Noonan was more than a little embarrassed to be hugged by Lucy’s girlfriend, especially with him standing right there, looking on with that goofy grin as if this were precisely what he’d been hoping for.
“About time?”
Sarah Berg went around the counter, took a framed drawing off the wall and handed it to him. “I drew this four years ago. That’s you, about to come in. It took you four years to go two feet. That’s what I call taking your own sweet time.”
Noonan smiled, enjoying her game. No doubt Lucy had told her all about his being shipped off to the academy. By portraying him as a stubborn ingrate, she’d spared him the necessity of explaining his years in exile.
“We’ve all been covering for you,” she went on, putting the drawing back on its hook. “Doing our own work and yours, too, and not a single thank-you.”
“I was wondering if I could have tomorrow off?” he said.
She’d gone over to Lucy now and was giving him a hug, which he accepted with obvious if awkward pleasure. “He’s got other, cooler friends he wants to go see,” she told him. “It took him four years to come visit us, and now he’s leaving again.”
“I’ll take one of them hugs,” Big Lou said, clearly impatient with this difficult-to-follow conversation.
Sarah went around the counter and gave him what appeared to be a heartfelt one.
“How about me?” Dec Lynch called.
“No hugs for you,” Sarah told him, still clinging to Big Lou. “You lost the bet.” Turning to Noonan she explained, mock seriously, “He said you were gone for good.”
“But you knew better.”
“Yup,” she said. “I only draw true things.” And she fixed him with a smile and her dark eyes, amounting to a challenge. The Lynches were all grinning at him, too.
And in that moment it occurred to Noonan that his options had just narrowed. He might leave Thomaston after graduation and head out west somewhere, just as he’d planned, but he wasn’t going to be able to remain aloof. That option had evaporated when he walked through the door at Ikey Lubin’s, making Sarah Berg’s drawing come true. His presence had completed something, though he wasn’t sure what. It felt dangerously like he’d just gotten a new family. It felt good.
LATER, when they were in the back room tearing down a mountain of cardboard boxes, Lucy said, “So, what do you think?”
About his having a girlfriend? Or about Sarah? Noonan decided he must mean the latter, but in truth, he didn’t know what to think about Sarah Berg. She was no great beauty, though neither was there anything obviously wrong with her, as he’d feared there might be. Back in the front of the store the girl had somehow commanded his attention, whereas now he couldn’t imagine how she’d done it. Bony and angular, she wasn’t the sort of girl he normally looked at twice, and now that she was gone he had a hard time remembering her facial features. It was her attitude, her sense of play, that lingered like a sweet scent in the air. She’d seemed almost to be laughing at him, and girls didn’t usually do that. She also had a natural grace that wasn’t particularly feminine or studied, and a forthrightness and vulnerability that had made him feel protective, though he couldn’t imagine what she might need protecting from. Without being able to put his finger on why, he was disappointed she was leaving tomorrow, sorry that he wouldn’t be seeing her again until September.
“My father offered her a summer job here at Ikey’s,” Lucy explained, “but she’s saving for college and she’ll make a lot more money babysitting for summer people on Long Island. Plus it’s the only time she gets to see her mother. Her parents have been separated for years, and now her mother’s filing for divorce.” This last he said as if it were an unspeakable tragedy.
“Good for her,” Noonan replied, thinking of his own mother. Then, when he saw the stricken look on Lucy’s face, “Why stay together when everybody’s miserable?”
“I don’t think Sarah was miserable,” Lucy said. It was the death of her brother, Rudy, he believed, that caused their separation. Her mother had moved back to Long Island, where she hustled work as a freelance commercial artist, while looking for long-term projects, but mostly settling for scraps—designing logos and pamphlets and restaurant menus. Her father had predicted that in the end she’d fail and have no choice but to return, and they’d all be a family again, but so far that hadn’t happened. Her mother was making a go of it. Sarah’s father, in addition to being the town’s eccentric English teacher, spent his summers working on the novel he’d been writing for over a decade. His book was another reason Sarah couldn’t stay there for the summer. It required the deepest of solitudes.
As they tore down boxes, Lucy chattered on, bringing Noonan up to speed on all things Thomaston, all things Lynch. He explained how they’d come to buy Ikey Lubin’s, and then to expand it, how his mother, who’d been reluctant at first, became a partner and why they’d brought his uncle Dec in. He told Noonan that his second cousin, Karen Cirillo, had lived upstairs for a while, and how Jerzy Quinn had ruled junior high, and what had happened to Three Mock and how he’d come to meet Sarah. And he wasn’t having his spells anymore, which was really great. He told Noonan his father had become a hero for rescuing the Spinnarkles and that he’d had a small cyst removed from under his right arm last year. Everybody had been alarmed, but the biopsy had proved negative. Some of the cells didn’t look quite right, though, and the fact that the cyst was so near the lymph glands had worried the Albany oncologist. As did the fact that his patient lived in Thomaston, so now Big Lou was getting blood work done every other month, just to be sure.
As Lucy rattled on Noonan felt some of the ease of their old friendship return. Odd, how he’d vividly remembered every one of his irritating habits and forgotten his virtues entirely. Always good-hearted, he now seemed less needy, not so inward gazing as before, which was good. If the Lynches were determined to adopt Noonan this summer, at least it wouldn’t be painful. In fact, he was glad he’d stopped by. Noonan kept hoping Sarah might join them, but Lucy told him today was salad day, which meant that his girlfriend was busy helping his mother make fresh salads to stock the deli portion of his uncle’s meat case for the weekend. The weather was supposed to be good, so half the East End would be stopping by the market on the way to the lake to stock their picnic baskets with Tessa Lynch’s salads and Dec Lynch’s smoked pork chops.
When they finished with the boxes and returned to the front of the store, everyone was there but Sarah, who was across the street putting the kitchen back in order. Mrs. Lynch remarked that Noonan looked hungry and handed him a heaping plate of salads—potato, macaroni and egg. In fact, he was famished. His father was as stingy as ever with grocery money, and he felt as if eating there was taking food out of his brothers’ mouths. “Damn,” he said, swallowing a too-large forkful of macaroni salad. “This is good.”
This seemed to please Lucy’s mother. “You got a summer job lined up?” she asked.
He told her he was busing tables at three different restaurants, half expecting her to offer him another at Ikey’s.
“I guess we won’t be seeing much of you, then,” she said, glancing over at Lucy, who rather peevishly refused to meet her eye. It was an odd moment. Did she mean to prepare her son for disappointment? Had Noonan been wrong in concluding that his old friend was less needy than before?
Noonan was finishing the last of his plate of salads when Sarah returned and came right over to where he sat at the small table by the coffeepot. “So, what do you think?” she said, pulling up a chair.
“About?”
“About what you just finished eating.”
“Good,” he said. “Really good.”
“Which was your favorite? And be careful how you answer. I made one of them. Tessa made the other two.”
“I liked all three.”
“Coward.”
“The macaroni was my favorite.”
“I made the egg,” she said. “Maybe we’ll get along better when I come back in
September.”
“You’re really going away for the whole summer?”
“You can keep Lou company.”
Lucy came over then. “He’s got three jobs lined up.”
“You’ll wind up working here, too,” she warned. “Just you wait. Ikey’s is addictive.”
Dec Lynch was in the process of cleaning up. The store would remain open until midnight, but the meat and deli section closed at six. “How long will you be at the doctor tomorrow?” he asked his brother.
“I’m thinking maybe I’ll cancel,” Big Lou told him. “Why lose half the day drivin’ down there and sittin’ in that office when we got so much work to do?” he said. “Hell, I’m feeling good.”
“You’re going,” Tessa Lynch said.
“All damn foolishness,” Big Lou whined, though he did seem to understand that his wife had just spoken the last meaningful word on the subject. “Ain’t nothing to worry about no more. The tannery’s been closed goin’ on two years.”
“The poison’s still there, Lou,” she reminded him. “If I put a grain of arsenic in your coffee every morning for thirty years, it wouldn’t disappear from your body just because I started making tea.”
“I ain’t sayin’ that, Tessa,” said her husband, apparently more worried by his wife’s analogy than poisoned groundwater. “You read that story in the paper? They say fish are comin’ back to the stream. They wouldn’t live here if it wasn’t good for ’em.”
“Why not?” his wife responded. “We do.”
“Tessa’s right as usual, Biggy,” his brother piped up. “I saw the trout that guy caught last week, and it had a tumor the size of a golf ball under its gill. In fact, right where it’d be if you had a gill. Have that specialist check under there, Tessa. Make sure Biggy doesn’t have a gill growing under his armpit.”
“I wish he did,” said Mrs. Lynch. “We could charge money to see it.”
Sarah rose to her feet and went over to give Big Lou a hug and kiss goodbye. “People sure are mean to you, Lou-Lou,” she said.
“I know it, sweetness,” he said, folding her in a great embrace. “They enjoy being mean, I guess, or they wouldn’t do it. That’s a long train ride you got tomorrow. Can’t your dad go along to keep you company?”
“No, by tomorrow he’ll be at his typewriter, and he won’t stop until Labor Day.”
Clearly, this didn’t sit well with Big Lou. “What’s that book of his about, anyhow?” as if its subject matter might reveal whether it was important enough to justify not accompanying his daughter to New York.
“Right now it’s about a thousand pages, single spaced,” Sarah told him.
Which only added to Big Lou’s original argument. “One day wouldn’t hurt none,” he said.
“How would you know, Biggy?” his brother chimed in. “You haven’t even read a book, much less written one.”
Big Lou ignored this insult, just as he did most of what his brother had to offer. “He could ride down with you, meet your ma and ride right back again.”
“But then they’d have an argument in Grand Central. Don’t worry, Lou-Lou. I meet my mom in the same place every year. She’s always there.” Taking him by the elbows, she said, “Promise me you’ll keep your appointment.”
“I promise you,” Tessa Lynch said.
“I just wish you didn’t have to go,” Big Lou said, his eyes, to Noonan’s astonishment, filling with tears. “You could work here this summer.”
“Cut it out, Lou,” his wife warned him, pulling open the door to the walk-in. “We’ve been through this. Sarah’s doing what she needs to do.”
“I ain’t sayin’ that—”
“Yes, you were, Lou. We all heard you. Don’t go. That’s what you were saying.”
“I’m just saying I wish she didn’t have to,” he explained, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Well, she does have to,” Tessa said, and disappeared into the walk-in.
“I know,” Big Lou conceded, more to Sarah than his wife.
“I’m going upstairs,” Dec said, though he made no move to go anywhere. “I’ve enjoyed about as much of this conversation as I can stand.”
Sarah pulled on her jacket. “You two can walk me home if you like,” she said, meaning, apparently, Lucy and Noonan.
Noonan would have liked to, but he assumed that neither one of them probably wanted him along to witness their goodbye, so he was surprised that both Sarah and Lucy seemed disappointed when he declined.
“You have a good summer, sexy,” Dec said, coming over for his own goodbye hug. “I’m not as old as I look, you know. A lot of girls your age think I’m cute.”
“Name three,” Sarah said, making Noonan smile at the ease with which she handled him and, really, all of the Lynches.
“That’d be bragging.”
Tessa Lynch returned from the walk-in then, carrying a heavy tub of potato salad and regarded her brother-in-law with chagrin. “Quit fondling that girl and open the case, will you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Dec said, going back around the counter to help her.
“Most women my age think you’ve seen better days,” Tessa told him.
Was it Noonan’s imagination, what he witnessed then? The glass of the display case was thick and curved, magnifying and distorting the purple roasts and troughs of ground meat within, so probably it was just a trick of the eye. Yet when Tessa Lynch stepped away, it seemed to Noonan that Dec Lynch reached out and grazed the back of her hand with his.
LATER, walking home, he talked himself out of it. The fact that his own parents’ marriage was a tangle of deceit didn’t mean other people’s marriages were similarly flawed. In truth, he was quite taken with the world the Lynches had created for themselves and how easily they all moved within that sphere. Not just them—Sarah, too. It was clear she loved not only the Lynches but also Ikey Lubin’s, as if the store satisfied some deep craving, and everything she could ever imagine wanting was right there on the shelves, whereas all the things she didn’t want or weren’t good for her had been thoughtfully removed. Though Noonan was pretty sure that much of what he himself wanted out of life was not for sale at Ikey Lubin’s, he had to admit the attraction of the place, its warmth, camaraderie and generosity. Would he have felt that way if it had been just the Lynches, if Sarah hadn’t been there? He supposed the coming months would tell.
He was halfway home, dusk falling, when a horn tooted, and the Lynch station wagon, Lucy’s mother at the wheel, pulled alongside the curb. “Get in,” she called across the seat, “and I’ll give you a lift.”
Since her phrasing was more an order than an offer, he did as he was told, sliding onto the big bench seat and closing the door. He’d never been alone with Mrs. Lynch before, and while he had no particular reason to be uncomfortable, he was. Had she followed him, and if so, for what purpose? To warn him away from their world, from Ikey Lubin’s, from her son? He thought again of Sarah’s drawing, where he was pictured outside, about to enter. Was Tessa Lynch there to tell him that outside was where he belonged? He was relieved when she spoke, revealing another agenda entirely.
“How’s your mother?” she asked, taking her eyes off the road to watch him answer.
“Okay,” he said. “You should give her a call sometime.”
“I went out to the hospital,” she said, “but your father sent me packing. I called the house last week, but apparently she promised him not to talk to me.”
Noonan nodded but offered no comment. Had he wanted to talk about his parents, Mrs. Lynch wouldn’t have been a bad person to confide in. But he didn’t want to talk to anybody.
“You don’t have to say anything,” she said, apparently reading his reluctance. “I want you to promise me, though, that if things get bad you’ll tell me. Your mother’s endured about as much as she can, and I might be able to help. Don’t tell my husband or Louie. Tell me.”
“Nothing’s going to happen,” Noonan assured her.
“Rea
lly? And why’s that?”
“I’m home now.”
She turned to look at him again. They’d come to a stop sign and were about to cross the Boulevard, which unofficially separated the East End from the Borough. They were just a couple blocks from the Marconis’ home, but Mrs. Lynch put on her blinker and turned right, heading out of town. “Look, I know you’re game,” she said after a few moments’ silence, “and I’m sure you’d try your best—”
“Where are we—?”
“—but you’re only seventeen, and you might not have the kind of help your mother needs.”
“Like what?”
“Like someone to talk to. She and I have been good friends since Berman Court. You probably didn’t know that.”
“What good has talking done her?”
“A lot. More than you know. Not just her. Our talks go both ways. We listen to each other.”
Noonan thought again about what he’d seen earlier, or imagined seeing, Dec Lynch’s hand grazing hers.
Suddenly she looked concerned, almost frightened, as if considering something that had until that moment escaped her. “I hope you don’t think there’s a solution to your mother’s problems,” she said, glancing down at his lap, where Noonan’s hands, to his surprise, were balled into fists.
He quickly relaxed them before speaking. “Why shouldn’t there be?” After all, he’d been congratulating himself that the solution had already been found. He’d served notice to his father, hadn’t he? The old man knew he was onto him. Things were already different.
“Because people don’t change. You do know that, right?”
Noonan shrugged, not wanting to disagree openly with something she clearly was adamant about. But people did change, didn’t they? He himself wasn’t the same person he’d been five years ago, before going to the academy. And a couple of hours in Lucy’s company suggested that he’d changed, too, as much as Noonan or even more.