WE’RE DOWN AT THE restaurant. I’m in back tallying up our meat order, Angela’s out front, and the news comes on the TV we got mounted at the end of the bar. Nobody called us or anything—we just heard it on the news, same as everybody else.
“New developments in the Maretto case. Details at six.” At this point you come over to the bar. Then you have to wait there for ten minutes, through the end of some damn “People’s Court” and five or six commercials, to find out what they’re saying now about the murder of your son. How do you think that feels?
But the worst is yet to come. Because when the news finally comes on, they’re sitting there saying my boy was a goddam wife beater and a drug addict, and those punks shot him because he didn’t pay his bills. My son that never finished a bottle of beer in his life, a drug addict. As for hitting her—that guy never could never lay a hand on anyone. Least of all her. He worshiped the ground she walked on.
For a minute we just stand there staring at the set. Who knows what the customers are doing at this point? You hear nothing but the voices coming from the screen. Somebody hands me a shot of whiskey—here, Joe, you better drink this. But I just stand there holding it. Can’t move.
Then she comes on. Suzanne. Our daughter-in-law. She’s sitting on the very couch in the very place where my boy died. Little microphone clipped on her blouse. That little turned-up nose of hers that always looked to me like they took her out of the oven too soon. Looks like she got her hair done for this event. She’s got the dog in her lap and she’s petting him. And the reporter that’s talking to her, he’s acting like this is the First Lady or the Queen of England he’s got here. “I know this must be very hard for you, Mrs. Maretto,” he says. “I know everyone’s heart goes out to you.”
She looks right into the camera, like she’s looking straight at Angela and me. “My husband was addicted to cocaine,” she says. “He owed a lot of money to the two young men currently facing charges. He was getting violent, losing control. I believe that’s the reason why they killed him.”
I can’t help myself then. I don’t even think, I just pick up the table that’s next to me and throw it. I smash my hand on the bar, knock over every drink, every bottle that’s sitting there. Then I start in on chairs. Angela tells me I was screaming too. Maybe I was. I don’t remember.
When my wife gets me calmed down—quiet anyway—they’re just finishing up with the damned interview. “So, Mrs. Maretto, how does all of this make you feel?” says the reporter.
She wipes a tear from the corner of her eye with this piece of Kleenex she’s holding. “Well I try to be a positive person, Bud,” she says. “I’m a fighter. All through this terrible ordeal I have tried to move forward with my life, hold on to my dreams. I know my husband would’ve wanted me to. But I have to admit to you that sometimes I wish I had died myself that night. Sometimes I actually wish I were dead.”
When we heard her say that, a strange thing happened to Angela and me. Neither one of us said anything, but I knew we both understood what had to happen. I mean, we’d have to work out the details. There’d be time enough for that, but we knew we could handle it. You don’t run a bar in the Italian section of town twenty years without making a few friends that can help you at a moment like this. The important thing was we knew what we had to do, and there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that we were going to do it.