I was learning, but it was slow. I still took courses, and I was going to get my MFA because I hate to quit things before they’re finished. But I knew the MFA didn’t have a lot to do with my work. I had to learn myself how to do my work. Other painters could sometimes tell me things not to do, but they didn’t even know how, or exactly why, they did what they did. I’d never met one who could tell me how to do what I did. The rest of the classroom work was theory, and a review of criticism. It was interesting. I liked knowing the sort of Kenneth Clark stuff about how art both shapes and records the culture it comes from. But it didn’t help me to get Tyler Street complete. I had to figure that out myself.
Rosie was asleep on my bed with one paw over her nose. She woke up suddenly and jumped down and went to the door. In a minute the doorbell rang, and Rosie did a couple of spins and jumped up against the door and barked, her tail wagging very fast. Normally that would mean my father or Richie. I went to the door.
I was right. It was my father. Unfortunately it was also my mother.
“Did we interrupt anything?” my mother said.
“No, I was painting, I need a break.”
My father got down on the floor with Rosie and let her lap his nose. Since my father was built like a short blacksmith it was an interesting display.
“Oh God, Phil, be careful of your knee,” my mother said.
My father had been shot fifteen years before, arresting a man who’d murdered three women, and his left kneecap had been shattered. An orthopedic surgeon had pieced it back together, and while he limped slightly and it ached occasionally, it was as durable as the right knee. I knew that. He knew that, and, I think, my mother knew that. But she always warned him anyway.
My mother and I went to the kitchen and I put on coffee. My mother had brought some raspberry turnovers. My mother almost always brought something. My father got up and came into the kitchen and picked up a turnover.
“Phil, wash your hands, for God’s sake. How do you know where that dog’s tongue has been.”
My father winked at me and bit into the turnover. I had come to realize as I matured that one basis of their relationship was his ability to ignore her. If she noticed it, she didn’t seem to care.
“Well, don’t be coming around trying to kiss me with dog slobber all over your face,” my mother said.
“I may have to, Em,” my father said. “You’re so goddamned irresistible.”
We had some coffee and turnovers at my kitchen table with Rosie in continuous agitation for a bite. My father broke off a piece of turnover and gave her some.
“Phil,” my mother said, “you shouldn’t feed her from the table.”
“Certainly not,” my father said.
“How are your courses?” my mother said.
She liked to think of me as a graduate student. It made her seem younger and it was more respectable than being a private detective.
“Fine,” I said. “I only take one a semester, all the time I have.”
“Won’t it take a long time to finish?”
“Yes.”
“But doesn’t it postpone when you can become a painter?”
“I think she is a painter,” my father said.
“You know what I mean. I mean full-time.”
“I may never do it full-time,” I said. “I like the detective stuff, too.”
“Well, that’s foolish,” my mother said.
“Because it’s not proper work for a woman?”
“No,” my mother said, “because it’s not proper work for my daughter.”
I nodded. My father was munching his turnover and giving some to Rosie and looking at my incomplete painting of Chinatown at the other end of the room. I wasn’t sure he even heard my mother.
“I never had your choices,” my mother said. I’d heard it before. I could have recited it with her, had I cared to. “My generation married and had children and stayed home and raised them.”
But you, I recited in my head, you have a smorgasbord to pick from.
“... a smorgasbord to choose from,” my mother said.
Damn, she varied it on me.
“You can be anything you want to be and why you would throw that chance away and settle for this silly detective business...”
Now she shakes her head.
She shook her head.
It’s beyond me.
“It’s beyond me.”
“I like the detective business,” I said. “My B.A. was in social work, remember.”
“And you’re so pretty, too,” my mother said.
“You hear from Richie?” my father said.
“I saw him three nights ago,” I said. “We had dinner.”
“How you doing?” my father said.
“How should she be doing,” my mother said. “She’s divorced from him.”
“You getting along?”
“Better than we did when we were married,” I said.
My father smiled as if he understood that.
“The thing is,” I said, “we are really connected, and divorce or not, the tie between us is pretty strong.”
“Divorce cuts that tie,” my mother said. “Don’t fall for it. You don’t need a husband, and if you decided you wanted one, why would you want a hoodlum?”
“Richie’s not a hoodlum,” I said.
My mother looked at me the way you look at a slow child. My father picked Rosie up in his lap and let her lap him some more.
“I like Richie,” my father said, his face was screwed tight against Rosie’s kisses. “He’s straight as far as I know. I don’t like his father so much, or his uncle, but they’re stand-up guys.”
“Whatever that means,” my mother said.
“You working on something?” my father said.
“I’m working on a missing girl, a runaway, she’s fifteen.”
“Where’s she from?”
“South Natick.”
“You think she’s in Boston?”
“That would be my guess,” I said. “You don’t run away from South Natick to Medfield.”
“Richie giving you a hand?”
“He put me in contact with someone who could help.”
My father nodded.
“You figure she’s hooking?” my father said.
“Probably,” I said.
“Oh for God’s sake,” my mother said. “Must we talk about runaways and whores?”
My mother hated it when my father and I talked business. I knew she felt excluded and I knew she was jealous that he spoke to me as an equal. Good.
“Well,” my father said, “you need something, you’ll call.”
“Yes.”
“We had an auction,” my mother said, “raised nearly a thousand dollars for the couples club last month.”
My father and I listened quietly to the details.
Chapter 11
Tony Marcus was having huevos rancheros at a table in the back of Beans & Rice restaurant, which wasn’t open yet. Junior was with him, and a thin jittery little cokehead named Ty-Bop, who looked like he might be twenty. Junior was the muscle. Ty-Bop was the shooter. Spike sat at the table with Tony, straddling a chair, his forearms resting on the back.
“You called?” I said to Tony.
“Sit down, Sunny Randall,” Tony said.
I sat beside Spike who patted my thigh.
“Got your girl for you,” Tony Marcus said.
“You make me proud, Tony.”
“She’s hooking for Pharaoh Fox.”
“You heard it here first,” Spike said.
I smiled at him.
“Pharaoh know about me?” I asked Tony.
“No.”
“He prepared to give her up?”
“We didn’t discuss it, Sunny.”
Leaning against the wall, Ty-Bop seemed to be listening to music that no one else could hear. He tapped and bounced next to Junior who was motionless.