After I'm Gone (9 page)
She knew she was being sold, but that was okay. She was in sales herself, helping to move the weak drinks at the Variety. The plate was $65, no small sum, but she bought it and put it in an old trunk at the foot of her bed. There, the plate joined china and silverware she had begun to assemble, piece by piece. There was a large serving dish that dated to Revolutionary War times, the kind of item one would expect to find in a house such as the Brewer home in Sudbrook Park, although, of course, Julie would never live
there
. Mount Washington, maybe. Guilford if the divorce didn’t leave Felix too strapped. But not that house, that neighborhood, through which she had driven far too many times. At any rate her things kept accumulating in this small wooden trunk, eighteenth-century English, also discovered on Howard Street. Julie never called this trunk a hope chest, but that didn’t keep it from being one.
One night, in her English class at CCB, she was struck by a particular F. Scott Fitzgerald quote shared by the teacher, about the test of a first-rate intellect being the ability to hold two conflicting thoughts without going insane. She carried it back to Felix, another tribute to drop at his feet, like a house cat with a mouse.
“So you must have a first-rate mind,” she said. “If you think you can really love two women at the same time.”
She assumed he would at least have the courtesy to say that he loved her best but couldn’t leave his wife while the children were young. Or that Bambi wouldn’t give him a divorce under any circumstances. Once he had told her he could never marry a shiksa, but she had fixed that problem. So what was holding him up?
“Yes siree,” she said, trying to keep her tone light. “You and F. Scott Fitzgerald, two first-rate intellects for the ages.”
“Who says I’m not crazy?” Felix said, kissing the top of her head.
S
andy decided to call it a day after talking to No-Longer-Tubby Schroeder. One of the perks of being a consultant was making his own hours. The downside was that those hours could never be overtime. Work as much or as little as he wanted. Didn’t matter, no one cared. He earned a flat rate, no benefits.
But it filled the evenings, reading the Julie Saxony file, and he found himself gravitating back to it even as the days were growing longer. It was really two stories, parallel universes. A missing woman from Havre de Grace. A dead woman in Leakin Park. Fitting, he thought, for a woman with two lives—Juliet Romeo, Variety headliner. Julie Saxony, respectable business owner, valued member of the Havre de Grace Merchants Association, which had put up a reward when she disappeared.
He rubbed his eyes. Even now, after two years, the house ached with quiet. Not that Mary had been a loud person, quite the opposite. Nor had Bobby Junior been noisy, not by a child’s standards. When he was a toddler, Sandy and Mary had called him the colonel, mistaking his silence for dignity. Who knew, back then, what could be going on in a kid’s head? Mary knew. She always knew, even before the trouble started. She kept it to herself as long as possible, outright lying to pediatricians and teachers and, eventually, Sandy. So when Bobby’s problems started, about age six or so, they seemed to come out of nowhere. But it was just that Mary had papered over them for so long. For someone who usually couldn’t tell a mild fib, she had been a disturbingly good liar when it came to Bobby Junior.
Then there were the five hard years, the years when they fought about what to do, only to have the decision made for them: Bobby needed to go away. It was an ugly truth, but a truth nonetheless, that Sandy had been happy to have Mary all to himself again when Bobby was sent to “school.” Maybe if Bobby Junior had been different, normal, Sandy wouldn’t have felt that way. How could he ever know what he would feel? His kid was born different, not right. The fact that Mary still gloried in Bobby Junior was the essence of Mary, the reason Sandy loved her so much. After all, she had gloried in him, too, despite his flaws, the mistakes that her parents said made him unsuitable as a husband. He was just grateful that the decision about Bobby was taken out of their hands, that they could stop fighting over it.
Mary wasn’t. But she rallied because that’s what she did and Sandy thought they had a pretty good time after that. Thank God her family had the money to pay for Bobby’s care, set up a trust. There wasn’t enough cop overtime in the world to pay for that kind of thing.
The Saxony file was open on the dining-room table, all the various pieces spread out. He started gathering them up, not because he was a neat freak, but because he knew the mere act of organizing a set of papers could highlight something he hadn’t considered yet. It was as if his fingers knew things, but they couldn’t show him unless they were moving, touching. He had to think it was similar for carpenters and writers, and he knew it was the same for chefs. It was a kind of muscle memory, ingrained by years of doing a thing. The body led, the mind followed. He was good at being a murder police and proud of being good at it. But was it so wrong that he had hoped to be good at something else in his lifetime?
Sandy’s retirement, almost ten years ago, had been full of promise. He had stayed on the job longer than most, making it to thirty years of service. But he was only fifty-two then and he had no intention of truly retiring. Almost no one who left the department did. They went to other government jobs, or into private security. Some of his older friends were double-dipping now, drawing
two
government pensions and their Social Security. They lived well.
But Sandy had a different idea for his retirement, a dream he had nurtured for years. He had wanted to open a restaurant, an authentic Cuban one that would serve the dishes of his childhood. There was no place in Baltimore that really did it right, and don’t even mention the Buena Vista Social Club to him, which was basically a great location that served nachos.
Nachos!
Sandy was going to make arroz con pollo and plantains and real Cuban coffee. People who had eaten in Miami’s best-known Cuban restaurants said Sandy’s food was as good, better.
And maybe it was, but that didn’t change the fact that no one came. If a plantain falls in the forest and no one’s there to eat it—he still had nightmares, thinking about the waste, the uneaten food, the not-special-to-anyone specials.
The location was good, or should have been. Mary—she was always up for whatever he wanted—found a storefront on Hampden’s Thirty-sixth Street, not far from their Medfield home. Hampden was gentrifying at a fast clip at the time, although, like most Baltimore neighborhoods, it never turned the corner all the way. But real estate was going up, up, up in a way that had never happened in Baltimore. It seemed so smart to extend themselves to buy the building, with a long-term eye toward renovating the upstairs for apartments. Within six months of the purchase, the building was worth twice as much as they had paid for it. Except they hadn’t really paid for it. They had put nothing down, borrowed 110 percent. Everyone was doing it.
Seven years later, when he went to sell the building, it was worth about 60 percent of the debt they were carrying. They had never established any real equity because they had used a second mortgage—and a third and a fourth and then cash from the money that Mary’s parents left her when they died, money outside the trust set up for Bobby Junior—for improvements to the restaurant. They sold it in a short sale, the most excruciatingly long process Sandy had ever endured at the time, although Mary’s allegedly fast cancer took half the time and felt longer still. Sometimes, watching television, Sandy came across a rerun of
Seinfeld
about a Pakistani guy who runs a restaurant that’s always empty and it’s played for laughs, being a sitcom and all, and all Sandy wanted to do was throw a brick at the TV set. Maybe running a failing business is funny when you’re a millionaire comedian, but when you lived it, the jokes didn’t come so fast.
Sandy was that rare person who understood he didn’t have much of a sense of humor. He had faked it well enough at work, knowing when to laugh, even getting a good line off every now and then, but he wasn’t inclined to see the funny side of things, and life didn’t tempt him to change his point of view.
And that was before Mary got sick. He knew the two things were not connected, that she didn’t get cancer from the heartbreak over the restaurant. He also knew it wasn’t the earlier surgeries, all those years ago, when she lost so much blood and needed transfusions, but he couldn’t shake the notion. She had allowed him his dream, bankrolled it without a single word of reproach when all that money went down a rabbit hole lined with black beans and flan. And then she got pancreatic cancer. Stage IV. Mary never did anything halfway.
His papers gathered, he started making coffee, the good stuff. He still cooked for himself, but there wasn’t much joy in it, and he almost never made Cuban food.
He wasn’t stupid or naïve. He went in knowing that a restaurant was hard work; he came from restaurant people. He knew that most restaurants didn’t make it. But he also knew that he was smart and that his food was good. So why didn’t people come? Sometimes, he blamed the low-carb diet fad, which put rice and bread off the menu for so many people. He blamed the lack of Cubans in Baltimore. There had been a big influx of Latinos on the East Side, but they were all from Central America and Mexico. His food did not speak to them. It seemed that his food spoke only to him and a few stubborn regulars. There had been one young man, a guy who looked like an aging skateboarder, but he turned out to be in business himself, running a music venue with his father-in-law. Sandy and the kid talked about the perils of small business sometimes while the boy sat at the counter, wolfing down cappuccinos. But they never spoke about their lives, probably because Sandy kept that door closed to everyone but Mary. He was shocked, a year ago or so, to see the boy, as he still thought of him, pushing a stroller down Thirty-sixth Street, in the company of an attractive woman, although she wasn’t Sandy’s type. He didn’t like sturdy women. He liked the little flowers, the women who needed protection in this world. He had been drawn to Mary’s delicacy, only to be amazed by her steel. First with Bobby, then with her own illness.
Cancer. In his lifetime, it had become less of a thing. Everyone was so
cheerful
about it now. They forgot that it could still be pretty awful. Even he had forgotten. He had been stubbornly, stupidly hopeful, asking the doctor about those commercials, the ones for miracle places that cured people everyone had given up on. But Mary had accepted, from the first diagnosis, that she was being given a death sentence. If she had been thinking only of herself, she would have gone home and swallowed rat poison. She was a dignified woman, and there was no dignity in what happened to her over the next four months. “I carried you to your doorstep on our first date,” Sandy said. “What’s the big deal in my carrying you now?”
But he was carrying her to the toilet, which she found humiliating. Mary had been a woman who, through thirty-plus years of marriage, insisted on decorum, especially about bathroom matters. To have her body assert all its ugly reality in those final months grieved her so. She put on lipstick and beautiful nightgowns until the end. But she no longer wanted fresh-cut flowers in the house. “When they die, they remind me that I’m dying.”
Sandy had objected, defending the flower bearers in a way he was not inclined to defend most people. He had a pretty low opinion of people and whether that was because of the job or the job was because of that tendency was a chicken-or-an-egg question at this point. At any rate, he argued for the flowers. “No, they’re pretty, they’re nice, you’re not—”
“I am,” Mary said. “I’m dying. And look at those cut stems in water. They’re dying the moment they’re cut.”
The next day, he had brought her an orchid, in a pot. And although he didn’t know dick about plants, he learned to tend to it, and then another, and another, until the first floor was a bower, a word that Mary taught him. After she was gone, he thought about letting the orchids go, or giving them away, but Mary would be disappointed in him, giving up on yet another living thing, so he kept the bower, feeling for all the world like Nero Wolfe or goddamn Ray Milland when he played the villain on
Columbo
, complete with ascot. Only an asshole wore an ascot.
Columbo
—that was a good show. Utterly ridiculous, but it wasn’t trying to be a documentary on police work. At least the writers knew that solving a homicide was more talking than anything else, although some of those confessions—well, Sandy wouldn’t want to be the assistant state’s attorney who took Columbo’s cases to court.
He turned on the television to keep him company while he puttered among the plants. No one would accuse him of having a green thumb, but he saved more than he lost now.
The rowhouse was still set up as it had been in Mary’s last months, so she could live on one floor. Now Sandy lived on one floor, using the first-floor bathroom. He went upstairs only to shower and change his clothes. But he slept in the sofa bed where she died, although it bugged his back.
Mary’s last word was “Bobby.” He tried to tell himself it was for him, that she had reverted, in that final moment, to the given name he no longer used. But Mary had almost always called him Roberto. Her last word was for her son, who loved his mother so much that he had almost killed her.
A few days after she died, Sandy drove out to the group home where Bobby now lived; tamed and dulled by medication, the boy—a thirty-five-year-old man, but always a boy to Sandy—was puzzled by the news. “Where’s Mom?” he asked, although he had been told repeatedly she was gravely ill, that this day would come. “Where’s Mom? When is Mom coming to see me again?”
Sandy had not visited him since that day. It wasn’t a plan. Nobody plans to be that much of a bastard. Mary’s illness had disrupted what routine there was and she was the keeper of that flame. He forgot to go, something came up. Then something else came up and before he knew it, six months had gone by and the caretakers, when he called, told him that Bobby was fine. “Does he ask after me?” No, he was told. He asks for his mother, but never his father. Okay, so that was that. He had no relationship with his son. It wasn’t his fault that Mary could forgive Bobby Junior for throwing her through a plateglass window, while Sandy never could. It didn’t matter to him that Bobby was only eleven at the time, or that he did not understand what he had done, that he cried over his bloodied mother as paramedics tended to her. She had lost so much blood that day, almost enough to kill her. Did the transfusions cause her cancer? Sandy knew that was ridiculous, that he shouldn’t blame Bobby for killing his mother—and yet he did. He just did.
At the table, the one where Mary used to insist on taking her meals despite being so weak she could barely sit up, he ate an early supper and watched the news. He missed having an afternoon paper, although it had been almost twenty years now since one was published. Sometimes, he felt that he was born to miss things, to lose things despite his meticulous ways. In Spanish, translated strictly, things lost themselves to you and that had been Sandy’s experience. His restaurant. His parents. Mary. The promise of his son—not the boy himself, but the dream of the child who never was, the boy who had seemed so happy and healthy and perfect at birth, straight 10s on his Apgar. Nowadays, you couldn’t open a newspaper, turn on the TV, without hearing about autism and Asperger’s, and people were always telling you about this book they read or
Rain Man
or how their boss was on the “autism scale.” Not that people talked to Sandy about these topics, because there was no one left in his life who knew about Bobby Junior. But he heard things, on TV and out in the world. He heard things.
The local news got silly after the first break, and he opened Julie Saxony’s file again. It was the opposite of whatever picking at a scab was. Something was registering every time, even if he didn’t know what it was. He was beginning to prefer the more recent photograph, the one where she was too thin. Yes, to be honest, the va-va-voom shot of her in her stripper days had been what first caught his eye. But the 1986 photo, where she was all of thirty-three—she looked so old and sad. This was the woman who had been murdered, he reminded himself. A woman who had achieved a lot, but at some cost. If he were the kind of a guy who talked to photos, he might have asked her: “What made you so sad?”