“Bren — ,” I said.
“Forget it,” she said. It would be five minutes or more before we could cross the tracks. “Merry Christmas, okay? Merry fucking Christmas.”
“Stop it,” I told her. “Just stop it.”
“And a Happy — ”
“I’m sorry, all right?” I reached over and took one of her hands. She tried to pull away. The train shook the car. I kept her still until she quit fighting me. For a long time, once the tracks were clear, we didn’t move. We sat there holding hands.
City Codes
“It doesn’t pencil out,” said the priest — the lawyer-developer-priest from the Dallas Archdiocese. Father Matt. “We knock one unit off our sixty-unit plan, we’ll lose our profit margin. Not that we’ll profit. We’re strictly nonprofit, of course. But in the next ten years we’ll have to recoup our building costs, our maintenance outlays … otherwise, it’s not feasible for us to proceed. In which case, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell — that’s what you’ll get next door instead of us.” By us he meant God-fearing Good Guys. Nice Neighbors.
I was thinking, Pizza Hut. Hmm. One squatty story instead of a seventy-five-foot apartment house packed with Catholic college boys leering into my stepdaughter’s bedroom window. I was raised Catholic. I know what those bastards are like.
I thought, Taco Bell. I could abide that.
“No, sorry.” Father Matt shook his graying head. As a concerned neighbor, living next to the lot where the Fellowship Commons would rise, I had joined other concerned neighbors in asking Father Matt to reconsider the project’s density. We were sitting around a table at City Hall, after work. The table smelled of coffee, though none appeared to be available. I was late; Haley was waiting for me at the Boys and Girls Club, where she went after school each day. “I can’t accommodate you. It just doesn’t, you know, pencil out.”
I had a pretty good idea what he could do with his pencil.
“Why are you sticky?” Haley sat up against her pillow. As I straightened her sheet, she reached to tap my collarbone. She pulled away quickly.
“My heart-scar isn’t healing so well,” I said. “You know the vitamins you take at breakfast? My doctor says if I cut one in half each night — a Vitamin E gel — and spread the juice on my chest, in six months or so, the scar might vanish.”
“Pill-guts?”
“Yep.”
“What was the matter with your heart?”
“It was all blocked up.”
She curled her blankie under her chin. She’d had it since she was two — before I came into her life — and now, six years later, its frayed edges looked like fettuccini. “My daddy?”
“Yeah, honey?”
“He says his heart is broken.”
Oh my. “How often does he tell you this?”
“Pretty much often.”
“Haley, you know, sometimes adults — ”
“You were friends with my daddy?”
“For a while, yes.”
“If you weren’t having mating with my mommy, you and my daddy would probably still be friends, right?”
Pizza! Tacos! Prayer! Any damn thing but this! “Maybe.”
“My favorite game is ‘Mercy,’” she said, and for ten minutes she told me about the fun she had twisting her daddy’s arm until he screamed, in mock pain, “Mercy!” Finally, a yawn. “Terry?”
“What is it, sweetie?”
“You got pill-guts all over Blankie.”
“Here, let me rub it off. Lights out now.”
Downstairs, I locked all the doors. Before heading to bed, I stopped at the bathroom mirror. Bumps and ridges right between my ribs, like a badly sown field of crops. Gone in six months? Well. In another six months, if Good Father Matt had his way, we’d never know that Sarah Levin’s historic home had been next door. I patted myself with a towel.
In bed, Jean was reading part of the Comalia Land Development Code, downloaded from the Internet: “Section 18A: Neighborhood Compatibility.” She looked up at me. “Are we still going to fight this thing?”
“Father Matt?”
“I think we can get him on scale, the solar maps — that baby’ll bury us in shade — and the fact that he’s asking for seventeen different exemptions from the code. Plus he’s got no parking or lighting plan. And the latest city stats show student enrollment dropping.” She waved a sheet of paper. “This building is just a money-maker for the church. It’s not a community service, no matter how they pitch it.” From the beginning of the process — meeting with the neighborhood association, writing testimony for our upcoming appearance before the city planning commission — she’d been galvanized not just by the potential destruction of the Levin place and our loss of privacy (Haley’s bedroom would be the most exposed to the new building) but by the fact that the couple who’d sold us our house, two years ago, knew this development was in the works, and hadn’t told us. We’d learned this from the neighbors. Some of them suggested we sue the Wards for lack of full disclosure, but we weren’t the suing types, nor could we afford a lawsuit. Besides, we just wanted to be done with the Wards.
When our real estate agent first showed us the house, Jean and I weren’t married yet. Mr. Ward, a retired Navy man, in his early seventies or thereabouts, followed us closely as we toured each room, asking who we were, what we did (our agent told us, later, he was way out of line). He was tall and fit with a belly mildly rounded, like the curve of an old computer screen. He towered over me but seemed entirely hapless. Days later, I learned from a colleague at the local college, a man who was active in the Catholic community, that Don Ward had been asking about Jean and me at mass. I imagined him shouting, “Living in sin? No sale!” and Jean and I got the jitters.
As it turned out, sin didn’t interest the state of Texas or Bright Realty, and the deal went through just fine. “God bless you,” Mrs. Ward, a frail, parchment-skinned woman, told us the day we moved in our boxes. Her stuff was already gone — all but the framed, glass-sealed paintings of the Virgin Mary, which hung in every room. The Virgin sleeping, blessing others, weeping, cradling her child. As we worked, Mrs. Ward gingerly removed these scenes from the walls, wrapped them in tissue, and placed them into U-Haul boxes. “God bless you,” she said, passing through the kitchen as I unpacked my margarita glasses with their green, cactus-shaped stems. “God bless you,” she whispered to Jean, slipping by the bathroom as Jean arranged her makeup and toiletries in the cabinet. “That woman creeps me out,” Jean said once Mrs. Ward had gone. I agreed, though the old altar boy in me was touched by her care of the Holy Mother. Jean was Jewish and would have none of it — though she softened when a neighbor told us the Wards had raised nine kids in this house. “Nine? It’s a wonder the woman can walk.”
This bit of bio, we figured, explained the pass-through between the kitchen and the dining room, a space with a shelf, cut among upper and lower cabinets, where plates could be set. The space had been boarded up — scarred, splintery plywood — blocking the kitchen from the dinner table. Removing the plywood, to open things up, was one of our first priorities. “Clearly, the woman was walling herself off from her children,” Jean said. “And from Sailor Boy, too,” I added. For a week or so we felt tenderness for poor Mrs. Ward, who, we surmised, had barely kept her sanity in this house. If the Virgin had helped her survive, then God bless the Virgin.
Then we discovered what the Wards hadn’t told us. Though Don had no financial interest in the Commons, he was a local Catholic leader and had helped persuade the archdiocese to invest in the real estate. Initially, the rest of the neighbors understood that the church would renovate the Levin place, one of the oldest homes in our town — we’re sixty miles south of Dallas — and one of the few nineteenth-century structures in central Texas designed by a woman (“And a Jew,” Jean noted). The house had been vacant for years but was listed on the Historic Register. The neighborhood was fond of it. “It could be rezoned and fixed up to make a nice coffee shop or cyber-café,” Don Ward told his friends.