C HAPTER E LEVEN

I was seventeen years old. My mother had been dead for a few months, and I was working for Napoli’s World Famous Pizza, making endless deliveries on a bicycle. It was a big old clunker of a bike with fat balloon tires and crooked wheels and an oversized wire basket on the handlebars, big enough to hold six pies at a time.

Saturday night was always our biggest delivery night, and the night with the most problems. People were usually half in the bag when they called in their orders and often totally bombed by the time I arrived with their pies. Usually there was a party going on and they had to take up a collection to pay me, with a lot of stupid arguing over who owed what, and who still owed from the last time. I’d be standing there in the apartment hallway like an idiot while all this went on, but on the advice of old man Napoli I never handed over the pizza until I had the money. That was the surest way to get a door slammed in your face.

I was tired. Napoli made the best pies in Flushing and I’d been on the go nonstop since five thirty in the afternoon. Now it was past midnight, and this was my final delivery of the night—four sausage and pepperoni pies to the top story of a five-floor walk-up.

I could hear music and screaming and laughter from above as soon as they buzzed me into the vestibule. It was a shabby building, the walls starved for paint, the linoleum floors crowded with banged-up baby carriages. An old lady on the second floor opened her door and glowered at me as I approached. She was obviously the closest thing this building had to a guard dog, and none too happy about the noise from above. She wore curlers and a hair net and she clutched at the lapels of her bathrobe to keep me from sneaking a peek at her withered breasts.

“Whaddya, bringin’ ’em food at this hour?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You tell them to pipe down!”

I ignored her, kept climbing, and paused to catch my breath at the door before knocking. I had to knock again, harder, to be heard above the racket. Suddenly it opened, and a fat, balding young guy with a cigar jammed into his mouth was grinning at me.

“Pizza’s here!” he shouted. “Come on in, kid!”

I knew immediately that this was a bachelor party. I hated these things, knew I’d probably have to go through hell to get paid, but what could I do?

I followed him into a room so thick with smoke that I could hardly breathe. There were at least a dozen cigar smokers there, twenty-somethings with a smattering of thirty-somethings, all standing with their backs to me, shoulder to shoulder in a sloppy semicircle. Empty beer bottles were everywhere, and I looked in vain for a place to set the pizzas down. “Where do you want these?”

“In a minute, in a minute. First enjoy the show, kid.”

“What show?”

He nudged one of the guys aside, pushed me into the gap. “This show!” he cried.

I blinked my watery eyes and saw a girl in a white cowboy hat, white skirt, and white boots dancing around a young man sprawled in a lounge chair, obviously the man due to marry in the morning. The men were whooping and yelling so loudly that they drowned out the stripper music coming from the girl’s pathetic little boom box.

But the girl could hear it, or at least she pretended she could. She whirled and strutted and pointed an admonishing finger at the groom to be. It said MANDY in silver letters across the front of her hat, so the guys began chanting “Man-dee! Man-dee!”

Off came the halter top, off came the white skirt, and just like that Mandy stood naked before us, save for the hat and the boots.

This was the first naked woman I’d ever seen. I was unaware of the fact that I’d tightened my grip on the pizza boxes, hugging them as if they were a life raft. Mandy was blond haired and blue eyed, maybe two or three years older than me. She was dazzling but not beautiful, but the point was that she was there, in the flesh, almost within touching distance. I watched the rest of her blurry-fast routine, which ended with her blowing kisses to the crowd as she deftly picked her clothes up off the floor. She ducked into another room and within seconds she emerged wearing a trench coat that went all the way to her ankles. Without another word or gesture to the catcalling crowd, Mandy the stripper scooped up her little boom box and was gone. Obviously she’d been paid up front, unlike me.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Mandy has left the building!” said one of the guys, and they all laughed at that.

“Here, kid.” The fat guy who’d let me in stuffed some bills into my shirt pocket, took the now-cold pies from me, and pointed at the front of my pants.

“Hey!” he said, “looks like somebody got a little excited here!”

I looked down. Streaks of pizza oil ran from my crotch to my thighs. I’d been squeezing those boxes even harder than I realized.

They exploded in laughter at the sight of me. I made the cardinal sin of not counting the money as I ran for the door and dashed down the stairs, thinking maybe I’d catch up to the stripper, half wanting it to happen, half fearing that it would.

But she was gone, and so was the delivery bike I’d left in front of the building. Somebody had stolen the fucking thing.

I couldn’t believe it. That old clunker was such a hunk of junk that I couldn’t even imagine anyone wanting to steal it, so I never bothered with the wheel lock that old man Napoli provided. The double bang of the stripper and the bicycle theft had me numb. I began the long walk back to Napoli’s, wondering what I was going to tell him, wondering where the stripper had gone, wondering if “Mandy” was her real name and how often she stripped. I wondered if she had a real job as well, or if she was just a stripper. It was amazing to me that a woman could do something like that for money. I didn’t think it was wrong, just amazing.

I took the money from my shirt pocket and counted it. The tab for the four pies had come to forty-eight bucks, and the guy had slipped me three twenties. Twelve bucks, the best tip I’d ever gotten. If the bike hadn’t been stolen and my pants hadn’t gotten fucked up, this would have been a hell of a good night.

Napoli was in a bad mood when I got back, eager to close up shop. He was about sixty years old, one of those lean, surly Italians whose eyes grew narrower with suspicion each and every year of his life. All those years of pulling pizza pies out of hot ovens didn’t do much to improve his personality.

“Hey, Sammy. What’d you do, get lost?”

I wasn’t about to tell him that I’d stopped to watch a stripper. “They took a long time to pay.”

“Son of a bitch bastards.” This was one of his favorite expressions.

I gave him two twenties and a ten from my wallet, and he gave back two dollars in change. I didn’t want him knowing I’d gotten a twelve-dollar tip. It would hurt me the next time I was due for a raise. He gave me my weekly pay in cash, and then I had to tell him.

“Mr. Napoli—”

“Hey, your pants are all fucked up.”

“I know.”

“And you forgot to bring the bike inside.”

I sighed, looked at the floor. “Somebody stole it.”

“Stole it?”

“It wasn’t there when I got downstairs from the last delivery.”

He rubbed his face, muttered an Italian oath. “Who would steal such a piece-o’-shit bike?”

“I don’t know.”

He cocked his head at me. “I bet you forgot to lock it! You didn’t lock it, did you?”

I thought about lying, changed my mind. “No, I didn’t lock it.”

“Sammy. Sammy.”

“I know, I know.”

“You gotta make good for that bike.”

I knew this would happen, and I also knew the old prick was enjoying it. Might he have sent someone to steal it, so his faithful employee could get stuck for the price of a much-needed new one? I wouldn’t put it past him.

“How much?” I ventured.

He rubbed the back of his wrinkly neck. “I dunno…forty bucks?”

“Forty bucks! It’s a twenty-year-old bike!”

“Sammy—”

“You said yourself it was a piece o’ shit!”

“Yeah, but it worked, didn’t it? And I have to replace it, don’t I?”

“I’ll replace it, okay?”

He hadn’t thought of this possibility. His already narrowed eyes became razor slits. “Where you gonna get a bike?”

“Leave it to me.”

“All right, but it’s gotta be a bike that can do the job.”

“It will be. Don’t worry about it.”

“Don’t get mad, Sammy. You gotta be responsible in life, know what I mean?”

This was the perfect lesson for a fallen young Catholic, absolutely flawless. I’d sinned by watching a stripper, and for my instantaneous penance, I was hit with oil-stained pants and a stolen bike.

We turned off the lights and stepped outside. I helped him pull down the burglar gate.

“You want a ride home?”

“No, I don’t want a ride home.”

I walked off without saying good night. The oil stains on my pants were going to be hard to get out. Maybe I should present Napoli with a cleaning bill, as long as I was being dunned for the bike. If my mother were still alive she’d know how to get the stain out, but she was dead, and it was times like this that I thought of her.

Were people in heaven able to watch us down on earth? My mother wouldn’t have liked to see me ogling a stripper. That would have made her suffer, and that brought up another point—would God let his good little souls in heaven suffer by witnessing the deeds of their sinful loved ones down on earth? Or did they just play their harps and hang out with each other in a blissful state of grace, ignorant of the sinning being done by their survivors down on earth?

I needed advice. I needed comfort. I needed a shoulder to cry on, but whose? My father’s?

Well, it was worth a shot. He was bound to be at Charlie’s Bar, as he always was on Saturday nights, not to mention Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Charlie’s Bar became my destination.

It was past 1:00 a.m. when I entered the joint, a place I’d only ever been to in search of my old man. Charlie’s was a dingy, grimy gin mill that was more like a slovenly friend’s finished basement than a licensed saloon. It had fake wood paneling in the halls, and bar stools with fake leather seats.

But Charlie McMahon was real, a burly, gray-haired retired fireman who worked the stick six nights a week, serving the working-stiff locals. He didn’t seem to like his customers very much, but for some reason he liked my father, probably because they were both Irish, and for that reason he was always friendly to me.

“Sammy! What the hell happened to your pants?”

“Pizza box leaked on ’em.”

“You still workin’ for that miserable guinea?”

Apparently he’d forgotten that I was half Italian. “Yeah, well, it’s a job…. My old man around?”

“He came and he left. Looked kinda tired. You guys doin’ all right, Sammy?”

I shrugged.

“He misses your mother somethin’ awful.”

The hell he did. “So he went home a while ago?”

“Maybe half an hour.”

“All right, I’ll see you around, Charlie.”

“Wait. Sit. Have one on the house, you had a rough night.”

Before I could object he set a longneck Budweiser in front of me, dripping foam. “Happy days, kid.”

“Thanks.”

Why did he want me around? Maybe because it was so damn depressing in there. Three or four middle-aged guys were sitting at the other end of the bar, shell-backed men solemnly staring into the foam at the bottom of their beer mugs in search of that elusive key to happiness. What a place to look for it!

At least I was young—underage, in fact. Even if I just sat there without saying a word, I’d bring some vitality to those dismal early morning hours. Charlie went to the other end of the bar to refresh the shell-backs’ drinks, and that’s when she walked in and sat down next to me.

She didn’t even look at me at first. Charlie came over when he was through at the other end, and he seemed less than delighted to see her.

“How’s tricks, Fran?”

“Lousy.”

He asked her what she wanted, and his eyebrows went up when she told him to make her a white wine spritzer. Charlie’s usual customers were beer and whiskey people, the women included, and it was easy to read the unspoken thought in his head: who does this broad think she is? He made her the spritzer with cheap Gallo wine from a gallon jug, took her money, and went back to the other end of the bar. She sipped her spritzer, made a face at it, and set the glass on the bar. At last she looked at me, and I knew she’d been drinking heavily before she got here.

“What are you starin’ at?”

She was right. I’d been staring at her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to stare.”

“It’s rude. Don’t do it.”

She was around thirty-five, not bad looking but frazzled, the way women often get when their marriages go wrong and they’re stuck with kids. Her dark blond hair was cut in a stylish shag, and she wore stone-washed jeans and a brown leather jacket. She took out a pack of Kools, shook one into her mouth, and looked at me again. “You got a problem if I smoke?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Don’t ma’am me! You want one?”

“I don’t smoke.”

“Good for you. You’ll live longer.” She lit up, inhaled deeply, breathed it out through her nostrils. “What the hell happened to your pants?”

I didn’t want to tell her, but I had to. I had to talk to somebody, and it came spilling out of me as if a dam had burst—the pizza delivery, the stripper, the leaking pizza boxes, the stolen bike. By the time I finished talking she’d smoked the Kool down to the butt and crushed it out in an ashtray. “So you gotta pay for the bike, huh?”

“Well, I have to replace it.”

“What a prick. I always thought that Napoli was a prick, and now I know for sure.”

She signaled for another spritzer, plus a beer for me. She smacked my hand away when I tried to pay. Charlie served us in silence and gave me a look that could have been either an encouragement or a warning. Then he returned to Lonely Guy Corner.

Fran lit another Kool. “First time you ever saw a stripper, I’ll bet.”

“Well…yeah.”

“First time you ever saw a naked woman in person, right?”

She smiled at me like a lawyer who knows the answer before he asks the question. There was no point in trying to lie to her. My face felt hot as I nodded.

Thankfully, her smile did not evolve into a laugh. She nodded, downed the rest of her spritzer, shook her hair, and looked me in the eye. “Would you like to see another one?”

My scalp tingled. Fran stared at me as rudely as I’d stared at her minutes earlier. This was it. This was absolutely and without a doubt the moment no man can be ready for.

“Yes,” I finally replied, but was my frantically beating heart really in it? I didn’t know. I couldn’t know. All I did know was that I wasn’t ready to be alone that night. Fran seemed neither pleased nor surprised by my reply.

“Drink up,” she said, “and let’s get out of this dump.”

We didn’t say good-bye to Charlie. She walked out of the place and I followed her like an obedient, fearful pooch.

I was frightened. While I’d been in Charlie’s I’d felt safe, but suddenly I felt like a hostage, walking the night streets with Fran, even though nothing was stopping me from getting away. In fact, it seemed as if she’d forgotten all about me. She was two full strides ahead of me, and picking up speed. All I had to do was stop walking, but I didn’t do that. I couldn’t do that. This was the first woman I’d spent any time with since the death of my mother, and I wasn’t ready for it to end.

I wondered if she’d known my mother. I doubted it. Fran didn’t seem like a churchgoer to me. I hurried to catch up to her. She was breathing hard.

“Are you okay, Fran?”

She stopped walking, turned to glare at me. “How do you know my name?”

“I heard Charlie say it.”

“He never spoke my name!”

“Yes, he did! How else would I know it? I don’t know you. I never saw you before!”

She seemed as if she was about to start crying. She covered her face with her hands, took openmouthed breaths between her palms. She was hurting. I didn’t know what to do. My mind raced with possibilities, one of which was to tiptoe away, then sprint the half mile to my own house. But I didn’t do that. I couldn’t. It would have been like abandoning the wounded.

“Would you like to know my name?” I offered at last.

“No, I would not,” she said, keeping her face covered. “I have no interest in knowing your name.”

“Okay, I won’t tell you.”

Fran seemed relieved to hear this. She kept her hands over her face but at least her breathing slowed. The night was loud with crickets. It was early October. Fran began to chuckle.

“Stupid crickets,” she said.

“Why are they stupid?”

“Because winter’s comin’, and they don’t even know it, ’cause it’s been so warm. The first frost is gonna hit, and they’ll all be dead.”

“Yeah, but they don’t know that. It won’t be so bad. It’ll just happen to them, and that’ll be that.”

At last, Fran’s hands fell from her face. For the first time all night she stared at me with wide-open eyes.

“What are you,” she asked, “a philosopher?”

I shrugged. “It’s true, isn’t it?”

“You’re goddamn right it’s true…. How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

“Seventeen, and already you understand somethin’ like that. Man, some bad shit must’ve happened to you, huh?”

If she was waiting for an answer, she wasn’t going to get one. I just stared back at her, listening to the crickets.

“Sometimes I wish I was a cricket,” she said softly. “Be nice not to know what’s coming, you know?”

“I know.”

Fran stared at me for another moment. Then her eyes narrowed, and she grabbed me by the elbow.

“Come on,” she said, “we’re not far now.”

Anybody who might have been watching us at that point could have taken Fran for an undercover detective hauling in a suspect. But it was nearly three in the morning. Nobody was watching us.

Minutes later she led me up the three steps to her front door and into her house, and only then did she release my elbow with a shove that was almost dismissive. The house was boxy, cramped, low-ceilinged, the kind of place that made you want to run outside and gulp air. Fran ripped off her jacket, tossed it on the floor. “Sit down, I’ll bring us a drink.”

I sat on a dark green couch. Fran fetched a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and two glasses. I’d never drunk whiskey before, but this did not seem like the time to bring that up. Fran poured with a heavy hand. We clinked glasses, and then she said:

“To my wonderful husband, who walked out on me and our two boys like it was nothing.”

Fran’s head went back like a Pez dispenser as she downed her drink in one gulp. Then she let out a laugh, the least happy laugh I’d ever heard.

I was shocked. A husband! The looming sin of fornication was about to be compounded with adultery! All I could do was sit and stare at Fran, who poured herself another drink and downed it the same way.

“Come on, drink up,” she scolded, “you’re fallin’ behind!”

I did as I was told. Catholics are good at that, even when the wrong person is giving the orders. The stuff went down like liquid fire. Fran went to refill my glass but I covered it with my hand.

“You’re married?”

“Ah, not really. Not for long. The bastard finally moved out and got his own place. He’s got the boys this weekend. One weekend a month he takes the boys, and I have a little time to myself. Only thing is, I forgot how to be alone. Ain’t that somethin’? I don’t know how to do it anymore.” She laughed that horrible laugh again, a sound more like crying than crying itself.

I stood up. “You want me to go?”

“No. Don’t. Please. Hang out. Just…hang out awhile.”

There was an angry vulnerability to her voice. She hated herself for this weakness, hated me for revealing it. She got to her feet and grasped my elbow as she had before, but this time the grip was different. Not a domineering woman bullying a shy young man, but a blind person in desperate need of help to cross the street. She carried the whiskey bottle in her other hand. We headed upstairs, Fran clinging to my elbow as if she expected me to break into a run.

But that wasn’t going to happen. My desire to flee was gone. I was going to see this thing through, wherever it took me, wherever it took her. “Where’s the bathroom?”

“Here.”

She pushed a door open, pulled a light cord. “I’m at the end of the hall, when you’re through.”

It wasn’t clean. There was stuff growing in the mortar between the floor tiles and there were deep brown water level rings etched into the toilet bowl. Then I saw three toothbrushes in a plastic cup, two of them with Star Wars handles, and remembered that the woman I was about to fuck was a mother. I lifted the toilet lid with my foot, took a piss, flushed with my elbow, and then headed down the hallway.

A night-light shining from an open doorway caught my eye. I stepped inside and realized this was Fran’s sons’ room. I had no business being here, but I had to look around.

They had bunk beds with a little wooden ladder leading to the top one. There was a Jaws shark poster on the wall, and I stepped on something that turned out to be a Spider-Man action figure. There was a framed photograph on the wall, and as my eyes adjusted to the moonlight I saw that it was a shot of Fran and her sons on some kind of amusement park ride, captured by a fixed-focus camera as the thing plunged down a man-made waterfall. The boys looked to be a year or two apart, maybe six and seven years old. Everybody’s hair was blown straight back, and their mouths were wide, wide open in what looked to be shouts of absolute joy. You look at a picture like that and figure the people in it will never, ever be unhappy.

“Where the hell are you?”

Fran’s voice startled me. I left the boys’ room and went down to the end of the hall, where a dim, flickering light beckoned. I entered this room and saw that the light came from a thick green candle on Fran’s bedside night table. The whiskey bottle stood next to it. Fran’s clothes were all over the floor, dropped where she’d stripped. She was in bed, under the covers up to her neck.

I stood at the foot of the bed like a doctor on a house call. “I went to the wrong room.”

“You idiot. Come on.”

With trembling hands I took my clothes off, but not carelessly. I made a neat pile of it—shoes on the bottom, shirt on top. I guess I wanted to be ready for what I suspected would be a rapid exit—grab all my stuff, and get the hell out of there.

I stood naked in the candlelight, not hard, not soft, awaiting yet another invitation. Fran ripped back the covers and revealed her white-skinned self. It was a startling sight, my second naked woman on the same night, but nothing like the sight of Mandy, or whatever her real name was.

I was drunk, but I understood at once the reason for the candle. Any other kind of light would have been too harsh on Fran’s thickened midsection and floppy breasts.

“Get in bed,” she said wearily, as if we’d been married for twenty years.

I crept onto the bed, and lay beside Fran without touching her. Fran got up on one elbow to look at me, and managed a smile. “Well, at least you’re a little bit excited.”

It was true. I was slowly hardening. She reached over and petted it as if it were a friendly collie, and it stood strong.

I was thinking about Mandy. She was probably asleep somewhere, totally unaware of her role in getting the pizza delivery boy laid for the first time. It would have been nice to talk with Mandy, just talk somewhere. If I’d gotten down the stairs faster, it might have happened. We could have gone for a cup of coffee at the Empire Diner on Francis Lewis Boulevard. I could have made her laugh, explaining why my pants were covered in pizza oil. I figured strippers could use a good laugh, that there wasn’t much in their line of work to laugh about.

I never would have gone to Charlie’s, never would have hooked up with Fran, never would have been poised on the brink of this thing that now had to happen, whether I liked it or not.

Fran took control. I thought we might kiss first but that wasn’t on the agenda. Fran went down and took me in her mouth in a way that was far from gentle. I couldn’t believe it was happening. I didn’t even know that people did things like this. Masturbation was all I knew about sex. I felt my hands bunch into fists and wondered if I should be stroking her hair or doing something with my hands—anything but making fists!

What did I know? I had never kissed a girl, never hugged a girl, never seen a pornographic film. I hoped that instinct would carry me, but so far that didn’t seem to be happening.

Fran’s head rose. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Did you like that?”

“Yeah,” I lied.

I was actually glad it hadn’t been pleasurable. I would have shot too soon, and somehow even I knew enough to know that women didn’t like that.

Fran stretched out on her back. “Come on, let’s have it.”

The time had come. I climbed on top of her, ready to meet my fate, but I was having a hard time with the angles.

Fran lifted her head, like an annoyed sunbather when a passerby accidentally kicks sand on her. “What the hell are you doing?”

All I could do was breathe. It jutted from me like the prow of a schooner, but my ignorant knees were planted on the outsides of Fran’s thighs. Good for wrestling, bad for sex.

“Hey. How are you gonna fuck me from there?”

She sounded like a baseball coach scolding a boneheaded player for throwing the ball to the wrong base.

“Well. Uh…”

“Get your knees on the inside, for Christ’s sake!”

I did as I was told, for my own sake, not Christ’s, and with Fran pulling me toward her it happened, a swift, efficient, unemotional event that ended even before I was through pumping, as Fran suddenly decided she’d had enough of it and shoved me away. I nearly went off the bed but managed to hang on somehow, clutching the edge of the mattress and pulling myself back aboard beside Fran, who’d rolled away to the other side, tangled up in the sheet. We were both breathing hard, the air ripe with whiskey. Whatever we’d been doing was over, now and forever.

“You okay?” she asked the wall.

“Uh-huh.”

“Sorry it couldn’t have been with someone special, kid.”

And then she was crying, softly and quietly, like rain on cotton. I tried to touch her, but she curled herself into a ball, like one of those roly-poly armored insects that protects itself this way, but Fran’s only armor was her rage, and that, suddenly, was gone.

“Fran?”

“Shhh. Give me a minute. Just be quiet.”

I did as I was told. I wondered what time it was. The windows were black with night, but dawn couldn’t have been far away. On the other hand, it was hard to imagine the sun ever rising again.

“Find me my robe, would you? It’s on the floor somewhere.”

I was glad to have something to do. While I was looking for the robe Fran sat up in bed, blew out the candle, and took a drink straight from the whiskey bottle.

“You want a swig?”

“No, thank you.”

I handed her the robe. She stood to put it on, sat back down, and seemed to calm down. I sat at the foot of the bed, awaiting instructions.

She took another swallow of whiskey. “You can leave now, if you want.”

There was nothing I wanted more, but I needed more than just her permission. I needed her blessing, a blessing in this far from holy place. “I’ll stay if you like.”

“Why?”

“Maybe you want to talk.”

She managed a weak smile. “You’re a nice boy, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you are. You go to school, you’ve got a job, and now you’ve been laid. Too bad it wasn’t with your girlfriend, huh? Somebody you’re really crazy about.”

“I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“Don’t bullshit me.”

“I’m not. I don’t have a girlfriend. I’ve never had a girlfriend. I’ve never…”

Fran’s eyes were bleary. She seemed to be wobbling, as if she were on a raft at sea. “Never what?”

“Never even kissed a girl.”

Why was I telling Fran things I could barely tell myself? I’ll always wonder about that.

She stared at me, struggled to focus. Her eyes narrowed with determination. She crept toward me, reached around for the back of my neck, pulled my face toward hers, and suddenly stopped. She let me go, retreated to her end of the bed.

“No,” she decided, ending an argument with herself. “A kiss is special. It’s okay that I was your first fuck, but a kiss is special. That you should have with someone who matters.”

She took another drink from the bottle.

“I don’t think you should drink anymore.”

“I won’t. I’m done now.” She screwed the cap on the bottle, as if to prove her sincerity. Her consonants were slurring and her eyes were at half-mast. I was sure she was going to pass out, and then what was I supposed to do? Take an easy exit? That wouldn’t seem right.

She wobbled, seemed ready to pitch face-forward off the side of the bed, and then suddenly she straightened up with an odd alertness, a matter of will over whiskey.

“Get dressed,” she said. “We have to do something.”

I did as I was told. It took me less than a minute. She got off the bed, tied the robe around herself, stepped into a pair of slippers, and led the way downstairs.

“Do what?” I asked, but she wouldn’t say. I followed her out the front door. The sky was going gray with the first light of dawn as we crossed that tiny, dew-soaked lawn to a tin shed at the edge of the property. Fran struggled with the shed door, which finally slid open with a rusty groan. I could see that it was jammed with gardening equipment—rakes, shovels, an old-fashioned push mower.

Did she want me to cut her lawn, at five o’clock in the morning? I would have done it for her, but that wasn’t what she wanted. Fran reached into the shed and tugged hard at something that seemed reluctant to budge. The metal walls boomed and banged as the thing she struggled with made its way out of that tangle of junk, and suddenly it was free and clear, out in the open. Breathing hard, Fran set it before me. “Here. This is for you. You said you needed one, didn’t you?”

It was a rusty old bicycle, probably ten years old, maybe even older. It had a faded blue frame, wide wheels, and flat tires.

“Oh my God.”

“It was my husband’s. Look at the seat. Stupid fucker carved his name right there in the leather. See?”

I looked. On the back of the seat the name BOB had been scratched into the leather, probably with a penknife.

Fran chuckled. “What a dick! Who the hell carves his name into a bicycle seat?”

“I can’t take this bike, Fran.”

“Yes, you can. Bob didn’t want it. The boys don’t want it. It’s all yours. There’s nothing wrong with the tires, they just need air. Been years since Bob rode this bike.”

I felt paralyzed standing there, holding on to that bike as Fran shivered against the morning chill. She stroked my hair in a way that was almost affectionate.

“You take it, and you tell your boss to go fuck himself.”

They were the words I needed to hear. I walked the bike to the sidewalk, with Fran at my side. She stopped at the end of her path.

“Go on, now, get out of here, I gotta get some sleep before my boys come home.”

She kissed my cheek and pulled back for a last look at me. I had to say something, and what I said was, “Thanks for the bike.”

I was deliberately specific in my thanks. I didn’t want her to think I was thanking her for sex. Even I knew that would have been rude. She said, “Don’t mention it,” and walked back into her house without so much as a backward glance.

How much of this night would she remember? Would she remember giving the bike away? I knew I couldn’t return it. How could I return it? It would be like trying to return my virginity.

There was an all-night gas station on Northern Boulevard, and that’s where I headed. They had an air hose that cost a quarter and in no time at all I had the tires pumped up. I climbed aboard the bike and rode it home, savoring the predawn sounds, the end of the crickets and the start of the mourning doves. It was a decent bike with better balance and a better glide than the one that had been stolen. Old man Napoli was going to come out ahead on this deal.

When I got home I put the bike inside our garage and locked the door. I went into the house and could hear my father snoring. He didn’t even know that I hadn’t been home all night. I knew he’d sleep until at least eleven o’clock, and I wanted to be sure and get up before him to deliver the bike to Napoli.

I didn’t want my father to see the bike, didn’t want him to ask any questions. I didn’t want him to know anything about the night I’d just had. I just had to hope that Charlie McMahon wouldn’t tell him anything about me tipping a few with Fran, but I wasn’t too worried about that. Charlie looked like a man who had secrets of his own.

My father was still asleep when I left the house, rode the bike to Napoli’s World Famous Pizza, and presented it to my boss.

He was stunned. “Where’s you get this bike?”

“A broad I fucked last night gave it to me,” I thought of saying, but instead I opted for, “I told you I’d get it, and I did.”

“By God, you sure did, Sammy.”

“God didn’t have anything to do with it, Mr. Napoli.” I leaned the bike against the side of his building. “Now we’re even.”

“You’re a good boy, Sammy.”

“One more thing. I quit.”

He was stunned. He thought I was kidding. I assured him I was not kidding. He offered me a raise. He offered to pay me forty bucks for the bike. I told him it wasn’t about the bike, or the money.

I left him standing there outside the pizza parlor, clutching Fran’s husband’s bike as he yelled at me until I was out of earshot. I went home and slept for twelve hours.