Collected Short Stories: Volume V Read online

  “A date?” She laid the yellow NCR copy she was processing on the desk and smoothed the edges with the spatulated tips of her fingers. “Never been there myself but I heard they got valet parking.”

  Jesse cringed. He knew that the gourmet restaurant was notoriously expensive but hadn’t factored the added expense into the price of the meal. Miranda kept her eyes focused on the paperwork littering her desk. “It’s against company policy.” she spoke in a gravelly monotone.

  “What is?”

  “Secretaries fraternizing with the work-bay help… Mr. Patterson told me so when I was hired.”

  Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud! Jesse felt the turgid blood congealing in his brain. He shuffled halfway to the door on wobbly legs when her voice sounded again. “On the other hand, there’s no mention of it here.” She was clutching a copy of the Paterson Toyota employee handbook. “And I should know. I revised the manual... all thirty-five pages.” She sandwiched the three-ring binder between a row of paperwork neatly stacked on her desk. “I’m not doing much of anything tomorrow night.”

  “Pick you up around seven,” Jesse replied. “I’ll make reservations.”

  *****

  Saturday afternoon, Jesse found his mother hunched over the kitchen table stripping the skins off a bowl of Clingstone peaches. Earlier in the week she brought home a bushel of fruit purchased at a farmers’ market. The flesh, which clung to the pits, was softer and juicier than the freestone variety sold in the grocery stores.

  Crooking her thick neck to one side, Mrs. Caldwell sniffed the air. “What’s that god-awful stench?”

  “English leather.”

  Mrs. Caldwell gawked at her son. “Got a date?” Jesse’s head bobbed up and down. A squat woman with a doughy nose, Mrs. Caldwell lifted her watery blue eyes heavenward. “I’ll be a grandmother yet!”

  Jesse watched her dice the blanched peaches into bite-size pieces which she tossed into a copper pot simmering on the stove. When the pot was half-filled, she sprinkled a generous cup of sugar over the fruit. Quartering a fresh lemon, she drizzled the juice over the mix.

  “What’s with the lemon?”

  “Brings out the flavor.” Mashing the soggy wedges in the palm of her hand, she drained the last few drops. “Opposites attract,” his mother chuckled at the clever repartee, “even in food.” She stirred the ingredients thoughtfully with a wooden spatula. “So who’s the lucky girl?”

  “Just a secretary from work.”

  The bubbling peaches exuded a tart aroma. “Can’t go out on a first date looking like an ignoramus.”

  “What?”

  “That grease spot on your fly isn’t going to endear you to anyone. Go back in the bedroom and change your pants.”

  “The others are in worse shape.”

  Mrs. Caldwell eyeballed the thickening slurry before reducing the heat. “Take them off. I’ll clean the stain by hand.”

  In the bedroom Jesse removed his pants and returned to the kitchen. “I never said anything about a first date,” he groused.

  Now that the mixture had thickened Mrs. Caldwell proceeded to ladle the steamy fruit into individual preserve jars. A yearly ritual, she always steeped the preserves in a separate pan of water for ten minutes before tightening the lids. “Yeah, well...” She scrubbed the cloth with a wet rag and dish detergent. “The stain... it’s thinning away to nothin’. Don’t hardly show now.” She handed him the soggy pants. “Throw them in the dryer and I’ll run a hot iron over them when they’re dry.”

  Drifting back to the stove, she teased a spoonful of fruit onto the ladle. “Taste.”

  Jesse nibbled at the hot fruit. A look of sublime joy ebbed across his grizzled face, the dark eyes scrunching shut. “Don’t get much better than that!”

  “Go dry your pants,” his mother barked.

  A half hour later as Jesse was inching down the driveway, the front door burst open and his mother waddled down the bricked steps. She thrust a jar of the homemade jam through the open window. “Geez,” Jesse bellowed. “It’s hot as hell!”

  “Give the fruit to your girl friend.”

  “She ain’t my girlfriend. Just a ...” He left the sentence dangling.

  “You tell her I don’t use no pectin. Nothin’ artificial to thicken the spread. It’s all-natural, fresh-grown. .. none of that high fructose, sicky-sweet, corn syrup crap.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Releasing his foot from the brake, he continued down the driveway toward the street. Before Jesse reached the highway, he cracked the glove compartment, tossed his mother’s unsolicited gift into the cavity and slammed it shut.

  *****

  “I ain’t much of a conversationalist.” They were cruising down the interstate ninety-five in the direction of downtown Providence. Wearing an inscrutable, sphinxlike expression, Miranda Huffington sat stiffly in the passenger seat, her slender hands folded in her lap. Since picking her up at the three-decker tenement behind the public library, Jesse hadn’t spoke more than a half dozen words.

  “All that mindless prattle,” Miranda observed, “is greatly overrated.”

  “That’s for sure.” Jesse balked, not knowing what else to say. If he tried to elaborate was he further contributing to the garbage heap of vacuous jibber jabber?

  “My Uncle Jack was painfully shy.” Miranda cut short his self-damning reverie. “The man could sit in a room full of people and hardly string two words together.” The golden dome of the Rhode Island state house loomed diagonally to their left. “Then he married Aunt Rita.”

  “And how did that work out?”

  “Not so hot. The new wife was a non-stop talkaholic. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. The woman never came up for air... never shut her trap two seconds back to back.”

  The last remnants of late afternoon light bleeding from the sky, Jesse could view the road clear enough but hadn’t a clue where Miranda’s monologue was heading “One day in mid-August, Uncle Jack drove to Green Airport in Warwick. He left the Toyota sedan with the keys in the ignition and booked a one-way ticket to the West Coast. No more captive audience. No more endless rants. No more Aunt Rita.”

  Not a bona fide smile per se, but the intimation of good humor flickered across Miranda’s features. Jesse turned off the Atwells Avenue exit ramp. The Blue Grotto with its eggshell white, stucco veneer came into view directly ahead. “My father joked,” she continued dryly, “that Uncle Jack should have married a deaf mute.”

  During the meal she ordered the gamberie aragosta scampi, which featured gulf shrimp and fresh lobster poached in a garlic butter. Jesse opted for the potato gnocchi tossed with caramelized onions, pancetta and pomodoro sauce.

  “Al Florentine mentioned that you raise honeybees.”

  “Yes, that’s true.” Miranda dabbed at her thin lips with a napkin and a faint hint of burgundy lipstick came away with the sauce. The girl never wore makeup to work. The color softened her features. “Fifty thousand bees in a single hive... all working for the survival of the colony,” she spoke in a confidential tone leaning forward across the table, “they’re truly selfless creatures.”

  Dressed in a black tuxedo with cummerbund, the maître d’, a smallish man with a scant wisp of dark hair covering an otherwise bald forehead, was showing an older couple to their table. The last time Jesse wore a penguin suit with onyx studs down the front of a pleated shirt was during his sister Eunice’s last wedding. “At the end of the summer the females kick all the drones out of the hive. That doesn’t seem terribly fair.”

  Miranda eyed him pensively. “No, but the males might eat down the honey reserves and the colony starve to death.”

  “But then, Jesse protested, “in the spring when the bees emerge from the hive, there wouldn’t be any males to mate with the queen.”

  “Toward the end of the winter,” Miranda explained they just make a new batch of drones to replace the ones that were evicted.”

  After the meal they strolled about Federal Hill. Over the past few decades, the grit
ty, blue-collar community had witnessed a series of seismic upheavals. Those greenhorn Italians who originally settled the community had long since dispersed to the more affluent suburbs of North Providence, Johnston and Warwick as a wave of scrappy Hispanics invaded the streets running parallel as far down as dirt-poor Olneyville. Over the last decade, gentrification brought back the white-collar grandchildren of the original settlers to reclaim their heritage along with a mix of college kids and affluent yuppies.

  At a bakery three blocks down from the restaurant Miranda bought a box of vanilla biscotti. “Did Uncle Jack ever resurface?” Jesse ventured.

  “No, never.” A short distance from the bakery they paused in front of an art gallery featuring high-end pottery, ceramics and custom-made jewelry boxes. “You lived at the Beacon Woods apartments a while back,” she suddenly blurted in a peremptory, no-nonsense tone. “How come you moved home with your parents?”

  Everything was blissfully perfect and now this.

  Jesse hesitated considering his options. He could lie - resort to verisimilitude, bloviate, confabulate, bullshit his way out of the ticklish situation. Stalling for time, he peered through the display window of the art gallery at a keepsake box fashioned from a shimmery orangey black wood. A tag hanging from the box read: Cocobolo, Mexican rosewood. Two hundred fifty dollars. A pair of brass hinges was cleverly recessed into the carcass of the box, the back wall mitered to support the lid at a comfortable angle. The craftsman probably used a slot cutter chucked into a drill press to make the cut with the thin, sliver of a blade spun on a horizontal axis at low speed - six to eight hundred rpm’s. Jesse didn’t know any of this for sure. As a mechanic his stock-in-trade was finding solutions, fixing what was broke.

  Everything but his sorry existence.

  “If it’s something you’d rather not discuss...” Miranda’s voice jolted him back to the present.

  “Living on my own wasn’t what I expected. No, not at all.” In a gush of emotional diarrhea, Jesse described his wretched loneliness and inability to make friends at the apartment complex. He even told her about the roofer and his shrimpy, dark-haired punching-bag-of-a-girl-friend. “Pretty pathetic, huh?”

  Miranda screwed her features up in a bittersweet smile. Time seemed to flow in slower and slower increments. “Damaged goods... that’s what we are.” There was nothing maudlin or self-serving in her tone. Stepping in front of him, she thrust her face up under his chin. “Give me a kiss.”

  *****

 

  “Peach jam... when I was a kid, my mother cooked it up in huge, copper pots every fall.” They were back at the car. “The mushy yellow fruit didn’t look half as nice as store-bought jams or jellies. What with the dented lids and smudged labels, I thought it was bogus... stupid as hell.” Opening the glove compartment, Jesse handed her the glass jar. “My mother whipped up a batch earlier today. She don’t use that gobbledygook thickener.”

  “Pectin.”

  “Yeah, whatever... It’s nothing fancy, but the taste is to die for.” Jesse fired up the car and glanced at his date. Miranda was staring straight ahead with just the faintest smudge of a smile brightening her mouth, the jar cradled in her lap like a precious heirloom, a fruity talisman.

 

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  Will the Rain Hurt the Rhubarb?

  “Adrian Flanagan’s working three to eleven over at the Brentwood Nursing Home.” Like a poker player dealt a lousy hand and waits for his opponent to fold or raise the ante, Jason Flanagan fidgeted with his hands. “Thought I might drop by later this week to see how she’s doing.”

  His wife, who was stuffing the washing machine with a load of soiled towels grimaced but never bothered to raise her head. The wiry, elderly man, who stood a tad less than six feet, watched her measure a cupful of Borax liquid detergent. Kate, a petite Italian woman with a pointy nose and auburn hair streaked with gray, sprinkled softener into the machine before closing the lid. Her eyes flared and lower jaw flattened like a battering ram. “Not a good idea.”

  Jason could sense his wife raising the emotional drawbridge, walling herself up behind a thick slab of brittle-minded certitudes “Why’s that?”

  “The nursing home is a private business, and you’ve no legitimate reason being there.”

  Jason cringed. After thirty-three years of marriage, his wife was still doing ‘the voice’.

  The voice was a stilted, phony as a three-dollar bill inflection that she inadvertently slipped into when out of her natural element. A set of gears in the washer clicked and the agitator began swirling the dirty clothes in the sudsy water. Only now did the woman step back, hands on hips, and look her husband full in the face. “Some things are better left in the past.”

  “Maybe I’ll go see my brother.” He scratched his stubbly chin reflectively. “What’s it been… fifteen years now? I’m sure he’s heard from Adrian by now.”

  Kate Flanagan cringed. “You’ll be wasting your breath talking to that moron?”

  Jason knew better than to argue the point. His older brother, Jack, was worse than a moron. He was a belligerent slug who never regretted a personal indiscretion no matter how much damage caused. A pot-bellied Irishman, Jack Flanagan was a loudmouth braggart who made it big in the durable medical supply business. Adrian’s mother was a non-stop talkaholic, who would rather slash her wrists than spend two hours alone in the house with her own private thoughts.

  In later years, Jason developed the bizarre notion that his niece, Adrian, was switched at birth. Her parents—that is, the bogus couple who brought her home from the maternity ward—couldn’t possibly be biologically related to this soft-spoken, angelic soul. It was luck of the draw, and Adrian Flanagan got dealt a pair of duds, imbecilic jokers from the bottom of the deck.

  Fifteen years earlier, Jack Flanagan’s mug was smeared all over the Providence Journal, when the IRS indicted him for tax evasion. A private accounting firm sent to review his corporate records at the medical supply company discovered that the flamboyant businessman, who favored Cuban cigars, Lincoln Continentals and off-colored jokes, was ‘cooking the books’. A slew of hospital beds and motorized wheelchairs that never left the company showroom had been billed to Medicare along with a hundred eighty-five bogus claims for bottled oxygen. Worse yet, an elderly woman with rheumatoid arthritis receiving inhalation therapy had been deceased a half dozen years.

  Rumors circulated that Jack Flanagan was heading to Connecticut for a little rest and relaxation courtesy of the federal government. Jack’s new mailing address was a minimum security facility with an outstanding law library, soft ball field and state-of-the-art exercise gym. Nolo contendere. In the end, he copped a plea, paid a hefty fine and received a two-year suspended sentence. Case closed!

  Throughout the ordeal, the man never showed a speck of remorse.

  The week before his final court date, Adrian’s old man was yakking it up like a remorseless jackass at a Fourth of July barbecue. Decked out in Bermuda shorts and a garish print shirt, Jack Flanagan poked fun at the district attorney. Everyone cheated on their income tax, right? The unfortunate glitch with the hospital beds, bottled oxygen and wheel chairs was just sloppy bookkeeping. Sloppy bookkeeping to the tune of over two hundred thousand dollars!

  At the cookout, not a single neighbor snubbed the man or expressed moral indignation. Even Jason’s parents, who damned the thieving bastard to hell in the privacy of their own home, laughed at their son’s flippant jokes and snide remarks. Jack Flanagan didn’t give a rat’s ass about a fall from grace. His only regret was getting caught.

  Some things are better left in the past. The Thanksgiving following the indictment Jason was visiting his brother’s family. Adrian was hunkered down in the den, playing with a one-legged Barbie doll, which she was dressing in a glitzy evening gown. Jason remembered her as a round-faced imp with coal black hair cropped short —a persnickety tomboy with sparkling eyes, burnished coppery complexion and stocky
frame. Adrian snuggled up alongside him on the couch with an impishly brazen smirk. “Uncle Jason, do you think the rain will hurt the rhubarb?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you, Adrian,” he hunched over and whispered with a conspiratorial flair, “They’re forecasting a ninety-nine percent chance of torrential downpour, but if it’s in cans, everything should be okay.”

  Adrian giggled infectiously but just as abruptly her features darkened and the girl lowered her voice several decibels. “Daddy told mom that she’s got shit for brains.”

  In the kitchen, the thermometer popped and Jason’s sister-in-law was easing the turkey from the oven. “Cripes!” He didn’t know what else to say.

  “She called daddy a two-timing louse… a human turd.” Adrian reached out furtively and grabbed her uncle’s wrist. “My parents hate each other so much they’re getting divorced. It’s supposed to be a secret so don’t tell no one.”

  For a second time in as many minutes, Jason was rendered speechless. He was carrying on a conversation with a nine year old about things that no child should comprehend. “I want to come live with you and Aunt Kate.”

  Jason watched as an array of holiday concoctions – string beans with almond slivers, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce and butternut squash laced with honey – was laid out on the dining room table. “That’s not possible,” he countered. “And anyway, I’m sure your parents will work things out.”

  “No, they won’t,” Adrian insisted glumly. “They’re too selfish.”

  Jason stared at the crippled Barbie doll. One of her oblong breasts was jutting out from the tattered gown. “Time to eat!” The call to table rescued him from the need for any further half-truths and cowardly evasions regarding Jack Flanagan’s marital intentions.

  * * * * *

  A few months later, Adrian vanished from the home, dragged off to live with the garrulous mother’s extended family. Jack remarried the following year and his new wife, who was really just a repackaged, jazzed up version of his old wife, got down to business.