Songs in Ordinary Time Page 58

  “Nice to meet you, Tom,” Sam said, nodding at the purring cat.

  “He’s a nice cat.” Renie stroked its neck.

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “Helen don’t know Tom’s here.”

  “Where does she think he is?” He was confused by Renie’s obvious alarm.

  “I mean she don’t know anything about Tom. I didn’t tell her.” He stared at Sam.

  “So you keep a little pussy on the side, big deal.” He laughed, but Renie didn’t get it.

  “I just didn’t want her to hear about it. I just didn’t.”

  “Hear about what?” And the minute he said it, he knew Renie meant his old dog Riddles. Renie didn’t want to endure her old complaints about Riddles, about his deceit. Renie had said the dog had just followed him home one night. She claimed he had lured the dog home with him. Riddles had lived in the shed off the back porch. Whenever Helen went shopping or to church Renie would carry the stocky red dog into his bedroom, where he’d spend the furtive hour laughing and talking to Riddles until she came home, breathing into the back of her gloved hand, insisting she could “smell dog” in the house. One day Riddles disappeared. Helen said the real owners probably took it back. Renie said Riddles ran away because he was a hunting dog and not a house dog. But when he said it, he had gotten this same sheepish look, because he must have known it was a lie.

  Renie began to rearrange a display of juice makers. He had on the same dark plaid shirt and brown tie he always wore. Poor bastard, Sam thought. Let somebody else tell him that Helen had paid Howard Menka to poison the dog. He couldn’t bring himself to.

  The cat jumped down behind the counter and lapped milk from a blue soup bowl Sam recognized as part of his mother’s china. The Fermoyle legacy had come to this. He thought of Marie. He cleared his throat and asked Renie what he knew about Omar Duvall. His first night home, in the middle of her tirade, Helen had told him that Marie was going out with a trashy-looking man by that name.

  Renie said he’d only met Duvall one time. Duvall had tried to interest him in some soap-selling scheme. He suggested using the soap as a promotional tool: a free ten-pound box of detergent with every washing machine. When Renie said he couldn’t afford to do that, Duvall had explained that the thing to do was to jack up the price of the washing machine enough to cover each box. Renie said he didn’t think that would work, not with the big new Montgomery Ward’s opening up on Route 4. Well, then, just sell the soap then, Duvall had suggested. He could even keep it out back, sell it on the side, no wasted shelf space, no advertising, just tell his customers what a great buy it was. And that way, Duvall had said, it could all be under the table, nothing on the books, no trouble like he’d had before with the IRS and the cash sales.

  “So right then, when he said that, I don’t know, I got suspicious.” Renie stepped close to Sam and looked around, though they were the only ones in the store. “I think he’s really a tax agent, that’s what I think. I could tell the way he was looking around. He just knew too much about what was going on here.” Renie looked around again. “You maybe oughta warn Marie there’s something fishy going on.”

  “Not much gets by you, does it, Renie? You’ve always got your finger right there on the pulse of things.” He leaned on the counter. “Hey, I’ll bet you know something about my mother’s trust fund for me.”

  “Nothing! I don’t know nothing.” Renie shook his head and this time held the shrug with upturned hands.

  “Don’t give me that shit,” he snapped. Renie did this to him.

  “I got nothing to do with any of that,” Renie said, the color in his face draining as he eyed a long, black Lincoln that was parking in front of the store. “Ask Helen.”

  “I’ll ask Helen. I’ll ask her, goddamn it!” He pounded the counter, and the cat darted toward the cellar door.

  “There’s a customer coming,” Renie warned as a tall, slim woman emerged from the Lincoln.

  “I don’t give a shit who’s coming.”

  “Sam!”

  The bells on the opening door rang, and Sam moved to the back of the store. He opened a refrigerator and peered inside. The woman wore a red-and-white-polka-dot dress. She carried a toaster under her arm as she marched up to Renie. She banged the toaster down, dislodging crumbs and charred raisins onto the counter. “It’s defective! This morning the toast never popped up and it burned so bad that now my ceiling’s stained.”

  Renie was still staring at the crumbs when the woman flung down a receipt. Renie picked it up and read it closely.

  “I want my money back, every penny!”

  “The toaster’s a year old,” Renie said. “It only had a ninety-day warranty. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry! You’re sorry? My ceiling’s ruined and that’s all you can say is you’re sorry?”

  “I could give you a new one, Mrs. Hinds,” Renie said with a weak gesture toward the shelf of toasters behind him.

  Sam peered down the length of the store. Nora Cushing. He hadn’t seen her in years.

  “All I want is my money back,” she insisted.

  She hadn’t changed a bit, Sam thought. The Cushing fortune, and still tight-fisted with every penny and just as bitchy as ever.

  “Look at them,” Renie pleaded. “Take any one you want, Mrs. Hinds. You got your pick.”

  “I don’t think you understand. It’s the principle here. It’s not the toaster. I mean, my Lord, Dad’s getting the Golden Toastee line in the store, so it’s not as if I need one of these!” she said with a flip of her hand.

  “You what?” Sam remembered her gasping eighteen years ago. “You married her? You married Marie Luseau? My Lord, you can’t be serious.”

  Renie was staring at her. “The Golden Toastee line? You mean the toasters? You’re going to sell them?”

  “Yes, so it’s not the toaster, you see, it’s the principle—”

  “Are you sure about that?” Renie interrupted.

  “What are you suggesting, that I’m trying to finagle something here?” she sputtered.

  “I think you better check, Mrs. Hinds. I don’t think Cushing’s is getting the Golden Toastee line.”

  The laughter rose from deep in her throat. “Well, we are, but that’s beside the point….”

  “Nora!” Sam called, coming toward her now. “Nora Cushing!”

  “Oh! Oh, Sam!” She glanced at Renie, then back at Sam. “Oh, I’m so embarrassed.”

  “How’ve you been?” he asked, conscious of his frayed cuff as they shook hands.

  “Well, I guess I’m a little worked up,” she said, gesturing toward Renie, whose whole body seemed to have caved in on itself. “It was just such an awful morning. I was busy with Bernard—he’s been very sick, you know.”

  Sam nodded. He had heard that Nora’s son had some terrible illness.

  “But then smoke from the burned toast got all through the house, and it just seemed like there wasn’t anything I could do about anything anymore, except this! The toaster!” She grabbed it from the counter and held it. “Renie, what can I say? I’m sorry. I’m really embarrassed.”

  Renie stared at her with bright wet eyes. His mouth twitched.

  “See, Renie understands,” Sam had to say when Renie still did not speak. “You’re going through a lot right now.”

  “Oh God,” she sighed. “It’s just been so awful.” She sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her wrist. Her perfume smelled of roses and wrinkled dollar bills. Her tanned skin and smooth black hair looked expensive. Even under the store’s dim lights her necklace and bracelets and rings glittered. She had begged him to marry her. Marie Luseau could go to a home somewhere and have the baby. She’d even pay for it herself. It wasn’t a real marriage, Nora had argued, because she was just a child who had set out to trap him. They could have it annulled. Between her father, who was a Knight of Malta, and her cousin, Father Burke, they had plenty of connections to the Vatican. “I can’t,” he’d said to every entreaty. Can’t. Co
uld not, would not. Why? Why? Why? she’d demanded. They had been engaged for over a year. Her mother’s parlor had been filled with gifts. Why? Because. Because. Because he loved her, loved skinny little Marie Luseau more than he had ever loved anyone. Had that been it? he wondered now. Had it been that simple, when all these years he had regarded it as a symptom of his failed life, a coward’s way out, one more heinous escape. How grateful Nora must be now. Eighteen years ago she had wept hysterically in her father’s car as she stabbed her wrist with a nail file. How could you do this to me? How could you? How could you? How could you humiliate me with someone like her?

  “It’s leukemia,” she whispered. “We’ve brought him everywhere.” Her eyes shone with tears as she recounted the history of her son’s illness. The easy bruising and painful joints she had blithely ascribed to growing pains, the shocking diagnosis, the bewilderment, the unfairness of it all. He was their only child, just fifteen years old, a brilliant student. A gifted pianist.

  Renie blew his nose into his handkerchief. Sam ran his fingers through his hair, a sad smile fixed against this sudden urge to push her out of his way and run up the street. She touched his arm, then reached suddenly into her pocketbook, pawing through it with the same intensity with which she had searched that night for her nail file. She pulled out a photograph of her son and handed it to him. He said the boy looked like his father. Yes, she nodded. He did. She asked about his children, taking deep breaths, smelling rich again, her pinched brave smile attesting to the blind injustice that would rob her of her one and only stellar child while the ragtag kids of a loser like Sam Fermoyle were spared.

  “Is it true about Alice being interested in the convent?” she asked, patting her smudged eyeliner with a pale blue tissue.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  It was a painful moment. Her look said it all: she shouldn’t have asked, because how the hell would he know. “Actually, she’s going to college in just a few more weeks,” he said.

  She asked about his mother and Helen. He realized she hadn’t asked him what he was doing now. People who knew him never did. She asked if he was still at his mother’s.

  “Temporarily,” he said. For the last ten years.

  After she left, Renie said he had to close for a while. He had a headache, and his stomach was upset. Renie followed him to the door, and Sam asked again if he could borrow a buck. Renie took out his wallet that was so worn it had been taped together on the fold. Even the dollar he gave him was thin and frayed.

  “Hey, thanks, Renie,” he said with a flick of the bill; then, seeing the misery in Renie’s expression, he turned back and asked what was wrong.

  “Nothing,” Renie said.

  “You think I’m gonna go get a drink with this, right?”

  “No, I wasn’t thinking that.”

  “Well, what are you thinking?”

  “It’s a business thing,” Renie said. He shrugged and shook his head, and now Sam realized it was the cat. Renie was afraid he’d tell Helen about the cat. Well, if that was it, he wanted Renie to know the secret was safe with him.

  Renie nodded, then looked up at him. “You know what you said once, about Riddles being buried under the tomatoes?”

  Sam pointed to himself. “I said that? Me? No! I’m like you. I don’t know what could have happened to him.”

  “You think he ran away?” Renie watched him closely.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe he got lost. You know, maybe he took a wrong turn or something, and he got confused. Like when you found him, right? He was lost then.”

  “He wasn’t lost.” Renie looked at him sheepishly. “I just said that. I got him off this lady that came in the store. Her husband died and she said the dog was always howling he was so lonesome. She was going to put him to sleep, so I said I’d take him.” A little grin came over his face. “And right off the bat he liked me. Just like he did her husband. She told me that. So I know he didn’t run away.”

  “I don’t know. It’s just one of those things, I guess.”

  “Maybe somebody stole him,” Renie said hesitantly.

  “Well, there you go! That’s probably what happened.”

  “Yah. And sometimes I think I hear him, you know. I get up in the middle of the night and I go out on the porch to see if it’s him.”

  “Yah, well, who knows, Renie. One of these nights he’ll probably be scratching on the door and Helen’ll start yelling, ‘That dog’s ripping my screen,’ and then Bridget’ll start barking back at him again, and it’ll be just like it used to be.”

  “I hope so,” Renie said.

  In Joey’s absence a rotted cornerpost of the popcorn stand had been yanked out, and the roof edge was sagging, lifting at times like a tent flap in the wind. One night all the stacked wooden cases for empty cans and bottles had been toppled by raccoons or vandals, and so they had been hauled away by a town crew. And now Joey had a competitor. He was a pleasant young man who sold popcorn, soda, foot-long hotdogs, and French fries out of the side of an old school bus that had been painted red, white, and blue. The beauty of this arrangement was that the bus would be there only during the band concerts. By day the park could be noncommercial—that is, as soon as the aldermen could get rid of the old man’s ramshackle stand.

  No one was more disappointed than Chief Stoner when Joey returned to his stand just two days after leaving the hospital. Retirement would have been a more gracious ending than the eviction that even some of Joey’s oldest sympathizers were considering. In the way that inexplicable events are often diabolized, the mugging had come to be regarded as almost inevitable. Once again, Joey Seldon had crossed paths with violence. Oddly, the town’s indignation was less over the old man’s suffering than it was over the defiant swagger of Blue Mooney. Fired from J. C. Colter, he now spent his days racing his motorcycle up and down the winding mountain roads and his bitter nights roaring through Atkinson’s sleeping streets. There had been three more burglaries in the last two weeks, and now Jerry Coughlin was convinced his restaurant was next on Mooney’s list. He’d banned Mooney from the A+X, which came as a great relief to Alice Fermoyle.

  The police, in an effort to monitor Mooney’s activities, began to sit in a cruiser parked at the end of the road that led up to his mother’s cottage. Her young customers had stopped coming. Just as she’d predicted, her son’s presence was harming her family.

  So with the old man back in the park selling popcorn, it was a bittersweet time for Sonny. For Carol’s sake, he and Eunice had tried being friends, but it was impossible. Without love’s flattering veil she’d become the same loud, brash, irresponsible Eunice Bonifante who’d always grated on his nerves.

  He had begun to understand how connected people were. The old Judge had known it. His father had known it. It amazed him that he’d veered so drastically off course.

  He went home every two and half hours to give Carol her medication and spend a few minutes visiting with her. He had reinstituted the weekly firearm inspection. He filled the jugs in the fallout shelter with fresh water. He took the police radio out of the house and returned it to the station. He hired two shifts of nurses and insisted that Lester get out and have some fun. Call Alice, he told him. Lester said she wouldn’t talk to him. Then go meet another girl, he said, relieved, not that he’d thought she was a bad influence on Les, but she certainly couldn’t have been a positive one, not with all her family’s troubles.

  One day Lester went to the rectory and asked to speak with Father Gannon. He said he finally understood his life’s calling. He wanted to be a priest. Father Gannon advised him to wait until he was older, until he’d experienced life a little more. Shocked and disappointed, Lester made an appointment with the Monsignor, who put Lester in immediate contact with a pious young seminary counselor in Saint Albans. The Monsignor leaned across his desk and told Father Gannon that he was never, ever to give such twisted advice to a young man again. The office door slammed. The kitchen door slammed.

 
Howard looked up from the hedge he was trimming to see Father Gannon sit down on the steps and light a cigarette. Howard had never smoked. He liked the smell of cigarette smoke, but no one else did, especially not the Monsignor, who had banned the unpriestly habit from his rectory.

  “So how was your trip to see Perda?” Father Gannon asked, rolling the perfect white ash off his cigarette.

  “It was okay,” Howard said, pleased that Father had remembered his cousin’s name. Most people couldn’t even remember Howard’s name.

  “How’d Miss Brastus like the trip? You two have fun together?”

  “She didn’t like it too much.” Howard’s voice quavered. He wished he’d never told Father Gannon about Lucille. He lowered his head to the angle of shrubbery he continued to clip. It hurt to talk about it. Actually Lucille had said it was the worst time of her life.

  “How come?”

  “Too depressing there, she said.”

  “Really? Well, where does Perda live?”

  “Waterbury,” Howard said.

  “Waterbury?” He took a long drag on his cigarette, all the while peering down at Howard. “You mean the state mental hospital?”

  “Yah. That’s where Perda lives. She’s got the mind of a baby.”

  “Howard! That’s not where you go on a first date!”

  He couldn’t tell if Father Gannon was surprised or amused. “It wasn’t a first date. Me and Jozia always used to go see Perda.”

  “I know, but with Miss Brastus it was a date.”

  “It was?”

  “Of course. Now you have to make it up to her. You have to take her on a real date.”

  “I do?”

  “Yes, Howard! To a movie or out dancing. Women like that. They want to be fussed over. They like to get all dressed up and go somewhere nice—not to a mental institution.” Father Gannon got up and ground out his cigarette. “Ask her. You’ll see.”

  The tender branch tips fluttered to the grass as Howard’s clippers scissored along the hedge. He didn’t think he could do that. Besides, she and him hadn’t spoken a word since the bus back late that night, when he’d tried to give her the extra plastic paperweight he’d saved for her. It was the prettiest one. Inside was a yellow flower that sprayed red droplets through the water when it was shaken.