And that was before Mary got sick. He knew the two things were not connected, that she didn’t get cancer from the heartbreak over the restaurant. He also knew it wasn’t the earlier surgeries, all those years ago, when she lost so much blood and needed transfusions, but he couldn’t shake the notion. She had allowed him his dream, bankrolled it without a single word of reproach when all that money went down a rabbit hole lined with black beans and flan. And then she got pancreatic cancer. Stage IV. Mary never did anything halfway.
His papers gathered, he started making coffee, the good stuff. He still cooked for himself, but there wasn’t much joy in it, and he almost never made Cuban food.
He wasn’t stupid or naïve. He went in knowing that a restaurant was hard work; he came from restaurant people. He knew that most restaurants didn’t make it. But he also knew that he was smart and that his food was good. So why didn’t people come? Sometimes, he blamed the low-carb diet fad, which put rice and bread off the menu for so many people. He blamed the lack of Cubans in Baltimore. There had been a big influx of Latinos on the East Side, but they were all from Central America and Mexico. His food did not speak to them. It seemed that his food spoke only to him and a few stubborn regulars. There had been one young man, a guy who looked like an aging skateboarder, but he turned out to be in business himself, running a music venue with his father-in-law. Sandy and the kid talked about the perils of small business sometimes while the boy sat at the counter, wolfing down cappuccinos. But they never spoke about their lives, probably because Sandy kept that door closed to everyone but Mary. He was shocked, a year ago or so, to see the boy, as he still thought of him, pushing a stroller down Thirty-sixth Street, in the company of an attractive woman, although she wasn’t Sandy’s type. He didn’t like sturdy women. He liked the little flowers, the women who needed protection in this world. He had been drawn to Mary’s delicacy, only to be amazed by her steel. First with Bobby, then with her own illness.
Cancer. In his lifetime, it had become less of a thing. Everyone was so cheerful about it now. They forgot that it could still be pretty awful. Even he had forgotten. He had been stubbornly, stupidly hopeful, asking the doctor about those commercials, the ones for miracle places that cured people everyone had given up on. But Mary had accepted, from the first diagnosis, that she was being given a death sentence. If she had been thinking only of herself, she would have gone home and swallowed rat poison. She was a dignified woman, and there was no dignity in what happened to her over the next four months. “I carried you to your doorstep on our first date,” Sandy said. “What’s the big deal in my carrying you now?”
But he was carrying her to the toilet, which she found humiliating. Mary had been a woman who, through thirty-plus years of marriage, insisted on decorum, especially about bathroom matters. To have her body assert all its ugly reality in those final months grieved her so. She put on lipstick and beautiful nightgowns until the end. But she no longer wanted fresh-cut flowers in the house. “When they die, they remind me that I’m dying.”
Sandy had objected, defending the flower bearers in a way he was not inclined to defend most people. He had a pretty low opinion of people and whether that was because of the job or the job was because of that tendency was a chicken-or-an-egg question at this point. At any rate, he argued for the flowers. “No, they’re pretty, they’re nice, you’re not-”
“I am,” Mary said. “I’m dying. And look at those cut stems in water. They’re dying the moment they’re cut.”
The next day, he had brought her an orchid, in a pot. And although he didn’t know dick about plants, he learned to tend to it, and then another, and another, until the first floor was a bower, a word that Mary taught him. After she was gone, he thought about letting the orchids go, or giving them away, but Mary would be disappointed in him, giving up on yet another living thing, so he kept the bower, feeling for all the world like Nero Wolfe or goddamn Ray Milland when he played the villain on Columbo, complete with ascot. Only an asshole wore an ascot.
Columbo-that was a good show. Utterly ridiculous, but it wasn’t trying to be a documentary on police work. At least the writers knew that solving a homicide was more talking than anything else, although some of those confessions-well, Sandy wouldn’t want to be the assistant state’s attorney who took Columbo’s cases to court.
He turned on the television to keep him company while he puttered among the plants. No one would accuse him of having a green thumb, but he saved more than he lost now.
The rowhouse was still set up as it had been in Mary’s last months, so she could live on one floor. Now Sandy lived on one floor, using the first-floor bathroom. He went upstairs only to shower and change his clothes. But he slept in the sofa bed where she died, although it bugged his back.
Mary’s last word was “Bobby.” He tried to tell himself it was for him, that she had reverted, in that final moment, to the given name he no longer used. But Mary had almost always called him Roberto. Her last word was for her son, who loved his mother so much that he had almost killed her.
A few days after she died, Sandy drove out to the group home where Bobby now lived; tamed and dulled by medication, the boy-a thirty-five-year-old man, but always a boy to Sandy-was puzzled by the news. “Where’s Mom?” he asked, although he had been told repeatedly she was gravely ill, that this day would come. “Where’s Mom? When is Mom coming to see me again?”
Sandy had not visited him since that day. It wasn’t a plan. Nobody plans to be that much of a bastard. Mary’s illness had disrupted what routine there was and she was the keeper of that flame. He forgot to go, something came up. Then something else came up and before he knew it, six months had gone by and the caretakers, when he called, told him that Bobby was fine. “Does he ask after me?” No, he was told. He asks for his mother, but never his father. Okay, so that was that. He had no relationship with his son. It wasn’t his fault that Mary could forgive Bobby Junior for throwing her through a plateglass window, while Sandy never could. It didn’t matter to him that Bobby was only eleven at the time, or that he did not understand what he had done, that he cried over his bloodied mother as paramedics tended to her. She had lost so much blood that day, almost enough to kill her. Did the transfusions cause her cancer? Sandy knew that was ridiculous, that he shouldn’t blame Bobby for killing his mother-and yet he did. He just did.
At the table, the one where Mary used to insist on taking her meals despite being so weak she could barely sit up, he ate an early supper and watched the news. He missed having an afternoon paper, although it had been almost twenty years now since one was published. Sometimes, he felt that he was born to miss things, to lose things despite his meticulous ways. In Spanish, translated strictly, things lost themselves to you and that had been Sandy’s experience. His restaurant. His parents. Mary. The promise of his son-not the boy himself, but the dream of the child who never was, the boy who had seemed so happy and healthy and perfect at birth, straight 10s on his Apgar. Nowadays, you couldn’t open a newspaper, turn on the TV, without hearing about autism and Asperger’s, and people were always telling you about this book they read or Rain Man or how their boss was on the “autism scale.” Not that people talked to Sandy about these topics, because there was no one left in his life who knew about Bobby Junior. But he heard things, on TV and out in the world. He heard things.
The local news got silly after the first break, and he opened Julie Saxony’s file again. It was the opposite of whatever picking at a scab was. Something was registering every time, even if he didn’t know what it was. He was beginning to prefer the more recent photograph, the one where she was too thin. Yes, to be honest, the va-va-voom shot of her in her stripper days had been what first caught his eye. But the 1986 photo, where she was all of thirty-three-she looked so old and sad. This was the woman who had been murdered, he reminded himself. A woman who had achieved a lot, but at some cost. If he were the kind of a guy who talked to photos, he might have asked her: “What made you so sad?”