No Time to Wave Goodbye (6 page)

“Brandy and Alexander.”

“Right,” Vincent said, of the two-hundred-year-old sisters who came every Sunday to The Old Neighborhood, ordered a Brandy Alexander each, and then giggled about how they were going to be picked up for drunk driving before they got back to La Grange. Kenny, the bartender, who’d worked with Angelo for thirty years, never even put any brandy in their drinks.

That day, Vincent remembered pleading, “Sam, what else have I asked you to do for me in my life? To be
my
best man? No. To teach
me
to play ball? No …”

“Uh, who taught who? I’m having trouble remembering.”

“Ben, come on. Don’t be an asshole,” Vincent said. “I get down on my knees.” And he did.

“Get up, fool. You’re not going to guilt me into it.”

“I’m not trying to guilt you. I’m trying to embarrass you,” Vincent said. Kenny laughed.

But Vincent started to freak out a little. If the goddamn restaurant got in the way of this … The urgency began pounding at the base of Vincent’s throat, like when he was a kid and had fucking panic attacks. It was like a thousand seagulls lifting their wings to take off, just like he’d told Tom Kilgore.

He gave Beth an expurgated version of what he said next, which was, “Are you going to let them run you like this all your life? I mean, it’s your fucking life. But did they let you go to the prom? Did they let you drive?”

The restaurant. The restaurant. Always the restaurant. Now, two restaurants for three generations to obsess over.

When Ben graduated from high school, Pat took the family to Rome—they would have taken Vincent to Rome when he graduated as well, except that he never did. It was there, at the original Cappadora’s
Ristorante, that Ben announced that he’d decided to major in culinary arts. Everyone was so drop-over thrilled they lit a candle at St. Peter’s! An heir! Like white smoke from the chimney! Another Cappadora behind the steam tables, fighting with people over tomatoes on the dock downtown, driving a Caddie, wearing a nice dark Italian suit with a blue shirt and a red tie. And, just like the script, once Ben was back from the woodsy-artsy eastern college, Grandpa and Dad immediately demanded their pound of flesh—a hundred and seventy pounds, to be exact. And Ben-good-boy had to forsake his softball team and even his girl to twitch the corners of the tablecloths, take away the one knife that had a spot on it, to lay just one bay leaf on the gravy that didn’t need even a single extra grain of salt to be perfect—gravy from Grandma Rosie’s recipe made the way it was eighty years ago by her mother, a recipe guarded like the step-by-step plans for a nuclear weapon.

To Beth, Vincent said, “That’s when Ben said, I have a surprise for you. You’re going to be an uncle.”

Kenny brought Vincent a Campari and soda, which Vincent stared at in contempt until Kenny, laughing again in the soundless way he did, replaced it with two flutes of champagne. Vincent felt a huge lump in his throat. He had to chug the bubbly and ask for the bottle to get over the urge to start bawling. Finally, he said, “How long have you been married, Sam? A week?”

“Long enough,” Ben said.

“You’re a kid.”

“I’m a kid whose parents had a kid by the time they were my age. Although the jury’s still out. That could have been a mistake.”

“We know it was a mistake. Dad was in grad school.”

“I mean a lifelong error, Vincent. Not a failure of technology.” They both laughed then.

“Well, fucking congratulations,” Vincent said. “Fucking hallelujah. But how does this rule out my movie? And how does Eliza figure to be a mother when she’s what? Twenty?”

“She’s twenty-one. And Eliza knows how to wash her face and pick
up her clothes, Vincent. She’s been washing clothes since she was five.”

“Right, sure. I know that,” Vincent said, penitent. When Eliza’s slang made her sound like a born West Sider, they forgot that she’d spent the first part of her life in one of the poorest places in the poorest country on earth. At Saint Francis Orphanage in Bolivia, eight-year-old Eliza had been considered one of the
older
children, expected to take care of the babies.

It wasn’t until Vincent got into the car that he started to freaking cry like an asshole. Jesus. Ben was going to be a dad. Ben, married and a father. Ben was like Dad, the marrying kind. Vincent was like nobody. He didn’t even resemble anyone in the family as far as he could tell. Kerry looked like their mother, Ben like Dad. Maybe he was a throwback. Or the milkman’s kid.

“Which ones were the hardest?” Beth asked now. “I’ve had shoots that took five hours before the person got halfway settled down …”

“The Whittiers were hard to convince, but they were easier to do. Once we got there. I don’t think either of them was really sold on the idea. The guy was totally, totally against it. The girl, Blaine, the one who was so shy at the party? She was great. And the mom was just so sweet and soft. But Bryant Whittier is such a pompous guy. The first thing he asked was what we hoped to accomplish, and while we were talking he made some comment about the footage of earthquake victims. He said that people liked to feel good about themselves but compassion had its … I don’t know … something … that those stories gave people who saw them a compassion high or something that they didn’t deserve. The Caffertys were willing, but oh wow…. We left the Caffertys at six that night, Ma. We got there to set up at eight in the morning.”

“Why?”

And so Vincent took a huge breath and told Beth about the Caffertys. From the corner of his eye, Vincent saw a gray limousine glide past and wondered if Charley Seven was making sure he’d drop off a payment before he went back to California.

B
eth asked him, “First of all, tell me about how you found them. The Caffertys. And all of the families.”

“Penny found them. Penny? From Compassionate Circle?”

Beth said, “I remember Penny.”

“I couldn’t think how I could do it. I couldn’t run an ad. I couldn’t search police files. I wanted to find people who would want to do this or at least agree to it so I could try to interview them. Now, Ma, it was over ten years ago she last talked to me. And when she came to the phone, she knew right away who it was.” She even called him “Reese,” the teenage nickname Vincent had once adopted to keep older guys from calling him “Vinny” when an elbow to the gut didn’t suffice. He’d told her he was regular old Vincent now and had been for more than ten years.

“It’s still great to hear from you,” she told him. “How old are you, Vincent?”

“Every year I’m pushing thirty with a shorter stick,” he said. She laughed.

“Wow, that’s
old!”
she said. “How can I help you?”

Penny Odint was Penny Amos now, mother of two daughters born after the child who had been murdered by her ex-husband while Penny was speaking to him on the telephone. All Penny heard was
“-
Bye-bye, Mommy,” and the handgun blast. Compassionate Circle now had sixty-eight chapters with Penny as the national director. Sixty-eight chapters … that many children, Vincent marveled, that much grief. And yet, most of them were presumably safe, or at least whole, snatched by their noncustodial parent in the parting salvo of a divorce. But even with Penny’s ex-husband, her child hadn’t been safe.

Her child was a child who fell between the statistics—like Ben—except that Penny’s little boy fell on the wrong side of the percentages.

The first thing that Penny asked him was, “Why? Why are you making a movie about families who never found out what happened? Why can’t you do a movie about the happy endings? Your family was one of the lucky ones.”

Vincent answered as honestly as he could. “Penny, to tell you the truth, I guess it’s because we were lucky. It makes you wonder about the others. How their lives go on and what helps them be strong.”

“They’re not all strong,” Penny said.

“I know,” said Vincent. “But look. Your story didn’t have a happy ending. But your work helps other people.” And she had to agree with that.

Vincent told Beth that Grandpa Angelo had asked him the same question. Turning up the collar of his wool cardigan, Grandpa gripped his espresso cup and pushed the glider back as far as it would go. “So much grief, ’Cenzo. Your mama and papa and Nana and I waited so long. Now you would bring the grief back to us? To build a new house of grief? Pain already lives next door. Even now, I see your father’s face sometimes and it’s all there.”

Vincent said, “The best answer is, I won’t really know why I need to do this until I do it, Grandpa. I don’t think it’s going to be fun.”

Over a period of months, long before he told even Grandpa Angelo
and Candy what he was doing, Vincent and his business partner Rob winnowed down the possibilities. The choices were finally easy: It came down to a combination of the target families’ poignant willingness and the chemistry between them and Vincent. Vincent went to Washington State; then to Durand, California, outside San Francisco; to Texas; to Wisconsin’s Lake Madrigal; and to Chicago, to make sure he
had
a film, even before he approached Charley Seven for the money. He shot hoops with the Dicksen boy. He ate the Hutchesons’ ranch eggs and sourdough and drank the Caffertys’ endless cups of coffee—because these families drank more coffee than anyone except people at an AA meeting. He watched their television programs with them, knowing that they forgot the thread of a TV mystery during a commercial for cream cheese. Swallowing hard, Vincent let them show him home videos and family picture albums. He admired first steps and class graduation and candles on a Sweet Sixteen cake. They began to think of him as someone who could walk back in after getting something out of his car without having to knock. Vincent didn’t really have as much of a way with people as Rob did. But he had intensity and he had the history.

He and Rob scouted out the best deals on used lights and cameras and found a Canon XL high-def, the boom, and the other mikes, while Rob began setting up a schedule to make sure they had cheap hotel rooms and good pasta. The quality of a film—any film, even
The Godfather
—depended on the quality of the food.

And finally, the last piece fell into place.

To woo Ben, Vincent had to fight the pull of the restaurant, the restaurant, the restaurant—which was almost genetic. Back when his ma was basically living but brain dead, when she forgot what you said about ten seconds after you said it, Vincent’s dad also was always gone—he had the restaurant to run to. For a while, an older girl cousin took care of them, and then Dad presumed Ma could, but he presumed wrong. Except for Ben, who was nurtured by George, the good-guy husband of his goddamned kidnapper, the Cappadora kids lived on leftover bracciole and all the creative child care that Vincent could
provide—which was not much, given how busy he was building his bookmaking operation.

Still, Kerry turned out to be a good kid and a great woman.

“Did Ben ask why you wanted to do this too?” Beth asked.

“Only about a thousand fucking times,” Vincent answered and winced. “I’m sorry, Ma. I apologize for swearing.”

“Accepted. What did you tell him?”

Vincent shook his head. How much could he say? Try the truth, Tom used to say; it catches people off guard. “I told Ben, ‘What, do you think there’s an excess of awareness about missing kids?’ I reminded him that Candy looked right at him sleeping in Cecilia’s mother’s house and that if people thought more, if they knew how nuts Cecilia was, they could have brought him home after a week. A lot of shit would have remained out of the fan.”

Beth winced. She looked out over the pristine and absolutely unused pool. Vincent went on, “What I really told him that was most important was that I didn’t think every documentary film has to be about politics. I said there was a strong emotional narrative in the reversed life these people have had to live….”

“You were right.”

Vincent said, “Thank you.”

“Your father will get over the financing thing.”

“I couldn’t ask you two,” Vincent said.

“You could have asked us.”

“I’d have had to tell you what it was about.”

“You don’t get enough from Tutu Amore ‘chocolatto for lovers’? I love how they’re swimming in chocolate in the commercial.”

“That was risqué when we made it,” Vincent said. “And no. We don’t get enough. Not even close.”

Tutu Amore paid for how Vincent and Rob lived, which was decently, “drinking champagne on a beer gut,” as Grandpa Angelo said, in a typical expression. When he said something vaguely insulting, he would tell you he didn’t mean to “cast assertions.” Vincent’s house in Venice Beach had once been a garage, but all two rooms were his own.
He had a mortgage. So what, he lived in a dump and dressed like a prince? Didn’t all Italians do that? Italians in Italy? Didn’t they put everything they had on their backs or on their tables?

“Tell me more about the Caffertys,” Beth urged him. The past half hour comprised the largest sum total of sentences in sequence Vincent had spoken to her since he was sixteen.

“Ben got weird. He was fine until we got to the Caffertys’ house. Then he stayed outside.”

He didn’t tell her that, half the time, Vincent wished he had stayed outside too. The night before he shot the Caffertys, two Benadryl and an Ambien hadn’t made a dent in Vincent’s chronic insomnia, which abated only when he slept at his parents’ house. It was while he was with the Caffertys that the gut pain that bothered him for the rest of the shoot first began. It was just him and Rob and Ben with Charley Seven’s bizarre nephew Marco, called Markey—the precondition for the loan. It wasn’t until after they’d finished the interview that Vincent realized he had felt, the whole time, as though he was walking around the house of his early childhood, with the lumpy green sofa and the Wisconsiny checkered curtains, the things Pat and Beth had had before the restaurants got famous and they got what Ben called the Villa Cappadora in WASPville and did everything over in a variation of beige.

“Do you know Markey Ruffalo?” Vincent asked.

“Not really. Just to see. We know his sister, Adriana.”