She’d asked for a follow-up call. Back at Bonnie’s, I picked up the phone to call Maverick with about the same ease as Kennedy had calling Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Her nephew was no Fidel Castro, but he was a punk, nonetheless. To use mob parlance, I had set him straight after I put him on blast about how he was messing up his life. He was now initiated and educated about consequences and decisions. I wished it’d ended better, but he’d pulled a knife, and it cost him. I announced myself before Maverick’s cigarette-scorched voice had a chance to reply.
“The man of the hour himself. I was about to call you, Mr. Cleary, and thank you.”
“Thank me? Thank me for what, calling you first?”
“No, to thank you for having the talk with my nephew.”
“I wouldn’t call it a conversation.”
“I know. He needed to learn the rules of the road, and you taught him.”
“Rules of the road?”
“You know how it is,” she said in the cheerful and disarming voice of Barbara Walters before she lowered the boom on her guest. “There’s always that one idiot behind the wheel who thinks the red light doesn’t apply to him. So, what does he do? He barrels on through the intersection as the light changes. If he’s caught, he’ll insist the light was amber. My nephew is that driver. He likes to see what he can get away with, and he always has an excuse when someone tries to hold him accountable. I’ve tried, as much as I’m allowed. His mother has only so much energy after a long day. You, my friend, succeeded.”
It took me a second to find words before I told her, “I don’t know what to say.”
“There’s nothing to say. I’m grateful.”
“About the kid’s arm?”
“Don’t you worry about it, Mr. Cleary. He can do his homework and abuse himself with the other one. I’ll pay the ticket for the cast, the sling, the works, if it keeps the little anarchist out of trouble. Let him figure out the joys of being left-handed in a right-handed world. It’ll build character.”
I heard a voice, as if someone had walked into her office. She said she had to tend to business. I asked after Tammy, and she assured me that Tammy Costa would contact Bonnie, if she hadn’t already done it.
I hung up the phone, relieved.
I turned on the television, kept the volume respectable. I visited the fridge and returned to the parlor drinking a beer from a long-necked bottle. A beer was a rare treat for me, something I yoked to the memory of my father and his friends over a game of cards on a Friday night, but stranger to me was me sitting in the armchair waiting for the news. I never understood the addiction or the ritual people had with watching the news at five, at six, at ten, or before they went to bed. Unless it was an event of worldwide significance, I’d rather read the paper. I prefer ink on my fingertips to images inside my head because I can wash my hands. I can’t afford therapy.
I turned on the television and sat down. I looked at what was on the screen, recognized the channel, and recalled my mother telling me about the day she was in the studio of Boston’s Channel 4. President-elect Dwight Eisenhower was standing next to someone for a photo when the clock on the wall behind him fell on his head. I was four years old when it happened, but I recall how my mother would regale family and friends with her brush with fame during the holidays.
I heard the door open. Bonnie was home. I checked my watch. It was almost six. I hadn’t made or taken anything out for dinner, and I was beat from teaching two teenagers manners.
I heard her drop her keys into the glass bowl, the tired sigh, and the sound of her shoes hitting the floor. She’d hang up her coat next, undo the scarf around her neck like a man undid his tie at the end of the day. She had not called out to me or Delilah from the hallway, but I suspected that she had set her briefcase (a Homa, in leather and with the accordion web inside for folders and two metal tabs on top that required keys to open the bag) on the floor.
“I’m too tired to cook,” she said, coming into the room from behind me.
“We can do take-out.”
I was thinking of a half pizza from Newbury Pizza, one of the few places that served it with a thicker crust than Pizzeria Regina and with a lot more mozzarella. If you called late enough and they were down to the last of their anchovy pizzas, they’d sell it to you half price because the little fish were a hard sell. I was tempted, ready to pick up the phone and place an order, when I asked her to change the channel to 5 whose station motto was ‘Five is family.’ She shot me a dirty look.
“Do I look like a clicker to you, Shane Cleary?”
“But you’re already up and halfway there.”
She indulged me and clicked the dial to Channel 5. Solemnity engraved in their faces, Chet and Nat, a husband-and-wife team, spoke in somber tones: “Another police officer is dead. He was gunned down, one of three officers in the two weeks. More to follow.”