Penny from Heaven

  Today she’s made lasagna, which is my favorite.

  “Looks good,” I say as she puts a large portion on my plate. She always puts too much on my plate and gets upset when I don’t eat it all. It doesn’t matter how much I eat: I can never eat enough to make her happy.

  After dinner the uncles break out their instruments and start playing. There’s a trumpet, a mandolin, a violin, and the piano. They’re like their own band. Soon everyone’s singing and dancing and loud, and it’s a regular party.

  It’s nearly six o’clock by the time I leave.

  Before I go, everyone kisses me good-bye on both cheeks, something we never do in my family. They also slip money into my hands, rolled-up one-dollar bills. I kind of like this tradition.

  “I’ll drive you home,” Uncle Dominic says. I’m perfectly capable of walking home by myself, but he never lets me. He’s almost as bad as my mother.

  At my house he idles at the curb, watching to make sure I get in okay. I give him a little wave. I go into the parlor, and for a moment I think everybody’s asleep or something. But they’re in the dining room, eating dinner.

  They’re so quiet, I hardly know they’re there.

  The next morning I borrow Frankie’s bike and go to Uncle Nunzio’s factory.

  The clothing factory is on the other side of town. It’s a big brick building that looks just like every other big brick building. During the war the factory made uniforms for the military, but now it makes regular clothes, mostly awfully nice wool coats. You can hear the sewing machines buzzing even before you go in.

  Carolina, Uncle Nunzio’s secretary, is sitting at her desk outside his office. She’s wearing a stylish suit with a fake-flower corsage.

  “Hi, hon. Your uncle’s on the phone. He’ll be done in a minute,” she says.

  I sit on a bench to wait. It’s hot inside, real hot, even with the fans going, and I feel sorry for all the ladies at their sewing machines, row after row, sweating away. Most of them are from Italy.

  “You want a butterscotch?” Carolina asks, holding out a tin.

  “Sure,” I say, taking one.

  “How’s your mother?” she asks. She and my mom went to school together.

  “She’s good, thanks.”

  “You look more like her every day,” she says.

  “I sure hope she didn’t have this hairdo when she was my age.”

  Carolina laughs. “Oh, your mother could’ve pulled off that hairdo. She was the most daring girl I knew.”

  “My mother was daring? Honest to goodness?” I can’t picture my mom like this at all. She won’t go out of the house without an umbrella and scarf even on a clear day.

  “Would I lie to you?” Carolina says with a laugh. “Our senior year, she helped steal our school rival’s mascot, a goat.”

  “A goat!”

  The door to the office opens, and Uncle Nunzio is standing there.

  “It’s the little princess,” he says with a broad smile.

  “Hi, Uncle Nunzio,” I say.

  “Ask Alberto to come in for a minute, eh, Carolina?” Uncle Nunzio says.

  A short elderly man with gray hair and a tape measure hanging around his neck comes into the office. Alberto’s been my uncle’s tailor forever.

  “Alberto,” Uncle Nunzio says, “Penny needs a new coat.”

  “Bellissima,” he says to me, which I know means “most beautiful girl” in Italian.

  Alberto leads me out of the office and over to a workroom in the factory where the coats are stored. There are all sorts of coats—coats with shiny buttons and fur collars and matching gloves and everything. I spot a nubby wool coat that’s cranberry red with a rabbit-fur collar and rabbit fur around the wrists. It has a matching muff and hat.

  “That one, please,” I say.

  Alberto has me try it on, but it’s a little long in the sleeves. He takes the coat over to a sewing machine and fixes it while I wait.

  Uncle Nunzio is in his office looking at some papers when I come in, the coat over my arm.

  “Got one?” he asks, looking up.

  “Yeah,” I say, holding up the coat. “Thanks.”

  “You take the muff, too?”

  I shake my head. “I got the hat.”

  “Take the muff,” he says. “It’s rabbit. The best.”

  He goes to the door and calls to Carolina, “Get Penny the muff, okay?”

  “You got it, Mr. Rosati,” she says.

  “What about your mother?” he asks me. “She need a new coat?”

  “Sure,” I say, although I know she doesn’t like gifts from my father’s family for some reason. Maybe she’s worried about getting more lamb’s eyes.

  We go back to the coat room. He waves at a rack in the corner.

  “Pick something out,” he says.

  I look through the coats. They’re all so beautiful, trimmed in mink and rabbit and lynx. But it’s the reddish fox stole that catches my eye. It will go with my mother’s hair, and it’s something she would never pick out for herself in a hundred years. The fur gleams in the dim light, and the little teeth of the fox are bared and angry-looking, like it’s not too happy to be a stole.

  The coat and muff and hat go in the basket of the bike, but I wear the fox stole draped around my neck the whole way home, feeling like a movie star. I imagine my mother wearing it, looking glamorous, although I’m not sure where she would go. Usually she spends her Friday nights listening to the radio with me and Pop-pop and Me-me.

  When I was younger, she used to date. They were always good-looking fellas, but they never came back after she introduced them to me. I guess they didn’t want kids. Mother hasn’t dated in a long time, but I keep hoping that maybe she and Uncle Dominic will get together. He’s handsome and he already likes me and I’m sure I could work on the living in the car and get him to wear a pair of shoes.

  When I get home, Frankie’s waiting on the front porch.

  “Couldn’t take hearing the baby cry no more,” he tells me. Baby Michael’s real colicky, and I guess no one’s been getting much sleep at Frankie’s house these days.

  He sees the fur stole and asks, “That your fancy new coat?” It irritates Frankie that the uncles are always giving me presents, even though he knows it’s because my father is dead and everybody feels sorry for me.

  “It’s not for me. It’s for Mother,” I say. “This one’s for me.” I hold up the red coat.

  “‘Little princess,’” he mimics. “You’ll look like Red Riding Hood in that getup.”

  “Aw, shut up, Frankie,” I say.

  Frankie follows me into the house. It’s dark and quiet.

  “Me-me? Pop-pop?” I call out, and then I find the note on the table.

  Penny,

  Gone shopping. Put the tuna casserole in the oven at 4:30.

  Love, Me-me

  “You want to stay over for dinner tonight? Me-me made a tuna casserole,” I tell Frankie.

  He considers it and then shakes his head. “Nah, I want to survive the summer.”

  Frankie’s brought his baseball mitts, so we go out to the backyard. He wants to practice fielding, and he has me throw him ground balls. After a bunch of grounders, I throw the ball high in the air.

  “I tell ya, it’s a crying shame, you being a girl,” he says. “That arm of yours is like a cannon.”

  Frankie’s always trying to get me to play on his team. Sometimes I do if they don’t have enough boys.

  “I mean it,” Frankie says. “You got talent. Must be Uncle Dom’s blood.”

  “Long as I don’t end up living in a car,” I say.

  “If he was still playing ball, he wouldn’t be living in the car,” he says.

  “Why do you think he quit, anyway?” I ask.

  “Beats me,” he says. “Maybe he wasn’t good enough. I gotta use the can.”

  “I gotta use the can” is his favorite expression. He heard Benny say it, and now he says it every chance he can get. It sounds a lot rud
er than “tinkle.”

  After a while I get to wondering where Frankie has wandered to. I walk into the house and hear the sound of water leaking. I go into my bedroom and look up and see water coming through the ceiling. By the time I get to the upstairs bathroom, Frankie’s already put every towel on the floor and water’s still coming out of the toilet.

  “What did you do?” I demand.

  “Nothing!” he says.

  “Why’d you use this bathroom?”

  “I don’t know. I like it. It’s bigger,” he says.

  “You gotta make it stop!” I say.

  “Get me a wrench,” he orders, just like Pop-pop.

  I run downstairs and fetch the toolbox. By the time I get back upstairs, the leak has slowed to a trickle.

  “This stupid toilet,” I say.

  “Here, gimme that,” Frankie says, and grabs a wrench and looks behind the toilet. “I think this is the thing that stops the water.”

  “You sure you know what you’re doing?” I ask.

  “Sure, sure,” he says. “No problem.”

  He twists something and I hear a crack, and suddenly water starts spurting everywhere. A regular flood!

  “Frankie!” I shout.

  “It ain’t my fault!” he shouts back.

  My mind is whirling. I can’t call my mother, because she’s at work, and Me-me and Pop-pop are shopping.

  “I’m calling Uncle Dominic,” I say, and the minute the words leave my mouth, I know it’s the right thing to do.

  I call the store and Aunt Fulvia picks up.

  “What’s the matter, hon?” she asks.

  “I gotta talk to Uncle Dominic,” I say in a rush. “It’s an emergency!”

  Uncle Dominic gets on, and I explain to him what’s happened. He pulls up and gets out of his car a few moments later, carrying a toolbox. With his slippers and his bloodstained apron from Falucci’s Market, he’s a sight to see.

  “It won’t stop,” I say. “I don’t know what to do.”

  Frankie’s standing at the top of the stairs.

  “You do this?” Uncle Dominic asks.

  “What?” Frankie says. “It just broke. It’s always breaking. Tell him!”

  “He’s right,” I say.

  When we reach the bathroom, Uncle Dominic takes one look behind the toilet and shakes his head. “Stay put. I gotta go down to the basement.”

  Frankie and me hold our breath, waiting, and suddenly the water stops.

  “It stopped!” I yell.

  Uncle Dominic comes back up a minute later.

  “What’d you do?” Frankie asks him.

  “I just shut off the water,” he says.

  “Jeez,” Frankie says. “That was it? I could’ve done that!”

  “Frankie,” Uncle Dominic says, “I don’t think plumbing’s your calling.”

  Frankie waves his hand. “As if I’d wanna be a plumber.”

  Uncle Dominic gets down on his hands and knees by the toilet and does this and that. Then he goes back downstairs and turns the water back on. When he comes back up, he says, “That should do it.”

  “Is it okay to use?” I ask.

  Uncle Dominic flushes experimentally. There’s no flood!

  “You’re safe,” he says.

  Uncle Dominic and Frankie and me mop up all the water, and when we’re finished, it looks good as new. Well, aside from the rugs being soaking wet and all the towels. We drag everything outside to hang on the clothesline.

  “Come on, Frankie,” Uncle Dominic says. “I’ll give you a lift home.”

  “Thanks, Uncle Dominic,” I say, and I mean it. “You saved my life.”

  “Anything for you, Princess,” he says with a small smile.

  As I lie in bed that night, I stare at my new red coat hanging on the back of the door. It’s beautiful, probably the most beautiful coat I’ve ever owned when it comes right down to it.

  But when I hear the toilet flush above me, I know which uncle gave me the best present today.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Translator

  My mother’s laughter wakes me up.

  It’s a light, happy laugh—a sound I’m not used to hearing.

  I push back the covers and open the door to my room and go out to the parlor. I can see my mother through the screen door. She’s standing on the porch talking to Mr. Mulligan. She’s holding four bottles of milk.

  “Pat,” she says, and laughs again.

  I open the screen door and they both stop talking.

  “Hi, Bunny,” she says. “You’re up early.”

  “It’s hot,” I say. “Hi, Mr. Mulligan.”

  “Hello, Penny,” he says with a big smile.

  “Mr. Mulligan was just telling me how he might be getting a new route. Isn’t that interesting, Penny?” my mother asks.

  “Real interesting,” I say, trying not to roll my eyes.

  “I better be off. Lots of deliveries yet,” Mr. Mulligan says, and tips his hat. He walks back to his truck, whistling.

  We go inside to the kitchen, and Mother pours a cup of coffee, smiling to herself. She didn’t smile when I gave her the fox stole last night; she just shook her head and put it in the closet, saying, “Now, where would I ever wear this?”

  “It’s going to be just you and Me-me and Pop-pop for dinner tonight,” she tells me. “I have to work late.”

  “Okay,” I say. I feel bad for my mother sometimes. She works so hard. None of the other kids I know have mothers who have to work. But then, most of them have fathers.

  “Do you have to work at your uncle’s store today?” she asks.

  “We have deliveries this afternoon.”

  Her mouth purses slightly. “Then be sure to give Me-me a hand with the chores this morning.”

  I go to my bedroom and come back a moment later.

  “Here,” I say, holding out a small envelope. “Uncle Ralphie paid me.”

  “Bunny,” she says, “you don’t have to give me your money.”

  “I want to,” I say, going over to the Milk Money jar and dropping it in. “Maybe we can save up and buy a television.”

  “We’ll see,” she says, which means no.

  “Are we going to Aunt Francine and Uncle Donald’s for vacation this summer?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she says. “At the end of August.”

  “Do we have to?”

  “But that house is right on the lake,” my mother says, by which she means the house belongs to relatives and is free.

  Aunt Francine is my mother’s older sister. She and her husband have a cabin on Lake George in upstate New York, and we go there every summer. It should be fun, but it isn’t, because I always have to watch their seven-year-old daughter, my cousin Lou Ellen. Lou Ellen’s a brat.

  Last summer she got mad because I wouldn’t play dolls with her. That night when we were taking a bath together, she reached across and turned on the hot water faucet and it burned me on my back. Mother rushed me home to see Dr. Lathrop, our family doctor, because she didn’t trust the doctor at the lake. I had to go to the hospital and everything. Dr. Lathrop had been in the army and knew all about burns and put this medicine on my back called Scarlet Red that stained everything I wore. I had to get a whole new wardrobe.

  The worst part, though, was watching my mother. She went kind of crazy when I got burned. The entire drive home I kept telling her it didn’t hurt. Dr. Lathrop said my nerve endings were destroyed, which is why I didn’t feel any pain. I couldn’t do anything for the rest of the summer: no playing, no baseball, no bicycle riding, no going to the beach, no nothing. I just lay on my stomach listening to the radio and Pop-pop burping. But Mother thought I was going to die. Even now I’m surprised she lets me leave the house.

  “Well, I’m not taking any baths with Lou Ellen,” I say.

  “That’s probably a good idea,” she says, buttering a piece of toast and passing it to me. “Are you getting excited for your birthday? It’s almost here.”


  “I guess,” I say with a shrug. When I was little, I used to ask my mother for a father, but I haven’t asked for that in a while.

  “Twelve’s a big birthday,” she says.

  Twelve has always seemed pretty old to me. The girls who are twelve are in seventh grade and worry about their hair and are always trying to borrow their older sisters’ bras.

  “What did you get when you were twelve?” I ask, curious.

  “My first real piece of jewelry,” she says.

  “Really?”

  “It was a single-strand pearl necklace. Me-me and Pop-pop said that twelve was old enough to take care of something precious. I still have it.”

  “I know that necklace,” I say.

  “I wore it to my very first dance. My dress was peach crepe de chine,” she muses, looking out the window, twisting the ruby ring on her finger. It’s her engagement ring from my father.

  The sun is streaming through the green gauzy curtains, and my mother looks so beautiful standing there. She is the most beautiful woman I know when she smiles, which isn’t nearly often enough.

  “Did you kiss him?” I ask. “The boy you went to the dance with?”

  “Penny!”

  “Well, did you?”

  “Now, what would you know about kissing, Bunny?”

  Not much. I can’t imagine kissing any boy, certainly none of the ones I go to school with. How can you kiss a boy who you watched pick his nose in kindergarten?

  My mother shakes herself and looks down at the watch on her wrist.

  “Just look at the time! I’m going to be late for work at this rate,” she says, and gives me a quick hug, her perfume swirling around me, lily of the valley.

  Long after she’s gone, I imagine my mother—young, beautiful, and wearing a peach crepe de chine dress—twirling under the moon in my father’s arms as Bing Crosby croons “Dancing in the Dark.”

  Me-me’s cleaning up the breakfast dishes when Pop-pop says, “Thought I’d take Penny for a stroll into town. Need me to pick up anything?”

  Me-me smiles and says, “Let me get my list.”

  Across the table Pop-pop winks and I roll my eyes.

  I’m just his excuse to go to the tobacco shop to buy cigars. He’s not supposed to smoke cigars anymore because Me-me doesn’t like the way they smell up the house, but he still buys them every chance he gets and smokes them secretly. There’s a pile of cigar stubs behind the azalea bush in the backyard that’s been growing for a while now.