No Place Like Home (3 page)

I bent down to hug her—she wasn’t quite as short as Jordan, but it was close. Jane, who would be twenty-four this summer, was the only one who’d come close to my height. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m evil and you are a goddess. Thank you.”

Jasmine allowed it for three seconds, but it wasn’t her nature to be comfortable with the loving attention of women. “Go on, now,” she said. “Get that boy out of jail and tell him to come see me in a day or two so I can kick his little bottom for him.”

“I will.”

I got Shane, who was shamefaced and contrite but also a little giddy on the actual fact of being arrested, home and into bed in time for me to start making the pies. I’d built up a fair amount of business in two months, trading mostly on nepotism at first, then, as word spread, capitalizing on the fact that I was a master of that particular food form.

I’m a great cook—when you’re raised in a restaurant, it comes naturally—but I studied cooking seriously in New York, and my passion is for pie. The family kept asking me when I was planning to get a real job, but this was my real job. I hoped, eventually, to build it into a catering business, something I’d run from Michael and Andre’s restaurant for nearly seven years, but at the moment, Michael needed my attention a lot more than my business did. We had a roof over our heads and utilities were cheap. As long as I could bring in groceries and start building a savings account again, we’d be okay for now.

Since flats of blueberries were on special, I’d decided to bake blueberry pies this morning. The fruit mixture and pie shells had been prepared the night before, but I liked baking them in the morning so they’d be aromatic and maybe still a little warm when I delivered them. It went quickly. By ten thirty, they were loaded into the station wagon and I was on the road into town. By one, I was back home, considerably richer and definitely on my last emotional nerve.

In the middle, at exactly eleven, I had walked into Falconi’s, which technically belongs to my mother and her sisters, so my father couldn’t keep me out, even though I was fairly sure he wanted to. I was a little nervous each time I dropped pies by there, but my father had taken pains to avoid me, managing to run an errand or be out talking to somebody when I showed up.

Torture, right? Why would I bother? Because I needed to. Because Shane needed him. Because he could pretend all he wanted, but I knew he still loved me.

I was always his favorite. Except for my height, which comes from my mother’s side, I look like him more than the others. I have his winged eyebrows and golden eyes and curly hair. My mother says the internal angle is even more similar: our birth dates are three days apart, under the sign of Leo—which is probably at the heart of our falling out. Lion pride.

As if to prick that pride, the car started screaming as I drove up. I had no idea why it did it, just started screaming at the top of its lungs at odd moments. Three mechanics had looked it over to see if they could find the source, and all three shook their heads in bafflement. I told everyone it was just haunted, but Shane said if that was true, I have a ghost following me from car to car, making special noises in each one. We had a brand-new Buick off the lot once that had a weird, deep squeak in the front left tire. A delivery van that turned the radio on and off at will.

Anyway, I wasn’t expecting much out of an ’83 Chrysler station wagon I bought for seven hundred bucks. It ran very well, so I put up with the occasional scream. Except that I hated it totally when it did it that morning, commencing when I turned the corner from Northern and made my way through the blocks to the small, unassuming corner building that had housed Falconi’s for seven decades. It screamed until I turned off the engine, drawing Lorenzo, the daytime bartender, outside the kitchen door to wave at me, a grin showing off his big white teeth.

I rolled my eyes and stuck my head out the window. “Don’t say it or I’ll keep driving and you won’t get any blueberry pie with your lunch today.”

“Ah, cruelty, thy name is woman!” He put his hand over his chest and came to open the back gate fitted with racks for the pies. I got out and went to help him. Four pies, twice a week. I suspected sometimes that my grandmother, who no longer worked but reigned from her back table for a few hours every day, made everyone in town eat those slices of pie so she could get me back in there as often as possible. No one else on my list used anywhere close to eight pies a week.

Lorenzo carried two and I carried two. “You gonna marry me yet?” he asked. He was already married, to a tiny neat lawyer who’d bought them a very nice house in University Park, and he was crazy about her. But he was also insane for my pies.

“Well, you’d be handy enough around the house—” something I desperately needed in the old farmhouse “—but you’d be back to being poor.”

He inhaled the scent from the still warm pie. “It would be worth it.”

It’s a cliché to say that Italian men have a flirting disease. It’s also, to some degree, true. I’d probably be disappointed if he didn’t find some way to appreciate me every day.

He pushed open the door and let me go ahead, laughing when I had to squeeze close. I pretended to be scandalized. “You should be ashamed of yourself, young man.”

“I am, I tell you. Every single time.”

So I was laughing and playing word games with the married bartender when I came in and saw my dad sitting there at the table with my grandmother, listening to everything we said.

He’s a good-looking man, my father, even now, just past sixty. His hair had silvered a little, and he combed it straight back from his forehead, which showed off his hawkish, gorgeous nose. As usual, he was wearing a clean, starched shirt with a collar, this one in blues and tiny threads of yellow, tucked into a crisp pair of gabardine trousers. His shoes had a shine. His nails were neatly trimmed. He’s natty, is Romeo. Probably where Jasmine gets it.

When he saw me, he didn’t give me any long, meaningful look or anything. Just stood up, picked up the papers he’d been going over with Nana Lucy, and walked off. Like I was invisible.

So maybe I was wrong. He would never acknowledge me again. He really meant it when he said I was dead to him for the rest of my life.

Beside me, Lorenzo said, “Don’t take it like that, babe.”

Right. Easier said than done. I wondered suddenly if Jasmine had already told my father about Shane ending up in jail, but realized it didn’t matter. It wasn’t as if it would make any difference, one way or the other.

Stung, I rushed through my business, stopped for a minute to kiss my nana’s white head and agreed to bring Shane and Michael to dinner on Sunday, and got out of there as fast as I could. The whole time, my cheeks felt hot and I could feel the sympathy of the waitresses and even some of the early customers. I hate it when they feel sorry for me, and it made me want to do something dramatic, like scream an epithet at my father’s stiff back, which is something I would have done in my youth.

Twenty years had given me the wisdom to know it wouldn’t change anything. He’d still ignore me. I’d look like more of a floozy than ever, and not one pair of sympathetic eyes would be fooled into thinking I didn’t care.

Back at the farm, I rousted Shane out of bed and put him to the most miserable tasks I could come up with: scrubbing both bathrooms, the kitchen floor, and even—I have to admit I assigned it with a certain glee—the baseboards. It was a task Sylvia had tackled every third Saturday of the month, and it had not been done once since we arrived. They were the old style of baseboards, six inches of carved wood, and required a tremendous amount of elbow grease. It would take him hours to take a rag and Liquid Gold to every single one in the house.

Michael was up, a good sign, and sitting on the screened porch. “Hey, good looking,” I said, kissing his head and covertly checking for fever with my hand. He didn’t like being fussed over, and it killed him to have to be so dependent, so he wouldn’t always say when he was feeling bad. “Did you eat?”

“Yeah, Shane made me breakfast.”

“Well, I brought you a treat for later, then.” I settled in a chair opposite and held out my prize, a filled éclair from a bakery he liked. “Ta da!”

He grinned at me, those deep eyes flashing mischief the way they’d always done. “A woman after my own heart.” He took it out and started nibbling it. Savoring it. “So what happened with Da Kid? I take it you had to bail him out of jail in the wee hours of the morning?”

“Oh, it’s good this time.” I ticked off the violations on my fingers. “They were tagging a billboard over on Fourth Street when a cop spied them.”

Michael raised his eyebrows.

“Wait,” I said. “It gets better. Being a fairly bright pair of idiots, they had an escape plan in place. They scrambled down from the sign—drunk, of course—”

“Naturally.”

“—and got in Justin’s car to outrun the cop.” It made me nauseated to imagine what might have happened.

“Obviously they were not successful in their flight.” A tiny smile quirked the corner of Michael’s mouth.

“No. Getting caught with spray paint cans in hand, drunk, after curfew wasn’t enough. They had to add eluding the police.” Watching him make his way through the éclair, I regretted that I’d resisted buying a cruller for myself. “What is
wrong
with him?”

“Ah, it’s not that bad. He’s seventeen, that’s all. In the long run, you know he’ll be all right.”

A pang went through my chest. “I’m really not that sure right now. He’s got no strength of character. He’s too charming, he’s too good looking, and he’s too much his father’s child.”

Michael thought about that as he licked some custard off his thumb. “All true but the last bit. He’s not really like Billy. He’s more like you.”

It wasn’t all that comforting, to tell you the truth. It’s not like I have a record of outstanding successes. “I wish my father would pay attention to him. I don’t care anymore if he forgives me, but he could do a lot for Shane.”

Michael looked at me. No words. He didn’t approve of my father, but only because he didn’t understand him. Michael loved me, and hated that I cared so much that my father has not spoken to me in twenty years, a reality that had grown more excruciating with every passing day. “You can’t judge everybody by the way your father was, Michael.”

“Is that what I’m doing?”

I shrugged. Relented. “No.”

“Truth is, darlin’, I can’t really think of anything your father and my daddy would have had in common. ‘Cept rotten children.” He winked, a shadow of his former self.

We sat in the quiet of the gathering heat, not talking. I propped my feet on the rail and listened to Shane’s music on the CD player inside—something new and alternative in a minor key. It expressed remorse, and I had to smile. The kid has great taste in music, actually, loves everything from Celtic to jazz, Bach to metal in addition to his beloved, blasting rock ’n’ roll.

Music. Would it save him or kill him? Did so many musicians self-destruct because the music failed them or did self-destructive people end up in music? A familiar knot of panic tied itself in my gut.

“Have you heard from your father lately?” I asked, taking my mind from the immediate worry.

“Not for six or eight months. He was working in Indiana. Asking for money in a roundabout way.” He gave me a bitter smile. “Didn’t have the heart to tell him I didn’t have any left.”

“Sorry.”

A lift of one bone-thin shoulder. “Not your fault.”

“I think you need to call him, Michael. You need to see him.”

Slowly he examined the last of the éclair, then ate it. “We been through this, darlin’. No point in breaking his heart just yet.”

I sighed. There was no way to
make
Michael do anything he didn’t want to do, and he’d somehow made up his mind to spare his father the pain of his eldest son’s lingering illness.

Michael’s parents had been ordinary, blue-collar southern people, salt of the earth as they say, until they got together. And they turned from normal to completely abnormal, alternately obsessed with lust for each other or caught in a spiral of jealousy and revenge that had ultimately ended with Michael’s father in prison.

Where my life had been as stable and ordinary as, well . . . pie, Michael’s had been as turbulent as a hurricane. In spite of that, I’d never heard him actually speak ill of his parents—in fact he was a hell of a lot more forgiving of their foibles than I would have been—but their double-edged passion for each other had been a disaster for their children, Michael and his brother, Malachi, who was a few years younger. Michael had been their meal ticket during low times—they’d parade him out to sing and play guitar in any little honky-tonk or hole-in-the-wall lounge they could find to pay them. Michael laughed about it and said it was those times that had made him a musician in the end, but I hated to think of him, skinny and gawky at nine or twelve, singing in some dive in Texarkana.

He did it because he could, because he had to, because the family needed him to do it. And because he was fiercely, deeply, rabidly protective of his little brother.

Malachi. I’d never met him, and considering I’d known Michael for two decades, that was saying something. They got together sometimes, but Michael always met him someplace private, and they’d go off and have a few days of good-old-boy fishing or some such thing. His brother led adventure tours all over the world, and it almost seemed that Michael had to chase and capture his brother each time he wanted to see him; that Malachi was so restless he couldn’t bear to light in one place for more than three minutes at a time.

Case in point: for six months, I’d been trying to find the mysterious Malachi. I’d written letters to a post office box number in—of all places—Biloxi, Mississippi, where he stopped for rest when he wasn’t wandering the world in search of Hemingwayesque adventures.

Not that Michael knew that I’d written. He didn’t want his brother here, either. I’d had to riffle through Michael’s things in search of Malachi’s address when it became clear that he wasn’t going to tell either his paroled father or his footloose brother that he was dying and they ought to come visit. I couldn’t find an address for the father, but I’d written to Malachi. Repeatedly. No answer.