“Do I look like a restaurant?” John remarked as a cheerful Abby proceeded to rinse off the trio of dishes following their impromptu guest’s departure.
“It was only breakfast,” she replied. “You don’t have to get so huffy about it.”
John rolled his eyes. “First it’s breakfast, then dinner, then you’ve got the two of us packed off to an altar.”
“She does seem like an awfully nice girl, doesn’t she?”
“And you made an awfully fast appearance for someone who didn’t want to be seen,” he chided her, recounting the super-human speed with which she had raced upstairs, removed all trace of her Dead Sea facial, and made it back down in time to invite Gabrielle to join them in the kitchen before the latter could get off their front porch.
“It was the least I could do to thank her for returning my glasses.”
“Which, I’m sure, you left at Helen’s on purpose.”
Abby stuck her tongue out at him. “Can I help it if I just want to see you happy?”
“I am happy.”
“You could be happier,” she insisted. “Look at your brother. He’s finally settling down.”
John dumped out the coffee grounds into the garbage can with a defiant flick of his wrist. “When I decide to follow “settle down”, I promise you’ll be the first to know.”
“Well, it’s not going to happen if you don’t start putting yourself out there.”
“‘Out there?’”
“Haven’t I always told you that you’d make a wonderful catch?”
John let her praise go unanswered, having had more than enough reminders in the past twenty-four hours that the only girl he had ever wanted to be caught by had thrown him back in the pond without a second glance.
He recalled that he had first really noticed Kate Toscano on a Tuesday afternoon. That wasn’t to say, of course, that he hadn’t seen her around Avalon Bay for most of his life or that he had a particularly phenomenal memory to remember the exact day of the week.
Like many of his peers, he had tried to squeeze the very last ounce out of a blissful summer vacation over a decade ago; its symbolic ending on Labor Day was no exception that year. When he had grudgingly dragged himself out of bed the next morning, it was with the realization that he was a junior in high school and he hadn’t saved quite as much money as he had hoped from part-time yard work to put toward the purchase of his first car.
As always, his best friend Lenny Molino had come up with ‘The Plan’.
One of the seniors, Lenny told him, wanted to offload his old car in time for the graduation promise of a coveted new one from his parents. Even without the benefit of a name, John had known exactly who it was.
Brad Leister, in John’s view, represented everything that could be potentially bad about Avalon Bay. Out-of-towners from Manhattan, the Leisters had bulldozed their way into the community when John was around twelve and made it immediately clear that they knew more than anything about anybody. Brad’s father was a new VP at the bank which, if one were to believe Brad’s boasting, meant that their family pockets were virtually bottomless. Neither the smartest student nor the most athletic, Brad nonetheless had a following who’d do anything he wanted.
John, obviously, was not one of them.
“We can’t afford to buy his stupid car,” he told Lenny.
Lenny countered with the argument they couldn’t afford not to. Relying on the generosity and whim of parents to loan them the family car for a date just wasn’t going to cut it.
John reminded him that neither of them exactly had the ladies knocking down their doors.
“Because we don’t have a car!” Lenny shot back.
The “we” part of his plan was that they’d pool their money and make Brad an offer he couldn’t refuse.
“What are we, the Mafia?” John said, certain that Brad would laugh them off no matter what they offered.
Lenny, however, was undaunted. He had already talked to Brad, it turned out, and the latter agreed to meet them in the parking lot when classes were over on the first day back to school.
The first wrinkle was that Lenny forgot he was supposed to run an errand for his grandmother and was going to be late.
The second was that when John reached the perimeter of the parking lot at the appointed hour, Brad was engaged in conversation with a girl who had silky blond hair that fell past her shoulders. From the back, he didn’t realize it was Kate, a girl he knew only casually from around the neighborhood and school but never had more than two words with.
Even from a distance, he could see that there was some kind of argument going on. Probably haggling about the price of the car, he assumed. He nearly walked away at that moment, concurrently annoyed by the smug look of triumph on Brad’s face and the fact that Lenny had bailed on him. Curiosity, however, prompted him to stay where he was, a decision that put him right in the path of an unexpected destiny.
She had suddenly turned away from Brad and, with head down, was moving quickly in John’s direction. A few feet short of him, she looked up and it was only then he saw that her face was glistening with fresh tears. She gave him an embarrassed, almost apologetic smile and was about to continue on her way past him when he found the voice to ask her if something was wrong.
She seemed surprised at first that he should ask and as she quickly brushed her fingertips across a moist cheek, she informed him that she was okay but that she thought all guys were jerks.
How did a member of the accused sex respond to such a statement, John wondered. A hundred things raced through his head at the same time, the majority of them being a derogatory assessment of the jerk who had obviously just made her cry. Across the parking lot, he noticed that Brad was watching them and, for an instant, John was curious about whether he and Kate might be an item; it was a thought that disturbed him, to say the least. Around school, Brad Leister made no secret of the chauvinistic belief inherited from his father that females existed for only one reason.
Kate turned and noticed that they were being watched, too. As she started to move away, John reached out and lightly touched her arm. “I don’t suppose,” he started to say, faltering as her luminous green eyes met his.
“Suppose what?” she asked with a tilt of her head, presumably unaware of the captivating picture she made with even the faintest return of a smile.
John began his sentence again and steeled himself to finish it this time. “I don’t suppose a great pizza would change your mind about all the world’s guys being jerks?” he proposed.
She considered his suggestion just long enough for John to assume she was probably going to decline.
“I guess there’s only one way to find out,” she replied.
‘Capparelli’s’ was a typical mom-and-pop pizza shop on the Jersey shore that was frequented by anyone and everyone who wanted good Italian food at a cheap price. Antonio ‘Tony’ Capparelli, the heavy-set owner, prided himself on being a full-fledged immigrant from Sicily who’d “done good” in his new homeland and never let any of his patrons forget it. Above the bar, the Trinacria flag of Sicily shared wall space with the Stars and Stripes and on every 4th of July, miniature versions of both were proudly stuck into the candle-wax remains of the eatery’s tabletop Chianti bottles.
At 51, Tony also prided himself on a full head of black hair that he kept greased back with an excess of Vitalis. Though “Mama”, his wife, was rumored to only be in her late thirties, the combination of helping Antonio run the restaurant and bearing a succession of Capparelli children made her look far older than her years. Even as she set down two water glasses and handed John and Kate their menus, the toll of keeping up with Little Tony, the latest Capparelli progeny to start public school, was evidenced in her eyes.
“I can’t believe you’ve never been here,” John remarked when Kate asked him what he thought they should order.
“My mom and dad aren’t all that much for going out,” she said with a shrug and continued her perusal.
To John’s ears, it was a response that meant maybe they weren’t in favor of her dating as well. Then again, he reflected, when he’d overheard her call home to say she was having pizza with a ‘friend’, she’d been vague enough that perhaps her parents were as clueless as anyone else when it came to what their teenagers were doing.
“The pepperoni and sausage combo looks good,” she remarked.
“My favorite,” he said, though in truth she probably could have said anything and he would have agreed with her.
“Although the ham and pineapple could be pretty good, too,” she mused. “Sounds like Hawaii.”
“Have you ever been there?” he wanted to know. He suddenly wanted to know everything about her but Hawaii, he thought, was a nice enough invitation to start.
“Hawaii?” She shook her head. “No, but someday, I think.” In the next breath, she told him that she was going to be a writer and travel the world. She took a sip of water and started to open her mouth to ask him something – perhaps what he was going to do with his life – when the ebullient Antonio appeared at their table.
True to his fashion, he wasted no time in kissing Kate’s hand and asking John who his pretty date was. That her last name was revealed to be Italian endeared the restaurateur even more. “My chest, it burst with pride Signor Neal bring you here,” he declared. The buttons of his shirt, already straining from his girth, threatened to pop completely and expose the rest of his hairy chest. With a dramatic flourish, he whisked away both of their menus and announced that he was going to make them something special.
“So, you started to tell me about your writing,” John said when they were alone again. “You must be pretty good.”
Again, the casual shrug. “I’ve won a couple of essay contests,” she replied. “Mostly, though, I write for the yearbook staff.”
A fact which John was unaware but wasn’t about to admit it.
She told him that she and a friend were thinking of going to Amherst. “It seems like it’s a long way off,” she said, “but you can never start planning too early.”
Big Tony appeared again, this time to ask them if they wanted some garlic bread.
“That’d be great,” John told him.
“So, what are your plans?” Kate asked a moment later.
“My plan for right now,” he answered in complete honesty, “is to wonder how I got so lucky to be sitting across a table from you…”
Back in the present, John could easily have replayed that evening a hundred times in his head. Instead, the sound of a shriek sent him running up the stairs two at a time with a barking Shelby close behind.
“I told you to call me if you needed help,” he heard his mother say as he reached the bedroom store and saw her kneeling on the floor over a crumpled Sean. She looked up in relief as John rushed in. “Damn fool tried to get out of bed by himself,” she explained, trying to control the panic in her voice.
“Are you okay, Dad?”
Sean looked from one to the other, blinking in bewilderment. Only when he saw the whimpering Shelby trying to push her way into the middle of things did a lopsided smile come to his thin lips. “Sel-ba,” he murmured, trying to reach out with his good hand to touch her. “Dog.”
“Plenty of time for dog kisses later, Dad,” John promised. “Let’s get you up, okay?”
“Thank goodness he didn’t make it to the stairs,” a fretful Abby said. “If I hadn’t come out of the bathroom when I did, who knows what would’ve happened.”
“Better give the doc a call just in case,” John recommended. “I can handle things at this end.”
With Abby now out of the room, John helped his father back into bed, relieved that the older man hadn’t seriously injured himself when he made contact with the floor. “You gotta stop scaring us like that, Dad,” he gently reminded him. “When you want something, you need to call one of us first and we’ll take care of it, okay?”
Sean was staring off into space but his good hand suddenly tightened on John’s thigh. “Can’t…leave,” he muttered. “Bad.”
John leaned forward. “Come again?” he asked. “What’s bad?”
With difficulty, Sean turned his head on the pillow so that he was now facing him. “Tell...her. Can’t.”
“You want me to tell Mom you can’t do something?”
Sean’s expression perceptibly darkened and he tried to shake his head.
“Just take your time, Dad. It’s okay.”
The older man’s lips trembled as he took a deep breath and swallowed hard. “Lid…die,” he said. “Can’t…leave.”