The next time she saw Ricco, three days later, she told him what had happened, and that if they were going to do anything, they would have to do it early, so she wouldn't get hell when she got home.
He asked her why she still lived at home, and she told him about Eddie and Brian, and how Eddie, that sonofabitch, wasn't paying child support. He told her maybe something could be worked out; he would look into it.
The first thing that happened was that Eddie, out of the goddamned blue, sent a Western Union money order for four hundred bucks, which wasn't all he owed, of course, but was four hundred Antoinette didn't expect to get.
And then she heard from her mother that she had heard from Eddie's mother that Eddie had gotten mugged going home from work, that two white guys had done a real job on him, knocked out a couple of teeth, and broken his glasses and a couple of ribs, and taken all his money.
Antoinette wasn't stupid. She knew that the last thing Eddie would have done if he had got mugged and they took all his money would suddenly decide to send child support. And three days after the Western Union money order came, there was one from the Post Office, what he owed for two weeks child support, plus twenty dollars on account.
The only way Eddie would suddenly decide to start doing what was right was because somebody had convinced him that he better do right, and Antoinette suspected that Ricco was that somebody.
Ricco wouldn't admit it, of course, but what he said was that bastards who won't support their own children deserve whatever happens to them, like losing a couple of teeth.
The second thing that happened was that Ricco said he knew where she could get a nice apartment, a couple of blocks from the Warwick, the only problem being she couldn't have a kid in there. Antoinette told him it didn't matter whether she could have Brian or not, on what the phone company was paying her, she couldn't afford it. He said he would be happy to help out with the whole thing.
Her mother and father threw a fit when she said she was moving out, and her father said he knew it had something to do with that Guinea gangster with the shiny Cadillac, and her mother said she was making the mistake of her life, because Eddie was straightening himself out, like for example paying the child support for one thing. But she moved out anyway, and came to believe that her mother and father were really glad she had, because that way, except when she saw him on weekends, they had Brian all to themselves.
The apartment was nice, and Ricco not only picked up the rent, but was always slipping her a fifty or a hundred and telling her to buy herself something. She knew that she was kidding herself whenever she thought about maybe getting him to marry her. He was going to stay married to his Guinea princess for ever.
The only thing that had ever really bothered her was the first time he told her that he had a friend from Chicago that was coming to town and he wanted her to be very nice to him, and she knew what very nice meant. That made her feel like a hooker, but she had just moved into the apartment, and couldn't just move back home again, so she did it. It wasn't as bad as she thought, the guy was nicer than she thought he would be, and to tell the truth, he was pretty good between the sheets, and when he went back to Chicago, Ricco handed her four fifties and told her to buy herself a cheese-steak or something.
And it didn't happen often, maybe two, three, four times a year. It wasn't as if he was telling her to go stand on a sidewalk someplace and wink at strange men, just be very nice to people who were important to Ricco. That didn't seem to be, considering, all that much for him to ask of her.
This Vito Lanza the cop was something else. This was the first time something like this had happened. But if Ricco wanted her to do it, it was important. And what the hell, the truth was Vito was kind of cute, and not too bad in the bedroom department, either. It wasn't as if he made her want to throw up, like that.
Ricco told her he wanted her to be very nice to Vito the cop until he told her different. He said the cop was in a position to be useful to some business associates of his, and part of that meant getting him to figure that he owed her something.
It was pretty clear to Antoinette that it had something to with his being a cop at the airport. They wanted him to be looking the other way when something happened, something like that. It wasn't as if they wereafter Vito, anything like that. If they were after him, the same thing that had happened to Eddie would already have happened to him.
Vito was waiting for her outside the apartment in his Buick when she got home from work. He acted like he wanted to go up to the apartment with her, and then go see her Uncle Joe, but she told him that her uncle expected them now, before he had to go home, and they could come back to the apartment later.
Take care of business first. Antoinette had learned that from Ricco. Ricco was always saying that.
Marionreached the farm about quarter to nine. There had been no cars on the highway when he turned off onto the dirt county road, and he encountered no cars on the dirt road as he drove to the farm.
There are approximately 1,200,000 acres in that portion of southern New Jersey known as the Pine Barrens. Statistically speaking, the built-up portions of southern New Jersey represent a very small fraction of the total land area. The term "Pine Barrens," Marion had learned, had been applied to the area from the earliest days of colonization. "Barrens" meant the area was barren, except for stunted pine trees.
There were some exceptions of course. Some people had acquired title to land within the Barrens with the intention of farming it. Some had succeeded, including, for a time, some of Marion's maternal ancestors. It was a mystery to Marion how they had managed to eke a living out of their double section (1,280 acres, more or less, as the deed described it) but there was no question that they had, from the early 1800s for almost a century.
The house, as closely as he had been able to determine, had been built circa 1810, and the farm had been in use until just before World War I. He had no idea why it had not been sold, but it hadn't, and it had come to him via inheritance.
For a long time, he had thought that the reason he had not sold it was because no one wanted it. The house was 6.3 miles from the nearest paved road. There was a well, but the water was foul-tasting, and while Marion did not pretend to understand things like this, he suspected it was somehow contaminated. The taxes were negligible, and he had simply kept the farm.
Now he knew, of course, that it hadn't been his decision at all, but the Lord's. The Lord had had plans for the farm all along.
The fences, except for vestiges here and there, had long ago disappeared, as had the wooden portions of the farmhouse, and the barns and other outlying structures. What was left was a three-room building, partly constructed from field stone and partly from crude brick.
Marion's father had replaced the windows in the building, and installed a tin roof when Marion was a little boy. Marion now understood that his father had had some half-baked idea of making the farmhouse into some sort of vacation cabin, but that idea had sort of petered out. Marion's mother had not liked driving into the Pine Barrens to spend the weekend cooking on a camping stove and using an outside privy. There was absolutely nothing to do at the farm but sit around and talk and look out at stunted pine trees.
She had, he now understood, tried. She had planted various kinds of flowers and bushes, most of which had died, but some of which, roses and some bushes the names of which he had never known, had survived and even flourished. You couldn't see the farmhouse, behind the vegetation, until you were within a hundred yards.