C HAPTER T WELVE

Jake listens to my story without a word of interruption. He puts a steadying hand on my shoulder and says, “Quite a night.”

“Yeah, you’re right about that.”

“Think she still lives here?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Only one way to find out.”

And before I can stop him Jake is jogging across the street, bound for the front door of the place I entered a virgin and exited a confused man all those years ago.

“Jake, stop!”

He ignores me. He climbs the three steps to the door, rings the bell, and stands there waiting. I run to catch up with him, and when I get there—it seems to take years!—the door opens and an old lady in a loose nightgown is standing there.

It’s Fran, all right. Her hair has gone salt-and-pepper, mostly salt, and she’s gained at least fifty pounds, but those angry eyes are absolutely unmistakable, peering out of a moon face. She looks at Jake as if he’s just pissed on her doorstep.

“Hello, ma’am.”

“What do you want?”

Her voice is both whiny and demanding, as if her vocal cords have been marinating in bile since the last time I saw her. She keeps her gaze on Jake and barely gives me a glance. I doubt she would recognize me anyway, a kid she fucked in the dark and chased away before dawn, but you never know.

“My father and I are lost,” Jake says. “Could you tell us the way to Holy Cross High School?”

“It’s around the corner.” Fran lifts an arm to point, the flesh between the shoulder and the elbow loose and swinging. When she brings her hand back down, I see that it grips a cagelike contraption, which Fran’s other hand is already gripping. It’s a walker, a four-legged aluminum walker. The first woman I ever had sex with is crippled. Somehow it would have been easier to learn that she was dead.

“I’m sorry we made you come to the door,” Jake says.

“Yeah, I just had a hip replacement. Lots o’ laughs. Anything else, kid?”

“No, ma’am. You have a nice day.”

We turn to leave, and Jake is all but whispering when he asks, “Is that her, Dad?”

“Yes, it’s her.”

“Wow….”

Then suddenly Fran’s shrill voice seems to pierce my back instead of my ears, as if she’s thrown a dart:

“Wait! Get back here!”

Oh my God. She’s recognized me. It’s taken a moment for the penny to drop, but she’s picked me out of the rubble of her past, and now she wants a word with the boy-man who never came back for seconds.

Together we trudge back to Fran’s stoop. She’s still at the doorway, clutching the walker as if it owes her money.

I look her right in the eye this time, figuring I have nothing to lose. If she wants to yell at me, I can take my penance like a man. Fran studies my face, then Jake’s.

“I shouldn’t let you in my house,” she begins cautiously, “but I have a table I want moved and I’m thinking you two can do it for me.”

“We’d be delighted,” says my son, who gives Fran a moment to back up in her walker before entering the house and beckoning for me to follow. Resigned to whatever’s going to happen next, I follow my son into the dwelling I have never once returned to, even in my dreams.

Fran obviously lives alone. The place hasn’t been painted in a long time and there’s a faint odor of urine in the air. There’s a bedpan in plain sight, on the floor beside the threadbare couch, the same one Fran and I sat on before heading up to her bedroom.

Fran’s heavy body shuffles along, preceded by the walker. What the hell had happened to her? Back in the day she was slim, or at least trim, a woman on the brink of middle age doing her best to fight the clock. But as always the clock wins, even if the fight goes the full fifteen rounds.

“Follow me,” she says to Jake, the exact words she used with me when it was time to go to her bedroom. But Fran’s stair-climbing days are clearly over. I notice that there’s a cot in the corner of the living room. Fran is stuck on the first floor of this lousy house for the rest of her wretched life. The walking contraption makes squeaking sounds as we follow Fran to the kitchen, where she gestures with a jerk of her chin at a battered Formica-topped table.

“I want that table on the other side of the kitchen, against the wall,” she says. “The chairs, too. You think you can handle it?”

We can handle it, all right. Jake takes one side of the table and I get the other, and in less than a minute we have the table and chairs where Fran wants them.

“Anything else?” Jake asks.

Fran shakes her head. “That’s it for now. My sons would have done this for me, but they’re both useless. They take after their father that way.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Jake says.

“Not as sorry as I am to say it. Notice my lawn? They’ve been meaning to cut it for about a month now. They mean to do a lot of things for me that never get done.”

Suddenly she’s staring at my face, and I’m staring right back. It’s hard to believe that I have a history with this woman, that if she hadn’t taken whatever precautions she took we could have had a child who’d now be closing in on his thirtieth birthday.

“Do I know you?” Fran asks, almost gently.

I swallow, long and hard. “I don’t think so.”

“You from around here?”

“Used to be.”

“You’re from around here and you don’t know where the high school is?”

“I’ve been gone a long time.”

The three of us stand there for a few moments in silence, looking at each other. Fran eases herself into a kitchen chair and says, “I hope you guys aren’t waiting for a tip.”

“No, ma’am,” Jake says.

Fran points toward the door. “You can let yourselves out. Slam the door behind you, it’s self-locking. And here’s a tip. Don’t get old.” Her eyes mist up. “You hear what I’m saying? Don’t get old.”

We mumble our good-byes and let ourselves out.

Jake is calm, but I’m hyperventilating to the point where I could use a paper bag to breathe into.

“Jake. I cannot believe you did what you just did.”

Jake is shaking his head. “She just might be the saddest person I’ve ever seen.”

“She was sad thirty years ago, too.”

Jake catches my elbow, pulls me to a stop. “We can’t just leave.”

“What do you want to do?”

“The least we can do is cut the grass for her.”

He says it plainly, as if this idea is the most obvious thing in the world.

“Are you serious?”

“Come on, Dad, don’t think about it. Let’s just do it.”

It’s an amazing idea, a crazy idea, a beautiful idea, an idea I never could have had. My boy has a heart, and it’s in the right place.

The same old shed is on the side of Fran’s property. It’s in a state of near collapse, but the sliding door still opens. The same long-neglected tools are still in there, including an old-fashioned push mower and a crusty old pair of scissor-type hedge clippers. I pick up the clippers and make a few practice chopping motions. I find a can of Three-In-One oil and squirt some on its axis.

“Might as well do the hedges while we’re at it,” I say. “Go ahead, kid, take the mower. The lawn’s all yours.”

I can see that Jake is looking forward to it, like a kid about to ride his first roller coaster. He’s a city boy. He’s never cut a lawn before.

Jake has to lean his full weight on the mower to make it move through the high grass. The lawn is thick and mulchy, and I know he’s going to have to cut it, rake it, and cut it again to do the job right. Meanwhile, I’m hacking away at the hedges, trying to restore the rectangular shape I imagine they once had.

We work for at least ten or fifteen minutes before Fran appears at the door in open-mouthed shock. “What the hell’s going on here?!”

“We’re helping you out,” Jake says.

Fran raises an admonishing finger. “I didn’t ask for this. I’m not paying for this!”

“Don’t worry, we’re not charging you,” Jake assures her.

Fran is freaking out. She’s breathing hard as she says, “You are both trespassing. I’m going to call the police and report you for trespassing!”

Jake doesn’t know what to say. I set the hedge clipper down, walk to the base of the steps, and look up at Fran, who is not used to people doing anything nice for her. Unlike Blanche Dubois, she has never relied on the kindness of strangers.

But I am no stranger, and it’s time for her to know that.

“Lady,” I begin calmly, “you and I spent a night together a long time ago. You might not remember it because it only happened once and we’d both had a lot to drink, but I sure remember it because it was the first time I’d ever been with a woman.”

Fran puts her hand to her throat. She doesn’t quite trust me, but she senses that I am not lying. She hangs her head like a sinner.

“I went a little crazy when me and my husband split,” she says, staring down at her slippers. “I don’t remember much from those days.”

“You gave me a bicycle.”

She looks at me in shock. “I did?”

“I was working deliveries for Napoli’s, and somebody stole my delivery bike, so you gave me your husband’s old bike.”

“Christ! I always thought somebody stole that bike!”

“No. You gave it to me. Got me out of a jam.”

“What’s your name?”

“That’s another thing. You wouldn’t let me tell you my name.”

“Tell me now.”

I tell her. The hand at her throat moves to cover her mouth as her eyes widen. Then she drops her hand and says, “You’re Mary Sullivan’s boy!”

“That’s right.”

Jake turns to me. “Your mother’s name was Mary?”

I can’t answer him. All I can do is return Fran’s stare. Her eyes are moist, and she grips the handles of her walker as if she’s about to blast off into space.

“I don’t remember that night,” she says gently. “But I’m sure I wasn’t very pleasant company for you.”

“I was no picnic, either. My mother had just died. It wasn’t an easy time for either of us.” I turn and gesture at Jake, who’s resting his hairy chin on the lawn mower handle.

“This is my son, Jake. It was his idea to do the yard work.”

“Thank you, Jake.”

“You’re welcome.”

“We’ll finish up and leave,” I say.

“No!”

Fran’s voice is like iron, the voice I recall from our night together. “You finish up, and then we’ll have lunch.”

“Oh, you don’t have to—”

“I’m making lunch,” Fran says, and without another word she’s back inside, slamming the door behind her.

Jake looks at me. “Looks like we have lunch plans.”

“Looks like.”

An hour later we’re all seated around the Formica table Jake and I moved for Fran, eating grilled cheese sandwiches and drinking iced tea. Outside, the lawn is twice-mown and raked, and the privet hedges have been hacked into rectangular shapes. I’ve even spaded the soil around the base of the hedges, to give the place a touch of class. Jake and I have filled four big black plastic bags with clippings and trimmings, neatly lined along the curb for the garbage man.

I fear that Fran will want to talk about our bumbling, stumbling night together, but luckily she doesn’t. There’s nothing much to say, really—we both know it was a drunken collision between two desperate people. Truth is, Fran seems far more interested in Jake than she does in me. She reaches out and strokes his hair.

“Your grandmother had hair like this,” she says. “Same beautiful shine.”

Jake stops chewing. “Really?”

“Oh yes. Shame you never knew her. What a woman she was!” Fran turns to me. “I’d say she was just about the most…religious person I ever knew.”

I swallow some grilled cheese, nod. “She was big in church activities, yeah.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the way she treated people. It’s not as if I even knew her well. I wasn’t much of a churchgoer. But when my husband walked out on me, who do you think showed up at my door with a casserole?” She smiles at the memory of it. “It was one of those Italian dishes, with that weird black vegetable Italians like so much.”

“Eggplant parmigiana,” I say.

“That’s right! That was it! Something I could never make myself. And she didn’t make a big deal out of it. She just said, ‘I hear you’re having some trouble, so I made extra.’ That’s the kind of person she was.”

Jake is absolutely transfixed by Fran’s words. He now knows more about his grandmother than I have ever told him.

“Nice thing to do,” Jake says.

“It certainly was.” Fran turns to me. “Heart attack, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

Fran strains to remember more. “Wasn’t there something unusual about it?”

I force myself to shrug. “Only that she was young. Just turned thirty-nine.”

Her brow remains knotted for a moment, then relaxes. Luckily for me Fran was a casual Catholic whose memory has obviously been ravaged by years of boozing.

“Well, if there’s a heaven, she went straight there, I can tell you that,” she says. “Really a saintly person.” She smiles at Jake, frowns at me. “Can’t say I thought the same of your father. Little bit of a brute, wasn’t he? Whatever became of him, anyway?”

She doesn’t know. She stays in this house, trapped by her crumbling hips, so she doesn’t know what goes on in the neighborhood.

“He died a few years after my mother,” I finally say.

“He did? From what?”

“Heart attack.”

“Both parents had heart attacks?” Fran says. “Jeez, that doesn’t bode well for you, does it?”

“I try not to think about it.”

“I’d get a checkup, if I were you.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“I can’t believe I didn’t know about your father dying! Not that I ever hear anything much. I don’t exactly get around these days…. Listen, I’m sorry I said that nasty thing about him.”

“It’s okay. You’re absolutely right. He could be a brute, all right.”

I can sense Jake’s excitement. He’s stumbled into this mother lode of information about his ancestors, and he’s going to make the most of it.

“What made him a brute?” Jake asks.

“Jake, I—”

That’s as far as I get. Jake holds a hand up to silence me, without even looking at me. “I was asking Fran, Dad.”

I shut my mouth. Fran can’t help cackling with glee as she says, “He liked to mix it up once in a while at Charlie’s Bar.”

Jake’s eyes widen. “My grandfather was a barroom brawler?”

Fran nods, gulps iced tea. “I once saw him knock a guy out with one punch. And it wasn’t as if he was a big man, your grandfather. Had to stand on his tiptoes to reach the other guy’s chin!”

Jake and Fran are laughing out loud. I feel as if the walls of this house are closing in on me.

“We’ve got to get going,” I say. “I promised Jake I’d show him the house I grew up in.”

Fran shakes her head. “I still can’t believe I didn’t know about your father passing.”

“We sort of kept it quiet. There wasn’t a wake or anything.”

“No wake!”

“He wanted to be cremated, and then we scattered his ashes at sea. He was in the navy when he was a kid.”

“He was a character, all right. I’m sorry you lost him.”

“Me, too.”

Fran insists on accompanying us to the door. She shakes hands with me, but takes Jake in a full embrace. He has to jackknife his body to allow for Fran’s walker.

“You’re a nice boy. Stay that way.”

“I’ll try,” Jake says. It’s dawning on me that all my exes—Doris, Margie, Fran—like Jake a hell of a lot more than they ever liked me.

“Thanks for doing the yard work,” Fran says. “Gonna call my sons and tell ’em it’s done, and while I’m at it I’ll tell ’em to go to hell.” She shuts the door behind us, and it seems fitting that the last word I’ll ever hear her speak is “hell.”

I’m walking, but I can’t feel my feet. I feel dizzy, as if I’ve just given blood.

“That,” I tell Jake, “was the most surreal experience of my life.”

He doesn’t seem to hear me. There’s a dreamy look on his face as he asks, “Did your mother really have hair like mine?”

“In fact, she did.”

“How cool is that? I inherited my grandmother’s hair! Can you tell me more about her? Was that eggplant dish one of her specialties?”

“Let’s sit awhile,” I say as we come upon a wooden bench at a bus stop. I sit down, but Jake is too restless to join me. He paces back and forth, like a fighter eager for the bell.

“Dad, why did Fran say there was something unusual about your mother’s death?”

“Jake—”

“She was trying to remember it, and you got all nervous.”

“Jake. Listen to me.”

“I’m listening.”

“I can tell you some more things about my mother, but first you have to understand why it’s taken so long for me to…get around to it.”

“All right.”

“Are you sure? Because this is serious stuff.”

“How serious?”

“Very serious.”

“Just tell me, Dad.”

“I don’t think you understand what I mean when I say serious. This is something I’ve never told anybody, not even…myself.”

“Dad. What the hell happened?”

A bus stops in front of us. The driver opens the door and waits for us to board, shakes his head when we don’t, and pulls away. I take a deep breath, absorbing mostly bus fumes.

“Well, I pretty much killed my mother, is what happened.”