? I see a boy who wavers. A boy who vacillates. This is not the time for vacillation. I know you’re saying, Be safe. I’m saying, This is not safe. Do you understand? That’s the subject of our evening together: this is not safe.”

Todd swallowed. “We’re not goin’ to the game, are we?” he said.

“There is no game,” Bruno said. “Not for you.”

He turned off the dashboard lights. It was now totally dark.

Todd said, “We may a hit something.” He didn’t recognize his voice. “We stopped, we didn’t see anything.”

“You may a hit something,” Bruno said out of the darkness.

“We may a hit something.”

“What’re you telling me?” Bruno said. “You wouldn’t know? You see his head? You wanna go down the police station see pictures of his head?”

Todd started crying again.

Bruno opened his car door and the overhead light went on. He didn’t get out. After the darkness Todd had to shield his eyes with his hand. “I hurt your feelings?” Bruno said. “Is that what I did? I hurt your feelings? Tell me again: you hit somebody by mistake. You tell me that again.”

“I told you,” Todd said.

“You tell me again.”

“We mighta hit somebody by mistake. We heard a noise. We thought maybe it was a dog or something. We got out, we didn’t see anybody.”

Bruno nodded. He kept nodding. The door was still open. “You don’t respect me,” he finally said.

“It’s the truth.”

“Get out of the car.”

“Get out of the car?” Todd said.

Bruno leaned across him, scaring him, and opened his door. Todd was already leaning against it and almost fell out. “Get out of the fucking car. You don’t respect me, get outta the car. I don’t want anything more to do with you.”

“How’m I gonna get home?” Todd said.

“Fuck do I care? Walk. Fly,” Bruno said. “Take a fucking monorail. Get outta the car. Want me to get you outta the car?”

“Wait, wait,” Todd pleaded. “We did hit him. We did hit him. We were going along and my mother was driving too fast and we just hit him.”

Bruno leaned back across him and shut his door. Then he sat up and waited.

“We stopped and went back, but he was dead. She went back, I didn’t go back. We were gonna go for help. I thought she was gonna go for help. But then she didn’t, and the cops were there when we came back, and we went home and she called, but she didn’t get through.”

“She called the police?” Bruno asked.

“She didn’t get through. It was busy. I heard it,” Todd said. He was still crying.

“And this is the way it happened. Exactly.”

“And then we never called again.”

“And then somebody found an envelope. Your mother found an envelope.”

Todd shook his head.

“Don’t start with me. Your mother found a fuckin’ envelope,” Bruno said.

“We didn’t. I swear.”

“The money in that envelope was not all Tommy’s. You understand?”

Todd shook his head and hiccuped. He wiped his face.

Bruno sat forward. “Tommy and Joey Distefano and I were holding that money.” He put his hand out, to show what holding meant. “Holding that money, for some other people. Those people want their money.”

“We didn’t find any,” Todd said.

Bruno flapped his lower lip with his index finger. It made a light, popping sound. “Your mother went over to Tommy after, but you didn’t?”

Todd nodded.

Bruno watched him a minute longer and then started the car. “Aw right, look,” he said. “We’ll go get somethin’ to eat. We’ll stay out. Far as your mother knows, we went to the game, you didn’t tell me anything. Understand?”

Todd nodded.

“Hey. Am I here all alone? You understand?”

Todd said he understood.

Bruno put the car in gear. They backed over something backing out. They drove to an Arby’s in a better part of town and Bruno made him order a big meal even though he wasn’t hungry. When the food came, Bruno went to the men’s room behind the bar, and when guys came and went and the connecting door swung open, Todd could see him talking to someone on the pay phone.

NINA

Over the last few months I told her about every possible group I could think of: the Serra Club, the Christian Mothers, the Ladies’ Sodality, the CYO, the Rosary Society, the Parish Review Board, the St. Anthony’s Women’s Society, even the Knights of Columbus. Or it didn’t have to be in the Church: there were bus trips I knew about to Atlantic City, to the mills in Fall River, to Broadway shows. Ida What’s-her-name ran them out of her house.

I even told her about this martial-arts class they were running at the Bridgeport Y. I figured, you know, a woman alone.

Nothing. She didn’t want nothing to do with any of them. Okay, I figured. This Gary thing’d take a while longer.

Instead she ends up with Mr. Bacigalupe.

I took Sandro’s advice; I didn’t push it. Let her tell me when she’s ready to tell me. So we sat there like chidrules and it never came up. I even said, “You got something you wanna talk about?” She said, “No.” She was always like that.

I wanna tell her, You get involved with him, I’m wearing black. I’m in mourning. I lost a daughter.

So we’re sitting there in the kitchen and she doesn’t want to talk about him and she doesn’t want to talk about anything else, either. I was telling her about my bursitis, which is awful lately. My shoulder, it absorbs the dampness at night. I feel like a sponge. She’s barely listening.

I told her the house looked good and asked if she was having company. She gave me a look like what was I getting at, and I felt like saying, Hey, forget it, let’s not talk, let’s just sit here, all right?

I asked about Gary, had she heard from him.

I asked about her son.

The dog, we talked about the dog.

Finally, I go, “Joanie, I give up. What do you wanna talk about?”

She goes, “Ma, you’re not helping any, you know?”

This is what she said to me, after I sat there for thirty-five minutes talking about things she could do to help herself. I felt like saying, Okay, maybe they weren’t the best ideas, but I was trying, you know? I was trying.

It hurt, what she said.

They think you don’t have any feelings at all, that you just come and go without them. We were over Lucia’s the other day, she and Todd were outside the whole time. It looked like hell. I asked her if maybe she shouldn’t come inside, and she came back at me so fresh I thought, Forget it, and went right back in the house. In front of her son, too.

Then she gets in these moods and it’s like, Jeez, Ma, we don’t see enough of each other. I just keep my mouth shut; I don’t say a word. Every now and then, though, I tell her, When you want something, you have to work at it.

They don’t wanna know nothing. They gotta learn the hard way, just like we did.

I can’t talk to Sandro about it. The kid’s fine. Gary’s coming back. She’ll work it out. Happy days are here again.

This morning we were sitting there in the breakfast nook, I was going through the mail. The Church was raising money again, like in the old days, for the orphans in the Philippines or Indonesia, the little kids with flies on their noses. And I started getting tears in my eyes. Sandro sitting there, thinking I’m nuts. And here’s the thing: I was crying for myself. I was looking at poor kids who didn’t have a pot to piss in and crying for myself, like seeing their faces was making me panic, making me think that there was nothing I could do to get out of my life.

TODD

In the toilet at Arby’s I tried to figure out what to do. On the metal wall of the stall there was a sign: IT ISN’T POSSIBLE FOR US TO CLEAN AFTER EACH USE. Somebody scratched out enough letters so it said, IT ISN’T POSSIBLE TO CLEAN AFTER U.

My mother says when I was little and a kid had been beating me up on the playground, she found me one night going to bed with a hammer.

I had time to confess and make it right and I didn’t. I had chances. I knew what the right thing was and I did the wrong thing. I had the Sacraments and all this training and I did the wrong thing, and kept doing it.

God’s supposed to forgive you if you’re sorry. I’m sorry.

Also in the toilet in Arby’s I said an Act of Contrition. I got off the toilet to say it.

Someone came into the bathroom and I had to get up. It was an older guy and he gave me a look when I opened the stall door. I don’t know what he thought I was doing in there. My knees were wet from the floor. My eyes were like I had an allergy.

Part of me is glad. Glad that someone knows, glad that something’s finally going to happen.

My dad’ll hear about it in the paper, or maybe from a relative when he calls like a month later.

There was this kid I knew in third grade. He always, always got in trouble. He would only get hit between classes. Sister would take him to the office then, so he wouldn’t miss anything. I remember the way, on the days he was in trouble, he spent the whole period at his desk, sitting up straight, his hands folded, waiting.

JOANIE

My mother and father argue about directions. They have fights over what’s faster, this or that road. Which has more traffic. My mother’ll say, Why you going this way? You coulda gone that way. As a kid, I sat in the back and had to listen. Even then I knew they were arguing about this decision instead of the other ones. How they ended up here, how they got here. Instead of where they ended up in general. I mean with their lives.

My mother’s turning into one of those old people who think the rules are going to hell everywhere, the kind who hang around the pool at condos watching for rule violations. Reporting the kids without towels, the kids who do cannonballs.

But then I’ll see, like this morning, that she left some stuffed shells for us, wrapped in that careful, housewifey way, and my heart’ll go out to her.

I don’t want to hurt her about Bruno. When I was with him, it was like my head was saying no but my mouth was saying okay. Which is about the way the two normally operate.

A month or so after Gary left, Todd and I were sitting on the floor in the living room one night, listening to the radio. We were in a kind of stupor. The TV was broken. It was hot, and Todd kept rubbing his forehead with a wristband he was wearing. It reminded me of the summer he was always drying his sweat with a hand towel he carried around. We were listening to an oldies station. They played Petula Clark’s “Downtown.” Todd hummed along. He sang the last part to himself at the end, and I remember thinking that maybe we’d be all right, maybe we were going to make it.

All these days since the car thing have been the same, like ugly cabins along a swampy lake.

I never tried to be Queen of Heaven, but I did want to be a good woman, a good mother. It turns out I didn’t know how.

I wake up every morning with my heart racing, like every day will be the day that things work out, or at least get resolved.

The sisters used to say, You don’t get exactly what you pray for, you get what God thinks is best. So I used to figure I might as well just wait for that, anyway.

My mother said to me once, just in passing, impatient about something or other, “Well, when were you ever happy?” It stuck with me. I should have said, Easter Mass, when I was little. With my white dress and white gloves. My candy to look forward to, the sun on the lawn in front of the church, the air fresh in my nose, the trees with the birds I didn’t know, talking, calling things like Red key, Red key, or else So Soon, So Soon.

What would she have said? She probably would have said, Oh, you weren’t even happy then. But I was, I think.

I just want it all to stop. This morning, after Todd went out, I sat on the sofa with his peeled-off sweat shirt, like it was the last warm thing of his I’d touch.

BRUNO

The way to get respect is to treat people like dirt. It’s surprising how many people hold this view. I’m told this often. People say this to me; I say no. But I’m no professor. Many times I’m wrong. Often I’m wrong.

People surprise you. People disappoint you. Sure, you say to yourself, so-and-so was a disappointment, but this person, this person I know. And look what happens.

A more dispassionate man would have said, She doesn’t respect you. My friends said this.

You have to have the ability to see the facts without being sidetracked by the history. By your expectations. What are expectations? Rehearsing your own lack of imagination. Joanie’s not like that. Joanie’d never do that. Please. The Japs would never attack Pearl Harbor. John Hinckley was such a quiet boy.

Distance. What you need is distance.

What you do is you keep clear who your friends are. Who treated who like what.

Altruism is fine. Altruism is sweet. But you have to think of yourself. Because who else is going to?

And here’s something else nobody knows: the week before she got married, I sat in her mother’s kitchen three nights in a row until two in the morning, four in the morning, later than that. I wanted to know, out of curiosity, Did she think Gary was ready for something like this? Did she think she was? I was telling her over and over, He’s a good man. Fine. We know that. All’s I’m saying, Is he right for you? And she said, a little sad, but mostly smiling, Bruno, you haven’t given up, have you? I said, Forget me. Forget me. I’m talking about us. And she said, There is no us. There’s only you.

I kissed her good night that last night. She didn’t want to, but that was all there was to it. I had tears in my eyes. When I was up close to her, I whispered in her ear. I said, “You know this is wrong.” And when I let her go, she said, “Sometimes you gotta do the wrong thing.”

This is what she said to me after all our time together.

The morning of the wedding, I went over to see her again. This is how much pride I had. She was doing her hair in her mother’s bedroom. Her mother was thrilled I was there. I said I had an emergency message, coming through. All the way up the stairs, she’s trailing behind, tugging on my jacket flap. I had to hit her hand away. And I knock and peek into the room, with the mother standing behind me in the hall, and there she is, sitting there in her white already, three hours early, doing nothing, hands in her lap. And she goes, “What are you doing here?” What am I doing here. How many years, Christmas, New Year’s, Easter, I been coming over here? How many years I’d come over, I’d spring for something?

Tonight on the phone, Joey said, “That didn’t teach you, nothing’ll teach you.”

He said, “Now do you believe me?”

I feel bad sometimes. I know I haven’t lived the right way. I know sometimes people got hurt. They’ll always be people like me, people who’re glad to be the way they are but also think, now and then, that maybe a vaccination somewhere didn’t take. Maybe it’s that simple. I read once, I think it was Meyer Lansky, he said, Some people just never learn to be good.

Joanie spent the time Todd was gone poking through his room. The dog wandered in to check on her, shouldering the half-closed door open and unhurriedly nosing around before leaving. She waited until the dog was gone and then pulled out everything he had hidden. The box of letters under the board games in the closet (Phalanx! Goal! Storm at Dieppe), the little red spiral notebook, the round candy tin his father bought him on their one trip to the Caribbean (Zombies: Coconut Chocolate Clusters). She knew where everything was. She’d found everything cleaning at one time or another.

The candy tin was filled with photos. Bruno mugging for the camera with his hands curled like a movie monster’s. Gary with a new ten-speed and long hair, a photo she’d taken when they’d first met. Audrey on the sofa. Audrey under the willow, a tennis ball in her mouth. Gary pushing Audrey down a snow pile in some kind of king-of-the-hill game. A picture her mother took of the three of them at the beach, Gary holding Todd’s boogie board and looking off, Todd holding her hand and staring straight at the camera. Gary painting the garage.

Near the bottom of the tin she came across a Polaroid of the three of them and felt a lurch, like she’d stepped on a loose rug. One side of the image was smeared the way Polaroids sometimes got. The photo was three years old. Bruno had taken it, in their kitchen. She and Gary were at the kitchen table, and Todd was standing between them. The overhead light, a fake Tiffany thing, was prominent. Todd was holding a coffee-table book Bruno’d just given him on football called The Gladiators. He was looking directly at the camera. Gary was lifting the salt shaker with two fingers and a thumb, and watching her in a sidelong way. He looked unhappy. She had her eyes on the table. Minutes before the picture had been taken, she’d collided with Bruno in the darkened living room. He was coming from the upstairs toilet, she didn’t remember why; she’d been going to get something to win an argument. Gary and Todd had been in the kitchen. Bruno had stopped her with his arm after their bump. His fingers had pressed her neck forward. He’d kissed her, softly, like he was putting a daughter to bed, and she’d kissed him.

Now, with the photo on the rug in front of her, seeing after all these years that moment, Gary’s face, and Todd’s expression, she thought, Had they known?

The door opened downstairs. She shut the lid of the tin and put everything back and just got out of the room by the time Todd hit the bottom of the staircase.

He stood with a hand on the railing, and they looked at each other.

She came down the stairs. He started up them. “I didn’t hear you come in,” she said. “I didn’t hear a car. Audrey didn’t bark.”

“She doesn’t bark for Bruno anymore,” he said, like she should know that.

She eased over to let him past. She said, “How was the game?”

He looked at her, and she saw he was near tears. He continued up to his room, and she followed. He climbed onto his bed, and she went over and knelt next to him and took his shoulders and asked him what was wrong.

He was looking past her arm, and his expression changed so much she turned to follow his line of sight. There was a slightly curled black-and-white photograph on the rug.

“Get outta my room,” he said.

“Todd,” she said.

“Get outta my room,” he howled. He burst into tears. She tried to hug him but he fought her off. Audrey peeked in the door. Joanie got up and held her hands at her sides like they were wet, and then backed out of the room and shut the door behind her.

She pitched into the upstairs bathroom and sat on the toilet and put her face in her hands. “Oh, God,” she said.

The phone rang. It kept ringing.

“Answer the phone,” he shouted. His voice scared her so much she jumped up.

“I’m getting it, I’m getting it,” she said.

She ran downstairs and snatched it up.

“I’ll tell you, my husband,” Nina said. “They’re gonna make a movie about him, called Lights On, Windows Open: The Sandro Mucherino Story. Oh, how he wastes energy.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Joanie said.

“How are you?” Nina said. “Todd back yet?”

“Ma, I got no time,” Joanie said.

“You got no time,” her mother said. “I say one sentence, you got no time?”

Joanie put her hand over her eyes while she stood there holding the phone, and pulled downward like she was trying to take off a mask. “Whaddaya want, Ma?”

“I’m tryin’ to find out how things went with Mr. Bacigalupe. That’s all.”

Todd came downstairs and stood next to her. His eyes were wet. His mouth was a straight line and the rest of his face scared her. He stood with his hands on his hips.

“Did you find an envelope there?” he said.

“Hold on a minute, Ma,” she said. “What?” she said to Todd. She had her hand over the receiver and felt a pain in her chest.

“When you went out to look at Tommy, after you hit him.”

She flinched at the way he put it, at the brutality of his intent. She said, to maintain her poise, “Hold on a minute, Ma. Todd’s asking me something here.”

She put the receiver against her chest. He had his hand on his hair and was raking his fingers downward, a self-calming strategy she’d seen him use before. “What envelope?” she said. “What are you talking about?”

“Did you find an envelope?” he asked.

“No. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He turned and left. She raised the phone to her ear again. “What’s goin’ on over there?” Nina asked. “He all right?”

“Ma,” Joanie said. She was stretching the phone cord around the kitchen wall to see where he went.

There was a faint buzzing on the line while her mother let the rudeness go.

“You gonna see him some more?” Nina finally asked. “Your friend?”

“I don’t know. Ma, it’s almost midnight.”

“Bacigalupe,” her mother said softly.

“Why do you call him that?” she asked, distracted and frantic. She heard something being dragged on the floor upstairs.

“He was the one started using it, not me,” Nina said. “You know, Bacigalupe. Bacigalupo. ‘Kiss of the wolf.’”

She had the sensation her chest was filling with gravel. She sat, putting a hand out to catch the chair arm.

Upstairs, there was the hollow, wooden, grating sound of a drawer being pulled out.

“I gotta go, Ma,” she said. “I’ll call tomorrow.”

“Don’t bother,” her mother said, and hung up.

She got hold of herself and hung up the phone. She stood and crossed to the living room and listened. More drawers were being pulled out. She took the stairs two at a time.

Todd was pulling out the drawers and dumping them on the floor. He’d gotten his father’s big suitcase out of the cubbyhole storage off his bedroom and was pitching clothes into it.

“What’s this? You’re running away?” she asked. She hadn’t succeeded in purging the mocking quality from her voice.

“I’m movin’ out,” he said.

There was a banging at the door downstairs. Todd stopped what he was doing, a sock hanging from his hand. She put her palm on her stomach and tried to breathe out.

The banging resumed: four big bangs. She could hear Audrey jumping and whining and scratching at the door in excitement, but no barking.

She hurried down the stairs. She turned on the outside light. She moved Audrey away from the back door, made sure it was locked, and peeked out.

Bruno was holding up a bottle of champagne. He gave her a grin that showed a lot of teeth.

She hesitated, with her hand on the doorknob. He turned his head, held both hands up, and arched his eyebrows, as if miming exaggeratedly, “It’s your move.”

“It’s late,” she said through the door.

“It’s early,” he called back.

She still had her hand on the knob. “What’s the champagne for?” she asked.

“Celebrate,” he said.

Audrey spun and leaped in place, whining. Bruno tipped the bottle to his mouth, miming a drink. He made a face like, Mighty good.

She turned the lock. He pushed the door into her and swept into the room. She staggered back a little into the coats and umbrellas hung opposite the door.

The dog leaped up on him, and he lifted a knee and deflected her into the cabinets by the sink. She came at him again, and he conked her on the head with the bottom of the bottle. It sounded like a hammer pounding in a stake. She gave a yelp and flattened.

“Don’t,” Joanie said.

“I need her all over me right now?” he said. “We love each other. Fine. We love each other. Great. That’s established. Time for her to get outta the way.”

“You coulda hurt her, “Joanie said. She could hear Todd on the stairs and then the creak of the risers as he climbed as quietly as he could back to his room.

Bruno shook the champagne hard a couple of times and set it on the counter. “I was gonna bring you a Slim Jim, too. They had ’em at the checkout, but a colored woman took the last two.”

She stood where she was, a few feet from him, frightened at what could come next. Audrey was trying to get to the bump on her head with her front paws, but all she could reach were her snout and ears.

“You see my Windbreaker?” he asked. “I mighta left it here this afternoon.”

She swallowed and shrugged. She said, “Well, you left it here, it’s here.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” he said. He looked around the room like someone deciding if he wanted to buy something.

“Bruno,” she said. “It’s late.”

“Here’s what I was thinking,” he said. “I was thinking I could come over, we could have a little talk.” He sat in a kitchen chair. “You could open up to me.”

She stood there, staring at him. Audrey rolled on her back on the linoleum and finally sneezed.

He got up and wheeled into the hallway, through the living room, and up the stairs. She froze for a minute and then ran after him.

“Bruno, what are you doing?” she said, chasing him up the stairs. He wasn’t running. “Bruno, what are you doing?”

He leaned his weight into Todd’s door as he turned the knob, and boomed it open. Todd was sitting on his bed, surrounded by clothes. He scuttled back against the headboard.

“Bruno—” Joanie said, working up some real anger.

“What’s this?” Bruno said. “We’re goin’ on a trip? Club Med? South Seas? North Pole?”

Nobody answered.

“Atlantic City?”

“We’re havin’ a fight,” Joanie finally said.

“Ah, a family thing,” Bruno said. He sat on the bed and pulled a Vikings sweat shirt out from underneath him. “I certainly don’t want to get involved in a family thing.”

“Mom,” Todd said, like a plea.

“Here’s what your son told me,” Bruno said. “Your son told me you hit and killed Tommy Monteleone.”

She looked over at Todd. Their eyes met. She thought with complete clarity that this was the worst thing yet.

“Your son told me that you then got out of the car and went over to him. Your son told me that you probably took the envelope. Your son told me you been fucking me over all this time. Making me a jerk-off. Playing me like a fucking piccolo. That’s what your son told me.” His voice hadn’t gotten any louder, but there was so much rage in it she thought it could float him over the bed.

“No,” she said. She had to force air into her diaphragm to be heard.

“I didn’t say that,” Todd said.

Bruno shrugged. “This is what the kid told me. I didn’t necessarily believe it all. I thought, What do they know at that age? No offense. Maybe he made something up. Maybe he got something garbled.”

She put her hand out to the wall. It brushed the phone.

“The envelope thing he wasn’t sure about,” Bruno said.

Downstairs, Audrey shook herself hard, her collar jingling and her ears flopping.

“I think I know what your problem is here,” Joanie said.

“My problem,” Bruno said dangerously. He folded his hands before him like an altar boy. “You think you know what my problem is.”

He looked up at her. He contemplated her as if he meant to never forget her in that light.

“You gonna be teaching again in the fall?” he asked.

Her mouth fell open. She didn’t think she could endure much more of this. “Math and English,” she said.

“It’s nice there, huh?”

“Better than Blessed Sacrament,” she said.

He smiled. “It’s a tough racket, teaching.” It sounded like he was talking to himself.

“I could use some English myself,” he said, a little sadly. “I don’t express myself too good. Well. Too well. See what I mean?”

She took a deep, slow breath. She could hear Todd breathing, too.

“You know what you gotta have in this life?” he said. “You gotta have ability. You gotta have luck. You gotta have the balls to arrive at your own conclusions.”

“Bruno, what do you want?” she said. “C’mon.”

“C’mon?” Bruno said. “Come on?”

“I mean—”

“What am I gonna be, a headline? ‘Bruno Found in the River’? ‘Bruno Washes Up on the Beach’? Is that what’s gonna happen? Because you found some money and you want to hang onto it?”

“I didn’t find any money,” Joanie said.

“Did you kill Tommy Monteleone?” he asked.

She looked at his shoes. She looked at Todd, but he was looking away. “It was an accident,” she said.

“And you lied about that. All along,” he said. “All the things we talked about. You watched me go through this all along.”

The three of them were quiet. Bruno rubbed his nose slowly with both hands.

“What was I supposed to tell you?” Joanie said in a low voice.

“This was me,” Bruno said. “This wasn’t the cops, this wasn’t your fucking mother. This was me.”

She shrugged. She swallowed again.

“I sat there talking with you, thinking we were getting somewhere, and all along you were thinking, What a fucking jerk.”

“I wasn’t thinking that,” Joanie said.

“Get away from me,” he said, and she realized she had her hand out to him.

Todd had his arms crossed and was rubbing them with his hands. He cleared his throat. When Bruno looked at him, Joanie watched him try to make himself completely still.

Bruno turned back to her. She would not swallow again, no matter what. “And what about the new washer-dryer?” he said. “You saved your pennies in the piggy bank?”

She was stunned, flustered at having that dragged into it. “Sandro and Nina helped us out with that.”

“Sandro and Nina helped you out.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s the truth.”

He smiled again. “The truth.”

“The truth.”

“You never saw any money?”

“I never saw any money.”

He sat there nodding. Todd started breathing again. “Well,” Bruno said. He slapped his thigh. “I apologize for the inconvenience.”

She watched him closely. “Bruno—” she said skeptically.

“No,” he said. “That’s what you say, that’s what you say. I got no choice but to believe you.”

He stood up. He looked around the room at the mess. “Hey, listen,” he said. “You ever do decide to leave town, you let me know. I’ll help you run a tag sale for all this stuff. We’ll split the profits.”

“Bruno—” she said.

“Yeah yeah yeah,” he said. He headed to the door. He turned. “Todd,” he said, and pointed at him. “Be well.”

“Are you in trouble?” Joanie asked. She didn’t want to extend the conversation, but she had to know. “I mean, does this have to do with the people you work for?”

“Yeah,” Bruno said. “The people I work for. Long time ago.”

“You and Tommy and Joey Distefano?”

“It was a while ago,” Bruno said, almost dreamily. “And Mark Siegler. You remember Mark Siegler?”

She felt sick. “Mark Siegler?” she said. “What happened to Mark Siegler? I thought he had that heart thing.”

“He was killed,” Bruno said. “In a calamity.”

“A calamity?” Joanie whispered. “What kind of calamity?”

“Heart,” Bruno said. “Though I think a big pipe before that. Big steel pipe.” He left. She heard him going downstairs. She heard Audrey pad into the den in anticipation, getting out of his way.

The back door opened and shut, but she still didn’t hear his car. She listened a minute longer and then went to the top of the stairs. It was quiet. She tiptoed down and peered into the kitchen, tipping her body to see down the hall better. Everything was quiet. She crossed to the kitchen window and looked out through the curtains, but she couldn’t see anything. His bottle of champagne was on the table, where he’d left it.

She walked to the back door, thinking a horrible joke was about to be played on her. She found it locked. She tested it anyway, and looked out again, both hands on the knob.

Bruno swung into view from the side of the window, and she shrieked and fell back into the coats.

He looked in on her, then held up his hand in a wave and headed off down the driveway.

She slumped to the floor, kicking the shoes and sandals they’d piled there in various directions.

Todd was peeking into the kitchen.

“You all right?” he asked.

She closed her eyes and nodded. She swallowed, as if finally she could. “He scared me,” she said.

“Is the door locked?” Todd asked.

She nodded again. She opened her eyes.

“You okay?”

She stood up. She swiped at her rear and thighs, as if she’d been sitting in dirt.

“May be we should call somebody,” he said in a frightened voice.

She went to the phone and started dialing. When she finished, she looked at the clock. It was twelve-thirty.

Her father answered.

“Dad,” she said. She didn’t know what to say next.

“You all right?” he asked. She could hear him trying to get his voice back.

“I wake you up?” she said. She suddenly felt stupid.

“’S all right,” he said. “What’s up?”

“Mom there?” she asked.

“Hold on,” her father said.

They seemed to be fighting over the phone. Joanie couldn’t make out what they were saying. She heard a little of her mother’s voice.

“Your mother doesn’t want to talk to you,” her father said.

“Oh — We had a fight,” she said, trying to explain. She made a disappointed noise with her tongue.

“Call her back tomorrow. She’ll be all right,” he said.

She held the receiver near her chin. Her heel was bobbing and she was looking at Todd.

“You sure you’re all right?” her father said.

“Yeah. Go back to sleep,” she said. “Dad?” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Thanks,” she said. She hung up.

She stood looking at Todd in the light from the hallway.

“I’m scared,” Todd said.

“We’ll be all right,” she said. “What’s he gonna do?”

“I’m scared,” he said. “Let’s go over their house. Let’s go over there.”

She was going to tell him she’d have to call her father back again, but she saw his face, and her heart went out to him. “You wanna go over?” she said.

“Just for tonight,” he said.

“Okay,” she said. “Brush your teeth and grab a shirt for tomorrow.”

He stood staring at her. He was starting to cry again.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I told.”

Before she could hug him, he turned and ran from the room.

They’d be all right, she thought. Years from now, she meant. They loved each other too much to not be all right.

She got her toothbrush from the bathroom downstairs and underwear and a T-shirt from her bedroom dresser. She decided against hunting up a little bag, figuring it wasn’t that much to carry loose.

“Hurry up,” she called, and then regretted it: it probably scared him more.

He came thumping down the stairs two at a time. He had his little green knapsack over his shoulder. “Audrey’s comin’, right?” he said.

“Sure,” she said.

At the back door, she hesitated. Todd’s stomach made a noise. Audrey jumped up once, in impatience.

The garage light on the trees over the driveway reminded her of sitting in the car under the streetlight the night before. She peered close to the window on the side he’d surprised her from earlier.

“Ma,” Todd said. She looked at him. He had a claw hammer stuck in his Levi’s.

She unlocked the door. She opened it. Audrey bodied her way out past their calves and trotted around, making sweeps with her nose.

Joanie led Todd out and down the driveway. The garage was pretty well lighted. There was an intermittent wind.

She heard the jingle of Audrey’s collar stop, and when she looked over her shoulder, the dog had raised her head and was looking off down the street. Joanie pulled Todd into the garage, directing him with her hand around the passenger side. As she moved down the car she checked the backseat. She called once for Audrey, got in, checked the backseat again, and then, once Todd was in, locked all the doors and rolled up the windows. Her stomach unknotted a little.

Audrey trotted up and stood her front paws on the driver’s-side door. She unlocked it and opened it again, and the dog scrambled in over her and turned awkwardly around between them on the bench seat before settling down.

She turned the key in the ignition. It was like there was no front end to the car.

She sat there turning it.

“What’s wrong?” Todd finally said. The amount of fear in his voice was paralyzing.

She checked to see if it was in park. It was.

“He did something to it,” Todd said.

She opened the door. “I’m not gonna check it now,” she said. “Let’s go.”

At the front of the garage, Audrey gave a growl and took off around the house. Joanie grabbed Todd’s hand and ran for the back door. On the step she fumbled with the key. Todd called to Audrey. Joanie finally maneuvered it into the lock and got them inside and slammed the door and locked it. A second later, Audrey came trotting down the driveway and up to the door. Joanie looked around as much as she could and let the dog in.

“He did something to the car,” Todd said. He had his fist over the hammer in his pants, like someone with severe stomach pain. “He did something to the car to keep us here.”

“We don’t know that,” Joanie said.

“Call Grandpa,” Todd said. “Call Grandpa.”

“Hold it hold it hold it,” Joanie said. She was trying to get hold of herself. She turned on the overhead light in the kitchen and sat at the table. She pushed the bottle of champagne farther away from her. “What’re we gonna say?” she asked. “The car’s not working; we think Bruno’s coming to get us?”

She realized she was sweating and felt the dampness along her hairline and in front of her ear. “Anyway, Bruno was just here. And he left. Right?”

That seemed to calm Todd a little.

“And we got Audrey to protect us,” she said. “C’mon. We’ll check all the doors and windows.”

They checked them together, Todd holding his hammer out in front of them like the Olympic torch. He helped her with a sash that was jammed.

They left some lights on downstairs. She led him up to his room and helped him clear the clothes off his bed.

“I’m gonna sleep in my underwear,” he said.

He hung his Levi’s over the headboard.

“Where’s your hammer?” she asked.

“I musta left it downstairs,” he said with alarm.

“Don’t worry about it now.” She didn’t want to go downstairs for it alone.

He didn’t look much reassured.

“You know what?” she said. “I think I’ll snuggle here with you for a while. Is that okay?”

“That’s okay,” he said. He scooted over.

She hit the light and pulled off her own jeans and climbed under the covers in her T-shirt and underwear. She turned on her side to face him and folded her hands under her cheek. He was looking up at the ceiling.

“See? This isn’t bad. This is pretty good,” she said, but her voice had every quality of the end of the line.

Her thoughts rose in the dark like faint balloons.

She could hear water dripping into the big bowl she’d mixed tuna in, in the kitchen sink.

She lay there charged up and exhausted. She felt unexceptional and solitary, as tired as a mother who’d played all day with her kid and hadn’t tired the kid out yet.

Tommy Monteleone’s name stayed with her, like something she could experiment with to hurt herself.

She saw herself before she got married — sitting in the Milford library, with her shoes off and her legs folded under her — and her heart went out to herself in tenderness.

This whole life, she thought. All this pain: didn’t she make it herself?

She tried to calm down. She composed a letter to Todd. She composed a letter to Gary. She asked their forgiveness.

She thought of kissing Bruno. She thought of bats rushing out of their caves, sweeping past her and kissing the air over her skin.

She felt her soul opening up in the dark, unfolding sin after sin. In the gloom, she made out the Blessed Virgin statue on the dresser. Mary’s eyes regarded her with mild pity. Her own eyes were brimming with tears. A catechism line swam up from somewhere: God tries over and over again but the sinner will not hear.

She sang the lyrics to “Downtown.” Todd didn’t respond. She looked closer to see if he was asleep.

“Mom?” he said. “I still have to leave, I think. I don’t think I can stay here anymore.”

She closed her eyes and the tears broke down her cheeks. This, she thought. This was the worst moment.

It didn’t have to be so irreconcilable, she thought. Remember what we have.

There was a far-off whistling.

She controlled her breathing and focused on her hearing.

The whistling died off.

Audrey raised her head from the rug. Her license jingled: she was moving to hear better.

Something cracked outside, like someone snapping a good-sized stick. Joanie’s heart started going.

She heard a sound very near the window. It sounded like someone pouring liquid slowly out of a jar. It sounded like someone urinating against the side of the house.

“Ma,” Todd said.

“I hear it,” she said. “Shhh.”

There was a quick, faint popping sound, like someone had snapped a bicycle spoke.

They waited. Audrey woofed. She lowered her head to the rug again.

Joanie heard the whistling again. It was in the yard. She recognized it: “O Sordato Innamorato.”

She sat up in bed. “Call the police,” she said. “I’m going downstairs.” She got to her feet and turned on the little lamp on his bedside table. She climbed back into her jeans.

Todd was moving for the phone. He had a sober and alert expression, like a frightened general.

“I think he’s back,” she said. She felt as if she could throw up.

He nodded. Nothing seemed surprising now.

He picked up the phone and started dialing. She opened his door wider and hit the light in the hallway.

“Ma,” he said, and when she turned he was holding the phone out to her, his eyes large.

“Oh, God,” she said.

He let it drop. He scrambled into his Levi’s. At the base of the house there was a slow, metallic sound like the soft scrape of a snow shovel on ice.

“C’mon,” she whispered. She turned off the light. She had no plan. She thought she’d take him downstairs, try to locate what was going on, and push him out another window or door and run.

She led him down the stairs. She could hear her hand, sweaty, squeaking and skidding on the banister. Audrey stayed in the bedroom, watching them go.

“Audrey, who’s down here?” she whispered. The dog kept her chin on the rug.

They waited in the dark at the bottom of the stairs. Most of the blinds were closed, but she went cautiously around the living room, leading Todd, peeking out where she could see.

“My hammer’s around here,” Todd whispered. “I can’t find it.”

There was a sliding sound and a small clank from the kitchen. She felt a breeze at the back of her head and a familiar congested feeling of helplessness. “Stay here,” she said. She edged down the hall.

They’d left on the small light over the sink. She crept onto the linoleum. Everything was quiet. She headed for the back door. When she passed the spice cabinet, she sniffed vanilla extract. It always smelled to her like heart, like her love for Todd.

From where she was, it looked like the door was still locked. She slid along the cellar door, trying to get brave enough to get close enough to make sure.

She looked back at Todd. He’d gotten as far as the edge of the kitchen and was squatting all the way down to the floor, the way when he was sick he’d fold himself over on the toilet.

She looked into the sink. Drops of water were falling softly into the brimming bowl.

The cellar door crashed open, knocking her across the room and into the kitchen table. The table went over. She fell on her front on the linoleum. The champagne bottle bounced and rolled into the living room. Todd screamed.

Bruno was standing in the cellarway, holding up her underwear from the car.

“You forgot your things,” he said.

She turned on the floor and tried to tell Todd to run, but he was already running down the hallway. Bruno was over her in one long stride and after him. She got up and chased them. Bruno caught him on the stairs and dragged him down by the legs, Todd’s torso and head bouncing as he came down each riser. Audrey was up and barking in an uproar. Joanie punched and tried to kick, and Bruno let go of one leg and forearmed her across the head so that she pinwheeled over a low chair in the living room and landed on the rug. Something shot through her back.

She pulled herself up on an elbow, stunned. She heard a heavy thump and a high-pitched bark from Audrey. Bruno dragged Todd into the room by the feet and dumped him on the floor beside the coffee table. Then she heard him hustle the dog through the kitchen by the collar and pitch her down the stairs. There was a spectacular crash.

He came back into the living room and stood over them, breathing hard.

Audrey was barking and crying in the basement, and Joanie could hear her dragging herself around, but her voice was getting weaker. Bruno ran his hand over his hair. He flexed his shoulders to fix his shirt. He waited until there was only one solitary bark. Then he turned on the lamp and took a seat on the couch.

Todd was up on his elbows, too. His nose was bleeding. He was crying, but he wiped his face fiercely.

Bruno was looking into her eyes. “‘Sordo come una compana,’” he said. “‘My stone-deaf love.’”

There was a stabbing pain in her shoulder blade when she tried to put weight on her other elbow. She cried out.

“Pretty good tumble you took,” Bruno remarked.

“Fucker,” Todd said. It was the first time she’d heard him use the word.

“Fuckin’ Flyin’ Wallenda,” Bruno said.

“What’re you doing?” she said. “What do you want from us? We don’t have your money.”

He put his hand out flat toward her. “Forget the money. The money’s history. Did I ask about the money? The money’s over. Please. Let’s talk about you.

She went faint and cold and momentarily had the impression she couldn’t make out the color of the rug.

Todd was sniffling and got to his hands and knees. Bruno put a foot on his rear and pushed him over.

“Let me tell you a little secret,” Bruno said. “Tommy was coming to meet us that night. He parked a mile or so up the road. We were far away and had a bad angle on it, but we saw him get hit. It was pretty dark but we saw some of the car. We saw someone get out.”

Joanie remembered the darkened parked car right before the accident. She leaned more on one elbow and pulled her other arm closer to her body to lessen the pain. “Why didn’t you do something?” she asked.

“How did we know what was goin’ down?” Bruno said. “The people whose money we had were already a little upset.”

“You knew then?” Joanie said. “You knew then it was me?”

He shook his head. “Not until I saw you again. Saw the two a you again. You’re not exactly fuckin’ archcriminals.”

He stood up and leaned the brass floor lamp at a forty-five-degree angle between the sofa and the floor. The neck of the lamp assembly was on the arm of the sofa. He kicked through it and the lamp part snapped off. He picked up what was left, the rod and base, and wrapped the electric cord around it. Her insides seized up and then released. “Why didn’t you do something then?” she whispered.

“Fuck you,” Bruno said.

He unscrewed the base and yanked the cord out of the rod. What was left in his hands was about three feet long and hollow and an inch thick.

“Now, what Joey’s up to, I don’t know,” he said. “He was up in Hartford with us, I know that. This I took to be a bad sign. But I’m in deep shit. You understand me? I’m up to my fucking ears.”

“We don’t have the money,” she said.

“Nobody else can have it, Joanie,” he said matter-of-factly. “Where else could it fuckin’ go?”

“Maybe it blew away,” she said. “Maybe the cops took it.”

He snorted.

“Think of it like having a overdue book out of the library,” he said. “Having a real expensive book out of the library. And a real cranky librarian.” He stood up. He hefted the brass rod. “Where is it?”

“We don’t know,” she said.

He brought the rod down on Todd’s backside. Todd howled.

“You son of a bitch,” she screamed. He stepped across Todd and put a foot on her bad shoulder and pinned her. The pain spiraled through her, and she saw lights.

He stood back off her shoulder. When she opened her eyes, Todd was on his side, curled and holding himself.

“What am I gonna do with you?” Bruno asked, like he was talking to a dog that was resisting being house-trained. “What am I gonna do?”

“I can’t believe you hit him like that,” she said. She was whimpering from the pain and the shock.

“Deal with it,” he said.

Rage flooded her and she thought, I’m not sitting still for this, goddamit, and she rocked forward. The pain was blinding. She got more upright, though.

“You think maybe now I should be convinced of your sincerity and I should just go away, maybe with a heartfelt apology. Right?” Bruno said. “Is that what you’d like?”

She looked at him with hatred and nodded.

“That’s very nice,” he said. “That’s nice to know. Now here’s some news for you: I give a fuck.”

“You son of a—” she said, and he hit her again, a baseball swing, in the ribs. He hit Todd across the thigh.

She thought, I have to kill him. He’s going to kill us.

“Ask yourself,” Bruno said. “Why did you do this? Say: why did I do this?”

“I’ll kill you,” she managed to say.

“You did it because it was me, didn’t you, Joanie? Because you had me so far on the fuckin’ hook. ‘What’s Bruno gonna do about it? The sappy fuck.’”

He hit her again.

She shook. She crossed her arms. She tasted blood in her mouth.

“Ah, you’re gonna go all the way to the end, aren’t you, Joanie? You’re gonna go down with me, aren’t you?” he said.

Joanie opened her eyes and could see he was leaning closer.

“Joanie remembers from Blessed Sacrament: martyrs get the crown,” he said. “All those saints, Joanie, huh? All they had to do was die.”

“Maybe he never had it,” she said.

He leaned even closer. He was only inches from her face. “We searched his house,” he whispered. “We searched everything.”

She closed her eyes and ground the back of her head into the rug. He had her bad arm. The pain was like someone sawing a wire through her shoulder socket.

“All that time,” Bruno said. “You know what I was waiting for? I was waiting for you to tell me the truth.”

He got closer still.

“What did you want from me?” he whispered. “What did you ever want from me?”

“Oh, God, oh, God,” she said.

“What you did to me,” he whispered. “After all I felt about you.” She saw tears in his eyes through her own. Todd was on his knees behind him and swung the champagne bottle by the neck, and the sound it made on Bruno’s temple was new, was nothing she’d heard before. He made a guttural noise, like a fishbone was caught back in his throat, and he went over. And she had the brass rod in her hands, and Todd had the bottle, and in agony and together they pulled themselves over him and fell on him, as if their retribution were absolution. As if for now it was the only grace imaginable.