The gun, still loaded and ready to guard Vincent’s Bootery on 116th Street was hidden, appropriately, in one of Vin’s old cowboy boots. It was painful, physically and every which way, for Rose to crouch in the closet and extract it. Yet she lingered, running her hand along the familiar broken-in black leather and fancy white boot stitching, letting herself miss the husband she mostly despised. The revolver sagged heavily in her big front sweatshirt pocket but the feeling was not altogether unpleasant, a little like a baby there. Vincent’s Bootery was now a cell phone store.
The backdoor sticks. To open it, you have to lean with your whole weight, wham, shoulder-first. Each time Rose does this, she imagines falling onto the brick patio where she’ll lay in crumpled agony until 8:30 a.m. when, obligated, Paulie comes to check she’s not drinking, and forevermore forces her to wear that medical leash with the button to press in case of emergencies.
“I know you would have come and rescued me,” Rose says, as she shuffles toward Li with a breakfast tray. “If I were out there wailing in pain, I know you would.”
Li just bows (or has a cramp). He reaches clumsily for the tray and a bowl skids off, smashing. Together, the two wrestle the food down to the scratched-up dining room tile. Can he hear all her joints popping? she wonders. His smooth black eyes both avoid and study her as if she’s a phantom or royalty, the Queen of Queens maybe.
“The Queen of Queens and Yesu Jidu will commence to dine. Choice of Fiberall, orange juice, Sambuca.”
It’s a far swim from the meals she used to make, for her daddy, then her husband, then her son, for the endless stream of relatives from Italy and Bensonhurst, for Good Guys and Bad Guys, their loud wives, sandy children, pets! On a Sunday like this, she’d be expected to serve the antipasti and the pasta, two meats, a vegetable side, dessert, espresso, and mints. She prayed for a daughter to help her. When that didn’t work, she prayed for an air conditioner. Finally, “I just prayed they’d leave me the fuck alone, excuse my Italian. And here I am. Until Paulie gets his way. Or the whale saves me.”
“A bacterial time bomb,” the papers are calling the washed-up finback. If the city doesn’t get rid of her before the next high tide, she could infect the whole waterfront. Rockaway’s summer of ’93 would be an environmental disaster, a PR nightmare! A blessing for Rose. No one will bother coming near her house if the beach is closed. Rose will live happily ever after for one more summer. Rose and Li—
Sadly, no one’s ever seen a Chinese person in Rockaway besides the delivery boy for Wok and Roll. People would definitely notice. Li’s dark hair and busy eyebrows are actually a lot like young Vin’s were, but there are those nearly lidless eyes to give Li away, high cheekbones, a nose like some kind of exotic sliced mushroom. He sniffs with what might be disgust at the box of Fiberall cereal.
“If Paulie hadn’t had my gas turned off, I’d make you my famous cutlets and escarole,” Rose apologizes. “Or some soup — I know your people like soup. The nerve of that kid after forty-five years of scarfing my rigatoni. On a Sunday like this, I’d serve an antipasti and a pasta, two meats—
Eyes closed, Li begins quickly eating the cereal, with his hands, from the box, no milk. He’s got a way of chewing with his whole head that Rose has never seen before. And Rose has seen a whole lot of people eating.
“I’d go easy on that Fiberall,” she warns.
He streaked across her lawn just as she made it out the backdoor, without falling. There goes the neighbor’s huge black lab, Blacky, off its leash again, she’d assumed. And though she’d noticed his bark sounded odd, like a croup, she was too distracted, thinking how the wretch had gone to pee in his favorite spot against her shower house. No point reasoning with the owners, people so deeply unoriginal that they’d name a black dog Blacky. Didn’t they also want her property? Eager to buy and tear down the place Paulie was born in to build something they called a solarium. Owning things others covet might make some feel powerful, but it just filled Rose with fear.
In the distance, Ambrose lighthouse pulsed on, off, on, but its usual soothing rhythm was jangled by searchlights roaming the dark, chaotic waves. She could hear sirens. Screams? The helicopter din made it hard to make out. Then that lumpy policeman appeared, bouncing around the side of the house.
“What!” Rose snapped, clutching her sweatshirt closed. She’d been hassled by the law once before, after starting a fire on the beach. Had she really fallen, this officer would have been the one to find her. Quite by accident, while coveting the ivy climbing up her façade, the decorative inlaid tile, flowering shrubbery, large picture windows, his flashlight would have suddenly illuminated what was left of her, Rose Camille Maria Impoliteri. A shriveled, bloodied human carcass. An ugly, used-up thing requiring removal. A nuisance.
“We were ringin’ but you were out here, I guess,” the policeman said, and only then remembered to flash a badge. “O’Donnell.”
Behind him, a second, trimmer uniform materialized. This one trailing a nightstick along the beach wall and whacking now and then at Rose’s ornamental grasses. He looked so much like an old classmate of Paulie’s. Kevin? Kieran? But then they all did. Those fair-haired Rockaway lifeguards and rangers, cops, firefighters, Coast Guard; they could all pass for larger versions of the St. Francis High School bullies who tagged her son “Guido” and “Greaseball Wop,” “Guinnie Rat” and “Zipperhead.”
“Stop!” her frail voice failed to yell. “Why’s he doin’ that?”
“Just checkin’ around.” O’Donnell smiled, still bouncing, in place now. “You see anything unusual?
“Yeah. Over there, your partner beatin’ on my plants.”
“Any Chinese, I mean. Boat ran aground on a sandbar off a Breezy,” he explained. “The Golden Venture. Full of Chinese illegals. They’re drownin’ and runnin’ so we’re s’posed to check around.” With a couple more bounces for punctuation.
“I know about that,” Rose said. “You need to use the men’s room?”
A genuine offer but O’Donnell ignored it. “Anyone else wit ya here? Husband? Kids? Some kinda companion?”
Rose snapped. “What makes ya think that? I can take care a myself! I am—”
Which is when Blacky started up barking again, barking from inside the house next door, the same old bark she was used to. So Blacky wasn’t actually out there, Rose got around to understanding. So it hadn’t even been a dog that ran past her just—
“Wait,” she called uselessly. By the time her mind had gotten here, the two officers had set off to search the garage. “Wait. You can’t do that.”
Her elbow throbbed and flamed from opening the door, but still she followed.
“You can’t do that! Wait!” Kicking off her flip-flops to try and move faster. “No, I think you’re not allowed to do that. Without a warrant.” Was this true? She hadn’t the faintest idea. All she knew for sure was, “This is my house!”
The backdoor sticks, the tile is scratched; the basement floods every time someone cries, Vin used to joke. But according to the brokers who periodically call, the brick rectangle is now worth two million easy. Ten thousand was what Rose’s daddy paid for it brand new, back in the ’40s.
“Germans came ashore then, did you know that? German spies in Rockaway!”
Now total strangers regularly stroll up and make offers on the house over the beach wall.
“But I’m gonna fool them all, Li,” Rose all of a sudden decides. “I’m gonna leave the place to you.”