I DON’T GET IT. I keep trying to figure out what went wrong. Because at every step along the way, things just looked so good. And now this.
Angela and I went steady right through high school. I never looked at another girl. That’s God’s truth. She was all I wanted.
I wasn’t looking to set the world on fire. She didn’t need to find herself or any of that. What we wanted was to take over my uncle’s lunch counter, get a nice home, have healthy kids, raise them right. Someday sit in the den and watch our grandchildren open their Christmas presents, knowing we’d done a good job. Does that sound like too much to ask?
We did it by the book. No fooling around before we were married. First two years we were married, we lived with her folks, so we could save up for the down payment. We moved into this house the day Kennedy was shot. Our daughter Janice came along nine months later to the day. And Larry two years after that. So we had our boy and our girl. Angela stayed home with the kids, like mothers did in those days, and I worked like a dog at the restaurant. Nights, weekends, I didn’t complain. I had two healthy kids and a lovely wife. They were worth it.
Angela was just great with those kids, you ask anyone. Home-cooked meals every night, you could eat off the floor. Janice wanted skating lessons, Angela drove her an hour each way to the rink. Same thing with Larry’s Little League games, and then those drums. By this time the restaurant was doing real good, we got our liquor license, put in the bar. Running a restaurant in this part of town, big Italian clientele, I’m not saying we didn’t have one or two fellows among our customers that may have been on the wrong side of the law on occasion, but we kept our noses clean. We always ran an honest, family-type establishment. A lot of the time I’d be working, but Angie never missed one of the kids’ events at school. And always had the right thing to say if Janice didn’t get invited to a dance or maybe Larry struck out or fumbled a ball in the field. Larry may not have been a natural athlete, but you never saw a bigger heart in a player, or a kid that tried harder.
I’m not pretending the teenage years were a picnic. Janice had her skating to keep her out of trouble, but Larry was always such a friendly guy, always going someplace, he had some friends that maybe wouldn’t have been Angela’s and my choice. Long hair, guitars, drums, the whole bit. Larry’s only problem was, he trusted everybody else to be as decent as he was. But I trusted him too. I knew he had his head screwed on right, and sooner or later he’d buckle down and get on with his life. Which he did.
Angela and I had always planned on Larry going to college, but when he graduated high school, he said that was it. What are you going to do? He starts tending bar down at the restaurant. We tell ourselves now’s just not his time yet. His time will come.
Then he met Suzanne, and it seemed like that was going to do it for him. That little blonde had enough ambition for the two of them. “You know, Dad,” he said to me, not too long after he met her, “Suzanne’s going to go far in the world.
“You wait and see,” he says. “One of these nights you’ll turn on the news in the den and it’ll be Suzanne up there on Channel 7. And she’ll be coming home to me.”
He said being around her gave him a reason to make good himself. He was always telling us things Suzanne told him, how you’ve got to have a goal in life. Whatever it is you want, you can attain it, if you try hard enough and believe in yourself. You have to think positive. Don’t ever doubt yourself, and don’t get distracted looking over your shoulder at the other guy. Just be the best you can be, or be all that you can be. Go for it. Now I’m probably getting it confused with some commercial. But you get the idea. And I’m telling you, it all sounded pretty good to Angela and me. It seemed to us like Suzanne was giving Larry just the kick in the pants he’d always needed, to get somewhere.
Six, maybe eight months after he’d met her, Larry comes up to me real serious one night, says he needs to have a talk with me, man to man. He’s been thinking about his future, and he’s set his priorities. A person can’t get anywhere just having fun all the time. He wants to make something of himself, and not just party the rest of his life. All the things I used to tell him, only now he’s telling them back to me.
The bottom line was, he’d cut his hair and signed up for a night course in accounting. Told me he wanted to learn the restaurant business properly, so he could take over the place one day and make me proud. “I think I got a future in this line of work, Dad,” he tells me. Well, I could have told him that. A person would come into the bar just to be around that boy. You trusted him. He listened to what you said. He’d make you feel he cared, which he did.
“OK, son,” I tell him. “Show me you mean business and I’ll make you weekend manager come fall. I won’t treat you no different than if you were somebody else’s boy, though. No special favors. Business is business.”
You should’ve seen how serious he was about the whole thing, right from day one. Sold his drums. Went out and bought a briefcase, and a diamond for Suzanne. Handed out our matchbooks every time he walked in a door. People were telling me they’d run into Larry somewhere and before they could even spit it out to say, “How do you like those Red Sox?” he’d be asking them, “You give any thought yet to where you’re holding your company Christmas party this year? You tried my mother’s lasagna recently?” He’s hiring bands, got a comedy night once a month, ladies night at the bar. And so forth.
Next thing I know, my son’s close to doubled our business, Saturday and Sunday nights. No college degree, but the guy’s golden. He takes the bonus I give him and puts a down payment on a condo. The place on Butternut Drive.
All this time, Suzanne and Larry were engaged, although what with his night hours and her job at the mall, sometimes days went by he didn’t see her. Angela used to say she couldn’t understand it how two young people in love could be apart that way. My wife’s more what you might call the romantic type. But by my way of thinking, those two kids were just being sensible. Before a couple starts their life together, they need to have their ducks in a row.
He gave her the Datsun for Christmas. Nothing was too good for that girl, as far as my son was concerned.
They were married in July, and she gets this new job at a cable TV station. He kept his nose to the grindstone. They lived just around the corner from us, but we didn’t see that much of them to tell the truth. He worked long hours, and she was always out with her girlfriends or taking some workshop on how to improve your vocabulary or get ahead in the career world or some such thing. One time I remember Angela called her up and she couldn’t talk because she had this wardrobe consultant there, looking over her clothes, to tell her what she should wear. “I just found out I’m a summer, and all my clothes are winters,” she told Angela. “I beg your pardon?” says Angela. She called it getting her colors done. Said it would help her in her career. All I know is, finding out she was a summer cost my son a couple hundred bucks, and that was before she even went out to buy all those new outfits. She told us on television, everything’s got to be perfect. “The camera never lies,” she said. Well I don’t know about that.