After she was placed inside the Rispoli mausoleum, my dad and Uncle Buddy stopped speaking completely.
The silence between them was so deafening that I had to leave the bakery kitchen if they were both there at the same time.
It was as if my grandma were the last structure standing after an earthquake, and when she died, everything in the family quietly fell to rubble.
In that short period between my grandparents’ deaths, Uncle Buddy’s work habits had grown erratic; now they were just plain weird. He came in late and left early, mixed batter and dough in a lazy, halfhearted manner or not at all, and barked at customers if they were too slow in making up their minds. Sometimes he just sat in the kitchen smoking a Sick-a-Rette, staring hard at my dad, as if the power of his hateful gaze would force my dad to do or say something. I was unsure of what that something was, but then it didn’t matter anymore because Uncle Buddy stopped coming to work altogether. Instead, he used his keys to come in after hours and rummage through the kitchen, storage rooms, and basement, ripping open boxes, splitting sacks of flour, pushing over shelves. My father would find the mess, shake his head, and clean it all up, muttering, “He’ll never find it.”
“Find what?” I asked, picking up broken dishes.
My father shrugged, answering vaguely, “Whatever he’s looking for.”
“Dad?”
“Yes, sweetheart?” he said.
His eyes were full of a sad sense of looking beyond the here and now, it rattled me a little, and I lost the nerve to ask more about Uncle Buddy. Then something caught my attention, and I glanced past him at thin lines of smoke seeping from the Vulcan. “Something’s burning!” I said.
“Damn it! The melassa biscotti!” he cried, dropping the broom and rushing to the oven. A plume of black smoke rolled up to the ceiling as he pulled open the door, yanked out a tray of smoldering cookie lumps, and threw it on the mixing table. The stink of scorched sugar filled the room and I gagged a little. Overhead, fire sprinklers coughed and spurted streams of tepid water. My dad leaned on the table with both hands, hanging his head, and then pounded it with a fist so hard that I jumped. “It’s all ruined! Everything!” he shouted into the indoor thunderstorm.
“It’s just cookies,” I said.
“No, it’s everything! Everything,” he said, and then moved so quickly across the room that I jumped again. He was staring at me intently, almost like he was going to cry. “Sara Jane, you’re the oldest. You’re so smart and so. .” He trailed off, then pursed his lips and bowed his head. When he looked up, the possibility of tears was replaced by something cold and rooted on earth. “Innocence fades for everyone,” he said slowly. “If a person has any hope of survival, it must be substituted for plain reality. Listen to me closely, not with innocent ears, but with the ears of an adult. If something happens, you need to know about our family. .”
“What could happen?” I said, a shudder racking my body.
“Anything,” he said in a voice that I’d never heard before. He had made the leap into plain reality and I had to join him. I stopped shaking, or at least tried my best, as he said, “I have to tell you important things about our family business. And about the bakery. .” He paused as his eyes flicked past me.
“What is it?” I whispered.
“Yeah, what is it?” Uncle Buddy said from the kitchen door, striking a match and lighting a Sick-a-Rette. Its rotten-garbage smell mingled nauseatingly with burned molasses as he came toward us, a little grin on his lips. “Or should I say, where is it?”
My dad squared his shoulders and positioned his body sideways, a boxer setting his stance.
Uncle Buddy did the same thing, cautiously.
I moved closer to my dad, determined not to leave his side, mirroring his posture without realizing it.
Uncle Buddy chuckled. “Well, look-it here, a daddy-daughter boxing team. Hey, Sara Jane, before you unleash the stunning power of those spaghetti arms on old Uncle Buddy,” he said, his laugh turning to a sneer, “just remember it was me who made time to get you into boxing, not him.”
“But he’s my dad!” I said, surprised at the acid in my words.
“It doesn’t make him right,” Uncle Buddy declared. “Remember what I’m teaching you, kid, it’s an important life lesson. Just because he’s your dad does not make him right. In fact, your dad recently made a very wrong decision that could be very, very bad for your family.” He smirked at my dad, saying, “You’re surprised I know about that, huh? Stupid old Buddy? Well, stupid old Buddy has been hacking your voice mail and peeking at your e-mail. . techniques just like the government uses.”
“Buddy,” my dad said, his voice full of warning.
“I know, I know. . not in front of the kiddies, right?”
“Sara Jane can handle anything you can dish out and more,” my dad said.
“Oh, please.” Uncle Buddy chuckled again. “She’s still mooning over a kiss that happened five years ago.”
“Three,” I mumbled. I’d never heard my uncle’s mocking tone directed at me. It crushed my heart a little, but I also realized that I was curling my left hand into a fist.
“Come on, Anthony. Enough of the playacting and bullshit. You know that I know all about that notebook,” Uncle Buddy said.
“What notebook?” I said.
“Buddy,” my dad said, this time almost growling.
“I’m tired of looking for the damn thing, and besides, it’s not like you’re going to need it anymore,” Uncle Buddy said. “Just give it to me and then you and your little family can go on your merry way to wherever they send your kind of people.”
“They who?” I said. “What does he mean, ‘your kind of people’?”
Uncle Buddy grinned at my dad, the Sick-a-Rette stink-smoldering between his lips like something scooped from a litter box. “You want to tell her or should I?”
My dad paused, his jaw rippling, and said, “Even if I did give it you, Buddy, you wouldn’t know what to do with it. It’s too dangerous for someone like you.”
Buddy’s smart-aleck smile stayed in place, but his voice was ice. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means someone. . who wants to be like me,” my dad said slowly. “And you’re not, Buddy. You’re not like me.”
“Maybe I could be,” Uncle Buddy said, in a tone both angry and wishful, “if you give me the notebook.”
My dad remained silent, his face full of iron, as he shook his head no.
Uncle Buddy said, “Okay, kid, here’s exactly what we’re talking about-”
My dad cut him off abruptly, saying, “Sara Jane, go wait in the car.”
“But Dad. .”
“Yeah, kid, go wait in the car. Go do your nails or something else just as girly,” Uncle Buddy said. “It’s a perfect example of one of the important things he was going to tell you about the family business. . a woman’s place is on the outside looking in.”
“Yeah?” my dad said. “What about Greta?”
This time Uncle Buddy’s smile slipped. “Keep her out of this,” he said.
“You’re the one who put her in it. Right between us.”
“She’s not between us!” Uncle Buddy said. “This is! This family and its secrets! It has always been between us!”
“Not for me,” my dad said quietly.
“Of course not for you. You’re the older brother,” Uncle Buddy said, pointing the stinking Sick-a-Rette at him. “You have a healthy, blue-eyed son.”
They stared at each other until they remembered I was there, and then they slowly turned toward me. Their faces were so different, my dad’s weary and worried, my uncle’s smug and disdainful. Fragments of the past-Uncle Buddy’s unhappy response long ago at the announcement of Lou’s impending birth, my parents’ urgent “doing the right thing” conversations they’d been whispering about for years, the line of men at my grandpa’s funeral waiting to talk to my dad, the older son, while ignoring my uncle-appeared like pieces of an unfinished puzzle. My conversation with Willy about the history between them echoed in my mind, especially his ominous words “in a family like yours.” Whatever it all meant, I at least understood that the rift between my dad and uncle had shifted from depressing to dangerous. Even more clearly, I saw that danger creeping toward Lou. My entire body was shaking when I said, “What’s this about, Dad?”