“I’m happy to see you,” Mrs. Borriello said in accented English.
Mary smiled at Mrs. Borriello, who had aged since Mary saw her last. “How are you?” she asked the boy. Carmine, she recalled. And the youngest one was Anthony. She calculated the oldest brother to be dead four years now. How well she remembered that afternoon, the hush that fell over the building when the news went up and down that the boy, sent by his mother to gather wood by the bulkhead on Twenty-Eighth Street, had been reaching for a piece of driftwood when he slipped into the river and was swept away. It came out later that Carmine, who’d gone along with his older brother, had run along the riverbank looking for help and came to a group of laborers having a break up on the pier. “Please!” he begged them. “My brother!” But all they did was look where the boy was pointing, and after a minute, as they all watched the boy drift farther away, and as they took their lunches from their pockets, one of the men offered the boy half a sandwich for strength before he went home to tell his mother. Mary wondered now if they ever fished the boy’s body from the river.
“How is Anthony?” Mary asked.
“He’s doing good.” The boy looked at Mary, and then down at his hands, and then back at Mary. She wanted to touch his face. “Hey, ah, did you hear about my father? That he died?”
“No,” Mary said. She put her hand on Mrs. Borriello’s arm. “I’m sorry to hear about your husband. How? He was a young man.”
Mrs. Borriello pulled her scarf tighter around her hair. “A freak thing,” the boy said. “He was down framing a new building on Broadway and Broome, and they said he had the harness on to do a little welding job up on the beam, and then a strong wind came and he lost his footing and the harness broke. And he fell. It was the fourth-story floor beam.”
How many times had the boy heard the story, Mary wondered, to be able to tell it so matter-of-factly? What could he understand about beams and framing and the building of buildings? He was probably about ten years old now, but he seemed to Mary both older and younger. Older with his swagger and his way of speaking for his mama, but younger when she examined his soft face, his long eyelashes, the way, underneath everything he said, he seemed to look at each of the women and ask, Did I say it right? Is that really what happened to my papa? Just a beam and a broken harness and a gust of wind? And before that my brother? Is it really possible that he was there beside me one moment and swept away the next? That there was nothing tying him more closely to his life? Or my papa to his?
“Your poor mother,” Mary said in a whisper as she examined Mrs. Borriello’s dark brown scarf that blended with her dark brown hair, her drawn face, her quick hands passing over one grapefruit and then another until she found one she liked.
Mary leaned slightly toward the boy, wanting to hug him. “When?”
“Almost a year.”
“One year in October,” Mrs. Borriello added, also looking at her son. All three were quiet as the shoppers rushed around them and the produce man kept glancing at them and at their pockets to make sure they hadn’t stuffed them without paying.
“Hey,” the boy said. “I remember the fireworks that time. Remember?”
“I do,” Mary said, taking him by the shoulders and pulling him toward her. I am lucky, she thought. When I think I am unlucky I must remember that I am lucky. I am blessed. The boy let himself be hugged, and then politely pulled away.
The woman said something in Italian, and the boy tried to signal his mother with his eyes that he didn’t want to translate. “She says you have also had sadness,” he said finally. “But your sadness is a blessing in disguise, maybe. Maybe not, but maybe. That man was not a good one, and Our Lord works in mysterious ways.” The boy added on his own, “He comes in sometimes. He seems different now.”
“You might be right,” Mary said, placing her hand on the woman’s arm again to say good-bye. She began to turn away, to wish them a good day and best of luck, when a thought came to her. “Carmine,” she said.
The boy waited.
“Does your mother have a boarder?”
“A boarder?”
“Someone who lives with you and pays a little of the rent.”
“No.” He looked at his mother, who was scrutinizing Mary. Mary got the feeling that she understood everything. She wanted to ask how they were making ends meet, but she knew that would be intruding too far. How to put it? She turned to Mrs. Borriello and spoke to her directly.
Mrs. Borriello waited, and Mary felt she was already preparing a phrase to turn Mary down. “I have a regular job, six and a half days a week, and I earn decent wages, though not as good as I did before. Before the island. You understand? When I was a cook. This job is in a laundry but the pay is regular. I could live with you, Mrs. Borriello, and help out with the rent and around the rooms. I am neat, and the boys already know me. I would—”
Mrs. Borriello let go a stream of Italian, and the boy protested in Italian for a few sentences, before turning and walking down the block a little, leaving the women alone.
“I’ve been thinking about something like this,” the woman said. “I don’t like the idea of a stranger. I don’t like to put it in a newspaper.”
“But I’m not a stranger. You saw me come and go for many years.”
“Yes.” She stared at Mary, and Mary recalled the portrait of the Sacred Heart she’d noted that time she stood in the Borriellos’ dim kitchen after the older boy’s death, Mrs. Borriello not yet able to get out of bed. This was a religious woman, and Mary was sure she’d disapproved of Alfred and their arrangement. What woman would approve? She’d been crazy, and foolish, but what woman would have given up on him, knowing what he was like at his best? He was worth it, she wanted to say to Mrs. Borriello. And she loved him. And Christian doctrine preached forgiveness as much as it preached anything else. Underneath that scarf and those widow’s weeds was a young woman, perhaps younger than Mary. You understand, Mary wanted to say to her. I know you understand.
“No guests,” Mrs. Borriello said. Mary’s face burned. It was no matter, Mary thought. A few weeks of living together and the other woman would see that Mary was not like that. It had just been Alfred she’d made an exception for. Only Alfred. And now Alfred was off and married and raising another man’s son.
“Never,” Mary agreed. She shook her head emphatically from side to side so the woman would understand. She felt a flush of sweat spring up on her neck. The boy was kicking a dried horse turd along the curb and glancing over at them. “My boys stay in their bedroom. You get the cot in my room or the kitchen.”
“Yes. Fine.”
Mrs. Borriello named her price. It was more than at Mrs. Post’s, and it meant Mary would save nothing. Not a single dime unless she ate less, or washed her hair less often, or walked everywhere she went, or picked up another job for Sunday afternoons. If I offer less, Mary considered, she will take it. She said herself that she doesn’t want to advertise.
“Yes,” Mary said instead. “I can do that.”
Mrs. Borriello seemed surprised for a moment, and then happy. She waved over the boy. Mary shook the other woman’s hand, and then the boy’s. Each paid for her fruit, and they made their separate ways until the following Sunday, when Mary would move in.
She had not given a single thought to the others in the building when she’d made the suggestion to Mrs. Borriello, but when she walked away, and realized what had just been arranged, it felt again like time was moving backward, and that no matter how hard she tried to keep her eyes pointed to the step ahead, she kept getting knocked off balance, turned around.
She gathered her belongings from Mrs. Post’s when most of the others were out. It was only natural to feel that she was going home. Only when she saw the number hanging over the door — the dark entryway, the worn staircase beyond — did she truly understand what she’d done. At the bottom of the stairs was the same faded mural of a man on a horse, children picking fruit from trees. The plaster molding that had long ago been painted to match the wood of the banister had been chipped away further, and sat along the baseboard in small piles of dust. After so many months of avoiding the place, of swinging wide so as not to run into anyone, there she was the prodigal daughter without a thing to show for herself except for a scorch burn on her wrist, and swollen ankles, and a set of ten raw knuckles. They would laugh at her. She imagined Patricia Tiernan standing smug in her kitchen, saying what she always thought, what she always knew, while her fawning family gazed at her and nodded. She thought of the others who had never liked her, had never liked Alfred, and then how she and Alfred had thumbed their noses at what the others liked and didn’t like.