“I worry about Eddie.”
“That’s good of you, Ma, but it sounds like Eddie’s doing what he wants to do.”
“It’s not right.”
“Yeah, well, there’s a lot of things in the world that aren’t right, like the insurance companies, but we’re not going to change them either.”
“I’m just telling you, I’m not happy about it.”
“Oh my God, will you stop?” Roseanne said. “Your complaint is registered.”
That night they came home late, stumbling up the stairs. In bed she waited for them to begin. She tried to justify taking the money, telling herself it was for his own good, that Evelyn would want the girl out of her house. Anna Lucia had resolved to call the police once they got started, but after what seemed an endless silence — had they passed out? — instead of shouting and banging, she heard their footsteps cross the ceiling to his bedroom, and then that other, even more unwelcome noise she didn’t want to picture.
The next night while they were out, she chained the door again and took three twenties, leaving six, and then, seeing an opportunity, tore off the last of the toilet paper so there was just a thin square hanging from the roll.
It was a Friday, and they were later and louder than usual. They were already fighting out in the street. They continued the argument in the hall and then above her, the normal back-and-forth. There was no point calling the police until things got physical, and she lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling as if they might come falling through, until, after a long lull, finally there was a rumble of someone — maybe both of them — running, then yelling, and glass breaking, bottles possibly, china, and a thunderous crash that sounded like a dresser going over. Yes, that was what she’d been waiting for. Another crash, and then something smashing, maybe a plate. Someone or something big fell. She sat up and turned on her light, reached for her glasses and then the phone. The girl was screaming — keening, not making words at all — as Anna Lucia punched the buttons and calmly gave the dispatcher her address.
Waiting for the police, she heard someone coming down the stairs, and rushed to the front window in time to see the girl hustle between the parked cars and across the street with a duffel bag. Anna Lucia couldn’t be sure it was her plan that had worked, but in any case she was grateful. She thought Evelyn would be too.
Upstairs there was no sound. She considered going up, but it was three in the morning and Eddie might not want to see her. She sat by her front window, watching from behind the blinds as the police arrived with their lights going.
They rang the bell, then banged on the door. After a time, Anna Lucia went out with one hand holding her robe closed at her neck and let them in.
“You the complainant?” the big one asked.
“They’re fighting again.” She pointed and stood there as they climbed the stairs.
A couple minutes later the short one came down. His forehead was sweating. “You said ‘they’re fighting.’ Who’s ‘they’?”
She told him about Eddie. No, she didn’t know the girl’s last name.
“Any idea where she might be?”
“She ran off toward Liberty right after I called you.”
He asked if Anna Lucia knew what the woman was wearing. She didn’t exactly, but let him know about the duffel bag and her complexion.
“It’s a good thing you called,” the policeman said. “He’s pretty bad off. We’ve got West Penn en route. In the meantime I’d like to ask you a few questions, if that’s all right.”
“Of course,” she said. “Please, come in.”
There was no need to tell him everything. He’d seen it too many times. They were drunk and fighting and the girl stabbed him in the chest with a kitchen knife.
Anna Lucia cried, both then and after he’d left. She prayed. God knew that had never been her intent. Maybe it was inevitable, with the two of them. Still, it seemed awful, and needless. The girl would sink back into the underworld of the undocumented. Eddie would live, but would need round-the-clock care; he’d be moved into an assisted-living place in Wilkinsburg, where Anna Lucia would visit him once a month, bringing her famous lasagne.
Once he was gone, she had the rugs torn up and the walls painted a sunny custard yellow. She hired a crew of teenagers from St. Joe’s to help her move. She had a lot of stuff, and some of it was heavy: the loveseat with the brocade slipcover, her mother’s hutch, the marble-top table. Miraculously, it all fit. She stood in the middle of her new living room, directing the boys — a little more this way, a little more — until she had everything just the way she wanted it.
Part II
Three Rivers
Pray for Rain
by Nancy Martin
Highland Park
When the floodwaters rose, I went to the grocery store because that’s what normal people do. They buy milk and bread and toilet paper, and good girls even buy necessities for their neighbors too.
When I got back from the store around ten in the morning, I parked in the marina lot and grabbed the bag of groceries off the passenger seat. I bailed out into a driving rain and ran across the lot, hoping I looked like a regular person — someone with nothing on her mind but getting through the storm. Before I reached the gate to the boat launch, I wondered how much the flood had washed away.
Over the weekend, a monster hurricane had gathered speed over the gulf and tore a path of waste and death across Louisiana before heading up the Mississippi. The storm’s momentum carried heavy weather as far as the Ohio River Valley and finally stalled here in Pittsburgh, where a deluge that smelled like the ocean fell for three days straight. The three rivers rose until the weathermen on television starting yelping about the flood of 1936, sending the whole city’s population crowding into the grocery stores to grab supplies.
My old sneakers skidded at the top of the boat launch, and I grabbed the open gate to regain my balance. My houseboat was still there, riding with her lines pulled tight against the cleats of the dock, but the water had come another foot up the concrete launch during the hour it had taken me to get to the store and back. Now the Allegheny swept masses of junk and debris past the few remaining boats tied up at the marina. An empty doghouse floated by, trailing a length of chain. Half a plastic Santa bobbed by on the turmoil of cold brown water. He rolled with the current until one mittened hand rose in the air as if hailing a rescue boat.
“Oh God.” I stared at the torrent of garbage rushing on the flood.
From upriver, an enormous tree suddenly roiled up from the surge — muddy roots, thick trunk, branches and all — heading straight for the marina. I caught a breath as the tree slammed into The Hines, the old wooden cruiser in the first slip. The shudder reverberated down the whole dock, and unmanned, The Hines tore loose from her mooring. The boat spun out into the channel. A jagged hole had been ripped in her hull, and ugly brown water poured through it, rolling the boat lower.
Her owners had fled with nearly everyone else and weren’t here to see their grand old lady list down into the river. The swift current swept her past the old salvage yard and the closed steel mill toward the dam. As I watched, the boat struck the dam and split apart. Her glorious upper deck washed over the spillway and disappeared, but the rest of her — the ugly inner workings of the old boat — hung there on the lip, surging and groaning with the flood. Eventually, she’d sink down into the dark water to join the industrial waste that lay at the bottom of this stretch of river. Down there was an underwater junkyard full of horrors I didn’t want to think about.