4

 

 

At three a.m., I heard a sound that at first I thought was my cat, Mister Shit, who occasionally—usually during a full moon—prowls around the apartment in the wee small hours and mewls about something. But the cat-like sound turned into a rhythmic sobbing beat…lala break lala break lala.

Then Mary Jane gave me the elbow in the ribcage, and I was wide awake and in action. DJ’s crib was stuck in the bedroom corner in our North End apartment, and I quickly picked him up, carried him over to the changing table, unsnapped his onesie sleeper, swapped his sopping diaper for a new dry one and brought him back to our warm bed. Mary Jane was ready lying on her side, and he quickly nestled between us on the bed, fastened on to one of her breasts, began sucking and was soon making contented little sighs.

Most of the time, I could quickly go right back to sleep, but this morning, for some reason, I stayed awake and just watched my son have his early breakfast (there would be another at six, eight and ten). One of his incredibly cute little hands rested on his forehead, the other on his mom’s chest. Each hand had five perfect fingers, matching the toes hidden by the footies of his sleeper.

DJ was now six months old, and every day was just an amazing experience. I could tell by the way he followed me with his eyes, giggled when I tickled him and looked at his big sister Victoria that he was a genius child with an IQ well into the 200s. Whenever I mentioned that, Mary Jane rolled her eyes. You’ll show her, I silently said to the back of his head, with its wispy threads of hair. Oh yeah, in addition to being a budding genius, he had been born with a good head of hair, most of which he still had. A genius and a good-looking one! He was obviously destined for great things,what with all my brilliant Hacker genes bubbling around inside him.

I had been back from New York for a little over a week, and was scheduled to fly down to Savannah after the upcoming weekend. While I was home, I got to watch DJ while Mary Jane and Victoria went off to school—MJ as a fourth grade teacher, Vick as a sixth grader. The kid was a good napper, so I usually was able to get in a few hours of research—I was making notes of past events for the golf tournaments we would be broadcasting, since I was now the staff historian and color info man—but when he was awake I kept him fed (Mary Jane always left a few bottles of harvested breast milk), clean and dry, and when the weather permitted, we’d go for a walk around the North End of Boston. We were already favorites among the nonne in our mostly Italian neighborhood, and we usually came home from one of our walks with bags of biscotti and other home-baked treats.

I’d like to think DJ and I were bonding during these days together, but I suspected that at this age, he looked on me mainly as the tall hairy guy who’d occasionally feed him, change his nappies and give him all kinds of colorful plastic things to gum so the tall hairy guy could get another fifteen minutes on the computer. I made a mental note to ask him about it when he was sixteen.

“Y’know Hacker,” Mary Jane said to me one night as we took turns dandling the little guy on our knees so the other could scarf down some pasta, “It might be time to think about moving.”

“Gack,” I said. That being the universal male word for “OMG, we just had a baby and now you want to disrupt our lives further by moving to a new place?”

“I know,” she said, as Mary Jane understood the male language pretty well. “But DJ is going to need his own bed before long, and that means he’s gonna need his own room.”

“He cannot move in with me,” Victoria said with determination. She was twelve now and you could see the teen years gathering speed and coming rapidly down the pike. “I will not share my space with a male. Even if he is my brother.”

Mary Jane could have reprimanded her daughter, but instead chose to ally with her.

“See?” she said. “We are going to need more rooms.”

“I thought you liked the city,” I said. “You guys can walk to the school from here. And I’m just a train ride away from Logan.”

“I do like the city,” she said. “But Victoria will be moving on to middle school in just another year, and that’s a bus ride away. And you can get to the airport from anywhere. Uber uber alles.”

DJ was on my lap and wiggling. I held him up so we were nose to nose.

“This is all your fault,” I told him. “We may have to send you back.”

He giggled.

“Do you have some ideas?” I asked.

Mary Jane got up from the table, went into the bedroom and came back with a manila folder. It looked pretty full.

“I withdraw the question,” I said. Mary Jane took DJ from me and went into the living room and laid him down on a blanket on the carpet there. I began leafing through the New Housing File, as it was labeled. Mary Jane had been busy. There were notes and brochures about two or three large apartment buildings in the Back Bay, one in Cambridge, and some letters and printed emails from some real estate agents in the ‘burbs. Newton, Westwood and even Cohasset, down on the South Shore.

“Houses?” I said, surprised. “Aren’t you supposed to have saved up a bunch of cash for the down payment before you buy a house?”

She smiled at me from the living room. DJ was on his back, kicking his legs in the air like one of those huge summer beetles, occasionally grabbing one and stuffing his toes into his mouth.

“Carmine said he could help,” she said sweetly.

I thought about that for a bit. Carmine Spoleto was Victoria’s bio-grandfather. He had been Mary Jane’s father-in-law until her husband, Angelo, had joined the Choir Invisible in a mob hit in Charlestown when Victoria was just a few months old. Oh, yeah: Carmine Spoleto was also the capo di tutti in the Greater Boston area, and had been for more than forty years now. Strangely, I actually liked the man, he had been good to me, and was the most doting of grandfathers to the kids. Even though he was a vicious criminal with buckets of blood on his hands.

“Are you sure you want to borrow money from a leg breaker?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “It would probably be your leg that got broke if you didn’t pay him back. Me and the kids are family.” But she smiled sweetly as she said it.

“Why don’t we just move into his place out in Milton?” I said. “He’s got about fifty thousand square feet out there. We only need one or two.”

“Now, Hacker,” she said. “It wouldn’t look right to do that. Plus, how would you feel as a man and a provider if you just took your family to live with your father-in-law?”

“I’d feel like security was good,” I said. “Doesn’t he have some staff goombahs living out there with him?”

Mary Jane leaned down and spoke into DJ’s face. “Your daddy is such a joker,” she cooed. DJ smiled at her.

“And if we move out of the city, we’ll need another car,” I said. I had been feeling pretty good about the salary I was making from IBS. But the contract was only for ten months. And there were no guarantees it would last another season. Especially given The Assassin’s feelings about me. I suddenly saw the rent payments, and the car payments, and the insurance payments and the auto maintenance payments and the heating bills and God knows what else stacking up like planes over Logan at rush hour. My stomach began to hurt.

“Now honey, don’t fret,” Mary Jane said. “It’s not like we have to move next week or anything. But it is probably time to start thinking about it.”

I went into the kitchen and poured myself a couple of fingers of Bowmore, a fine single-malt Scotch whisky from the island of Islay, dark and peaty. I usually saved it for special occasions. It was my thinking whisky. Until I had three of them. Then it was my stop-thinking whisky.

There are pros and cons to everything, I thought, as the fiery malt burned its way down my gullet. While it would be better if I was fabulously wealthy and able to buy any piece of property in and around Boston, I was decidedly not. Not after my long career as a golf writer for the Boston Journal, a job which had never paid better than just above lousy. I suppose I should have worried about that more during all those years, but instead I was mostly enjoying my work and the people and the freedom to follow the Tour and my bliss at the same time. Piling up wads of cash had never been a major goal.

So now I had to rely on the kindness of family to provide for my own. There was part of me that protested about that: that’s not what real men do, said that small inner voice. On the other hand, buying a house was a big, important step and I knew lots of men who had accepted, even welcomed, help from their families to do it. Of course, their families were not The Family. That presented even more problems to think about.

“Honey?” Mary Jane called from the living room. “Can you come watch DJ? I’ve got a lesson plan I need to work on for tomorrow.”

I tossed back the last of my Islay malt. Slainte! Then I went out to play with my son. Thinking time was over, for now.