But then Theresa says first, "I'm sorry, Jerry. I can be such an ornery fucking bitch."
"Don't you say that," I tell her, as firm as I've ever been.
"You're Theresa Battle, and you should be like nobody else, and you're perfectly great as you are."
"You think so?"
"I've never not."
She leans over and gives me a quick kiss on the cheek, stamp-like and tiny the way it felt when she was a kid, before Daisy died, and she would kiss me all the time.
"You know you're a pretty silly Mr. Empowerment."
"I don't care. If you don't."
"Of course not. Hey, are you going to finish your milkshake?"
"Go ahead."
More customers have pulled in, enough so that the assistant manager steps out near the road and waves his hands, to get his partner to come back. The kid finally does, swerving in neatly right next to us. He gives me the keys, trying to thank me but unable to say anything but an awestruck fuckin' hog over and over again, and the thought occurs to me that I should just give the damn car to these two soft-serve-for-brains, fodder for a nice feature on the local news, Old dude just gave us the keys! they'd be saying, but they'd probably kill themselves in it or worse hurt somebody else like a pregnant sick young woman out for a cone.
But they're decent enough, because as we're pulling out the younger one sprints to Theresa's car and hands her another large shake for the road.
As we near Richie's place there's a discernible hush, a lurking prosperity, the oaks and maples ascendant. The only sounds are the throaty low-gear gurgles of the Ferrari, and I still can't help but make the back tires squeal as I sling and lurch around these generous mansion-scale streets. Theresa, trailing half a block behind, gently rudders the old boat down the lanes. I've called Richie's house but only the machine answered and I didn't leave a message, and anyway I'm thinking it's best if I just park the car out on the semicircular driveway and drop the keys through the mail slot, with not even a note. Let Richie figure it out.
And that's exactly what I do, though giving his machine a last few screaming redline revs in neutral before shutting it down right at the front entrance. But after I shove the keys through the slot (cut into the brick façade rather than the door), and turn around to leave, the front door opens and who's there but Richie, in a dingy off-white bathrobe, Saturday afternoon unshaven, his half-height reading specs perched on the end of his narrow nose. Really, he looks sort of terrible, not in the least Waspy and upmarket, suddenly bent over and darkish like any other of us newly aging New York Guidos, and for the first time since he was a kid I feel as though someone (if not Jerry Battle) ought to cut him a break.
"What's the big idea?" he says, holding out the keys to me. "I don't welch on my bets."
"Relax, Richie," I say, standing on his pea-stone driveway. "I just don't want it anymore."
"That car was the bet. You can't have a different one."
"I don't want a different one. I'm not trying to trade it in here. I'm giving it back to you."
"Why don't you sell it, then? Sell it and pocket the cash. It won't bother me. Who's that in your car?"
"My daughter."
"Your daughter?" Richie waves, and Theresa waves back.
"She's a beautiful woman."
"She's pregnant, and engaged."
"Well good for her. Congratulations, Jerry."
"Look, I'm giving back the car. I'm not going to sell it."
"Well, I can't take it back," he answers, suddenly sounding not in the least like he's from the old neighborhood.
"Why the hell not?"
"My colleagues all witnessed the match. They verified the terms. I entertain them and others in the firm here regularly. If they saw the car around I couldn't possibly explain to them why you'd ever give it back."
"You can hide it in the garage."
"I'm not hiding anything."
"Tell them I'm a nice guy."
"Nobody's a nice guy."
"Tell them I was trying to trade it back to you for Rita."
This stops Richie for a second, as he absently jiggles the keys.
"That they might believe. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Rita's not mine to trade."
"I know that."
"No, you don't," Richie says. "We broke up last week. She was here earlier this morning, to pick up the last of her things."
"You're kidding."
"I'm not."
"I don't believe you."
"Well, what the fuck do you think this is?" He reaches into his robe pocket and shows the diamond ring, the one with the stone as big as a hazelnut.
"What happened?"
"I don't know. After you came by that day it all went to shit.
But I'm not blaming you, Maybe she got sick of me. Maybe she didn't like my friends. Maybe she still loves you."
Something Jerry Battle can always hear. And I can't help but ask, "Did she say that?"
Richie's smarting, which I've never quite seen from him, and before I can mercifully retract the question he says, "Not exactly. I'll say one thing. It's amazing what certain guys can get away with. I don't see why she'd even speak to you, with how you strung her along and wasted her youth. But maybe the long-term dodge is the most effective kind."
"She never said one word about wanting to get married."
"Well, even I know that doesn't mean a damn thing," he says, shaking his head. "You have no idea how lucky you are, do you, Jerry? You've always had steady attention from the girls, and I'll be honest and say you're also not a terrible guy, and so it's no surprise you got plenty of ass. With me, I always knew I'd have to make a shitload of dough to get a pretty woman to share my bed."
"Hey, Rich., "
"That's okay, I know what I look like. It got me focused early.
I've taken nothing for granted, women or money or anything else. I'm not bragging here, I'm just saying how these things don't come easily to guys like me, and maybe people assume I wouldn't want to be anyone else but a partner at a top law firm with a big house in Muttontown and five Ferraris."
"Six, now."
"Okay, six. I'm not saying I want to trade places, but I'm not early-retired like you, I'll still be working seventy hours a week five years from now I'll croak in the saddle, looking right over Park Avenue. And I'll grant you there's always some hot ambitious broad wanting to have a wealthy guy for a boyfriend but it's no guarantee of having the love of a beautiful, good woman like Rita."
"Which I don't have either," I remind him, "plus no big bank account."
"You got Rita still thinking about you, you big dumb fuck.
That counts for a lot right there. Don't try to say anything or pretend you're insulted. You're going over there now, I already can see it in your eyes. So when you see her tell her I'm not about to keep this with me. I don't need something around to pull out and depress me."
Richie takes my hand and slaps the engagement ring into it.
I try to give it back to him, because I can already see Rita's face when she sees me with it, here's Jerry up to something low-down and dirty, some sly scheme whereby she'll be finessed into opening up a half inch too much and he'll instantly squinch himself in and inhabit the gap, but Richie steps back inside and closes the door on me, and when I tell him to open up he says, with heartache and defeat, "You already bought the ring with the car, Jerry. Now go away. She's all yours."
ALL YOURS, Jerome, all yours. I keep thinking this as Theresa drives away, to do some last-minute ingredient errands for Paul, leaving me on the sidewalk in front of the deep, narrow row house Rita rents the back half of so she can have her summer vegetable garden. This is a risky strategy, I know, to have yourself left seven miles from home at the doorstep of your ex-girlfriend's without a way to get back under your own power, but at the last second before begging Theresa to stand at the door with me I decide to play this one as straight as I can, for reasons not altogether clear. Perhaps I'm realizing that I've been too willing to share my life's loads with loved ones, never having the stomach to endure anything alone, how after Daisy died even given the tough circumstance I leaned way too hard on my mother and her sisters for help with the kids, and on Pop, too (at least as far as my livelihood went), and then soon thereafter on Rita, especially Rita, who never said a word and soldiered on raising Jack and Theresa through the hairy messes of adolescence, despite their lukewarm attitudes and provisionally stanced love and amazing chronic underappreciation of her cooking (at least until they returned home, respectively, after a couple months of college dining). But none of this was as bad as my daily, hourly, by-the-minute want of her total participation in all things me, her Jerry Husbandry; finding expression in even the most in-significant details I somehow got her to take care of, literally right down to the level spoon of sugar she'd stir into my morning coffee, the pat of butter she'd leave melting on my toast.