And I’d get the part.
You didn’t see any palm trees growing in this city except in the tropical-bird buildings of the Grover Park and Riverhead zoos, and in several of the indoor buildings at the Calm’s Point Botanical Gardens. This city was no garden spot. But on Palm Sunday, you’d think the plant was indigenous to the area.
Half the Christians who carried leaves of the stuff to church that Sunday didn’t know that the day celebrated Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. All they knew was that the priest would bless the frond and then they would carry it home and fashion it into a little cross which could be pinned to a lapel or a collar. Some of the palm crosses were quite elegant with fancy little serrated tips on the post and transverse pieces.
Mark Carella wanted to know why his father hadn’t made a little cross for him, the way all the other kids’ fathers had made for their sons. Carella explained that he was no longer a practicing Catholic. April, overhearing the conversation Carella was having with her twin brother, announced that she wanted to become a rabbi when she grew up. Carella said that was fine with him.
Mark wanted to know why they had to go to Grandma’s house two weeks in a row. They were going there next Sunday for Easter, so why’d they have to go today, too?
“Grandma’s always so gloomy nowadays,” he said.
This was a true observation.
Carella took him aside and told him he had to be a little more patient with Grandma until she was able to adjust to Grandpa being dead. Mark wanted to know when that would be. Mark was ten years old. How did you explain to a ten-year-old that it took time for a woman to adjust to the traumatic death of her husband?
“I miss the way Grandma used to be,” Mark said.
Which was another true observation.
Carella suddenly wondered if the man who’d shot and killed his father realized that he’d effectively killed his mother, too.
“Why don’t you tell her?” he said. “That you miss her?”
“She’ll cry,” Mark said.
“Maybe not.”
“She always cries now.”
“I cry, too, honey,” Carella said.
Mark looked at him.
“I do,” Carella said.
“Why’d that son of a bitch have to kill him?” Mark said.
When Rosa Lee Cooke was coming along in Alabama, there weren’t any white restaurants colored folk could go eat in. The restaurant Sharyn took her to today was thronged with white people. Crane her neck hard as she could, Rosa Lee could see only one other black family there. Black man and his lighter-colored wife, three children all dressed in their Palm Sunday best. Rosa Lee herself was wearing a tailored suit the color of her own walnut complexion; Sharyn had taken her shopping for it as a birthday gift. She was also wearing a bonnet she’d bought for herself, trimmed with tiny yellow flowers. Wouldn’t be Easter till next Sunday, but she couldn’t resist previewing it today.
She wasn’t a drinking woman, a little sip of sweet wine every now and again. But today was the day Jesus had marched into Jerusalem with his head held high, and she felt a little drink in celebration might not be remiss. So when Sharyn asked if she’d like a cocktail before lunch, she said she wouldn’t mind a Bloody Mary.
Rosa Lee had been thirteen when Sharyn was born, and now — at the age of fifty-three — the women truly looked more like sisters than they did mother and daughter, a compliment both had heard so often they were now sick to death of it. Same color eyes, same color skin, same smooth complexion, but Sharyn’s hair was trimmed close to her head whereas her mother’s was shiny with tight little curls springing from below the brim of her fancy hat.
They clinked glasses and drank.
A white man at a nearby table was openly admiring them. Rosa Lee noticed this, and turned her eyes away, just like she’d done in the South when she was a little girl. No sense inviting rape, she’d been taught back then, and it had stuck with her all her life. Wasn’t a white man on earth could be trusted. Black man sees Rodney King getting beat by white cops on television, the black man says, “So what’s new? This’s been going on all along, only difference is we finally got pictures of it.” White man sees Rodney King getting beat on television, he says, “Oh, how terrible, those cops are beating that poor black man,” as if this was something didn’t happen every day of the week in every city in America, white cops beating on a black man. Or messing with a black woman. Putting their hands inside a black woman’s blouse. Doing even worse things to a black woman, touching her where they had no right touching, just because she was in their custody.
“I called last night, y’know,” she said. “Wanted to make sure you said ten o’clock for church.”
“Yes, I got the message,” Sharyn said.
“So why didn’t you call back?”
“I got in late. I called this morning, soon as I…”
“Where were you?”
“Out.”
“Who with?”
“You don’t know him.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Dinner.”
“Where?”
“In the Quarter.”
“Dangerous down there. You shouldn’t be going down there at night.”
“The Quarter? It’s mostly gay, Mom.”
“Not all of it’s gay. There’re places in the Quarter a person could get hurt.”
“Well, not where we were.”
“Where were you?”
“A restaurant called Petruccio’s.”
“Italian?”
“Yes.”
“Too much garlic in Italian food,” Rosa Lee said.
“Why’d you pick an Italian place?”
“He picked it.”
“Who’s he?”
“Man named Jamie Hudson.”
“I don’t know him. Do I know him?”
“No, Mom.”
“How’d you meet him?”
“At the hospital.”
“He a doctor?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good. You staying home tonight?”
“Actually, I’ve got another date.”
“Tomorrow’s a workday, you should stay home tonight, get your rest. How you gonna help sick people, you runnin aroun all the time?”
“It’ll be an early night,” Sharyn said.
“Where you going?”
“For Chinese food.”
“I like Chinese,” her mother said. “Who with? This doctor again?”
“No, another man.”
“What’s his name?”
Sharyn hesitated.
“Bert Kling,” she said.
“Bert what?“
“Kling.”
“What kind of name is that?” her mother said.
“It’s just a name,” Sharyn said.
“That’s some kind of name, all right. How do you spell that name?”
“With a K.”
“K-L–I-N-G?”
“Yes.”
“That’s some kind of name.”
“Good afternoon, ladies,” the waiter said, materializing suddenly at their table. “May I bring you some menus?”
“Yes, thank you, please,” Rosa Lee said. “I’m so hungry all at once, aren’t you, Shaar?”
Shaar.
She had the sudden impulse to tell her mother that Bert Kling was a white man.
She squashed it like a bug.
Thieves knew all about coincidence.
They knew that if they were holding up a mom-and-pop grocery store at the same time a blue-and-white rolled by, that was coincidence and they were looking at twenty in the slammer.
Cops knew about coincidence, too.
They knew the dictionary definitions of coincidence by heart: “To occupy the same position simultaneously.”