I tried to distract myself on those daily subway trips by reading the graffiti or inventing lives for my fellow riders. But my mind wandered. Suddenly Veronica would be sitting beside me, reaching for my hand. I imagined whole conversations, trying out different explanations for her betrayal. Each day, she had a new reason. None of them mattered. People are what they do.
It was a summer of painful obituaries. First George Carlin. Then another of my favorites, Bernie Mac. I never believed the old saw about death coming in threes, but I found myself dreading the third one anyway. Then Carl Yastrzemski checked into a hospital for triple-bypass surgery. Yaz had been one of my father’s favorites, which made him one of mine too, but given the alternative, I almost hoped the third one would be him.
The news about the newspaper business was all bad. Desperate to stem the tide of red ink, papers all over the country slashed employee pay and laid off journalists by the thousands. The Miami Herald. The Courier-Journal of Louisville. The Los Angeles Times. The Kansas City Star. The Baltimore Sun. The San Francisco Examiner. The Detroit News. The Philadelphia Inquirer … Not even The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal were immune.
By late July, I was no longer a suspect, and the paper had reinstated me. Wu Chiang’s lawyer, more grateful than she needed to be for the credit-card records I’d mailed to her, had followed Brady Coyle’s script exactly, providing Polecki with my alibis and pressing the chief of police for a public exoneration and apology. Polecki dragged his feet as long as he could before grudgingly issuing a statement. The cops had released my Bronco and my grandfather’s gun, and the lawyer said she was holding them for me. I didn’t give her my number, either.
I wanted to go home. I missed the scent of salt, spilled petroleum, and decaying shellfish that rose like Lazarus from the bay. I missed the bellowing of the parti-colored tugs that bulled rusting barges up the river. I missed the way the setting sun turned the marble dome of the statehouse the color of an antique gold coin. I missed Annie’s tattoo, Mason’s fedora, Charlie’s omelets, Zerilli’s Cubans, McCracken’s crushing handshakes, Jack’s Italian curses, and Gloria’s one good eye. I missed knowing the names of almost everyone on the streets.
But there was still a price on my head. And it was only a matter of time before Providence joined the layoff trend. Would there be a job waiting if it were ever safe for me to return?
One evening Ruthie pulled out her photo albums, and we paged through them together on the couch. Ruthie and her sister—my mother—holding tennis rackets and mugging for the camera. Their father looking sharp in his Providence PD uniform, his chest bedecked with medals. Aidan and Meg ripping open Christmas presents. Little Liam playing with a Tonka hook-and-ladder truck.
When I was six, that truck and I were inseparable. I’d even slept with it. “Wow!” I said. “I’d forgotten how much I loved that thing.”
Ruthie smiled, got up, rummaged in the hall closet, and came back cradling the truck in her arms. I remembered it as a huge thing in my life, but when she handed it to me, I was surprised how small it was.
“I rescued it from the basement after your mother died,” she said. “You should have it.”
Maybe I’d sleep with it again. Better than sleeping alone.
In early August, the paper’s owners finally tired of bleeding money and laid off 130 employees, 80 of them news staffers. I called Mason to learn the names. Abbruzzi. Sullivan. Ionata. Worcester. Richards … So many old friends.
“You and Gloria were on the list, too,” Mason said, “but I talked to Dad.”
I was touched that he’d done that for me. I wasn’t surprised he’d kept his promise to her. But if readers and advertisers kept on deserting us, this wouldn’t be the last of the layoffs. Mason might not be able to save us next time.
By mid-August, the Yankees were finished, their stars looking old and slow and the young pitchers they’d counted on not yet ready for the big time. But the Sox trailed the surprising Rays by seven games now, and three of our starting pitchers, our right fielder, our shortstop, and our third baseman were all on the disabled list. Ortiz had returned from his wrist injury, but he wasn’t the same. And the great one, Manny Ramirez, was gone, traded to the Dodgers after throwing one tantrum too many about his pitiful twenty-million-dollar contract. I wondered what Rosie would have said about that. Me? After all that had happened, it was hard to care about baseball anymore.
On a Sunday afternoon in early September, the Providence paper’s banner headline grabbed me before I grabbed it from the newsstand: ARSON RETURNS TO MOUNT HOPE.
I carried the paper to the Algiers Coffee House on Brattle Street and read it over a cup of Arabic coffee and a lamb-sausage sandwich. A duplex on Ivy Street had burned to the ground, and a fast-moving fire had gutted Zerilli’s Market on Doyle Avenue. The story, under Mason’s byline, quoted Polecki as saying the fires were definitely suspicious but still under investigation. When I turned to page eight for the rest of it, I was thrilled to see that the fire picture on the jump page was credited to Gloria.
Mason’s story went on to speculate that the arsons had resumed because, after a quiet summer, the police and the neighborhood vigilante group known as the DiMaggios had “let their guard down.” I made a mental note to talk to Mason about clichés.
I tried to call Whoosh, but his home number was unlisted and the phones in his store were melted lumps of plastic.
75
Next morning, I borrowed Aunt Ruthie’s immaculate two-year-old Camry and headed south on I-95. An hour later I turned off at Branch Avenue, parked on the street by the gate to the North Burial Ground, opened the trunk, and took out my Tonka hook-and-ladder truck. A bunch of dead mums slumped against the headstone that marked the final resting place of Scott and Melissa Rueda. I placed the toy on the twins’ grave and took the dead flowers away.
Then I walked to the car, cruised a few miles east, and swung into Swan Point Cemetery. Rosie was buried among the rhododendrons, about fifty yards west of where they’d planted Ruggerio “the Blind Pig” Bruccola. Her grave was smothered in a mound of dead flowers. I cleared them away, preserving the mementos her fellow firefighters had placed there—three fire hats, a brass nozzle from a fire hose, several dozen Providence FD patches, and a few score more from other fire departments around the state. I draped a signed Manny Ramirez jersey over the shoulders of her gravestone, kneeled in the grass, and talked with her for a while, just the two of us reminiscing about our Hope High days while watching a tug churn its way up the Seekonk River. I kidded her about the neon flowered monstrosity she’d worn to the prom. She made fun of my awkward, left-handed layups. We agreed we had made a mistake, that one time we slept together, but we weren’t sure if the mistake was doing it at all or not giving it another try.
“I’m so sorry I missed the funeral, Rosie. I would have been there, but Aunt Ruthie talked me out of it. If she hadn’t, I’d probably be lying right next to you.”
When the chat between two friends turned into a conversation between the living and the dead, and I couldn’t hear her voice anymore, I walked back to the car, taking the jersey along with me. She’d want to wear it again the next time I dropped by to talk, and there was no point in leaving it behind so some punk could steal it.
I took a shortcut past Brown Stadium and swung Ruthie’s car onto Doyle Avenue. The store was a blackened shell, and Whoosh was standing out front supervising a sidewalk sale of smoke-damaged goods. I parked on the street, strolled over to him, and stuck out my hand.