Joe College

  “I went to a clinic.”

  “Is that what Kevin wanted?”

  She seemed impatient with the question, as if I hadn’t been listening closely enough.

  “He wanted to marry me. That’s all he’s wanted since the day we met.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  She looked at me like I was an idiot.

  “I didn’t love him. I thought I deserved to spend the rest of my life with someone I was in love with.”

  “But you don’t think so now?”

  I meant the question to sound sincere and apologetic, but it must not have come out that way. Her smile was bitter.

  “Right now he seems like a pretty good bargain.”

  She was watching me closely, and I squirmed under her gaze, grappling with an unexpected sense of loss. I’d never thought of Cindy as a person to be madly in love with, someone you’d ruin your life to run away with. But now that she had revealed herself as precisely this kind of person, I wondered how I’d missed it.

  “Anything else you need to know?” she asked me.

  I had lots of questions, but it didn’t seem like the right time to ask any of them.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Then let me ask you something.”

  “Fire away.”

  “How do you feel about all this?”

  “All this?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “This mess we’re in.”

  “That’s a hard question.”

  “Take your time.”

  I certainly knew how I should have felt. I should have felt awful about putting Cindy in a position where she thought she had no choice but to marry someone she didn’t love and even worse about indirectly helping to break up Kevin’s family. Most of all, though, I should have felt ashamed of myself for letting another guy take responsibility for a child I’d fathered. This was a direct violation of what I’d been taught all my life was the most basic definition of manhood—a man took care of his kids. You could have the crappiest job in the world, a wife you couldn’t stand to be in the same room with, a rustbucket car with bald tires and a cracked windshield, and a house with a leaky roof, but if you took care of your kids, you could hold your head up around anyone. Certainly this was the principle on which my father had based his own life. If it ever slipped my mind, he reminded me every time we saw something on the TV news that mentioned a single mother on welfare. “Where’s the father?” he demanded time and time again, his anger undiminished by repetition. “Off making a baby with someone else? Drinking wine out of a paper bag on the street corner? Why don’t they ask her where the father is?”

  But when I looked inside myself in response to Cindy’s question, I could detect only muted traces of guilt and embarrassment, and even then I couldn’t help wondering if what I was noticing were not these emotions themselves but the void created by their absence, since what I was mainly feeling just then was a combination of wild gratitude and awestruck relief, as if I’d just been rescued from a riptide or carried out of a burning building. I sat up straight in my chair and let go of a deep breath, like someone who had just completed some serious reflection.

  “I feel okay,” I said carefully. “This seems like a pretty good solution for everyone involved.”

  There wasn’t much left to be said after that. We exchanged searching looks—mine meant to communicate sorrow, hers stoical determination—and made a few futile stabs at small talk that ended when I looked at the clock and pretended to be surprised at how late it was.

  “Jeez,” I said. “I better get going. Tomorrow’s a work day.”

  “You sure?” she asked. “Kevin’s coming in a few minutes. I thought you might like to meet him. Only if you want to, I mean.”

  Sometimes people you think you know say things that suddenly make them seem like total strangers. Did she really think I wanted to meet Kevin? Or was she just trying to exact some kind of payback for the humiliation I’d inflicted on her in New Haven? Neither theory seemed to add up—she didn’t seem naive enough for the first or calculating enough for the second. Maybe she just thought it was a good idea for Kevin and me to at least know what each other looked like, given the peculiar bond we’d be sharing for the rest of our lives.

  “I’d like to,” I said, in a tone that clearly indicated otherwise. “But I’m trying to get to bed around nine these days. I can barely open my eyes at four in the morning as it is.”

  “Whatever,” she said. “It was just a suggestion.”

  Without another word, she got my coat from the hall closet and walked me to the door. She put her hand on the doorknob, but didn’t turn it.

  “I guess I won’t be seeing you for a while,” she said.

  “I guess not.”

  She looked up at me, her eyes shining strangely in the dim hallway.

  “You’re just going to go back to school and forget all about me.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  She shook her head, but I didn’t know if she was asking me not to talk or apologizing for making a scene at the last minute.

  “Cindy,” I said.

  I put my arms around her, unable to fathom how it had come to this. Her breath was hot and damp against my neck, and I was startled by how good it felt to be holding her again.

  “I wish you could have loved me,” she said. “It would have been so much better.”

  I held her tighter, willing myself not to think about the life I wasn’t going to have.

  “You deserve to be happy,” I whispered.

  She pulled away with a gasp, looking up at me with an expression that seemed to combine hope and alarm in equal measures.

  “We all do,” I added, in case she’d misunderstood me. “Everybody deserves it.”

  I’d long ago formed an image of Kevin as a middle-aged Lothario in a short-sleeved polyester shirt, so it took me longer than it should have to identify the cool-looking guy leaning against his car in front of Cindy’s house. He was tall and skinny, with shaggy blond hair hanging past the collar of his denim jacket and a kind of loose-limbed slouch that had probably been perfected during years of smoking in high school bathrooms; he looked like a soft breeze might knock him over. If it hadn’t been for his work clothes, the gray trousers and skinny tie, you might have pegged him for a musician, or at least a guy who worked in a record store. He couldn’t have been much older than twenty-five.

  Cindy didn’t flinch when she saw him or make any attempt to conceal the fact that she’d been crying, but she did tighten her grip on my hand as we descended the steps and made our way down the front walk. I lagged a half step behind her to signal my reluctance to everyone involved.

  “You didn’t have to wait out here,” she told him. “You could have rung the bell.”

  He gave a sullen shrug, sucking long and hard on his cigarette before flicking it onto her front lawn, staring at me the whole time. I made a complicated face in response, trying to convey discomfort, friendliness, and a desire to be elsewhere in a single expression. Probably I just looked like a moron.

  “Kevin, Danny,” Cindy said, liberating my hand for the ceremonial shake. “Danny, Kevin.”

  Kevin’s grip was as limp and unenthused as my own, and I felt a strange kinship with him when our eyes met. He seemed no more suited for marriage and fatherhood than I did.

  “Man,” I said, hoping he understood that I meant it as a compliment, “you don’t look like the manager of a Medi-Mart.”

  “Assistant manager in training,” he corrected me, smiling sadly. “It just means I have to work nights, weekends, and holidays.”

  “You’ll be a manager soon,” Cindy told him.

  Kevin didn’t dispute this assertion. Reaching into the pocket of his nicely faded jean jacket—I’d never been able to get my jackets to fade like that and would have liked to know his secret—he pulled out a soft pack of Winstons and extracted another cigarette. I tried not to stare as he struck the match and brought the tiny qui
vering flame to his face, but I couldn’t help myself. He blew a cloud of smoke at the sky and watched it dissipate.

  “Won’t that be something,” he said, so softly that it seemed to be addressed more to himself than to me or Cindy.

  It was a little after nine when I pulled up in front of my house, late enough that I could light the coffee stoves on the Roach Coach and save myself a trip later on. I’d gotten into the habit of watching my back in the past couple of days, in case the Lunch Monsters decided to pay me the same sort of surprise visit they’d paid to Tito, but that night my mind was elsewhere. The whole way home I’d been thinking about Kevin and Cindy and the baby and myself, wondering if everything hadn’t worked out in the best possible way for all of us. Kevin loved Cindy, so he couldn’t complain. Instead of being a single mother, Cindy would have a husband and a father for her child, a good-looking young guy with a decent job and not some portly middle-aged lech like I’d imagined. I’d be going back to school, picking up right where I left off. The baby would have a normal childhood, just like the one I’d had, maybe even going to the same schools and learning from some of the same teachers. I felt a small pang of sadness imagining all the milestones I’d miss out on—the first steps, the first words, the birthday parties and school plays and Little League games, the lost teeth and Christmases and trips to the beach and points of historical interest—but the thought that Kevin would be there in my stead seemed right somehow, as if the baby were as much his as my own. I even toyed with a fantasy in which I became rich and famous and returned to Darwin years later as a kind of fairy godfather, showering my wealth not only on the child whose life I hadn’t been able to share, but on Cindy and Kevin too, rewarding them for their years of sacrifice, buying them a fancy car and sending them on an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris while Polly and I stayed behind and looked after the kid. I tried not to think about Kevin’s broken family or the sadness and fatigue that had come over him when he talked about his job. He’d reminded me of my own father then, and I’d found this association more upsetting than comforting.

  I pushed open the back door of the Roach Coach and turned on the burners. Just as the flames ignited, a voice spoke in my head, as loud and clear as if another person were standing next to me. He died for my sins, it said. I wasn’t religious, so this message caught me completely by surprise. Incongruous as it was, the phrase repeated itself with such urgency that I must have spoken it out loud, even as my attacker came charging across the driveway.

  “He died for my sins.”

  Our driveway was narrow, and I was standing right by the edge, which was a good thing, since I was tackled with such force that my feet left the ground. I landed on my back on the dewy front lawn, the wind knocked out of me by the impact, my arms and legs spread as if I’d been crucified. Stars swam on the inside of my closed eyelids, and a strange calm settled over me as I awaited the first blow. I had already decided not to fight back, but instead to accept the punishment I had so deliberately called down upon my own head.

  A few seconds passed, though, and still nothing happened. Cautiously I opened my eyes. Instead of a ferocious goon, I saw Matt crouching over me, looking down with an expression of sarcastic glee.

  “What the hell—” I sputtered, too short of breath to complete the question.

  “Who died for your sins?” he demanded with a smirk.

  I sat up slowly, drawing my knees to my chest and shaking my head to clear away the cobwebs. I saw his paper dining hall cap lying in the driveway, not far from the Roach Coach, and wondered why I felt irritated rather than relieved.

  “Kevin,” I told him. “Who died for yours?”

  vito meatballs

  Matt was thrilled by the sight of the Roach Coach in the driveway, as excited as a little kid at the firehouse. “Is this really your truck?” he kept asking me, once I’d picked myself up from the lawn and begun breathing more or less normally. “I can’t believe this is really your truck.” He begged me to take him for a spin and wouldn’t stop until I promised to let him ride shotgun with me in the morning.

  His gung-ho spirit faded overnight, however, and he was still fast asleep on my bedroom floor when I tiptoed outside in a chilly dawn drizzle and climbed into the truck. I’d tried waking him at four and then again an hour later, but both times he’d flopped onto his stomach and pulled the sleeping bag over his head. I could have kept shaking and prodding him until he surrendered, but as much as I would have enjoyed his company, I sympathized even more with his desire to remain where he was.

  It had been awkward introducing him to my parents so close to bedtime—they were both in their pajamas and less than thrilled to learn that a visitor had arrived, let alone a crazy-eyed stranger in bowling shoes and a paper cap who blithely announced that he’d just been kicked out of his girlfriend’s apartment for insulting Emily Dickinson—but once we cleared that hurdle I was surprised at how happy I was to see him. The events of the previous week had left me feeling troubled and isolated, and I was glad to finally be able to talk about them with a friend, a more or less kindred spirit I could count on for unswerving empathy and moral support, if not for good judgment.

  On a normal day, my arrival at the warehouse generated about as much fanfare as the appearance of the next garbage truck at the dump. That Monday morning, though, people were waiting for me. I could feel it as soon as I pulled into the lot. The other drivers stopped what they were doing and stared at the Roach Coach as if the Pope himself were perched on top, dispensing his blessings from inside a bulletproof glass bubble. By the time I shut off the engine and climbed down from the cab, a small receiving committee had gathered in my honor in the middle of the lot. Chuckie was there, and Anthony, and Ted McGee, and even Pete the Polack, as well as a couple of guys I wasn’t even on nodding terms with.

  “Way to go,” said Fat Teddy, almost knocking me to the pavement with a friendly swat between the shoulder blades. “Show the bastards what you’re made of.”

  “Kid’s got balls,” said one of the strangers, a gangly six-footer with a receding hairline and a prominent adam’s apple.

  “Fock dare modduhs!” exclaimed Pete the Polack, ejecting a gob of spit from the corner of his mouth with startling conviction and velocity. It exploded against the blacktop with a clearly audible splat.

  Another stranger, a taciturn guy known as Corduroy on account of the ratty beige sport coat he wore on all but the hottest or coldest days of the year, stepped up and pressed my hand between both of his. His eyes were watery and his breath smelled like last night’s beer.

  “Your father must be proud,” he told me.

  “Fock dare sistus!” Pete added for good measure, launching an equally impressive projectile from the other side of his mouth.

  “Stand up to the bullies,” Anthony added quietly, raising a clenched fist and nodding his approval.

  Chuckie placed his right hand gently on my shoulder. His expression was so solemn I thought I was being knighted.

  “We’re with you,” he said. “We’re all pulling for you.”

  “Fock dare dogs!” Pete continued, getting a bit carried away. I thought he was going to spit again to complete the outburst, but this time he just cleared his throat and smiled.

  “You goot boy,” he told me.

  My hero’s welcome continued inside the warehouse, where I received numerous pats on the back and muttered words of encouragement that made me feel like the star quarterback must feel in the locker room on the morning of the big game. Even Sheila joined the chorus. She tallied up my order with a few quick scribbles in her pad, then pressed her icy palm against my cheek in an incongruously maternal gesture.

  “You be careful now,” she told me. “Come back in one piece, you hear?”

  I wasn’t displeased by all this attention—I wouldn’t have objected to being treated like that on a daily basis, in fact—but I couldn’t help wondering what I’d done to deserve it. It was true that I’d managed to elude the Lunch Monsters for se
veral days running, but as far as I knew nothing had happened over the weekend to account for the apparent jump in my status between last Friday and today. I loaded up the Roach Coach and headed around back. There was a long line for propane, as usual, but Chuckie was alone at the ice house, so I pulled up behind the Chuck Wagon and jumped out, hoping for some enlightenment.

  “Here he is,” Chuckie said, announcing my arrival to an invisible audience. “The man himself.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Ecce homo.”

  I figured the homo thing would get a rise out of him, but he let it pass without comment. He dumped three shovelfuls of ice into his ice bed before pausing to look at me.

  “You sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “It depends,” I said. “What am I doing?”

  His eyes narrowed; he studied me for a few more seconds, trying to decide if I was pulling his chain.

  “You’re too much,” he said, shaking his head and chuckling indulgently. Almost immediately, though, his expression darkened. “You want to borrow my piece?”

  “Do I need it?”

  “I dunno,” he shrugged. “Maybe. After what you said to Vito Scalzone …”

  “Vito Scalzone?” The name rang no bells. “You mean the kid?”

  “What kid?” He looked at me like I was being purposely dense. “Vito Meatballs.”

  “The old guy?”

  “Vito Meatballs,” he said again, as if this were a household name. “The one and only.”

  “Vito Meatballs?” My heart sank. “Is that really what they call him?”

  “Either that or Mr. Scalzone, I guess.” Chuckie gave a soft laugh, as if sharing a private joke with himself. “I can’t believe you told Vito Meatballs to suck your dick.”

  “What? Where’d you hear that?”

  “Fat Teddy told me.”

  “Who told him?”

  “I don’t know. Lots of people are talking about it.”