5 ORANGE CURTAINS SUNDAY MORNING AT SIX, four and a half hours before his daughter Nadine's First Communion, Jimmy Marcus got a call from Pete Gilibiowski down at the store telling him he was already in the weeds. "The weeds?" Jimmy sat up in bed, looked over at the clock. "Friggin' Pete, it's six in the morning. You and Katie can't handle six, how you going to handle eight when the first church crowd comes in?" "That's the thing, though, Jim. Katie ain't here." "She ain't what?" Jimmy threw back the covers and got out of bed. "She ain't here. Supposed to be at five-thirty, right? I got the doughnut guy honking his horn out back, and I got no coffee ready on account of?" Jimmy said, "Uh-huh," and walked down the hallway toward Katie's room, feeling the cold drafts in the house on his feet, the early May mornings still carrying the raw bite of March afternoons. "?a group of bar-hopping, drinking-in-the-park, methamphetamine-in-their-squashes construction workers come in here at five-forty and cleaned us out of Colombian and French roast. And the deli looks like shit. How much you paying those kids to work Saturday nights, Jim?"
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Jimmy said, "Uh-huh," again and pushed open Katie's door after a quick knock. Her bed was empty and, worse, made, which meant she hadn't slept here last night. "'Cause you either got to give 'em raises or shitcan their worthless asses," Pete said. "I got an extra hour of prep work before I can even?How ya doing, Mrs. Carmody? Coffee's brewing now, hon, won't be a sec." "I'm coming in," Jimmy said. "Plus, I got all the Sunday papers still bundled up, circulars on top, look like crap?" "I said I'm coming in." "Oh. No shit, Jim? Thanks." "Pete? Call Sal, see if he can make it in by eight-thirty, 'stead of ten." "Yeah?" Jimmy heard the sound of a hand standing on a car horn from Pete's end. "And Pete, Christ's sake, open the door for Yser's kid, will you? He ain't going to wait all day with those doughnuts." Jimmy hung up and walked back to the bedroom. Annabeth was sitting up in bed, sheets off her body, yawning. "The store?" she said, drawing the words out with another long yawn. He nodded. "Katie no-showed." "Today," Annabeth said. "Day of Nadine's First Communion, she no-shows for work. What if she no-shows at the church?" "I'm sure she'll make it." "I don't know, Jimmy. If she got so drunk last night, she blew off the store, you never know? Jimmy shrugged. There was no talking to Annabeth when it came to Katie. Annabeth had only two modes in terms of her stepdaughter?either irritated and frosty or elated that they were best friends. There was no in- between, and Jimmy knew?with some small amount of guilt?that most of the confusion stemmed from Annabeth coming into the picture when Katie was seven, just getting to know her father, and barely over the loss of her mother. Katie had been openly and honestly grateful for a female presence in the lonely apartment she'd shared with her father. But she'd also been wounded by her mother's death?if not irreparably, then at least profoundly, Jimmy knew?and anytime that loss would sneak up and slice through the walls of her heart over the years, she'd vent it mostly on Annabeth, who, as a real mother, never quite lived up to all the things Marita's ghost could have or would have been. "Christ, Jimmy," Annabeth said as Jimmy pulled a sweatshirt over the T-shirt he'd slept in and went looking for his jeans, "you're not going in, are you?"
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"Just for an hour." Jimmy found his jeans curled around the bedpost. "Two, tops. Sal was supposed to relieve Katie at ten anyway. Pete's putting a call in to him now, trying to get him in early." "Sal's seventy-something years old." "My point. He's going to be sleeping? Bladder probably woke him up at four, he's been watching AMC ever since." "Shit." Annabeth pushed the sheets completely away from her and got out of bed. "Fucking Katie. She's going to screw this day up, too?" Jimmy felt his neck get hot. "What other day has she screwed up lately?" Annabeth showed him the back of her hand as she reached the bathroom. "You even know where she could be?" "Diane or Eve's," Jimmy said, still back at that dismissive hand she'd raised over her shoulder. Annabeth?the love of his life, no question?man, she had no idea how cold she could be sometimes, no clue (and this was typical of the whole Savage family) just how corrosive an effect her negative moments or moods could have on other people. "Maybe a boyfriend's." "Yeah? Who's she seeing these days?" Annabeth turned on the shower, stepped back to the sink to give it time to warm up. "I figured you knew better than me." Annabeth riffled the medicine cabinet for the toothpaste and shook her head. "She stopped seeing Little Caesar in November. That was good enough for me." Jimmy, putting his shoes on, smiled. Annabeth always called Bobby O'Donnell "Little Caesar" unless she was calling him something far worse, and not just because he was a gangster-wannabe with a cold stare, but because he was short and fleshy like Edward G. Robinson. Those had been a tense several months, when Katie had begun seeing him last summer and the Savage brothers told Jimmy they'd clip the prick if it became necessary, Jimmy not sure if they were morally repulsed because such a scumbag was seeing their beloved stepniece, or because Bobby O'Donnell had become too much competition. Katie had broken it off herself, though, and outside of a lot of 3 A.M. phone calls and one near-bloodfest around Christmas when Bobby and Roman Fallow showed up on the front porch, the breakup aftermath had passed pretty painlessly. Annabeth's abhorrence of Bobby O'Donnell could amuse Jimmy because he half wondered sometimes if Annabeth hated Bobby not only because he looked like Edward G. and had slept with her stepdaughter, but also because he was a half-assed criminal as opposed to the pros she assumed her brothers were and knew, beyond a doubt, that her husband had been in the years before Marita died.
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Marita had died fourteen years ago, while Jimmy served a two-year bid at the Deer Island House of Corrections in Winthrop. One Saturday during visitation hours, as five-year-old Katie squirmed in her lap, Marita told Jimmy a mole on her arm had been darkening lately, and she was going to visit a doctor at the community clinic. Just to be safe, she said. Four Saturdays later she was undergoing chemo. Six months after she'd told him about the mole, she was dead, Jimmy having been forced to watch his wife's body puree into chalk over a succession of Saturdays from the other side of a dark wood table scarred by cigarettes, sweat, come stains, and over a century's worth of convict bullshit and convict laments. The last month of her life Marita had been too sick to come, too weak to write, and Jimmy had to make do with phone calls during which she'd be exhausted or doped up or both. Usually both. "You know what I dream about?" she slurred once. "All the time now?" "What's that, baby?" "Orange curtains. Big, thick orange curtains just? She smacked her lips and Jimmy heard the sound of her gulping water. "卝ust flapping in the wind, hanging from these tall clotheslines, Jimmy. Just flapping. They never do anything else. Flap, flap, flap. Hundreds of 'em in this big, big field. Flapping away? He waited for more, but that was the extent of it, and he didn't want Marita to nod off in the middle of the conversation like she'd done several times before, so he said, "How's Katie?" "Huh?" "How's Katie doing, honey?" "Your mom takes good care of us. She's sad." "Who? My mom or Katie?" "Both. Lookit, Jimmy? I gotta go. Nauseous. Tired." "Okay, baby." "Love you." "Love you, too." "Jimmy? We never owned any orange curtains. Right?" "Right." "Weird," she said, and then she hung up. Last thing she ever said to him: Weird.
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Yeah, it was weird. A mole that had been on your arm since you'd lain in a crib looking up at a cardboard mobile suddenly darkened, and twenty-four weeks later, almost two full years removed from the last time you'd lain in bed with your husband and curled your leg over his, you were dropped into a box and buried beneath the earth, your husband standing fifty yards away, flanked by armed guards, shackles clamped around his ankles and wrists. Jimmy got out of prison two months after the funeral, stood in his kitchen in the same clothes he'd left it in, and smiled at his alien child. He might have remembered her first four years, but she didn't. She only remembered the last two, maybe some scattered fragments of the man he'd been in this house, before she was allowed to see him only on Saturdays from the other side of an old table in a dank, smelly place built on haunted Indian burial grounds, where winds whipped and walls dripped and the ceilings hung too low. Standing in his kitchen, watching her watch him, Jimmy had never felt more useless. He had never felt half as alone or frightened as when he squatted down by Katie and took her small hands in his and saw the two of them in his mind's eye as if he floated just above the room. And the floating him thought: Man, I feel bad for these two. Strangers in a shitty kitchen, sizing each other up, trying not to hate each other because she'd died and left them stuck together and incapable of knowing what the hell they were going to do next. This daughter?this creature, living and breathing and partially formed in so many ways?was dependent on him now, whether either of them liked it or not. "She's smiling down at us from heaven," Jimmy told Katie. "She's proud of us. Real proud." Katie said, "Do you have to go back to that place again?" "Nope. Never again." "You going to go someplace else?" Jimmy, at that moment, would gladly have done another six years in a shithole like Deer Island, or even someplace worse, rather than face twenty-four hours in his kitchen with this daughter-stranger, this scary unknown of a future, this cork?in no uncertain terms?on what remained of his life as a young man. "No way," he said. "I'm sticking with you." "I'm hungry." And it hit Jimmy all the way?Oh, my God, I have to feed this girl whenever she's hungry. For the rest of our lives. Jesus Christ. "Well, okay," he said, feeling the smile shake on his face. "We'll eat." * * * JIMMY GOT TO Cottage Market, the corner store he owned, by six-thirty and worked the cash register and the Lotto machine while Pete stocked the coffee counter with the doughnuts from Yser Gaswami's Dunkin' Donuts on Kilmer and the pastries, cannolis, and pigs-in-a-blanket delivered from Tony Buca's bakery. During lulls,
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Jimmy ran coffee from the brewing machines in back out to the oversize thermoses on the coffee counter and cut the twine on the Sunday Globes, Heralds, and New York Timeses. He placed the circulars and comics in the middle, then stacked them all neatly in front of the candy shelves below the cash counter. "Sal say what time he'll be in?" Pete said, "The best he could do was nine-thirty. His car shit the bed so he's going to have to T it. That's like two train lines and a bus transfer from here and he said he wasn't even dressed." "Shit." Around seven-fifteen, they handled a semirush of folks coming off the night shift?cops, mostly, from the D-9, some nurses from Saint Regina's, and a few working girls who serviced the illegal after-hours clubs down on the other side of Buckingham Avenue in the Flats and up in Rome Basin. All of them were weary but convivial and wired, too, emitting an aura of intense relief, as if they'd just walked off the same battlefield together, muddy, bloody, but erect and unmaimed. During a five-minute recess before the early-mass crowd stormed the gates, Jimmy called Drew Pigeon and asked him if he'd seen Katie. "I think she's here, yeah," Drew said. "Yeah?" Jimmy heard the spike of hope in his voice and only then realized that he'd been more anxious than he'd allowed himself to admit. "Think so," Drew said. "Lemme go check." "'Preciate it, Drew." He listened to Drew's heavy feet echo away down a hardwood hallway as he cashed two scratch tickets for Old Lady Harmon, trying not to blink away tears from the sharp assault of her old lady perfume. He heard Drew coming back toward the phone and felt a mild flutter in his chest as he handed Old Lady Harmon her fifteen bucks and waved bye to her. "Jimmy?" "Here, Drew." "Sorry. It was Diane Cestra slept over. She's in there on the floor of Eve's bedroom, but no Katie." The flutter in Jimmy's chest stopped hard, as if it had been pinched between tweezers. "Hey, no problem." "Eve said Katie dropped them off round one? Didn't say where she was going."
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"Okay, man." Jimmy put a false brightness into his tone. "I'll track her down." "She seeing anyone maybe?" "Nineteen-year-old girls, Drew? Who could keep a tally?" "That's the cold truth," Drew said with a yawn. "Eve, Jimmy? All the calls she gets from different guys, I'd swear she needs a roster by the phone to keep 'em straight." Jimmy forced a chuckle. "Hey, thanks again, Drew." "Anytime, Jimmy. Take care." Jimmy hung up and looked down at the register keyboard as if it could tell him something. This wasn't the first time Katie had stayed out all night. Hell, it wasn't even the tenth. And it wasn't even the first time she'd blown off work, though in both cases, she usually called. Still, if she'd met a guy with movie-star looks and city-boy charm 匤immy wasn't so far removed from nineteen himself that he couldn't remember what that was like. And while he'd never let Katie think he condoned it, he couldn't be so hypocritical in his heart as to condemn it. The bell hanging from a ribbon tacked to the top of the door clanged and Jimmy looked up to see the first group of coiffed blue-hairs from the rosary-bead crowd charge into the store, yapping away about the raw morning, the priest's diction, the litter in the streets. Pete stuck his head up from the deli counter and wiped his hands with the towel he'd been using to clean the prep table. He tossed a full box of surgical gloves up onto the counter and then came over behind the second cash register. He leaned in toward Jimmy and said, "Welcome to hell," and the second group of Holy Rollers followed fast on the heels of the first. Jimmy hadn't worked a Sunday morning in nearly two years, and he'd forgotten what a zoo it could turn into. Pete was right. The blue-haired fanatics, who packed the seven o'clock mass at Saint Cecilia's while normal people slept, took their biblical shopping fury into Jimmy's store and decimated the pastry and doughnut trays, drained the coffee, stripped the dairy coolers to a shell, and reduced the newspaper stacks by half. They banged into display racks and stepped on the chip bags and plastic sleeves of peanuts that fell to their feet. They shouted out deli orders, Lotto orders, scratch ticket orders, and orders for Pall Malls and Chesterfields with a rabid indiscrimination as to their places in line. Then, as a sea of blue, white, and bald heads bobbed behind them, they dawdled at the counter to ask after Jimmy's and Pete's families while they fished for exact change down to the last lint-enfuzzed penny and took prolonged eons to lift their purchases off the counter and move out of the way for the raging clamor behind them. Jimmy hadn't seen anything resembling this kind of chaos since the last time he'd attended an Irish wedding with an open bar, and when he finally glanced up at the clock at eight-forty-five as the last of them went out through the door to the street, he could feel the sweat drenching the T-shirt under his sweatshirt, soaking into his skin. He looked at the bomb that had exploded in the middle of his store and then over at Pete, and he felt a sudden flush of kinship and fraternity with him that made him think of the seven-fifteen crew of cops, nurses, and hookers, as
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if he and Pete had ascended to a new level of friendship just by surviving the eight o'clock Sunday blast of ravenous geriatrics. Pete tossed him a tired grin. "Slows for about half an hour now. Mind if I step out back and grab a smoke?" Jimmy laughed, feeling good now and swept by a sudden, odd pride at this little business he'd built into a neighborhood institution. "Fuck, Pete, smoke a whole pack." He'd tidied the aisles, restocked dairy, and was replenishing the doughnut and pastry trays when the bell clanged, and he looked over to see Brendan Harris and his little brother, Silent Ray, walk past the counter and head for the small square of aisles where the breads and detergents and cookies and teas were stocked. Jimmy busied himself with the cellophane wraps over the pastries and doughnuts, and wished he hadn't give Pete the impression he could take a mini-vacation out back and that his ass would get back in here immediately. He glanced over and noticed Brendan peering above the aisle tops at the cash registers, like he was either planning to stick the place up or hoping for a glimpse of someone. For one irrational second, Jimmy wondered if he'd have to fire Pete for dealing out of the store. But then he checked himself, remembered that Pete had looked him straight in the eyes and sworn he'd never jeopardize Jimmy's life's work by dealing pot in his place of business. Jimmy had known he was telling the truth because unless you were the Grand Wizard of All Liars, it was nearly impossible to lie to Jimmy when he looked in your eyes after asking you a direct question; he knew every tic and tell and eye movement, no matter how minor, that could give you away. Something he'd learned by watching his father make him drunken promises he never kept?you saw it enough, you recognized the animal every time it chose to resurface. So Jimmy remembered Pete looking him dead in the eyes and swearing he'd never deal out of this place, and Jimmy knew it was true. So then who was Brendan looking for? Could he be stupid enough to be considering a rip-off? Jimmy had known Brendan's father, Just Ray Harris, so he knew a sizable chunk of dumb ran in the genes, but no one was so dumb as to try to rob a store on the East Bucky Flats/Point line with his thirteen-year-old mute brother in tow. Plus, if anyone got some brains in the family, Jimmy would begrudgingly admit it was Brendan. A shy kid, but good- looking as hell, and Jimmy had long ago learned the difference between someone who was quiet because he didn't know the meanings of many words and someone who just stayed inside himself, watching, listening, taking it all in. Brendan had that quality; you sensed he understood people a little too well, and that the knowledge made him nervous. He turned toward Jimmy and their eyes met, and the kid gave Jimmy a nervous, friendly smile, putting too much into it, as if he were overcompensating because there were other things on his mind. Jimmy said, "Help you, Brendan?" "Uh, no, Mr. Marcus, just picking up some, ah, some of that Irish tea my mom likes." "Barry's?" "That's it, yeah."
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"Next aisle over." "Oh. Thanks." Jimmy went back up behind the registers just as Pete came back in, carrying that stale reek of a hastily puffed cigarette all over him. "What time's Sal getting here again?" Jimmy said. "Any time now, should be." Pete leaned back against the sliding cigarette rack below the scratch ticket rolls and sighed. "He's slow, Jimmy." "Sal?" Jimmy watched Brendan and Silent Ray communicate in sign language, standing in the middle of the center aisle, Brendan clutching a box of Barry's under his arm. "He's in his late seventies, man." "I know why he's slow," Pete said. "I'm just saying. That was me and him at eight o'clock, 'stead of me and you, Jim? Man, we'd still be in the weeds." "Which is why I put him on slow shifts. Anyway, it wasn't supposed to be me and you or you and Sal on this morning. It was supposed to be you and Katie." Brendan and Silent Ray had reached the counter and Jimmy saw something catch in Brendan's face when he said his daughter's name. Pete came off the cigarette rack and said, "That it, Brendan?" "I 匢匢? Brendan stammered, then looked at his little brother. "Ahm, I think so. Let me check with Ray." The hands went flying again, the two of them going so fast it would have been hard for Jimmy to keep up even if they were making sounds. Silent Ray's face, though, was as stone dead as his hands were electric and alive. He'd always been an eerie little kid, in Jimmy's opinion, more like the mother than the father, a blankness living in his face like an act of defiance. He'd mentioned it to Annabeth once and she'd accused him of being insensitive to the handicapped, but Jimmy didn't think that was it?something lived in Ray's dead face and silent mouth that you just wanted to beat out with a hammer. They finished flinging their hands back and forth and Brendan bent over the candy rack and came back with a Coleman Chew-Chew bar, making Jimmy think about his father again, the stench of him that year he'd worked the candy plant. "And a Globe, too," Brendan said. "Sure thing, kid," Pete said, and rang it up. "So's, ah, I thought Katie worked Sundays." Brendan handed Pete a ten-spot.
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Pete raised his eyebrows as he punched the cash key and the door popped open against his belly. "You sweet on my man's daughter, Brendan?" Brendan wouldn't look at Jimmy. "No, no, no." He laughed, and it died as soon as it left his mouth. "I was just wondering, you know, because usually I see her here." "Her little sister's having her First Communion today," Jimmy said. "Oh, Nadine?" Brendan looked at Jimmy, eyes too wide, smile too big. "Nadine," Jimmy said, curious as to how the name had come to Brendan so fast. "Yeah." "Well, tell her congrats from me and Ray." "Sure, Brendan." Brendan dropped his gaze to the counter and nodded several times as Pete bagged up the tea and candy bar. "So, yeah, okay, good seeing you guys. Come on, Ray." Ray hadn't been looking at his brother when he spoke, but he moved anyway, and Jimmy remembered once again the thing that people usually forgot about Ray: he wasn't deaf, just mute, few people around the neighborhood or otherwise, Jimmy was sure, having encountered one like that before. "Hey, Jimmy," Pete said when the brothers had gone, "I ask you something?" "Shoot." "Why you hate that kid so bad?" Jimmy shrugged. "I don't know if it's hate, man. It's just 匔ome on, you don't find that mute little fucker just a little spooky?" "Oh, him?" Pete said. "Yeah. He's a weird little shit, always staring like he sees something in your face he wants to pluck out. You know? But I wasn't talking about him. I was talking about Brendan. I mean, the kid seems nice enough. Shy but decent, you know? You notice how he uses sign language with his brother even though he don't have to? Kinda like he just wants the kid to feel he ain't alone. It's nice. But, Jimmy, man, you look at him like you're two steps from slicing off his nose, man, feeding it to him." "No." "Yeah." "Really?" "Straight up."
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Jimmy looked out over the Lotto machine, past the dusty window onto Buckingham Avenue lying gray and damp under the morning sky. He felt Brendan Harris's shy goddamned smile in his blood, itching him. "Jimmy? I was just playing with you. I didn't mean nothing by?" "Here comes Sal," Jimmy said, and kept his eyes on the window, his head turned away from Pete as he watched the old man shuffle across the avenue toward them. "About fucking time, too."