He shrugged. ‘Well, whatever you call it, there it was. So right after I read the letter, I decided I’d sucked it up enough. I should spill out how I felt. It would do me good. My dad had caused us all so much grief and I’d never told him how I felt about it, what he’d put us all through. So he writes me this, this beautiful letter, reaching out really, and somehow this cues me – sensitive guy that I am – that the time is right to go and beat up on the old man.’
‘Literally? You hit him?’
‘No. I might as well have. I told him he was a son of a bitch who had a hell of a nerve thinking he could make some kind of amends.’
Sarah didn’t think Graham was aware that he’d stood up and begun pacing.
‘As though he’s going to somehow make up for leaving us, just walking out. In his dreams. What’d he think I was going to do, forgive him? Take him back with open arms? Get a life, Sal but I’m not letting you back in mine! I don’t want to make you feel better. Not now, not ever. I don’t care how you feel. And we’re not going to be friends, for Christ’s sake. You think we can be friends? I hate you, man. Don’t you fucking get it? I hate your guts!’
He was yelling by the end. Now, in the small room, the silence when he stopped left a vacuum. He was breathing hard, looking back at Sarah as though in panic. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I beat him up. I beat the hell out of him.’
She waited until he’d crossed to the kitchen sink and scooped a few handfuls of water into his face. ‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘So what did he do? How did he react?’
He was leaning against the counter, his arms crossed over his chest, his massive shoulders slumped. ‘He said I was right. He was crying. And you know what, I was glad he was crying. He said he was so sorry.’ Graham blew out in frustration. ‘And right in character, I told him sorry wasn’t good enough. Sorry didn’t make any damn difference anymore.’
In the pause she asked, ‘And then what?’
‘Then I left.’
‘So how did you…?’
‘That was later,’ he said.
There was an old hose in the alley where he parked his truck across from his apartment. It had been left behind by the construction crew at the federal courthouse, and Sal Russo had claimed it. He had it hooked to a spigot and was washing out the bed of his truck, which got tolerably rank by the end of Friday.
There wasn’t any nozzle, but Sal was happy enough to control the spray with his thumb. It spit water back all over him, but he didn’t care. His life was sea spume and fish smell. This was part of it.
He’d polished off the last mouthfuls of the gallon bottles of Carlo Rossi that his customers hadn’t got to. He had the cigar butt in his teeth, chopping words off around it, half singing, half humming ‘Sweet Betsy from Pike’. It was the middle of the summer, two or more hours of daylight left, and the wind was gusting up in front of him, blowing the spray back, soaking him by the second. Chomping down harder on his cigar, he grinned into the force of it, then turned to get another angle on the truck bed, flush out the scales.
Initially, he thought it was a premonition of one of his spells – a shadow in the center of the sun’s glare, something about the shape so mnemonic, it felt like a haunting. Moving to one side, he squinted up into it. ‘Graham?’
‘Hey, Dad.’
Sal bent the hose over on itself, stopping the flow of water. He hadn’t seen his son since that time in Vero, and that had been a stupid mistake. He had seen him play and then hadn’t been able to stop himself. He thought enough time might have passed. Maybe Graham could understand. But he’d been wrong.
And now here he was again. ‘What’s goin’ on? Your mother all right?‘ He couldn’t imagine any other reason his son would come to see him – not after the last time. Helen, he thought, must have died and they send Graham to tell him.
‘Mom s fine.’ He shifted on his feet. ‘I, uh, I came by to apologize. I’m sorry.’
The world took on a blurry edge for a beat, but Sal only blinked and nodded. ‘Yeah, well, like I said, you were right.’ He released his grip on the hose, pointed it vaguely at the truck. ‘So how you doin’?‘
His son didn’t answer right away, which forced him to look. ‘Not that great, to tell you the truth!
Sal kept the water going. ‘I saw they cut you!
‘I don’t blame ’em,‘ he said. ’I sucked.‘ There was a set to the face, a tight control. He looked about to break. ’I’m too old. It’s a kid’s game. I was stupid, the whole thing was stupid.‘
Sal nodded. ‘Yeah, probably. If it’s any consolation, it’s in the blood. I’d a probably done the same thing, then got cut too. Bet that makes you feel better!’
A smile started, but went nowhere. ‘Lots. Thanks!
‘Don’t mention it. You hungry?’ He squeezed off the water again, held it with one hand, and pulled a roll of bills out of his front pocket.
Sal had a regular spot at the U.S. Restaurant, a lone table that spearheaded the sidewalk at the narrowest point in the triangular building. The place was in the heart of North Beach and had been in its location half a block from Gino & Carlo’s bar, essentially unchanged, for as long as Sal could remember. You still couldn’t spend ten bucks on a meal there if you tried.
They were on their third carafe of red wine. The wineglass was a prop and Sal had his hands wrapped around his. A foot from them both, outside the glass, the tourist night was getting into swing, the lights coming up on the street.
‘I don’t know if there is a why anymore,’ Sal was saying. ‘Maybe there never was. I don’t know.’
‘But there had to be, Sal. You don’t just…’
‘Maybe you do. Maybe one day you wake up and you’re a different person. You’re going along and something happens and the whole vision you have of who you are – suddenly that whole thing just doesn’t work anymore. So everything it was holding up comes crashing down around it.’
‘What? Did Mom have an affair?’
Sal shook his head. ‘It wasn’t your mother. This was me. Who I was.’ He lifted the prop and used it, buying some time. ‘It wasn’t anything as easy as an affair.’
‘So what was it?’ Sarah asked him.
By now it was nearly midnight, although neither of them was much aware of the time. They were facing each other, sitting cross-legged on the floor.
‘To this day I don’t know. He said I didn’t realize how insecure a person my mother was – still is, if you want to know. No one who saw her out in the world would ever see that. Though we kids had seen it, of course, after we were older. The face-lifts now, the trappings. Stuff you don’t need if you’re together with yourself.’
Graham seemed embarrassed by the cheap psychology. He looked down at his hands. ‘Anyway, she loved him. Their backgrounds might never mesh, they got uncomfortable doing each other’s things, you know?’
‘Like what?’
‘Oh, Mom wouldn’t go out on the boat. Sal wouldn’t get dressed up for anything. It broke down to money – Mom was used to things you bought, Sal liked things you did. It was a pretty big difference.’
‘But they got together?’
He nodded. ‘They’d never be friends like some couples were, but he loved her and knew he could make her keep loving him.’