“Let’s not think about that,” he said. Because Nick Senior would have to come for it. He couldn’t just let it sit in the house, waiting for Graciella to change her mind about the cops. “So…you got anybody living here with you?”
“Besides the boys? No. But I’ve got an expensive alarm system.”
He nodded as if that would make a bit of difference. Nick Senior’s guys had shot people in their own homes. They’d blown up cars by remote control, right in the suburbs. The Sun-Times had been running stories about suspected mob hits all through the trial.
Graciella seemed to know what he was thinking. “He’d never risk hurting his grandsons,” she said.
“No, no. But still.” And thought: Still, there’s you.
“I need them out of this, Teddy. No more contact with the Pusateris, all that family business.”
“I promise you, I’ll make this work.”
Adrian galumphed down the stairs, white robe open and green belt dragging behind him, followed by a lanky brother a few years older. That one was Luke. His uniform was cinched tight, and he wore a swoop of brown hair over one eye like a sixties cover girl. Adrian said, “That’s him,” as if ratting Teddy out. “He won’t do magic.”
“No tricks! We’re late,” Graciella said.
Teddy waved the smaller boy over. “Come here, your shoe’s untied.” Adrian reluctantly stepped forward and offered a scuffed, yet still garish shoe decorated with green cartoon animals wielding swords and such, each no doubt possessed of unique abilities and an elaborate backstory. Teddy went down on one knee. “I know people who can do magic. Real magic. And what does it get them? Nothing.” He struggled to hold the shoelace between finger and thumb. His fingers had turned into rusty shears. Once—decades ago, before Nick Senior—they could make cards dance. Coins and papers and even engagement rings would wink in and out of existence, his touch as silent and quick as a mirror flicking sunlight. Once, he was a phantom of the card table. Maybe it was time for the phantom to strike back.
“Doing real magic,” he went on, keeping up the patter like a professional. “That stuff makes those folk unhappier than if they had no magic at all, because it doesn’t do ’em a damn bit of good. But if you can do a magic trick, you get paid. Do you want to get paid?”
Adrian nodded.
“Other shoe. Good. Now here’s the thing.” Graciella stood in the doorway, listening. “Magic’s easy. It’s tricks that are hard. You gotta be smart, you gotta be prepared, and you gotta be patient. Sometimes it takes a long time for a trick to pay off. Years even. Most people can’t wait that long. They just want the magic, right now. Poof.”
“I’m patient.”
“We’ll see.”
“So when are you going to show me the trick?”
“You beg, borrow, or steal a fresh one-dollar bill, and then we’ll talk.”
Graciella laughed. “In the car! Now!”
Teddy stood up with an embarrassing pop of the knees.
“You can’t tell a kid to steal money, Teddy. However…” She kissed him on the cheek. “I’m still glad I ran into you that day in the grocery store.”
“I have a confession to make,” Teddy said. “I didn’t run into you by accident. I saw you, I thought you were a pretty woman, and I made sure I got close enough to do my mind-reading trick.”
“Oh, I know about that.”
“You do?”
“How many women have fallen for it?”
“I plead the fifth, my dear.”
“Well, that wasn’t the miracle. It was the fact you were there at all. That you turned out to know Nick Senior, and that you’re willing to help—that Irene is willing to help, too. You two are my pair of pocket aces.”
She knew he’d like that metaphor, and he liked that he knew that she knew. He strolled to his car, humming to himself, swinging the plastic box full of a dead man’s teeth.
He used to have no problem making promises. When he proposed to Maureen, he said, “You’ll never regret this.” When their daughter was born, he said, “I’ll be the best dad in the state of Illinois.” And when Maureen told him she was sick, he said, “You’re going to be fine.”
It was a freezing morning in late winter. He found her in the bedroom, her face wearing that peculiar expression of the working clairvoyant: head tilted, mouth tight, eyes twitching under closed lids like a dreamer.
“There’s a tumor,” she said.
She’d discovered it on her own. She’d been feeling sick to her stomach for weeks, and had stopped eating. Then, following what she called “an intuition,” she’d turned her attention to her own body. Not-so-remote-viewing.
He said, “You’re not a doctor. Stop being dramatic.” It wasn’t the kindest he’d ever been. It was seven in the morning, and he was tired, unemployed, and in pain. He’d spent most of the night in the basement, watching the TV and doing physical therapy, which in this case took the form of repeatedly lifting a heavy bottle with his bandaged hands.
“I’ve already gone to the doctor.” What she meant was “doctors.” Weeks ago she’d made an appointment to see first their family physician, then her gynecologist, then an oncologist. She said, “I couldn’t tell you until I was sure.”
“But we can’t know for sure until they do a biopsy. Did they do a biopsy?”
“It’s scheduled for next week.”
“Then it could be nothing.”
After the test results came back, with undeniable evidence of epithelial cell tumors, he doubled down: the doctors were wrong, the tests were wrong, and even if they weren’t, she could go into remission at any time.
She stood at the entrance to the basement, arms crossed, keeping her tears behind her eyes. “We need to talk about what to tell the kids,” she said.
“Tell them what? There’s nothing to tell,” he said from the couch. “We’re going to beat this.”
In 1974, nobody he knew “beat” cancer. Half a dozen friends had caught the lung variety—they were a generation of chimneys—and had croaked in a few years. One died of colon cancer, another of some kind of melanoma. Ovarian cancer, that was something else. They called it “the silent killer” because early symptoms—stomachaches, the urge to pee, loss of appetite—were easily dismissed. The tumors grew, and it wasn’t until the bleeding started that you knew something had gone terribly wrong. By then it was too late.
All through the spring and into summer, he avoided all mention of the Big C. Wouldn’t have the conversation with Maureen. Her dogmatic belief that she was doomed infuriated him. It was surrender. Negative thinking. He knew that if they talked about death, if they planned for it, they would only give it power over them. Why invite the specter into their house, pour it a cup of coffee, let it put its bony feet all over their couch?
No. They’d beat cancer, by cheating if necessary. Teddy had been training for the job his entire life.
But even he couldn’t remain blind to the changes in her body. She grew thinner through that summer. Their age difference once had bordered on the scandalous, but now she was catching up to him, aging at three times his speed, and angling to pass him. By August she was coming home from work exhausted. Irene was cooking then, and Maureen would sit with Buddy in her lap and look out the window as if she were already on the other side of it.
One night late in August, she roused herself to wash the after-supper dishes, and he watched her thin arms scrub the pots. That was the night she made him promise never to allow the children to work for any government. He’d made fun of her, and she’d shouted at him, wasting the last of her energy on him. He felt terrible. He apologized, and promised to do everything she asked—all without allowing himself to think there’d ever be a time he’d have to take care of the kids without her.