Shoot the Moonlight Out, page 22
“I don’t know. I might be tapped out.”
“You just need to find some books that make more sense to you. That’ll help get you going.” She pauses, turns to him. “Can I tell you something? I’m nervous.”
“Of course,” Jack says, unsure of what to expect.
A smile. Electric. Beaming. “I’ve got a date tonight.”
“Who with?”
“I went out in the city with some friends a few nights ago. Actually, I went to see about a job at a bookstore in the East Village and then I met my friends at Dojo and we got drinks at Seven Bar. One of my friends, Stacy, she brought along her friend from when she studied abroad in college, Mairéad. She’s Irish. A writer too. Like really a writer. She’s twenty-five and she’s already got a novel out. It’s called Girl in Amber. We really hit it off. We talked all night. It was like a movie. Like Before Sunrise. We broke off from the group and wandered around, just talking. She’s really smart and funny. Like, it’s overwhelming how smart and funny she is. She’s into the occult. She says she can talk to spirits. We met for lunch yesterday too. She’s from Dublin, but she’s been living in New York for two years now. She’s never been to this part of Brooklyn. I invited her here tonight. We’re going to get some pizza. She wants to see the neighborhood after hearing me talk about it. She doesn’t know how little there is to see.”
Jack imagines Lily strolling aimlessly in the city with this Irish woman, carefree, no longer under threat from Micah. The feeling of peace in him intensifies.
Lily continues: “I’ve never gone out with a woman before, but this is the happiest I’ve felt in a long time. You know, Micah disappears, stops calling, and then I meet Mairéad. It’s like a gift. I’m glad I can tell you because I can’t tell my mother. She’s nuts about stuff like this. She hates gay people. She’d definitely disown me if I said I was gay or bi or whatever.”
“I doubt that,” Jack says.
“You don’t know Grace.” Lily nudges Jack with her elbow. “So, how do you feel about it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’re kind of like—I don’t know—you’ve kind of become like this father figure to me the last few weeks. I don’t want to hang too much on you, but are you weirded out? Do you have some good fatherly advice for me? Or bad? Are you going to tell me it’s ‘just a phase’?”
“I think you should do what makes you happy.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, of course. I would’ve been happy with Amelia dating women too. Women are better than men. Way less terrible, at least. You probably feel a lot safer too. They probably won’t pull the kind of shit Micah pulled.”
“You’re funny, Jack. You always surprise me.”
They turn onto Lily’s block.
“Can I ask you one more thing?” Lily says.
“Shoot.”
“Would you want to meet Mairéad? Can we come over? I told her all about you. I told her about your writing, about Amelia. She’s excited to meet you.”
Jack tries to picture the three of them sitting in his sad kitchen. “You’ve been to my house. It’s a dive. I’d be embarrassed to have this woman you’re interested in over.”
“It’s not a dive,” Lily says. “It’s a real place where a real person lives. It’s not like one of these suburban model homes that people live in now. That stuff makes me sick. Anyhow, I can’t bring her back to my apartment because of my stupid mom. Your house feels more like home now.”
“That’s nice of you to say. You’re really buttering me up here.”
“I’m trying.”
“Okay, come on over. What time?”
“I’m picking her up from the train on Twenty-Fifth Avenue in a half hour. We’re going to get pizza at Spumoni Gardens. Then we’ll head over. Maybe nine? Is that too late?”
“It’s fine. I should stop and get some drinks. You know what she likes? Wine? Beer?”
“Whatever you have is fine. Don’t go nuts.”
They stop in front of the house where Lily’s apartment is. She looks up and sees the lights on and complains that her mother is home, of course she’s home now and not out with her dumb boyfriend, and she’ll have to answer questions about what she’s getting dressed up for and who she’s going to see. Her mother doesn’t care most of the time—take Micah stalking her, for example—but then she chooses the most inopportune times to be nosy. “She’ll probably be able to sniff out the fact that I’m dating a woman,” Lily says. “Okay, I’ve gotta go. I’m going to change and stuff before I pick up Mairéad.”
“Okay,” Jack says. “I’ll see you in a little bit.”
Lily goes in through the gate and up to the front door, keying it open.
Jack walks away from Lily’s. He guesses he’ll stop at a bodega and buy a couple of six-packs just to have them around in case this Irish woman wants beer. He has Seagram’s at home, probably a dusty bottle or two of gin, definitely some ancient vermouth. Be nice to have some beer in the house. Beer feels younger.
FRANCESCA
Francesca hasn’t left her room in a week except to use the bathroom and go down to the kitchen for water and snacks. She hasn’t eaten much, barely touching any of the sandwiches Victoria has made for her, instead bringing bowls full of chips and packages of fruit gummies up to her room. Bobby has called fifty times at least, but she’s managed to ignore him. She’s told Victoria that she’s not feeling well, that maybe it’s some kind of summertime sickness, and Victoria has been understanding. Grandma Eva has, as usual, been riding her about not going out to look for a job, saying she’s faking feeling bad so she can avoid the responsibilities of the real world. She calls her lazy. She says she expects everything handed to her. Francesca avoids her as much as she can, which pretty much means that she tries to stay up super late and then sleeps away the day.
She’s haunted by what happened at Max’s. She keeps thinking about how Bobby made her hold the gun while he taped Max up. And then she thinks about the gun in Bobby’s hand. The same hand that had touched her in the hotel. The way he’d gone from tender to scary. The way he’d looked emptying the money and drugs on his bed. Max with his milk. That slummy office, which certainly didn’t look like the base of operations for someone who was stealing from old people. She thinks about standing out on the sidewalk while Bobby did whatever he did. She plays the scene repeatedly in her mind, as if on tape. Did she hear anything? A gunshot? Is what Bobby said about hitting him too hard or too perfectly by accident true?
What happened at Max’s was finally on the news today. She’s feeling extra uneasy. Likely, a robbery gone wrong or a mob hit, they said on Channel Nine. Bay Ridge rattled to its core. Max discovered by his shut-in parents who had finally ventured out of the house after a week and hobbled to his office. They were shaking. His mother said they thought he might’ve gone to Atlantic City for a few days with one of his clients, which he sometimes did, but they knew when he didn’t call that something was wrong. He was a good boy, she said. He was always so good to them, helping with their medicine and buying their favorite snacks. Weeping. He was their caretaker. His father didn’t say anything. He just stared blankly at the camera.
The cops are probably thinking it’s a mob hit. Probably the last thing they’d guess is the nineteen-year-old kid who worked there. Bobby is right about one thing. Running away would make clear he did it. They did it. Staying put means the cops might show up at his door if they discover he was on Max’s payroll (though Max paid him off the books), or if his father brings him in to talk when he hears the news. All he has to do is hold his tongue, play dumb, and the cops might pass him over. She wonders about his conscience. How can he just live with what he did?
Francesca is sitting cross-legged on her bed. The small TV on her dresser in the corner is playing a commercial. The news has just ended. Some movie’s coming on. A black bar swims across the screen every few seconds. The reception on this cheap little TV isn’t great. The antenna is wispy. She thinks about getting up and trying to adjust it but then just stays put.
A knock on the door.
“Who is it?” Francesca says. She’s pretty sure Victoria is out on a date, so it must be her grandmother.
Grandma Eva doesn’t answer, instead barging in and standing between Francesca and the TV.
“What is it?” Francesca says.
“This is ridiculous. A young girl like you, wasting away. Tomorrow you’re going to get your act together. Or else.”
“Or else what?”
“You’ve got a smart mouth on you.”
“Can you please leave me alone?” Francesca asks. “I really don’t feel like talking. You can’t just come into my room like this. I don’t know why my door wasn’t locked. It should’ve been locked.”
“Locked doors,” Grandma Eva says, disgusted. “If my sister, Jean, or I locked our door growing up, we would’ve gotten the belt. Even at your age, my mother wasn’t afraid of giving us a good whack. One time she hit Jean with the broom for talking back. It was a different time. A better time. Children feared their parents, not vice versa. You have your poor mother walking on eggshells around here lately. ‘I don’t want to upset Frannie,’ she says. ‘Victoria,’ I says, ‘you’ve got to force her to grow up.’ I’m glad she went out to try to have fun tonight, even if it’s with that dummy Stan. Your mother still has a spark in her. She’s a DiMaggio, after all.”
“Please. Leave me alone.”
“You know what your grandfather used to say to your mother when she was in high school and got in the habit of snapping back at us? ‘Go find your own apartment, your own food, your own this and that,’ he’d say. ‘Pay your own bills. See what the real world’s like.’ He’d say, ‘Aren’t you ashamed?’ ”
Shame is big with Grandma Eva. She thinks Francesca should feel so much shame about who she is, about who her father was. She should feel shame because she doesn’t mold herself into whatever Grandma Eva wants her to be. She probably prays to God about how ashamed she is of her own granddaughter. Francesca can’t help but imagine God listening to all these awful people and their awful prayers.
“You know what?” Francesca says.
Grandma Eva stands there, hands on her hips, poised to do battle. “What?” she says.
“Go fuck yourself.”
“Who do you think you’re talking to with that mouth? I should call the cops on you.”
“You’re gonna call the cops on me for telling you to go fuck yourself? What is your purpose in life other than to irritate me? You’re telling me to go get a job? You need a job. Go volunteer somewhere. Please. Just leave me alone.”
“I want you out of my house right now,” Grandma Eva says. “I let you and your mother move in here because your father died and left you with nothing, but I can’t tolerate you under this roof anymore. You are an angry and aimless person. You have no respect for me or for the rules of my house. Grandpa Natale’s rolling over in his grave.”
“I’m done,” Francesca says, uncrossing her legs and getting up. “You tell Victoria you kicked me out. See how she responds.”
“Stop calling your mother ‘Victoria.’ ”
Francesca grabs a backpack and fills it with a couple of pairs of underwear and T-shirts, her favorite jeans, her deodorant, toothbrush, and toothpaste. She takes the few bucks she has hidden in her dresser. What’s left of her rolling tobacco, which isn’t much, just a skittering of tobacco flakes and the apple slice she put in the Drum pouch to keep it fresh. She’s not sure where she’s going to go, but she’s a hundred percent on walking out of this goddamn ugly house right goddamn now.
“Where are you going?” Grandma Eva asks.
“What are you talking about? You’re kicking me out. I’m leaving.”
“But where are you going?”
“None of your business. Maybe I’ll go sleep in a park.”
“What park?”
“Any park.”
“You’ll get raped and killed.”
“My blood will be on your hands, Granny.” Granny, like a fairy tale. Grandma Eva hates when Francesca calls her Granny. It makes her feel a million years old.
“Don’t you ever—”
Francesca slings the backpack over her shoulder, pushes past Grandma Eva, and leaves the room. She stomps downstairs and out the front door and doesn’t look back at the house as she walks angrily up the block, crosses the avenue, and then just falls into wandering around the neighborhood.
She looks at statues of the Virgin Mary and Jesus in the cramped front yards of run-down houses. She looks at garbage cans in driveways. She looks in windows. One house, a two-story job with yellow siding, has a tattered American flag out front on a proper flagpole. That’s a lot of work, probably, putting up a real flagpole like that, sinking it in cement.
She’s lost track of where she is, winding up and down the blocks surrounding Bay Thirty-Fourth.
A house close to the corner of Twenty-Fourth Avenue and Eighty-Sixth Street looks familiar. It’s a house she remembers visiting for some reason or another when she was very young. Who lived there? Maybe a friend of Victoria’s? That’s it. Claudia Camarda, who’d been Victoria’s best friend since grade school, lived there with her family. Francesca remembers Victoria saying that Claudia moved to Delaware a few years ago. Her dad had died and her mom had dementia, and the house was too much. Francesca wonders about Delaware. She’s never been, never even driven through, that she knows of. It’s a state she can’t picture.
A sunset gloom has swallowed the neighborhood. The sky is pink and purple. She likes when the sky does this.
She’s trying desperately not to think about Max Berry, toppled in his chair. His mother and father finding him. The cops. That open safe. What if there’s security footage? What if Bobby was wrong about that? What if she’s right there, caught on camera, handing Bobby the duct tape, standing by idly as he forces Max to spin the dial at gunpoint? What if, instead of telling Bobby to stop, the world sees her turn her back on the situation, just walk outside because she can’t stomach it. She’d try to explain to the cops how great the week with Bobby had been, how she thought he was this sweet guy and then he talked about robbing Max to finance a trip west and she thought it was a fantasy until it wasn’t anymore and it was really happening and she felt paralyzed.
If she’s being totally honest, though, she’d also been a little thrilled. Part of her found it romantic, the idea at least.
On Eighty-Sixth Street, she finds a bodega she’s never been in before. Not that she remembers, anyhow. The window’s plastered with ads for canned iced tea and beer. The smell of the place hits her as she walks in. Some kind of sweet incense. The floor is tiled. A brown cat roams around, strutting down the long aisle, disappearing behind a display rack of shelves. A man is behind the register. Thirties, maybe. White shirt. Gym shorts. He has the Yankees game on the radio. To the right, a mostly empty rack with one Daily News left. It’s today’s, so the Max story isn’t on the cover, but it might be tomorrow. Lotto cards on the counter, a few loser scratch-offs left behind by some furious gambler. Another man, a customer, is back by the beer fridge.
Francesca needs cigarettes. She hopes they have rolling tobacco. “You have Drum?” she asks the counter guy.
“This look like a music store?” he says.
“It’s a brand of rolling tobacco.”
“Yeah, I know. That was a joke.” He gets her a pouch from the wall of cigarettes behind him, tucked next to the Bugler tobacco. He drops it in front of her. “Anything else?”
She shakes her head and pays.
The guy who’d been back at the beer fridge is now standing a few steps over from her, a six-pack of Guinness dangling from each hand, waiting in line. He gives her a half smile. She ignores it.
She goes outside, takes off her backpack, and sits on the edge of the little kiddie ride in front of the bodega. It’s a train car with the face of a pig, covered in graffiti, slicked with grime. Drop a quarter in and it bops around for a minute. She can’t imagine any parent putting their kid on this gross thing.
She remembers her father taking her to Coney Island one summer day when she was little. Tickets in her hand. A hot dog and orangeade. Most of the rides were awful, but she loved the Wonder Wheel. She also loved a display case that showed pictures and souvenirs of old Coney Island. The crowds. The lights. Tickets for rides. Ads. Flyers.
She rolls a cigarette with the fresh tobacco and lights it with a Bic she finds in the front pocket of her backpack.
The other guy, the one with the six-packs, comes out, his beer bagged, and he takes another glance at her. He’s about to walk by but then he stops. “You okay?” he says. “You mind that I’m asking? You look troubled.”
“I’m just great,” she says, her voice all smart-ass tough.
“You look—”
“Let me guess. Like I’m not from around here. Like I don’t belong here. Yeah, I get that a lot. I’m used to it. You want to see my neighborhood passport?”
“I was gonna say you look familiar.”
“Oh.”
“Maybe you just remind me of somebody.” He’s about to say something else. A train rattles by on the El overhead. He holds up his hand, signaling that he’ll ask what he’s going to ask when the train’s passed.
She drags on her cigarette. Looking at this guy, really taking him in for a second, she thinks that, actually, he looks pretty familiar himself.
The train passes.
“I don’t make it a habit of chatting people up,” he says. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry I bothered you.”
“I had a fight with my grandmother,” Francesca says. “She threw me out of the house. You asked why I look troubled. That’s why, I guess.” She leaves out the part about Bobby and Max, of course. About being an apprentice to a murder. Not an apprentice. Jesus Christ. Her mind. An accessory. She’s seen enough cop movies.
“You got nowhere to go?” he asks.
