“The thing about Cookie’s crust was that it was really thin, so you could eat a lot more pizza without gettin’ filled up,” Dot was remembering.
Inside, a family of four was finishing their meal-Dot and May could see that the two kids had ordered pizzas. There was a good-looking man, maybe fortyish, sitting alone at a table near the swinging doors to the kitchen. He was writing in a notebook-just a lined notebook of the kind students use. The old ladies didn’t recognize Danny, of course. He’d been twelve when they’d last seen him, and now he was a whole decade older than his father was when Dot and May had last seen the cook.
Danny had looked up when the old ladies came in, but he’d quickly turned his attention back to whatever he was writing. He might not even have remembered what Dot and May looked like in 1954; twenty-nine years later, Danny didn’t have the slightest idea who those bad old broads were.
“Just the two of you, ladies?” Celeste asked them. (It always amused Dot and May when anyone thought of them as “ladies.”)
They were given a table near the window, under the old black-and-white photograph of the long-ago logjam in Brattleboro. “They used to drive logs down the Connecticut,” Dot said to May.
“This must have been a mill town, in its day,” May remarked. “Sawmills, paper, maybe-textiles, too, I suppose.”
“There’s an insane asylum in this town, I hear,” Dot told her friend. When the waitress came to pour them water, Dot asked Celeste about it. “Is the loony bin still operatin’ here?”
“It’s called the retreat,” Celeste explained.
“That’s a sneaky fuck of a name for it!” May said. She and Dot were cackling again when Celeste went to get them menus. (She’d forgotten to bring the old biddies menus when she brought them their water. Celeste was still distracted by the cook’s crying.)
A young couple came in, and Dot and May observed a younger waitress-Celeste’s daughter, Loretta-showing them to their table. When Celeste came back with the menus, Dot said, “We’ll both have the pepperoni pizza.” (She and May had already had a look at the menu in the window.)
“One each or one to share?” Celeste asked them. (Just looking at these two, Celeste knew the answer.)
“One each,” May told her.
“Would you like a salad, or a first course?” Celeste asked the old ladies.
“Nope. I’m saving room for the apple pie,” May answered.
Dot said: “I imagine I’ll be havin’ the blueberry cobbler.”
They both ordered Cokes-“real ones,” May emphasized to Celeste. For the drive ahead, not to mention the slew of children and grandchildren, Dot and May wanted all the caffeine and sugar they could get.
“I swear,” May said to Dot, “if my kids and grandkids keep havin’ more kids, you can check me into that so-called retreat.”
“I’ll come visit you,” her friend Dot told her. “If the pizza’s any good,” she added.
In the kitchen at Avellino, maybe the cook had heard the old ladies cackling. “Two pepperoni pizzas,” Celeste told him. “Two probable pie and cobbler customers.”
“Who are they?” the cook asked her; he wasn’t usually so curious. “A couple of locals?”
“A couple of bad old broads, if you ask me-locals or otherwise,” Celeste said.
It was almost time for the Red Sox game on the radio. Boston was playing at home, in Fenway Park, but Greg was listening to some sentimental crap called The Oldie-But-Goldie Hour on another station. The cook hadn’t really been paying attention, but the featured recording, from 1967, was Surrealistic Pillow-the old Jefferson Airplane album.
When Tony Angel recognized Grace Slick’s voice singing “Somebody to Love,” he spoke with uncharacteristic sharpness to his sous chef.
“Time for the game, Greg,” the cook said.
“Just lemme hear-” the sous chef started to say, but Tony abruptly switched stations. (Everyone had heard the impatience in his voice and seen the angry way he’d reached for the radio.)
All the cook could say for himself was: “I don’t like that song.”
With a shrug, Celeste said to them alclass="underline" “Memories, I guess.”
Just one thin wall and two swinging doors away were two more old memories. Unfortunately, the cook would not get rid of Dot and May as easily as he’d cut off that song on the radio.
CHAPTER 9. THE FRAGILE, UNPREDICTABLE NATURE OF THINGS
OUT ON THE CORALVILLE STRIP, WITHIN SIGHT OF MAO’S, there’d been a pizza place called The Greek’s; kalamata olives and feta cheese was the favorite topping. (As Danny’s dad had said at the time, “It isn’t bad, but it isn’t pizza.”) In downtown Iowa City was an imitation Irish pub called O’Rourke’s-pool tables, green beer every St. Patrick’s Day, bratwurst or meatball sandwiches. To Danny, O’Rourke’s was strictly a student hangout-an unconvincing copy of those Boston pubs south of the Haymarket, in the vicinity of Hanover Street. The oldest of these was the Union Oyster House, a clam bar and restaurant, which would one day be across the street from a Holocaust commemoration site, but there was also the Bell in Hand Tavern on the corner of Union and Marshall streets-a pub where the underage Daniel Baciagalupo had gotten drunk on beer with his older Saetta and Calogero cousins.
Those taverns had not been far enough out of the North End to have escaped the cook’s attention. One day he’d followed Daniel and his cousins to the Bell in Hand. When the cook saw his young son drinking a beer, he’d pulled the boy out of the tavern by his ear.
As the writer Danny Angel sat working away in his notebook at Avellino-waiting for his dad, the cook, to surprise him-he wished that his humiliation in the Bell in Hand, in front of his older cousins, had been sufficient to make him stop drinking before he really got started. But in order to stop himself, Danny had needed a greater fright and subsequent humiliation than that earlier misadventure in a Boston bar. It would come, but not before he was a father. (“If becoming a parent doesn’t make you responsible,” the cook had once said to his son, “nothing will.”)
Had Danny been thinking as a father when he’d typed a one-page message to the hippie carpenter, and had driven out the back road to Westminster West in order to put the message in the asshole dog owner’s mailbox, before driving to Brattleboro and his surprise dinner at Avellino? Was this what the writer would have wanted young Joe to do, if his son were to find himself in a similarly hostile situation?
“I am truly sorry your dog is dead,” Danny had typed. “I was angry. You take no responsibility for your dogs, and you won’t acknowledge that a public road is not your dogs’ territory. But I should have held my temper better than I did. I’ll run somewhere else. You’ve lost a dog; I’ll give up my favorite run. Enough is enough, okay?”
It was just a plain piece of typing paper. The writer didn’t include his name. If Armando was right-if the asshole was a writer carpenter, and/or one of Danny’s former students at Windham -then of course the infuriating dog owner already knew that the runner with the squash-racquet handles was the writer Danny Angel. But Danny saw no reason to advertise this. He didn’t put the piece of paper in an envelope, either; he’d just folded it twice and put it in the dog owner’s mailbox, out where the driveway lined with dead vehicles met the road.
Now, as he sat writing in Avellino, Danny knew what Armando would say: “You don’t try to make peace with assholes,” or words to that effect. But Armando didn’t have children. Did that make Armando more unafraid? The very idea of an altercation escalating out of control-well, wasn’t that high on the list of things to protect your children from? (In the notebook, where Danny was scribbling to himself, the phrase “a nameless fear” stood out with an identifying awkwardness in several unfinished sentences.)