“Florence,” she said. “This was 1982. I was twenty-two, and Bennie, he was a big shot, thirty years old, money falling out of his pockets, that’s what I thought, anyway. But you know, when you’re young, someone with a thousand dollars seems rich. I wanted to get married at Temple Isaiah when it was still down on Oakey, but because Bennie wasn’t Jewish, they made a real stink about it. My father was a rabbi there, so he didn’t care, obviously, but the board wouldn’t let it happen for political reasons, which is just a fancy way of saying they didn’t want to have Bennie’s family showing up in photos inside the temple, not when one of their members was about to run for the Senate. So Bennie says, Fuck them. He said that to me. I remember it clear as day. He said, Fuck them. So he flew my family, all of my friends, all of his friends and family, plus anyone who was a member of Isaiah that wanted to come, flew everyone to Florence, and I got married at the Great Synagogue of Florence.”
“That sounds like a good time,” David said.
“It was,” she said. “But it took me until recently to realize he didn’t do it out of a sense of justice, or even to make me happy. He did it out of spite. Maybe I should have seen that back then, but what do you know when you’re twenty-two?”
“You think you know everything,” David said.
“That’s right,” she said. “That’s so right, Rabbi. You think you know everything. You think your whole life is going to be what it is at that very moment, can’t imagine anything ever being different, can’t imagine you’ll ever feel differently about the things you don’t care about, if that makes sense. A year later, my mother would be dead from ovarian cancer, and all of a sudden, I realize how young I am. That all I want is my mommy. So here I am now, with these two girls, and I’m realizing my entire marriage is based mostly on spite. That is not a pleasant experience, Rabbi. I don’t want my daughters to look back and think that their mother let them live a horrible life.”
The problem David faced on a semiregular basis when talking to his congregants was that he just couldn’t relate to their issues, but Rachel’s problem was one that David had become intimate with since the night he found himself in a frozen truck filled with meat and nothing but time to think. It was hard, after having a kid, not to start thinking about your legacy. Though, admittedly, David hadn’t really started contemplating what he was leaving behind for William until he was already gone, which was strange since he’d been thinking more and more about his own father, and his trip off that building.
Still, he couldn’t very well just let Rachel sneak out in the middle of the night, particularly since he was pretty certain he’d be the one who’d have to chase her down.
“My advice,” David said, “is that you need to look inside yourself first and see precisely what you’re dissatisfied with. I think you may find, ultimately, that your husband is not at fault here. Let the Torah speak to you.”
Rachel pushed her plate of uneaten bow-tie pasta and vegetables to the side of the table so she could make room for her purse, which she turned over and dumped onto the table. Among the items was a Saturday night special, a little silver-and-black Lorcin.380, a piece of shit, really, mostly a paperweight.
“Do you see this?” she said.
“The gun?”
“Of course the gun,” she said. “Why aren’t you freaking out?”
“It’s not pointed at me,” David said. “And I’m not scared to die.” He picked up the gun and examined it on his lap. Nice weight to it, actually, though David couldn’t believe Bennie allowed his wife to leave the house with anything less than a nine. Then it occurred to him: He probably didn’t even know she was packing. . and that was probably the point of this little exercise. David wrapped the gun in his napkin, wiped it down, and then set it back on the table with the napkin on top of it. “It would be a good idea to put the safety on, otherwise you might kill your purse.”
“I have to carry a gun because of my husband, Rabbi. Today, I’m going to pick up Jean and take her to softball practice, and I’m going to have a killing machine in my purse. Because of him. And because I think people will try to hurt me when I’m with him,” she said. “Or hurt my children. So don’t tell me this is somehow my fault. Okay?”
Half the restaurant was already eavesdropping on their conversation now, never mind all of the staff. Peopled tended to notice the word “gun,” and if the restaurant had anything approaching halfway decent lighting, they would have all been under the tables after she dumped the.380 next to the salt and pepper. “I’m a mess. Jesus. I’m a mess,” Rachel said quietly. She patted her face with powder from her compact, which made it look like she was trying to hide something. “How’s this?”
“Better,” he said.
Rachel gathered herself, even tried to smile. “I’m not asking for your permission, Rabbi, I’m asking for your guidance. So please, Rabbi, please, give me some idea of hope.”
He needed to get out of this conversation and this restaurant. “Okay,” he said. He was in an absurd situation, he recognized. Here he was, a man who’d spent his entire life killing people, sitting across from a woman with a gun, attempting to convince her that the world was a safe and good place, even in the face of what he knew was a terrible decision on her part, a terrible decision that could ruin his own life even more. “Your husband is not trying to hurt you,” David said calmly.
“How do you know that?”
“Because if he wanted to hurt you,” David said, again, calm as can be, “my understanding is that you’d already be hurt.” Rachel’s eyes widened, but David kept staring into them, hoping she’d get the subtext he was trying to impart, without revealing too much about himself in the process. “So my idea for hope is this: Live your life for yourself and your children, but do not put yourself in a position where your husband is forced to act. . irrationally.”
“Jesus Christ,” Rachel said. “He’s gotten to you, hasn’t he?”
“No one has gotten to me,” David said.
“You’re lying.”
“Mrs. Savone,” David said, “I have never been more honest than I am right now. I’m a rabbi, I’m not an idiot. I get the same newspaper as you. It’s all right there.”
Rachel stared at David for a long time, then chuckled to herself. “I should have seen it,” she said. “I don’t know how I missed it.”
“Seen what?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all.” Rachel looked at her watch. “I need to go,” she said, a smile wide across her face now, as if she’d discovered something particularly fantastic. “I have an appointment.”
“Don’t do anything stupid,” David said.
“I was going to get Botox, if you must know,” she said. She stood up and came around to David’s side of the table, kneeled down next to him so he could really see her face. “Do you see these lines around my mouth?”
“No,” he said.
“You are a liar.” She touched him lightly on the face, just under his left ear, where his beard still didn’t grow correctly. “You almost can’t see your scars anymore.” She let her hand linger on his cheek for just a moment, then smiled again, this time in a way that seemed terribly unhappy. “Dr. Kirsch did my face, too,” she said.
That afternoon, David sat on a chaise lounge out by his pool, smoked a cigar, and tried to figure out the best way to escape. It had warmed up into the low seventies, the sky was a deep blue, and in the distance he could hear the sound of children laughing.
David got up from the chaise lounge and walked the perimeter, tried to gather his thoughts into a straight line, see if he might be able to make some decisions. If Fat Monte was really dead — and David didn’t doubt the veracity of the information Bennie had given him, only that sometimes people in the Family who were presumed dead ended up alive — that was one less impediment to his returning home, or at least one less person who might hurt Jennifer and William. Not that Ronnie wouldn’t be happy to farm that out to the Gangster 2–6, or just some tweaks willing to kill a family for a grand a head, maybe less.