Spoonbenders Page 6

  “I’m going to ask Uncle Buddy,” Matty said, and vanished back inside.

  “Small world, right?” Teddy said. “Small God damn world.” He put aside the paper and pushed himself out of the lawn chair. “I’ll be back for dinner.” He set his hat on his head, then adjusted the angle. He stepped out the side gate just as Matty came sprinting up. The kid had run all the way around the house.

  “Buddy says I can open it!” Matty said.

  “He did?” Irene said.

  “Well, I asked him if I could, and he nodded.”

  “Fine. You can set it up in the basement—after you take a shower. And do not install the Internet!” He ran inside again.

  She watched her father back the car out of the garage, going extremely slowly. She wondered how many years were left before they had to take away his keys. It was a certainty that she’d have to make the call alone. Buddy was oblivious and Frankie was too much in the sway of the Legend of Teddy Telemachus to take action.

  She picked up the newspaper Teddy had been reading. A headline was circled in black marker: PUSATERI OUTFIT MURDER TRIAL BEGINS. She read the first paragraph, then the second.

  “God damn it,” she said.

  “What is it?” Matty said from behind her.

  “Your grandfather’s hanging out with mobsters,” she said. “Again.”

  “Really?” He sounded more excited by this than she liked. She looked up and saw that he was wearing only a towel.

  “The water’s turned off downstairs,” he explained. Matty and Irene had been using the downstairs shower, ceding the upstairs bath to Dad and Buddy.

  “Use the other one,” she said, and walked into the kitchen, reading.

  Nick Pusateri Jr. may take the stand in his own defense, his legal team said Monday. This continues weeks of speculation about whether Pusateri, accused of the 1992 slaying of Willowbrook businessman Richard Mazzione, would testify. Pusateri is thought to be a high-ranking member of the Chicago Outfit, and the son of alleged crew boss Nick Pusateri Sr. Prosecutors are eager to implicate other members of the organization.

  She finished the article and dropped the paper into the garbage. Murder, mobsters, and Destin Fucking Smalls. Whatever was going on with her father, she didn’t like it.

  The death of her mother was the landmark by which Irene navigated her memories. The day she first met Destin Smalls was only seven months before Maureen’s death. It was early in February, on the morning Irene found her mother crying.

  Irene couldn’t remember why she’d gone upstairs to look for her. It was a school day, so perhaps Irene wanted to complain about Buddy or Frankie not getting ready. When she pushed open the door to her parents’ bedroom, she found her mother sitting on the edge of the bed, palms on her thighs, eyes closed. Tears had traced a line down each cheek.

  There was something obscene about the sight. It was not just that her mother rarely cried; it was that the tears were falling and she was doing nothing to wipe them away, nothing to hide them. It was the most naked she’d ever seen her mother.

  Perhaps Irene gasped; something made her mother’s eyes snap open. And still she didn’t wipe at the tears. She glanced at Irene, but then her attention moved somewhere else, somewhere inside.

  Irene said, “Are you divorcing Dad?”

  Her mother seemed to take a moment to parse the words. “What?” Then: “Why would you say that?”

  There were so many reasons Irene could name. The fact that Dad slept on the basement couch now. That when he woke up he stalked the house in silence, scowling at every noise the kids made, barking at them, For Christ’s sake go play outside! He was not a drunk, Irene decided later, when she’d come to know a few, but he had the alcoholic’s tunnel vision, the addict’s hollowed wound. This was the winter Dad got into a car accident and spent weeks with bandages on his hands, the winter after the summer of The Mike Douglas Show and the family’s public humiliation. Somehow he made the house feel as small as one of those hotel rooms they’d stayed in when the Amazing Telemachus Family had been on tour.

  “You didn’t say no,” Irene said, as if catching her in a trick.

  Anger flashed on her mother’s face, raw and fierce. Her hands had not moved, but Irene felt as if she’d been slapped. For a long moment, no one spoke.

  Irene realized that Buddy had come up behind her. His sixth birthday would be soon, but he looked younger, a big baby head on a skinny body, no hint that he’d someday be the tallest of them.

  Her mother, finally, wiped one cheek with the knuckles of her hand. “You’re a bright girl, with a great talent, and I love you.” She stood up. Her mouth was set in a hard line. “But you’ve got to learn some manners. And no, I’m not divorcing your father.”

  She walked out of the room and downstairs. Irene followed her, and Buddy trailed silently after. Her mother took her winter coat from the coatrack and pulled it on.

  “Where are you going?” Irene asked. It was not yet eight in the morning.

  “To work. Walk Buddy to the bus stop. Make sure Frankie gets out of bed.”

  “You have a job?” Irene was outraged that she hadn’t been told this.

  “Don’t wake your father.” Her mother opened the front door. Cold rushed in and circled Irene’s bare legs like a frantic dog.

  Outside it was gray on gray, snowflakes hovering in the air, the world rendered as a pencil sketch. Her mother walked toward a dark sedan parked in the driveway, its exhaust puffing clouds. A man in a long coat stepped out of the driver’s side. He said something to her mother that Irene didn’t hear, and opened the passenger door for her. He touched the small of her back as she stepped around him, and then closed the door behind her. Then he turned, and saw Irene standing in the doorway, Buddy holding on to her legs.

  “You two will catch cold!” he said in a friendly tone. He was square-jawed and tall, twice the size of her father. And twice as handsome. His black hair was parted with Ken doll precision.

  Irene shut the door—and immediately stepped to the picture window and pushed aside the drapes. The car backed out of the driveway, leaving tracks that she was sure her father would notice when he awoke. But no: by the time she escorted Buddy to his bus stop a half hour later, the snow had already filled them in.

  Here’s a question of etiquette that could only come up in the Telemachus family: Who should blow out the candles on a dead woman’s cake? They used to let Buddy do it, but then Cassie and Polly started begging for the honor, and not even Buddy could turn down the twins when they were in Full Cute mode.

  “Go to town, girls,” Irene said to the twins. There were seven candles on the cake. There should have been fifty-two, but Irene didn’t dare have that much fire around the girls. So five yellows, one for each decade, and two reds for remainder. Buddy watched anxiously until each candle was extinguished.

  Maureen Telemachus had died twenty-one years ago, when she was thirty-one, the same age as Irene was now. This is the last year I have a mother, Irene thought. From now on she’ll be younger than me.

  Hardly anyone talked as they ate. Loretta, usually in a good mood, seemed subdued. Buddy’s silence was no mystery, but Teddy’s was. He’d brought home the pizza—a pair of Giordano’s, thick as motorcycle tires, not the crispy style that he’d been rhapsodizing about earlier—but wouldn’t say where else he’d been for the rest of the two hours since he’d left the house. He was distracted, and picked at his cake as if he couldn’t decide what it was.

  Frankie’s silence, however, was aggressive, peppered with grunts that begged for someone to ask what was the matter. Irene already knew. Two weeks ago Frankie had taken her and Dad out to dinner at the Pegasus, all on Frankie’s dime, he said, because he had some fantastic news to share. It wasn’t until they were done with the meal that he came clean. His fantastic news was that Teddy and Irene could become distributors in something called UltraLife, which he claimed was the fastest-growing multilevel marketing company in the United States.

 
At the Pegasus, Teddy had said, “When you say multilevel marketing—”

  “He means pyramid scheme,” Irene had said.

  That comment pretty much ruined the rest of the night. And the rest of Frankie’s month, evidently. But why did he think he could convince Irene or Teddy to invest in such an obvious scam? Irene was broke, and Teddy, though he had plenty of money (from sources he would not identify), refused to bankroll his kids. He’d grown up poor, and clawed his way out of poverty on his own, which in his mind was the ultimate test of evolutionary fitness. How many times had he told his children: Never lend chips to someone who can’t buy their way into the pot.

  Irene blamed her father for Frankie’s crooked little heart. Dad had filled his head with tales of gambling and gangsters, schemes and scams, con men and ex-cons. On the road, he’d sit eight-year-old Frankie on a hotel bed and teach him how to do a false cut. (Not Irene, though, not a single card trick. That stuff wasn’t for girls.) He’d constantly say to Frankie, You’re going to go far, kid! And Frankie would eat it up. He’d spend hours trying—and failing—to levitate pencils and spare change and paper clips. By the time the family got booked onto TV, Frankie was planning his solo career as a Vegas headliner, despite having no ability with either psychokinesis or sleight of hand. It wasn’t until Mom’s funeral that he showed a hint of talent, and by then it was too late to help the act.

  Once Mom died, there were no adults driving the bus. Teddy closed his eyes and refused to take the wheel. Frankie became a free-range malcontent, and Buddy became, well, Buddy.

  Matty said, “We got a computer.”

  He wasn’t looking at Mary Alice, who sat beside him, but that’s who he was addressing. She didn’t seem to notice. She stared at her uneaten cake as if it were an unmoving clock.

  Frankie squinted at Irene. “You can afford a computer?”

  “I didn’t buy it. Buddy did.”

  “Buddy?”

  “I set it up downstairs,” Matty said. “If, uh, anybody wants to look at it.”

  Frankie turned to his brother. “What the hell do you need with a computer?”

  Buddy sought out Irene’s eyes with a classic Buddy look: mystified and sorrowful, like a cocker spaniel who’d finally eviscerated his great enemy, only to find everyone angry and taking the side of the couch pillow.

  “He bought it for Matty,” Irene said, even though she was not at all sure about that. “He’s going to pay him back, when he gets a job.”

  “I am?” Matty said.

  “He can’t sit around all day,” Teddy said. It was the first thing he’d said since the cake came out. Thanks for that, Dad.

  “I could help Uncle Buddy,” Matty said.

  “Ha,” Frankie said. “Have you seen the way he works? I’m surprised he hasn’t electrocuted himself. Keep your distance, kid. It’s bad enough Buddy’s going to kill himself.”

  Buddy’s eyes widened.

  “Figure of speech,” Loretta said kindly.

  “No, he’ll work with me,” Frankie said.

  “At the phone company?” Irene asked.

  “He’ll be my apprentice.”

  Loretta said, “Maybe you shouldn’t promise anything until—”

  “Nobody tells me who rides in my van,” Frankie said. “It’s settled. He starts Monday.”

  —

  Irene lay on top of the covers, exhausted but unable to quiet her brain. When she’d gone to bed that night she’d plummeted into unconsciousness, and had disappeared into two hours of dreamless sleep before being hauled up into the waking world, her thoughts wrapped up like seaweed on a fishhook.

  In other words, the usual. Wide awake in the thin hours of the night, her mind churning along on the All-Star Tour of Embarrassments and Mistakes. The tour could visit any decade, and feature any number of characters from her past, from middle-school girlfriends to strangers she’d never known the names of. She’d remember a conversation or, more often, an argument, and try desperately to get her previous self to say something smarter, or kinder, or nothing at all. Yester-Irene’s behavior, however, was almost willfully resistant to modification.

  Lately the tour had been returning again and again to the most disastrous period in her life: the last year in Pittsburgh. In that time she’d gone from dream job (or at least, the best she could hope for with only an associate’s degree) to alleged criminal. It had broken her financially and emotionally. Matty had caught her more than once sitting at the kitchen table, hate-crying into a pile of bills and overdue notices. Which only made her feel worse. A child shouldn’t see his mother worrying about money. It made the kid into a figurehead parent, with all the responsibility and none of the power. She knew this from personal experience.

  She pulled on her robe and went into the hall. The house was quiet except for Buddy’s snore. Her usual insomnia treatment was to read until the book dropped out of her hand, but when sleep seemed impossibly out of reach, she’d do penance for her wakefulness by performing some onerous task: cleaning out the refrigerator, balancing the checkbook, verifying the date of each canned good in Dad’s basement pantry. (Scariest find: a can of kidney beans purchased by her mother twenty-five years ago.) Some nights Irene came dangerously close to pitching in on one of Buddy’s renovation projects.

  None of that appealed to her tonight. She went downstairs and drifted through the first-floor rooms, her eyes growing wide in the dark. Surfaces caught errant light and became strange. Objects trembled with arrested motion, waiting for her to glance away. Every chair and table became a wary animal. Don’t be afraid, she thought. It’s just me.

  Irene had realized at her mother’s funeral not only that she had inherited her position as Sole Responsible Adult, but that she’d been training for the job since she was ten. She was the one who’d managed Buddy’s tantrums. She was the one who’d poured water onto Frankie’s bed to get him up and out to school. (Only had to do that twice, but it worked.) Most of all, she learned how to keep Dad out of her way. She resented the job, but she was secretly proud of it. She knew that if she had not grabbed the wheel, they would have all gone over the cliff.

  It wasn’t until the winter after she’d graduated high school, in the wide backseat of the Green Machine, that she was asked the question she’d been waiting to hear all her life. Lev Petrovski, half naked and beautiful and sweating despite the frost outside the windows, pressed his forehead to hers and whispered, “But who’s going to take care of you, Irene?”

  This was not a statement she could weigh for truth. It was a question, and her heart shouted the answer: You, Lev. You will.

  What a stupid, stupid girl she was.

  On her second circuit of the first floor, she became aware of a faint, shifting light emanating from the basement. She went down the stairs and saw that Matty had left the new PC running. Multicolored lines zigzagged across the screen.

  She sat at the desk (a battered hulk that had once occupied a corner of Frankie and Buddy’s bedroom) and touched the keyboard. A field of blue appeared, and icons popped up like square flowers. It was a new version of Windows, and everything seemed shinier and somehow more insistent than what she’d used at her old job. Back then she’d been considered the office computer expert, not because of any actual expertise, but because her immediate supervisor had abdicated all technological responsibility. It fell to Irene to print out the electronic mail (or else how could the partners read it?) and become the guru of WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.

  She bent to look for the computer’s off switch, and noticed that Matty had already hooked it up to a phone jack. It’s got a built-in modem!

  Irene got up without turning off the machine. The little clock on the screen said that it was 12:32.

  She went upstairs and found the stack of mail that had accumulated over the past couple of days. There were five AOL CDs, each one promising 50 FREE HOURS! Well, she thought, if there was one thing she had, it was free hours.

  A few minutes later, the modem squealed lou
d enough to wake everyone in the house—or so it seemed; the night made the house seem both larger and smaller than it was in daytime. Soon the screen filled with a wall of colorful, rectangular buttons: “Today’s News,” “Clubs & Interests,” “Personal Finance,” “Entertainment.” And this one: “People Connection,” with a picture of two men and two women, laughing and smiling with their arms around each other. Her mouse cursor hovered over it, then slid away to safety. Who were these people? What the hell were they so happy about? And why should she connect with them?

  She went exploring elsewhere, reading new stories she wouldn’t have bothered with if not for the novelty of them being on-screen, and looked through the “Education” section in case there was anything that might be of use to Matty. It was like wandering her house, except that everything was bright and blinking and pixelated.

  Eventually, though, she returned to the “People Connection” button. She stared at it for ten, fifteen seconds. Then clicked.

  She was presented with a page of “Chat Room Listings” that gave her another batch of online metaphors to unravel. She could chat (which meant type), in a room that didn’t exist, to people she couldn’t see. The number of categories was overwhelming: Friends, Gay & Lesbian, Town Hall…Romance. She could almost hear their desperate clamoring behind the screen. Do you like me now? Am I funny? Oh, sure, I work out all the time…

  No. Nope. Nada. She was not going to become one of those lonely people sitting up all night bleaching their eyes against a computer monitor. She signed off, turned off the PC, and went upstairs to find a junk drawer to clean out.

  —

  It took all of two days for Matty to notice. He met her at the front door as she walked in from work, his voice quaking with indignation. “You installed AOL?” Then: “Without telling me?”

  Irene flushed with embarrassment. “It was an experiment. We’re not paying for it, so forget it.”

  “I’ll pay! Frankie’s giving me a job.”

  “Frankie says a lot of things that don’t happen. And even if you paid, I wouldn’t let you on AOL.”