Shepherd Avenue. Charlie CarilloЧитать онлайн книгу.
thing we couldn’t get rid of was the four-bladed push mower, which my father left behind in the barren garage.
He didn’t let me in on his plan until our final night together in the house. We slept on a pair of cots dragged close together in the living room, a courtesy of the moving company that was to bring the new owner’s stuff in the morning.
I hadn’t asked a single question about where we were going during the scuttling of our possessions. I just sat up in my cot, waiting for him to start volunteering information.
He swallowed. He was hesitating, like a kid reluctant to tell a parent about a broken vase. “I quit my job,” he said through a dry throat.
“I figured that out,” I said, irritated. He hadn’t been to work for two weeks. “So where are we going tomorrow?”
He seemed disappointed that I wasn’t startled by his announcement. “I have to take off for a while.”
I felt my heart plummet. I was being disposed of, too — he’d only been saving me for last!
“What do you mean? Where am I gonna go?”
“You’re staying with my parents in Brooklyn.”
I was stunned. “I thought we hated them,” I said. “How can we stay there if we don’t even visit?”
“We don’t hate them!” my father boomed. “There have just been years and years of misunderstanding.”
I was disgusted. “Yeah, sure, Dad.”
He said weakly, “My parents are good people.”
“I don’t even know them!” I rolled over on the cot so I wouldn’t have to look at him. Not even sure I wanted to be with him anymore I said, “Why can’t I go with you?”
“Because you can’t, Joseph.”
“Why?”
“Because nobody can,” he said in a way that made it clear the matter was beyond his control, as if a demon inside him were calling the shots.
Puzzled, I rolled onto my back. Oddly, I felt my anger melting. I started thinking about how miserable this past month with my father had been. Maybe we both needed a break from each other. Somehow, I sensed that losing both parents might be easier than losing one.
“For how long?” I asked roughly.
The fact that I was talking inspired my father. “A few weeks, no more.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
“Where are you going?”
“Across the country in the car.”
We were silent. The wind picked up, making the ancient window panes jiggle and creak in their loose putty jackets.
I felt him grasp my elbow. “Joey, don’t hate me,” he begged in a voice I’d never heard him use. Desperate.
“I won’t,” I said. I didn’t take his hand but let him hold me for a few minutes before rolling onto my side and falling asleep.
Almost everything we loaded into our Comet station wagon the next morning belonged to me. My father packed one bulging canvas sack for himself, filled with shirts, pants, and underwear. That and his shaving kit were all he’d take across the United States.
When we were on the road I said, “You have to sign my report card.” I dug it out of my pile of stuff. “We’re supposed to mail it back to school. Maybe you don’t have to if I’m not going back.”
“Give it to me,” he mumbled. At a red light near the Long Island Expressway he glanced at the card, hastily scrawled on it, and handed it back to me.
“Take care of it,” he said, knowing I had a stamped, addressed envelope the school had provided.
I looked at the card. Through the first three marking periods Mrs. Olsen, my fifth-grade teacher, had written tiny but stinging notes in the space provided for comments: “Joseph should participate in class more often … Joseph needs to be more outgoing … Joseph holds back during sports.”
And beneath each comment was my mother’s light-handed, almost fluffy signature, “Mrs. Salvatore Ambrosio.” She barely pressed a pen when she wrote.
I looked at the space for the last marking period.
“I suspect he can do better,” Mrs. Olsen had written of my straight-B performance.
“I suspect we all can,” my father wrote back before scrawling his fierce signature. It violated the boundaries of the dainty white box, and I could feel his lettering through the back side of the card, like Braille.
“There’s a mailbox,” I said just before we reached the entry ramp to the expressway. He braked the car. I got out and mailed the report card, sort of surprised that he’d waited instead of roaring away.
“Put your seat belt on,” he said, and that was the extent of our conversation for the rest of the trip to the East New York section of Brooklyn.
He slowed the car to a crawl when we made the turn down Shepherd Avenue. We drove beneath an elevated train track structure that left a ladder-shaped shadow in the late afternoon light. Rows of sooty red brick houses, fronted with droopy maple trees that seemed to have given up trying to grow taller.
My grandmother and Uncle Victor were waiting for us on the porch. I knew them only from photographs.
Clumsy introductions outside the car door: your grandmother, your uncle. No kisses. My father clasped his mother’s hand.
“Long time,” he said in a neutral voice. She nodded. Victor, after a moment’s hesitation, embraced my father.
“What are we, strangers here?”
Embarrassment melted Victor’s enthusiasm. He tore himself away to carry my stuff into the house. I stayed outside with my father, who kept his hand on the open car door, clinging to it as tightly as a rodeo rider grips a saddle horn.
My grandmother had planned to feed us, share one big meal together, but my father said he was already behind schedule. She urged him to stay long enough at least to see his father, who was late getting home. My father said he couldn’t.
“Not twenty minutes?” Constanzia Ambrosio asked. “What’s this schedule?”
“I’m very late,” my father said. “Believe me, Ma.”
How strange it was to hear him use that word, and how anxious he was to get moving, as if a bomb were about to explode inside him and he wanted to put distance between himself and his family to protect us from shrapnel. He stood like a chauffeur, handsome in denim jacket and jeans, misty-eyed, apologetic and arrogant at the same time. At last he hugged his mother, a collision of flesh like two human bumper cars.
“I’m sorry she died,” Constanzia blurted.
“Me, too,” my father said, his voice like a child’s. He let go of her and put his hands under my armpits. I braced myself, anticipating a lift.
But his hands went limp against my rib cage. “No,” he decided. “You’re too big for that now.” He crouched and hugged me, said “See you soon” in a broken voice, and split. I don’t know which of us felt more relieved.
* * *
Relieved, but not for long. The switch was concise, a changing of the guard.
“You’re gonna be livin’ here awhile, so forget about that Grandma and Grandpa business,” said Vic, my roommate, as he lugged double armfuls of my stuff to his room.
“We decided this morning,” he said, breathing hard. “No titles. Just Connie and Angie and Vic.”
Vic was eighteen years old, five foot ten, a hundred and ninety pounds. His hair was thick as a cluster of