“You want to call it quits?” he asks Danny. “I’m dying out here. I told you it was too hot to play.”
“Yeah, I know, but I had to get out of the house. Barb’s driving me nuts with this China thing. Between my law school tuition and the rent, we don’t even have the money for takeout Chinese, and we’re going to fly to Beijing?”
“I’ll give you the money, Danny,” Joe offers as they walk toward the bench at the edge of the court, dribbling the ball between them. “You know I will. I told you before, if you need money . . .”
“Thanks, Joey. I appreciate it. But—”
“But you’re not going to China. I know.” Joe plops down on the bench, peels off his T-shirt, and wipes his face on it.
“Well, would you?”
“Go to China to adopt? Hey, if I don’t meet someone pretty soon and get married and have a baby the old-fashioned way . . .” Joe opens the bottle of Poland Spring he’d left on the bench. “You never know, Danny. I want a kid.”
“You’ll have one. You’ll meet someone. And hopefully you’ll both be fertile so you won’t have to go through what Barb and I have.”
Joe nods, gulping water. Poor Danny and Barb.
After desperately trying to conceive a child from the moment they were married almost a decade ago, his friends resorted to expensive fertility treatments, to no avail. Finally, they made the decision to give up and adopt. That was two years ago—right around the time Danny fulfilled a lifelong dream by enrolling in law school.
“You know, you spend your teen years trying not to get anyone pregnant,” Danny says, “and then you spend all of adulthood doing the opposite.”
“Speak for yourself.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot. You spent your teen years dating a nun.”
“She wasn’t a nun yet. Not back then.”
“She might as well have been,” Danny says with a wry grin.
It might be amusing now, but at the time, Minnie’s fierce attachment to her chastity had been traumatic. At least, for Joey, who was convinced he was the only twenty-year-old male virgin in the greater metropolitan area.
If it hadn’t been for Nina, he might still . . .
Nah. There have been a lot of women since Minnie.
And Nina.
Too many women.
“You know, I’m sick of women,” Joe confides to Danny, who is guzzling his own water.
“You and me both. I mean, I grew up with three older sisters. Then there’s Barb. And her mother, and her sisters. And if we get a Chinese baby it’ll definitely be a female. The orphanages over there are full of them. Then I’ll be outnumbered in my own house.”
Joe suppresses a sigh. Back to the baby thing again. It’s all Danny wants to talk about these days.
As his friend goes on about Barb and her latest adoption plan, Joe allows his thoughts to drift back to his earlier conversation with Nina.
The way she had talked about never knowing what it was like to give birth . . .
Well, it almost sounded like she’d be willing to go through with it, just for the hell of it.
But then, that’s Nina.
She wants to try everything at least once. Bungee jumping. Marijuana. Indian food.
But giving birth is different, Joe reminds himself. Nobody—not even Nina—would just pop a baby out, say, “well, that was cool,” and move on to the next thing.
Would they? Would she?
Well, it was that way with the bungee jumping.
And with the marijuana, which they had sampled together, along with Minnie, at the tender age of fifteen behind the movie theater on Steinway Street.
“What’s the big deal about this?” Nina had asked, coughing her brains out. “It smells disgusting, and I don’t feel anything . . . except totally guilty. My father would kill me if he found out.”
The Indian food experience was even less satisfying. Nina had discovered that curry made her sick. So sick that she spent the next twelve hours in the bathroom.
But she had said, when it was all over, “I’m still glad I tried it. At least now I know what it’s like.”
Would it be that way with giving birth?
Yeah, right.
Nina—who thinks nothing of jumping off a cliff wearing an elastic cord and safety harness—has a thing about pain. In fact, for all her daring, she’s a wimp when it comes to physical discomfort. There’s nothing more dramatic than Nina with a sliver in her finger. Or Nina stubbing her bare toe.
He grins, shaking his head.
“You think it’s funny?” Danny’s voice cuts into Joe’s thoughts.
“Huh?”
“You seem amused by the fact that my wife spent the first six years of our marriage standing on her head after we had sex because some quack doctor told her the sperm would swim faster that way.”
Oh. He didn’t even hear Danny say that, but . . . “Well, that is funny, Dan.”
“Not to me. Not when it turns out my sperm weren’t swimming at all.”
“Hey, I’m sorry.” Joe pats him on the back, then tosses his empty water bottle into a nearby wire trash can. “Look, I’ve got to get home. I have to make a couple of phone calls.”
“Yeah? Who do you have to call?”
“Somebody at work gave me a pair of orchestra seat tickets to The Book of Mormon for next Friday night and I’ve got to figure out who I’m taking.”
“Haven’t you seen The Book of Mormon twice?”
“Three times,” Joe says. “But it’s great. I’d see it three more times. Unless—hey, do you and Barb want the tickets?”
“I wish. We have to go to Jersey for her mother’s sixtieth birthday party that night.”
“That’ll be fun. Weren’t you just telling me earlier how much you love your mother-in-law, and how she made that manicotti just for you on your birthday last week?”
“Yeah, Betty’s great, but trust me, Friday night won’t be fun. All Barb’s sisters’ and brothers’ kids will be there, and Barb will cry all the way home, the way she always does when we see the nieces and nephews. It’s gotten to the point where she gets all teary if anyone even walks by us in the supermarket with a baby in the cart.”
“I’m sorry, Danny.”
“It’s okay. We’ll survive.”
They begin walking toward the edge of the park.
“Hey, Joey!”
Joe looks up to see a group of shirtless teenaged boys in long, baggy shorts, backward Yankee caps, and hightops.
The tallest of the bunch is waving at him.
“Hey, Ralphie. What’s up?”
“We’re goin’ to shoot some hoops. How you been? Hey, Danny.”
“Hi, Ralphie.”
“How’d you get out of working this afternoon?” Joe asks Nina’s kid brother. “Your sister filling in for you again?”
“Yup.”
“You’re gonna owe her big someday, you know that, kid?”
“Yeah, I guess.” With a shrug, Ralphie continues toward the basketball court, dribbling a ball back and forth with his friends.
“Were we ever that young and lean and carefree?” Danny asks, shaking his head and patting his generous stomach.
“So I’m told,” Joe says, thinking of his earlier conversation with Nina.
She, of course, was the Queen of Carefree . . . until her mother died and she had to grow up and take charge overnight.
No wonder she’s so anxious to get out of here. She’s been a prisoner her entire adult life, chained to a house and kids and the grind of a family business.
Joe doesn’t blame her for wanting to leave Astoria and never look back. But that doesn’t mean he’s not going to miss her like crazy. He’ll be the only one of their old crowd left here, still single.
Other than Paulie Ca
viros, who is in the process of divorcing his wife Angie. But hanging out with Paulie is nothing like being with Nina. For one thing, Paulie doesn’t get most of Joe’s jokes—not the clean ones, anyway. For another, Paulie keeps talking about how great life is going to be now that he’s shed the old ball and chain.
“Ball and chain?” Nina had echoed incredulously earlier, when Joe recounted his latest conversation with Paulie. “He actually said that?”
“That and more.”
“Wow. Angie’s not my favorite person in the world, but she’s better off without him.”
“Yeah, except now we’re stuck with him,” Joe pointed out.
“Correction. You’re stuck with him. I’m outta here.”
“Not until next summer.”
“Well, I can put up with anything for a few more months. Even Paulie.”
Joe and Danny are passing a fountain filled with splashing, giggling children. The benches surrounding it are filled with mothers and nannies, some with carriages, some cradling newborns in the shade.
There’s just one man, as conspicuous in this crowd as a heavyweight boxer wearing a thong at a bridesmaids’ tea.
The stranger has an infant, wrapped in blue, strapped to his stomach in one of those Snugli things, and he’s helping a toddler in a pink ruffled bathing suit out of the fountain. Joe watches him bend to kiss the little girl’s head before he wraps her in a towel.
Thoughtfully chewing his gum, he wonders where the man’s wife is.
Then he wonders if he even has a wife.
Maybe he’s a single father.
Maybe—
“Hey, watch it, Joey,” Danny says, catching him on the arm.
“Hmm?” Joe stops short, then realizes that he almost stepped into a pile of dog poop.
“What are you doing? Too busy checking out that blonde au pair in the skimpy cutoffs?”
“Yeah, you know how it goes . . .” Joe shakes his head and focuses on the path ahead. “I just couldn’t help myself.”
Chapter Two
NINA SWATS AT a clump of too-long bangs that fall across her eyes as she bends to sponge off a table just vacated by a family with two toddlers. She wipes vigorously at the red-and-white-checked plastic tablecloth.
Families are the worst. Well, teenaged boys are slobs, too. But families . . .
Nina scrubs at a sticky substance on the red vinyl seat of a chair, then bends over to pick up a litter of crumpled napkins from the floor beneath the table. She’s about to leave the table when she sees that somebody has clearly licked the silver, perforated top of the glass Parmesan cheese dispenser on the table. It’s covered in drying slime and the cheese is clumping in the holes.
Oh, ick.
Why don’t parents keep a better eye on their kids when they eat out?
She scans the other half-dozen small tables, making sure everything else is in order. Three are empty, one is occupied by a group of giggling teenaged girls, and another by a middle-aged couple.
Nina pauses to straighten a framed, ancient poster of Cher and Nicolas Cage from the movie Moonstruck, then heads toward the kitchen, taking the disgusting cheese dispenser with her. She passes her teenaged cousin Cara, who is standing behind the register taking an order from an elderly man.
“Hello, Mr. Cebriones,” she says, pausing to empty the cheese into the garbage behind the counter.
“Hello, Nina. You look beautiful today, as always. Doesn’t she?” he asks Cara.
“Stunning,” Cara says deadpan, around a big wad of gum.
“She is stunning. Ah, Nina, if I were twenty years younger and you were twenty years older . . .”
“I’d be twenty years older than you,” she says with a wink. “Tell Mrs. Cebriones I said hello. And try the tomato-mozzarella salad tonight. I just made it and the tomatoes are perfect.”
Nothing, in her opinion, can beat sweet, deep red August tomatoes sprinkled with good olive oil and layered with aromatic green basil leaves and fresh mozzarella.
“For you, I’ll try it,” Mr. Cebriones says. “For you, I’ll do anything.”
Nina grins, pushing through the double doors to the sweltering kitchen. A rotating floor fan does little to stir the humid, garlic-scented air.
“What’s going on out there? Are things slowing down?” her father asks, expertly kneading and stretching a white blob of dough on a stainless steel countertop.
“Picking up, Pop. The dinner crowd’s starting to trickle in.” She tosses the cheese dispenser into a sink full of soapy water.
“Already?”
“It’s almost five-thirty.”
“Yeah?” A scowl bends Anthony Chickalini’s fleshy Mediterranean features. “So where’s your brother?”
“Probably still in the park with his friends.”
“I didn’t mean Ralphie.”
“Dominic? Who knows where he is, Pop?”
“He’s probably on his way.” Her father swiftly presses the dough into an olive-oil-coated pan, drizzles more olive oil on top, and begins sprinkling it with oregano.
Nina sighs and leaves the kitchen behind, wondering if her father will ever get a clue about her oldest brother. Probably not. Dominic is a classic middle son—at least, in the Chickalini family tradition.
Nina can’t help comparing her brother to her Uncle Cheech, Pop’s younger brother and the middle son. He’s on his third marriage—probably has a mistress this time, too—and has embarked on yet another career, trying to make it big with some kind of investment business that sounds suspiciously to Nina like a pyramid scheme.
Cara, Uncle Cheech’s daughter from his first marriage, has been working at the pizza place every weekend, trying to save money for college. She frequently rolls her eyes about her father, but Nina is careful not to voice her own opinion of hapless Uncle Cheech. After all, as Pop likes to say, blood is blood.
She buses another table, takes several telephone orders, and returns to the kitchen, wiping her hands on her long red apron.
“Pop, you should go home,” Nina says, seeing her father wince as he lifts a long-handled paddle bearing a pizza into the brick oven. “Your bursitis is acting up, isn’t it?”
“I’m fine. I’ll go when Dominic comes.”
“No, you don’t have to do that. I’ll take over the kitchen until he gets here.”
“I need you up front.”
“I’ll get Ralphie to cover with Cara.”
Pop looks old, Nina realizes, watching him rub his sore shoulder. His thick hair is more salt and pepper now than black, and the usual circles beneath his eyes seem darker and deeper than ever. His face is flushed—perhaps dangerously flushed—from the heat.
“I thought Ralphie was in the park,” her father says.
“So I’ll send someone to find him if he doesn’t show up here first. You know he’ll be in for pizza any second now. Go, Pop. You should rest.”
It’s been three years since the heart attack that almost killed him. Three years since Nina heard a thump in the middle of the night and found Pop lying on the floor beside his bed, gasping for air—instant flashback to Father Hugh and her first confession.
Three years since she made two wee-hour phone calls: the first to summon an ambulance, the second to summon Joey. He was there in a matter of seconds. By then Pop had stopped breathing.
It was Joey who performed CPR as Nina hovered helplessly, and Joey who was credited with saving Pop’s life.
It was Joey who paid for Pop’s weeks of hospitalization and rehabilitation when it turned out he’d let the health insurance policy lapse so that he could afford Dominic’s college tuition.
And it was Joey who took several weeks of vacation time from his job in order to run the restaurant while Pop was recovering and Nina was taking care of Pop and her siblings.
>
Three years since Joey saved Pop’s life . . . saved all of them, really.
Three years. Long enough for Pop to have gradually slipped back into his old, dangerous habits: working too much, eating too much, resting too little.
But Nina hounds him now, until finally her father agrees to go home and take it easy.
Left alone in the kitchen, Nina deftly takes over making pizzas, a job she’s been doing since she first started helping out in the restaurant, back when she could count her age on two hands.
She’s in the process of layering a pie with iceberg lettuce, sliced tomatoes, and shredded carrots when Joe Materi materializes in the doorway.
“Whatcha doin’, Nina?” He looks freshly showered and shaved, wearing a navy polo shirt with crisp white shorts and leather deck shoes.
She makes a face. “I’m making yet another salad pizza. Why these things are so popular lately is beyond me.” She drizzles vinaigrette over the whole pie. “Ugh. This couldn’t be more soggy and disgusting. They’ll love it.”
“Schmamanda used to adore salad pizza.”
“That is just so not surprising.” She juts her lower lip to blow a sweaty clump of bangs away from her forehead.
“So what are you doing here, Mr. Materi?”
“I was on my way back from renting a video and I came in to get a pizza.”
“What kind?”
“Sausage and onion.”
“Which video?”
“That hostage thriller that just came out, with Will Smith.”
“Huh, for a second there I thought you might have a hot date. But not with sausage, onion, and Smith.”
Joe grins. “Nah, it’s just me tonight. Want to come over and watch the movie with me? I’ve got an ice-cold six-pack and a carton of Häagen-Dazs.”
“I’d love to,” Nina says wistfully, removing a steaming pie from the oven and reaching for the pizza cutter. “But I’m stuck here for the night. Dom didn’t show up and I have no idea where Ralphie is. I don’t suppose you’d want to go check the park for him?”
“I wouldn’t mind, but the thing is, I saw him taking off an hour ago.”
“Taking off?” Nina swiftly rolls the cutter across the cheese-covered crust, creating eight evenly spaced wedges.