The Realm of Last Chances (3 page)

“Sure. Because of the pyrotechnics, people don’t think of Kundera as a Cold War novelist, but that was his landscape. When he lost it—well, it’s about like taking Mississippi away from Faulkner. You’ve got to know where you are to write about it well. Don’t you think?”

What she thought was that she’d better find out whether or not they’d be working at the same place. One lesson she’d absorbed in California was that you needed to keep your distance from the faculty. When the time came to make a tough decision, you shouldn’t let sentiment intrude. So many good people were looking for jobs that you couldn’t justify rewarding the unaccomplished or inept. “You sound like you’ve got a serious interest in literature,” she said. “Are you a professor, by any chance?”

This provoked the most curious response; she’d think about it off and on for the remainder of the day and would even wake up the next morning with it still on her mind. He looked up the street and then down at his feet as his facial muscles lost all semblance of tone. He tucked the paper under his arm and said he worked at an Italian deli on Main Street in Montvale and that sometime she ought to try their lobster salad. Then he climbed the porch steps and went inside.

the drinnans
had taken up residence on Essex Street in 1961. The husband—Terrance, though everybody called him Terry—had opened an independent insurance agency two years earlier, when he and his wife were still living in an apartment in Cedar Park. They chose the Queen Anne on Essex because it straddled the border between the two towns in which almost all of his customers lived. Terry knew ahead of time that it was going to be sold—he carried the fire insurance on it—and this information allowed him to make an offer and have it accepted before the house actually appeared in the real-estate listings.

His office was just three blocks away, on East Border Road, the main link between the two towns. The proximity of his business allowed him to walk to and from work and to return home most days for lunch. He did so even in winter, no matter how deep the snow was, persisting in his habit even though this involved descending a treacherous hill—a task that became more arduous as the sixties turned into the seventies and then the eighties and he entered what would, in his own case, be a foreshortened middle age. He liked to joke that the majority of auto accidents he was forced to make payouts on occurred on the same street where his agency stood. Cedar Park residents gave East Border Road a workout every Friday and Saturday night, traveling between their homes and the liquor stores in Montvale.

Almost everybody in both towns knew and respected Terry Drinnan, but when most people thought of the family it was his wife who came to mind. Whereas he’d moved to the North Shore only after graduating from Holy Cross, Elizabeth’s relatives had lived in Montvale for close to a hundred years: she’d
grown up in an octagonal house on Pond Street that had once been owned by Colonel Elbridge Gerry, who, though a citizen of some distinction, was unrelated to the famous statesman of the same name.

No one ever called Elizabeth Drinnan “Liz” or “Betsy.” She wouldn’t have minded if they did, and in fact she often wondered why they didn’t, though she never voiced her puzzlement to another living soul. She thought maybe there was something off-putting about her, some quirk in her makeup that made her seem distant, even when surrounded by friends, of which she had many. The baby shower given in her honor following the birth of her son was the largest anyone could recall, cars lining Essex for two or three blocks and a few parked all the way back on East Border.

Like her mother and both of her sisters, Elizabeth became a mainstay of the Fortnightly Club of Montvale, a women’s group “devoted to the preservation of natural resources, the promotion of the arts, education, civic involvement and world peace.” She served twice as president of the local chapter and, in the midnineties, after the death of her husband, was elected for a term to the same office in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs of Massachusetts. Plenty of evidence proved that people liked her, and if she’d never achieved best-friend status with anybody, neither had she ever made an enemy.

That was what she told herself when she learned of her son’s troubles: Thank God I’ve never made enemies. By then she’d been a widow for thirteen years, living on a fixed income that seemed to shrink daily. Paint was peeling off the house in great swathes, the front steps were half eaten by Ice Melt, the furnace had entered its third decade and she was still driving the last car Terry had bought, a 1991 Skylark, but she continued to dress well and take proper care of herself. People kept inviting her to social events just as they always had, and every few months one friend or another would attempt to introduce her to a man her
age or slightly older who’d recently lost his wife. She declined those offers but was unfailingly polite.

It was a good thing, she decided, that she’d never asked favors for herself and that she’d lived within her means, constrained as they might be. She entertained this thought as she waited in the lobby of Cedar Park Savings and Loan one day in late January 2005. Outside, big soft snowflakes were disappearing as soon as they hit the pavement. The temperature was due to fall, though, and by tomorrow morning, according to what she’d heard on the radio, the North Shore could expect somewhere between ten and fourteen inches. The grayness of the afternoon matched her mood exactly. The previous day, George W. Bush had been inaugurated for the second time, and she’d sat alone in her living room watching TV with the sound turned off, knowing as surely as she’d ever known anything that she wouldn’t live long enough to see the country choose a better leader. She was seventy-one years old, and it hadn’t been quite twenty-four hours since her son asked if there was any chance that she could possibly help him raise thirty-five thousand dollars.

“I pissed, shit and came, all at the same time,” Dushay said while he, Matt and Frankie worked on a trio of four-foot subs for a retirement party at Fellsway Fence Company. Frankie always insisted they finish the special orders before the lunch crowd arrived. Selling sandwiches was 70 percent of his business and working people didn’t have all day to stand in line.

“See, I’d gotten banged up the previous night in the big game against Reading,” Dushay continued, “and to kill the pain I went to sleep on a heating pad. Damn thing burned a hole in my hip, and then all my fucking effluvia got in the wound and created a septic situation, and next thing I know I’m in the hospital dying. Which is tragic—right?—because at the time I’m just sixteen. My old man told me later that the
doctors said I was a goner. And I’ll tell you something, Ziz. I’m not one of those people who questions the existence of God. I know He’s up there, because while I was dying I
saw
Him. His Son, anyways—Him and the Virgin Mary. Only thing was, Jesus looked older than she did. I don’t know how to explain that. Some shit’s just plain mysterious.”

“Douche, I got limited interest right now in theology,” Frankie Zizza said, dropping black olives down the middle of a sub in a perfect row. His wife, though raised Catholic, had recently converted to some off-brand Protestant denomination with a high percentage of Tea Party members. Frankie himself had been proclaiming his atheism ever since high school. “You ask me, religion’s ruining the goddamn country.”

“It’s not religion I’m talking about, Ziz. It’s mystery. It’s the mystery at the fucking heart of things.”

“The mystery at the middle of my fucking heart,” Frankie said, “is what made me hire this douche bag in the first place. If somebody could answer
that
one, I’d say he was positively Socratic.”

The previous afternoon, a customer had ordered a pound of roast beef. Since the tray in the display case had only a few strands left, Dushay strolled into the back room, pushed aside the better part of a sixteen-pound hunk that Matt had opened just that morning and took out a new one. Frankie bought them from a high-end wholesaler who used no preservatives or caramel coating, so they didn’t last long, and each one cost close to eighty dollars.

Lawrence Dushay was in his late twenties and a dead ringer for the actor Steve Buscemi, which helped the Saugus police identify him a couple years ago when he tried to fence a bunch of laptops stolen from Best Buy. He was one of several guys Frankie had hired after they got out of jail; most of them had worked out well, as he liked to note, and two owned businesses themselves now. Dushay, however, was proving peculiarly
inept. His first day on the job, ogling a female customer while slicing pastrami, he caught his sleeve in the Berkel and might’ve lost a finger or two if Matt hadn’t reached over and shut off the machine. He overcharged some and undercharged others. He cut thick slices when people asked for thin and vice versa. One day he showed up in flip-flops.

“You’re not still pissed about that roast beef, are you?” he asked now.

“Pissed?” Frankie said. “No, Douche, of course not. Why would I be pissed? I’m really happy about it. I’m especially pleased for Eddie and Wolf.”

“Who’re they?”

“Eddie and Wolf are my fucking mutts, Douche. They’ll be the ultimate beneficiaries of your generosity. Day after tomorrow they’ll chow down on eight or ten pounds of rotten roast beef.”

They finished the subs, and Dushay was dispatched to deliver them. As soon as the door closed behind him, Zizza shook his head. “That guy,” he said, “is a walking oil spill.”

Matt pulled off the gloves they had to wear when handling food. They were made of powder-free polyethylene and supposedly could not cause an allergy, but lately he’d developed red patches on both hands, around the base of each knuckle. As he’d learned some time ago, every profession has its hazards. “He might’ve been better off if they’d kept him in jail,” he said, then instantly wished he hadn’t offered that opinion.

Frankie had been his best friend from first grade through high school, though nobody could figure out what drew them together: Matt Drinnan, bookish, upper middle class, college bound, and Frankie Zizza, a working-class Italian who did so badly in school that his father finally persuaded the principal to release him each day at lunchtime, so he could hustle down to the deli and learn to make the sandwiches he’d spend the rest of his life selling. Each of them had always been able to tell
when he’d aroused the other’s displeasure, and Matt knew he’d incurred Frankie’s just now.

“You really think,” Zizza asked, “that Dushay would be better off someplace like Shirley, where a couple of BGs could hold him down every night while a third one banged him in the ass?”

“No.”

“Then we’ve achieved rare concord, MD. Because guess what?”

“What?”

“I don’t think so either.” Frankie pulled his own gloves off and walked around in front of the display case to the table where the coffee dispensers stood. He filled a Styrofoam cup and took a swallow, then promptly leaned over and spat it into the trash can. “Fucking Douche Bag!” he cried, slapping his forehead. “Again he makes the coffee out of yesterday’s grounds.”

Around eleven, the lunch crowd began to stream in, the motion detector above the door emitting one beep after another, a line starting to form. Day in and day out, you saw the same people, usually at the same time, and one thing that surprised Matt when he started working here was that they tended to order the same stuff on each visit. At eleven fifteen, Ryan Kelly, who owned Kelly’s Heating and Plumbing, would come in with mud on his knees and ask for the chicken cutlet sandwich with provolone and prosciutto. Billy Sutherland, the branch manager at the Main Street B of A, would appear at twelve sharp and request a boneless buffalo chicken sub on a braided sesame roll and a seafood salad on focaccia. While waiting for his sandwiches, he always grabbed two bags of Utz sour cream and onion chips and two bottles of root beer.

Matt observed their predictability with something akin to horror, but after a while he became their accomplice: he quit asking what they wanted, instead saying, “The usual?”
Like robots they nodded and, as if he’d been programmed, he slapped the same meat on the same bread, along with the same condiments. Once, when he and Frankie were cleaning up at the end of the day, he explained why he found such repetition appalling. “I mean, if you’re going to buy your lunch at the same place every day, at exactly the same time, why not at least try something different? Would it really upset Ryan’s equilibrium if for once in his life he ate pastrami with spicy mustard on a bulkie?”

Frankie was sponging off the counter, just as he had at closing time every day since he was thirteen years old. “ ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ You know who said that, don’t you?”

“Of course. But I’m surprised you do.”

“My kid told me about it. But Thoreau was full of shit, and so are you.” He stepped over to the sink and wrung out the sponge, twisting it a little harder than necessary. “Most people just don’t crave as much stimulation as you do, MD. They know there’s a lot they haven’t experienced and never will, but they’re okay with that. Because some of what they don’t know might flip their lives upside down if they
did
. You know what I mean?”

Matt didn’t bother to reply. It was always there between them: unspoken condemnation liberally seasoned by thirty-five years of unbroken devotion.

Today he made Ryan Kelly “the usual” and watched him leave to eat lunch in peace before replacing yet another leaky faucet or clearing one more blocked drain. He prepared Billy’s regular order, and when the three drunks who daily came in together appeared, he served them their baloney sandwiches and undercharged them like Frankie had instructed, tossing a free bag of chips into each sack. Then, as things were just beginning to taper off, he looked up and got the first genuine surprise of the day when the door opened and Paul Nowicki stepped through it.

A lifelong resident of Montvale whose wire-rims might have made him look scholarly had he not been so big, Nowicki owned one of two hardware stores on Main Street. He was four or five years older than Matt and, like Frankie, had taken over the family business when his father retired. When people used the term “solid citizen,” they generally had someone like Paul in mind. For years he’d looked after his sister, who’d been born with some type of rare heart disease. You’d see him helping her into and out of the car, walking her to church, waiting for her at the doctor’s office. He never had a family of his own until she died, and everyone figured it was because of his devotion. If he refused to care for her, who would? “That’s just the kind of guy he is,” they’d say. He was an usher at Saint Patrick’s and a member of the board of selectmen. Because he’d always loved dogs, he helped establish the local chapter of PAWS, the Pets and Animal Welfare Society.