Ben McGreavy had been a very smart man. Cass cradled a secret pride for the way he always seemed to have the right answer to every question. That whip-speed intellect once landed him a spot on Jeopardy!, and his winnings had gotten as high as $22,400 after the first round. But before the next round he’d had a few belts of Seagram’s scotch on his way to the set—just four or five, far less than a normal evening’s intake—hoping it would soothe his nerves. The stakes were high. Depending on how long he could hang in there, he had hoped to pay off some debts.
Not the one to his brother, Scott. Cass knew Ben had stopped keeping track of that years before. He’d probably stopped even thinking about it, except when Scotty would get mad about something else and invariably add, And what about all the money you owe me, huh? What about that?
Ben would shame Scotty by pulling out his wallet and tossing his last few dollars on the floor. Or just by looking at him, a look that said, You might be a big man somewhere in the world, but calling in a debt on your own brother, who hasn’t had your luck—that’s cold, even for you.
Cass had seen variations of this interaction countless times in the eleven years she’d been with Ben, since she was eighteen. She hated that they often didn’t have enough to live on—hated even more that it was their own fault. She’d been raised to work hard and follow the rules, and there had been precious little of that in the last few years. “We have to stop,” she’d say. “We have to get jobs and stand on our own feet!” And Ben would agree. Till the job bored him, which was always. Till the whisper of alcohol in her brain surged to a voracious roar and she was plummeting toward a roiling ocean of pain and the only thing left to do was pull the ripcord on sobriety and let booze be her parachute, floating, drifting down, down, down into the glassy warm waters of oblivion. Drowning either way.
Ben lost on the Final Jeopardy! question, winning the third-place consolation of $1,000. No debts were paid, but Cass had taken a load of groceries to the single mother on the third floor, a lot of prepared foods so she didn’t have to cook, and things Cass knew the kids had never had before, like clementines and blueberries. Then she and Ben had had a few days of howling hilarity spending the rest of it.
On what?
She watched as the casket was lowered into the ground. It seemed too small, not nearly large enough to hold so much knowledge, such a commanding personality as Ben’s. The winch let out its crick-crick-crick sound, and down he went into the stony brown earth.
God, he’ll be so freaking bored down there.
But what had they spent the money on? All she could remember now was laughing and drinking fussy-sounding wine at a restaurant with real flowers on the table. Real live flowers. Red ones, or possibly purple. Wherever it was, however long it lasted, it had been a good time.
“A wicked good time,” Cass said now, loud and slurry, a half bottle of Seagram’s having thickened her tongue. Her sudden exclamation destabilized her, and she lurched sideways for a step, as if she were on the deck of a storm-battered ship.
Don’t act drunk. The silent chide came automatically, as it had for the last decade.
“Shut up,” Ben’s brother, Scott, muttered, his large face paler than usual, short hair tufting up like dead grass out of snow. His blue-gray eyes, dull and blank, slid momentarily toward the priest muttering prayers at the coffin.
Cass didn’t care. Ben was dead. What else mattered?
“He was a good man!” Her finger wobbled at Scott, voice rising above the drone of cars whizzing unsympathetically by them on Market Street. “No matter what you thought of him.”
“I’m warning you,” Scott growled.
“Warning me? About what? What can you do to me now? Hit me with your big steroid muscles? Go ahead—I’m not afraid of that.”
Scott glanced at the priest. “Thanks, Father, I think we’ll wrap it up now. It’s a nice spot.” He handed over an envelope and nodded at the two guys in coveralls leaning against a tall, pointy headstone a few rows over. Through the blur of booze and tears it looked to Cass like an amputated church steeple stuck in the grass.
A broken hunk of God.
She felt her knees go loose again, and she stumbled forward. Scott grabbed her elbow; she could feel his grip through the only black coat the thrift store had had. It was a trench coat, size eight, and it swam on her like a tarp. The cuffs were frayed but she’d trimmed the wisps of thread and sewn up a hole by the elbow, right where Scott now laid his thick fingers.
“Don’t rip it!” Her screech sounded like the caw of a crow, even to her.
“Just get in the fucking car,” he muttered, taking her other elbow now and marching her toward his SUV, black, unscratched, and as clean as if he’d driven it off the dealer’s lot and straight to the cemetery. He hoisted her into the passenger side like a sack of laundry, then slammed the door and went around to the driver’s side, hopping up effortlessly, suddenly beside her, his finger thrusting toward her.
“First of all, I am not on steroids. And second of all, if he was such a goddamned good guy, why are you and me the only ones here? Huh?”
“People don’t know he’s dead!”
Scott heaved a long, aggravated sigh. “No, Cass. He’s been low-life-ing it so long, people think he’s been dead for years.”
“Don’t you say that! They all remember when he was on Jeopardy!”
“Jeopardy!? That was six years ago! The highlight of his life. The one time he used his brains for something other than trading risky stocks and the goddamned crossword puzzles.”
Cass burst into tears again. Ben was so good at the crosswords. She’d gotten him a book of them once when she was trying to get them both off the sauce, and he’d stayed sober for two whole days till he finished them all.
Scott slumped back in his massive leather seat. “Where are you staying—same place?”
“Yeah.” She inhaled a sniffle.
He reached past her, popped open the glove box, and tossed a couple of paper napkins in her lap. “Don’t get snot on my car,” he said. “And take those with you when you go.”
She cried silently the whole way home.
Not home, she thought as they sped down Brighton Avenue. Just back. Back to one of the countless crappy places she’d crashed in over the past eleven years since she’d left her last foster home on her eighteenth birthday.
“DCF stops paying me today,” her so-called foster mother had said when Cass got home from school that day. “Your ride’s over.” And she’d handed Cass a black trash bag with all her stuff in it.
“Can I have my pillow?” Cass had asked. She’d liked that pillow, it fit her just right.
“No, I need that for the next kid,” the woman said and shut the door.
The social worker had helped her find a bedbug-ridden room and a job sweeping up old ladies’ hair at Alba’s Set and Go. But then she started dating Ben McGreavy, the smartest guy she’d ever met, older brother to her classmate Scott McGreavy, the best athlete at Brighton High. It had sure looked like a better deal than Alba’s.
Scott pulled the SUV up in front of the crooked house, one end of the porch held up by a two-by-four. They lived in an illegal studio apartment in the basement. No, she lived there. Ben now had “a nice spot” in the Market Street Cemetery. Cass started to cry a little harder, her sobs painful and hiccup-y.
“Jesus, how hammered are you?”
“Screw you, Scotty!”
“Just get out of the car.”
She had her hand on the door handle, but something stopped her. The sense of things changing, everything happening so fast. She’d lost Ben, and now Scotty would be gone, too. He wasn’t really such a bad guy. Sorta big on himself, but athletes were like that.
“Scotty . . .”
“What?” He didn’t even have the car in park, she noticed. It was in drive, and he had his foot on the brake.
“Just . . . thanks.”
“For?”
“We owe you a lot of money, and you and I both know you’re never gonna get it now.”
He shrugged. “Ben owed me. You never asked for a thing.”
“Still. Thanks. From both of us.”
Scott stared out the window, up the street toward Brighton Avenue. “You gonna be okay?”
“Yeah.” No. “You?”
He snorted a mirthless little chuckle, and it occurred to her that maybe he was glad about Ben. Nobody to bail out now. No more Ben drama. Cass knew Scotty hated the drama more than he hated handing out money.
But Scott said, “He was my brother.” And his chin trembled. He blinked a couple of times, his blue-gray eyes shiny. Then he made his face go blank again. “You need anything? Groceries?”
“No, it’s okay.”
“I’m not giving you cash.”
“I didn’t ask for any.”
He nodded. Then he looked at her. Cass realized it had been a long time since Scotty had made actual eye contact with her.
“You take care of yourself,” he told her.
“You, too.”
“If you ever want seats or anything, let me know. I’ll leave them at the ticket window for you.”
“Thanks.” He’d been signed by the Red Sox two years before and had often gotten them tickets. Sometimes they’d loved sitting in the old park and screaming themselves hoarse when he got up to bat. More often than not, though, they’d scalped the tickets and gone drinking. Cass wondered if he knew.
When he pulled away, she stood on the sidewalk and watched his SUV accelerate. His brake lights went on at the end of the street. The black coat was so big she couldn’t wrap it tightly enough to keep the damp March wind from whisking up and licking at her skin. Scraps of auburn hair lashed at her face. But it seemed important somehow to wait. It was a small vigil she held as she watched those taillights, glowing red, like votive candles. A prayer for the passing of her life with Ben.
Scott’s SUV made a right turn. He was headed toward the Mass Pike, she guessed, west to that nice house she’d heard about, somewhere in the suburbs. Or maybe east to the airport to go back to spring training. Either way, that would be that.
Cass stumbled down the buckled flagstone path, around the back, and let herself into the basement. Her buzz dying, she focused only on getting to the half bottle of Seagram’s she’d left on the table a few hours before.