“You have a job?” Irene was outraged that she hadn’t been told this.
“Don’t wake your father.” Her mother opened the front door. Cold rushed in and circled Irene’s bare legs like a frantic dog.
Outside it was gray on gray, snowflakes hovering in the air, the world rendered as a pencil sketch. Her mother walked toward a dark sedan parked in the driveway, its exhaust puffing clouds. A man in a long coat stepped out of the driver’s side. He said something to her mother that Irene didn’t hear, and opened the passenger door for her. He touched the small of her back as she stepped around him, and then closed the door behind her. Then he turned, and saw Irene standing in the doorway, Buddy holding on to her legs.
“You two will catch cold!” he said in a friendly tone. He was square-jawed and tall, twice the size of her father. And twice as handsome. His black hair was parted with Ken doll precision.
Irene shut the door—and immediately stepped to the picture window and pushed aside the drapes. The car backed out of the driveway, leaving tracks that she was sure her father would notice when he awoke. But no: by the time she escorted Buddy to his bus stop a half hour later, the snow had already filled them in.
Here’s a question of etiquette that could only come up in the Telemachus family: Who should blow out the candles on a dead woman’s cake? They used to let Buddy do it, but then Cassie and Polly started begging for the honor, and not even Buddy could turn down the twins when they were in Full Cute mode.
“Go to town, girls,” Irene said to the twins. There were seven candles on the cake. There should have been fifty-two, but Irene didn’t dare have that much fire around the girls. So five yellows, one for each decade, and two reds for remainder. Buddy watched anxiously until each candle was extinguished.
Maureen Telemachus had died twenty-one years ago, when she was thirty-one, the same age as Irene was now. This is the last year I have a mother, Irene thought. From now on she’ll be younger than me.
Hardly anyone talked as they ate. Loretta, usually in a good mood, seemed subdued. Buddy’s silence was no mystery, but Teddy’s was. He’d brought home the pizza—a pair of Giordano’s, thick as motorcycle tires, not the crispy style that he’d been rhapsodizing about earlier—but wouldn’t say where else he’d been for the rest of the two hours since he’d left the house. He was distracted, and picked at his cake as if he couldn’t decide what it was.
Frankie’s silence, however, was aggressive, peppered with grunts that begged for someone to ask what was the matter. Irene already knew. Two weeks ago Frankie had taken her and Dad out to dinner at the Pegasus, all on Frankie’s dime, he said, because he had some fantastic news to share. It wasn’t until they were done with the meal that he came clean. His fantastic news was that Teddy and Irene could become distributors in something called UltraLife, which he claimed was the fastest-growing multilevel marketing company in the United States.
At the Pegasus, Teddy had said, “When you say multilevel marketing—”
“He means pyramid scheme,” Irene had said.
That comment pretty much ruined the rest of the night. And the rest of Frankie’s month, evidently. But why did he think he could convince Irene or Teddy to invest in such an obvious scam? Irene was broke, and Teddy, though he had plenty of money (from sources he would not identify), refused to bankroll his kids. He’d grown up poor, and clawed his way out of poverty on his own, which in his mind was the ultimate test of evolutionary fitness. How many times had he told his children: Never lend chips to someone who can’t buy their way into the pot.
Irene blamed her father for Frankie’s crooked little heart. Dad had filled his head with tales of gambling and gangsters, schemes and scams, con men and ex-cons. On the road, he’d sit eight-year-old Frankie on a hotel bed and teach him how to do a false cut. (Not Irene, though, not a single card trick. That stuff wasn’t for girls.) He’d constantly say to Frankie, You’re going to go far, kid! And Frankie would eat it up. He’d spend hours trying—and failing—to levitate pencils and spare change and paper clips. By the time the family got booked onto TV, Frankie was planning his solo career as a Vegas headliner, despite having no ability with either psychokinesis or sleight of hand. It wasn’t until Mom’s funeral that he showed a hint of talent, and by then it was too late to help the act.
Once Mom died, there were no adults driving the bus. Teddy closed his eyes and refused to take the wheel. Frankie became a free-range malcontent, and Buddy became, well, Buddy.
Matty said, “We got a computer.”
He wasn’t looking at Mary Alice, who sat beside him, but that’s who he was addressing. She didn’t seem to notice. She stared at her uneaten cake as if it were an unmoving clock.
Frankie squinted at Irene. “You can afford a computer?”
“I didn’t buy it. Buddy did.”
“Buddy?”
“I set it up downstairs,” Matty said. “If, uh, anybody wants to look at it.”
Frankie turned to his brother. “What the hell do you need with a computer?”
Buddy sought out Irene’s eyes with a classic Buddy look: mystified and sorrowful, like a cocker spaniel who’d finally eviscerated his great enemy, only to find everyone angry and taking the side of the couch pillow.
“He bought it for Matty,” Irene said, even though she was not at all sure about that. “He’s going to pay him back, when he gets a job.”
“I am?” Matty said.
“He can’t sit around all day,” Teddy said. It was the first thing he’d said since the cake came out. Thanks for that, Dad.
“I could help Uncle Buddy,” Matty said.
“Ha,” Frankie said. “Have you seen the way he works? I’m surprised he hasn’t electrocuted himself. Keep your distance, kid. It’s bad enough Buddy’s going to kill himself.”
Buddy’s eyes widened.
“Figure of speech,” Loretta said kindly.
“No, he’ll work with me,” Frankie said.
“At the phone company?” Irene asked.
“He’ll be my apprentice.”
Loretta said, “Maybe you shouldn’t promise anything until—”
“Nobody tells me who rides in my van,” Frankie said. “It’s settled. He starts Monday.”
Irene lay on top of the covers, exhausted but unable to quiet her brain. When she’d gone to bed that night she’d plummeted into unconsciousness, and had disappeared into two hours of dreamless sleep before being hauled up into the waking world, her thoughts wrapped up like seaweed on a fishhook.
In other words, the usual. Wide awake in the thin hours of the night, her mind churning along on the All-Star Tour of Embarrassments and Mistakes. The tour could visit any decade, and feature any number of characters from her past, from middle-school girlfriends to strangers she’d never known the names of. She’d remember a conversation or, more often, an argument, and try desperately to get her previous self to say something smarter, or kinder, or nothing at all. Yester-Irene’s behavior, however, was almost willfully resistant to modification.
Lately the tour had been returning again and again to the most disastrous period in her life: the last year in Pittsburgh. In that time she’d gone from dream job (or at least, the best she could hope for with only an associate’s degree) to alleged criminal. It had broken her financially and emotionally. Matty had caught her more than once sitting at the kitchen table, hate-crying into a pile of bills and overdue notices. Which only made her feel worse. A child shouldn’t see his mother worrying about money. It made the kid into a figurehead parent, with all the responsibility and none of the power. She knew this from personal experience.