I’LL TELL YOU WHAT kind of a boy this was. This was a boy that one time, when he was eleven years old, took his paper route money and sent it to Africa for the starving children. This was a boy that, the night of his senior prom, he stops by the nursing home with his date to visit his grandmother. You want to talk Mother’s Day? I’ll give you Mother’s Day. This boy, on Mother’s Day, sent me one long-stemmed rose for every year he’d been alive. Last year it was twenty-three. Now that’s as many as it will ever be. You tell me—does a mother get over something like that?
Even when he was a baby he was good. Slept through the night, first night we brought him home from the hospital. Even before we had him toilet trained, he used to apologize when I had to change his diaper. I kid you not. “Sorry, Ma,” he’d say to me. His big sister taught him how to say, “Better luck next time.” “Better next time,” he’d say to me. Could you be mad at a boy like that?
Oh, he was an altar boy. But he never planned on being a priest, like so many of the other altar boys. Even when he was five, six years old, and people would ask him, “What are you going to be when you grow up?” his answer was always the same. “I’m gonna cook spaghetti and pour beer at my pop’s restaurant.” Never a fireman. Never a policeman. My boy was going to make the best eggplant parmigiana in town.
Larry never gave us trouble with girls. He was always a gentleman. The girls loved him, naturally—who wouldn’t? And he liked the girls too. But like he always said, “You and Pop come first, Ma. Any girl for me, she’s gotta be a girl for my whole family.”
Now I won’t say we didn’t have our moments. What parents don’t, I ask you? One time we got a note home from school, Larry’s gotta do his homework. He says you don’t need algebra to work in a restaurant. So his father and me had a talk with that boy. “You sure you don’t want to go to college, Lawrence?” I ask him. “Because you know, you say the word, your pop and I will come up with the money, same as we did for Janice’s skating.” We may not be wealthy people, but our children never lacked. Never was there something they asked for that we didn’t provide. And never did they abuse our good faith either.
But no, he wasn’t a college man, and we made our peace with that. We knew our Larry would earn an honest living at our place, and one day it would all be his. The customers adored him. Not just the young girls but everyone. “How’s Larry doing?” they’d ask me, if a couple weeks went by they didn’t see him. “You should see my granddaughter that’s visiting from college,” they’d say. “She’d be a nice girl for Larry.”
He was always polite. Never made them feel like they weren’t good enough. Only he kept his distance. Never got serious once, until she came along. The little blonde. A model, he called her, meaning she gave out free samples at a store. Not Italian, that’s for sure.
“I got to tell you something, Ma,” he said to me one time, when the two of us were tending bar, a week, maybe two after he met her. “This is the girl I’m going to marry.” By this time he’d sent her the roses, took her out for dinner, but you didn’t want to think it was serious. I mean, these two had nothing in common. P.S., she was older. Two years. Not that she liked to let on.
“She’s a cutie all right, Larry,” I told him. “Reminds me of Nanette Fabray.” I mean, you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to know it’s a bad idea to try and discourage them. That only fans the flames. “I bet she’s a college graduate too,” I say. Her father running a car dealership and all.
Oh yes, he says. She went to college over in Somerset. Honor student, sorority sister, the works. She’s heading someplace, this one. We’ll be hearing from her, you can just bet on it.
“Let me tell you something, son,” his father tells him. “The cute ones, the pretty ones, they aren’t always the best bet for the long haul. Look for a woman you can grow old with.”
“What are you saying, Joe?” I ask him. “You saying I didn’t ever cause your heart to skip a beat, round about 1962? You telling me all I ever was to you was somebody’s ma?” I can say these things to my husband on account of what a good relationship we got. I know he’s crazy about me. He knows I know it too. I just like to give him a hard time now and then.
“You’re the exception, Angela,” he tells me. “Everybody knows that. But how many times in a century is a boy gonna find a beautiful woman that’s a beautiful mother too? And since I found one, how many more times can it happen? Tell me the odds lightning’s gonna strike twice.”
“Well,” he says, “all I know is this is the girl for me, Dad, and come summer, you’d better get your good suit cleaned because there’s going to be a wedding.”
Couple weeks later he brought her by the restaurant. You could tell he was nervous taking her around. He shows her the baseball trophies from the team we sponsored, shows her the ice-making machine. Takes her into the cooler even. “Here’s the ladies’ room,” I hear him telling her. “Here’s a picture of my sister, the year she placed second in the eastern division junior figure skating competition, compulsory figures. … One time we had Tony Conigliaro sitting here, right on this very bar stool,” he says. “And you know the guy that does the muffler commercials, that says ‘You show us a better deal, we’ll install your muffler free of charge’? He sat right there in that corner booth.”
You could tell she was trying not to laugh, when he said these things. This was a worldly type woman. She probably never met a boy like Larry, that couldn’t tell a lie to save his life. She probably thought he was nuts.
I’m still trying to figure out why she decided to marry him. I mean, no question, she could’ve found other guys. I’m not saying Larry wasn’t a wonderful catch. Best husband a girl could ever find for herself. And it’s true, he worshiped the ground she walked on.
But what was she looking for out of him? That’s the question I lay awake nights asking myself. Why’d she have to go and marry my son?