Nana's eyes fixed on the scrape on the side of my forehead – the bandage there.
"It's a scratch," I said. "Not a big deal. It's all good. I'm fine."
"Don't give me that ridiculous nonsense answer, Alex. Don't you dare condescend to me like I'm somebody's fool. I'm looking at the line of trajectory taken by a bullet that came an inch from splattering your brains and leaving your three poor children orphans. No mother, no father. Am I wrong about that? No, of course not!
"I am so sick of this though, Alex. I have been living with this sort of terrible dread every single day for over ten years. This time I've had it. Up to here. I've truly had enough. I'm done with it. I'm through! I quit! Yes, you heard me correctly. I quit you and the children! I quit!"
I put up both my hands in defense. "Nana, I was out with the kids when I got an emergency call. I had no idea the call was coming. How could I? There was nothing I could do to stop what happened."
"You accepted the call, Alex. Then you accepted the assignment. You always do. You call it dedication, duty. I call it total insanity, madness."
"I. Didn't. Have. An. Option."
"You do have an option, Alex. That's my whole point. You could have said no, that you were out with your kids. What do you think they would do, Alex – fire you for having a life? For being a father? And if by some accident of good fortune they did fire you, then so be it."
"I don't know what they could do, Nana. Eventually I suppose they would fire me."
"And is that such a bad thing? Is it? Oh, forget it!" she said, and banged her mug down hard against the tabletop. "I'm leaving!" she said.
"Oh, for God's sake, this is ridiculous, Nana. I'm totally exhausted. I was shot. Almost shot. We'll talk about it later. I need to sleep right now"
Suddenly Nana stood up, and she moved in my direction. Her face was wild with outrage, her eyes tiny black beads. I hadn't seen her like this in years, maybe not since I was growing up, and a little on the wild side myself.
" Ridiculous? You call this ridiculous? How dare you say that to me."
Nana struck me in the chest with the heels of both her hands. The blows didn't hurt, but their intent did, the truth of her words did. "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm just tired."
"Get yourself a housekeeper, a nanny, whatever you can get for yourself. You're exhausted? I'm exhausted. I'm fed up and exhausted and sick to death of worrying about you!"
"Nana, I'm sorry. What else do you want me to say?"
"Nothing, Alex. Don't say anything. I'm tired of listening to you anyway."
She stomped off to her room without another word. Well, at least that was over, I thought as I sat down at the kitchen table, tired and depressed as hell now.
But it wasn't over.
Minutes later, Nana reappeared in the kitchen, and she was lugging an ancient leather suitcase and a smaller traveling bag on wheels. She walked past me, through the dining room, and then right out the front door without another peep.
"Nana!" I called, struggling up from my seat, then starting to jog after her. "Stop. Please, stop and talk to me. Let's talk."
"I'm through talking!"
I got to the door and saw a dented and gashed pale-blue DC Cab throwing off exhaust fumes and plumes of smoke out front on the street. One of her many cousins, Abraham, drove for DC Cabs. I could see the back of his retro Afro from the porch.
Nana climbed into the ugly blue taxi, and it immediately sputtered away from the house.
Then I heard a small voice. "Where's Nana going?"
I turned and lifted Ali, who had snuck around behind me on the porch. "I don't know, little man. I think she just quit on us."
He looked aghast. "Nana quit our family?"
Chapter 31
MICHAEL SULLIVAN WOKE with an awful shudder and a start and knew immediately he wouldn't be able to get back to sleep. He'd been dreaming about his father again, the scary bastard, the boogeyman of all his nightmares.
When he was a little kid, the old man had brought him to work at his butcher shop two or three times a week in the summer. This went on from the time he was six until he was eleven, when it ended. The shop took up the ground floor of a two-story redbrick building on Quentin Road and East Thirty-sixth Street. Kevin Sullivan, Butcher was known for having the best meats in all of the Flatlands section of Brooklyn, but also for his skill in catering not just to the Irish but to Italian and German tastes.
The sawdust on the floor was always thick and swept clean every day. The glass in the windows of the cases sparkled. And Kevin Sullivan had a trademark – after he presented a customer's meat for inspection, he smiled, and then took a polite bow. His little bow got them every time.
Michael, his mother, and his three brothers knew another side of his father though. Kevin Sullivan had massive arms and the most powerful hands imaginable, especially in the eyes of a young boy. One time he caught a rat in the kitchen and crushed the vermin in his bare hands. He told his sons he could do the same thing to them, crush their bones to sawdust, and their mother seldom went a week without a purplish bruise appearing somewhere on her frail, thin body.
But that wasn't the worst of it, and it wasn't what had woken Sullivan that night and so many other times during his life. The real horror story had begun when he was six and they were cleaning up after closing one evening. His father called him into the shop's small office, which held a desk, a file cabinet, and a cot. Kevin Sullivan was sitting on the cot, and he told Michael to sit next to him. "Right here, boy. By my side."
"I'm sorry, Dad," Michael said immediately, knowing this had to be about some dumb mistake he'd made during his chores. "I'll make up for it. I'll do it right."
"Just sit!" said his father. "You have plenty to be sorry for, but that's not it. Now you listen. You listen to me good."
His father put his hand on the boy's knee. "You know how badly I can hurt you, Michael," he said. "You know that, right?"
"Yes, sir, I know."
"And I will," his father continued, "if you tell a single living soul."
Tell them what? Michael wanted to ask, but he knew better than to say a word, to interrupt his father once he had begun to speak.
"Not a solitary soul." His father squeezed his son's leg until tears formed in Michael's eyes.
And then his father leaned forward and kissed the boy on the mouth, and did other things that no father should ever do to his son.
Chapter 32
HIS FATHER HAD BEEN DEAD for a long time now, but the creepy bastard was never far enough away from Sullivan's thoughts, and in fact, he had devised unusual ways to "escape" from his childhood demons.
Around four the next afternoon he went shopping at Tysons Galleria in McLean, Virginia. He was looking for something very speciaclass="underline" just the right girl. He wanted to play a game called Red Light, Green Light.
During the next half hour at the Galleria, he approached a few possible game players outside Saks Fifth Avenue, then Neiman Marcus, then Lillie Rubin.
His pitch was straightforward and didn't vary. Big smile, then: "Hi. My name is Jeff Carter. Could I ask you a couple of questions? You mind? I'll be quick, I promise."
The fifth or sixth woman he approached had a very pretty, innocent face – a Madonna's face? – and she listened to what he had to say. Four of the women he'd hit on before her were pleasant enough. One was even flirty, but they all had walked away. He had no problem with that. He liked bright people, and the women were just being cautious about the pickup game. What was the old saying? Don't pick that up, you have no way of knowing where it's been.
"Well, not exactly questions," he went on with his sales pitch to the Madonna of the Galleria. "Let me put it another way. If I say anything that bothers you, I'll stop and walk away. That sound fair enough? Like Red Light, Green Light."