When we get to the cemetery I have to ask workmen for directions to Pop’s gravesite since this is the first time I’ve been there since the funeral. By this time I’ve calmed down; my mom, though, is still stewing in her resentment, an icy frigidness coming off her in waves, all over some fucking flowers. About what I should’ve expected. Anyway, I don’t care.
I find Pop’s grave. I wait by it while my mom plods along behind me. Pop’s buried in a family plot, Tony and Jim are buried there also, although with Tony the casket’s empty since the army was never able to locate his remains. There are two empty graves there waiting for my mom and me.
When my mom catches up, I hand her the roses to place on the graves. She puts six roses on Pop’s, three each on my brothers’. All three gravestones are modest. With my pop’s, just his name and the years marking his birth and death. Both Tony and Jim’s have them being loving sons, and in Tony’s case, that he died in service of his country. While we stand there, I see a wetness around my mom’s eyes, then a few tears crawling down her cheek. It’s a struggle but she keeps her mouth from crumbling.
We stand at the gravesite for around fifteen minutes, neither of us saying anything. My mom turns first to leave.
While we’re walking to the car I spot a name on a gravestone that I recognize. It’s a guy I hit for Lombard. The gravestone talks about what a wonderful person he was, a loving father and devoted husband. I remembered him as a cocaine-snorting asshole who fucked every whore he could get his dick into. He sold drugs for Lombard, and when DiGrassi found that this scumbag had been ripping Lombard off for five years I was brought into the picture. This loving father offered me his thirteen-year-old daughter to do whatever I wanted with as a way to try to save his ass. I didn’t mind icing him one fucking bit.
I realize my mom’s watching me. From the glimmer in her eyes, she knows that I had something to do with this fucker’s death, probably even knows then what I do to make my money.
Christ, she’s perceptive. Always has been able to look inside me, which pretty much explains why we don’t like to be around each other.
chapter 20
present
I woke up with my head splitting. Squeezing my eyes hard against the sunlight drenching the room, I lay immobilized for a long minute before I sat up slowly, making sure to move at a glacier’s pace to keep those tiny silver daggers from ripping into my brain any more than they were. Once I maneuvered myself into a sitting position, I cradled my head in my hands until I thought I could move. I realized then my cell phone was ringing but there wasn’t a chance I’d be able to reach for it. Instead, each ring sent those daggers ripping deeper into my brain. When I could finally get off the bed, I stumbled to the bathroom and splashed cold water on to my face. I was still doing that when my cell phone rang again. Grabbing a towel to dry off my face, I went back to get the phone.
My eyes weren’t functioning well enough for me to read the caller ID and I croaked into the phone instead, asking what the fuck the person wanted.
“Dad, is that you?”
It was my son, Michael. I sat on the edge of the bed and carefully massaged my eyes with my thumb and forefinger. I apologized to him for the way I answered the call.
“This guy keeps calling and making vague, tough-guy threats,” I explained. “I thought it was him calling again.”
“Are you okay?” Michael asked. “You don’t sound good.”
“I’m okay. I just get these headaches. Today it’s worse than usual.”
“How long have you been getting them?”
“A long time. Years. It’s nothing to worry about.”
His voice flat, he said, “I’m not worried. I saw you on the news last night.”
“I thought you don’t watch TV?”
“Usually I don’t. A co-worker called me to tell me about it.” There was a pause, then, “If you want to meet me, I can do it today at twelve-thirty. Well?”
“Sure, I’d like that.”
“I’ll give you an address then, where we can meet.”
“Okay, sure, let me get a pencil and paper.”
Opening my eyes against the light was agony as a flood of tiny silver daggers emerged and went flying through my eyeballs and into my brain, but I ignored them as best I could and fumbled around the apartment until I found a pencil and some paper to write on, then had Michael give me the address of a coffee shop in Medfield. I knew nothing about Medfield other than that it was a good twenty miles away.
I asked, “Is that where you’re living now?”
“No, but it’s not too far from where I’m working. You should call the police about those phone calls you’re getting.”
“Yeah, I’ll probably do that.”
There was a click then as my son got off the line. I waited until my eyes could focus enough for me to dial, then I made several calls to find out how I could take the bus from Waltham to Medfield. It was going to require two bus transfers, which would leave me in Walpole, and from there I’d have to either walk four miles or take a cab, but I’d be able to get there by twelve-thirty. I made my way into the kitchen area where I poured several large glasses of lukewarm water down my throat, made a mental note that I needed to buy myself a coffee maker, then stumbled back to the bathroom. After stripping off my underwear I stood under the shower until my head started feeling more normal. At one point I tried lifting my right arm. My shoulder was sore as hell, but I was able to lift my arm higher than I could the other day, which was about all I could ask for.
When I got out of the shower I didn’t have much time before I needed to catch the bus to meet my son. Despite how empty my stomach was feeling I didn’t have time to make myself breakfast, so on the way to the bus stop I stopped off at a convenience store and bought a large coffee, a box of chocolate-glazed doughnuts and a newspaper.
I wished I had remembered my baseball cap and sunglasses, but I’d been in too big a rush and had left them back in my apartment. There weren’t a lot of people on the sidewalk, but most of those that were turned my way as I went past them, and from the way their jaws dropped, there was no question that they recognized me. I was in too much of a hurry to care. As it was, I barely caught my bus. There was an empty seat in the back row that I took, and as was common with people who regularly take public transportation, most of the riders already sitting didn’t bother looking up as I walked past them. The few that did didn’t pay enough attention to recognize me.
Once I was seated I wolfed down two doughnuts and half the coffee. It made me feel a little better, my headache more its normal dull ache than the stabbing torturous pain it had been earlier. I reached into my pocket for my bottle of aspirin and realized I’d left that back in the apartment as well. Fuck it, I decided at this point it didn’t matter. I’d be able to make it through the day okay without it.
As much as I was dreading it, I looked at the newspaper. Sure enough, I was back on the front page, and of course they had to prominently display a photo of me taken from the video that had been made. It was a long article which carried over to several pages. I tried reading it but the text blurred too much. I drank the rest of the coffee, sat back and closed my eyes. Ten minutes later I tried again. I had to hold the paper a few inches from my eyes, but this time I was able to focus enough on the print to read it.
The article dredged up all the stuff from the previous weeks, but grudgingly labeled what I did the other day “heroic”, especially after finding out about the arrest records of the two Mueller brothers, who turned out to be fraternal twins. At nineteen they had robbed a liquor store and pistol-whipped the owner and two customers, and each ended up doing a four-year stretch for that. The police were now looking at them for a recent robbery in Watertown where the perps wore ski masks and an employee at the liquor store had been shot and beaten unconscious.