“I curse you,” he said. “It’s because of you and your children that my son is dead. So one of your children will die.”
“What are you saying?” Da asked, confused. “You don’t know what you’re saying. It’s the grief talking —”
“I’m talking!” Nate shouted. “I’ll do it, Mac, God knows I can, and I have a right to. You won’t know which one I’ve chosen. But one of your children will die. James. Margaret. Kathleen. It doesn’t matter to me which one. Nothing matters anymore. An eye for an eye. A child for a child. Do you understand?”
“No. Benny… Nate — you don’t mean this!” Da cried. “You don’t!”
Nate turned and walked back. Alone, but with the three men at his back, protecting him.
Thirty-four
Providence, Rhode Island
November 1950
“Nate isn’t a killer,” Da said to us. “He’s out of his mind with his grief, and who could blame him for that? He didn’t mean what he said.”
Muddie nodded, her eyes wide with fear. Jamie and I said nothing.
But Da decided we would go to a friend’s anyway. The Learys lived over on Power Street, in a big square house that looked like it was squatting on its lot, holding on against any stray hurricane that might try to blow it away.
The day of Billy’s funeral was a gray day, with a sky like steel and clouds scudding across the sky. The papers said that hundreds had come to the church and people lined up outside. I could picture it: the heavy smell of flowers in the church, and the pools of water from people’s umbrellas. Billy was a Korean War hero, never mind that he had never gone to war; he had enlisted and died in uniform, and that was enough. His mother, they said, was in a state of collapse, but there was a photograph of Nate, ashen-faced in his suit, going into the church.
It all had nothing to do with Billy. Billy was somewhere else in my mind.
I remembered the day we went with Jamie to Roger Williams Park. The cherry trees were in blossom, and under the trees the light was so pink you felt you were nestled in the heart of a flower. Billy took my picture, and Jamie’s, because he kept saying how perfect the light was. After a bit the weather changed and the wind blew and suddenly the petals were flying in the air, thick as a hard rain. We ran through the trees and the petals nestled in our hair and our clothes, and we brushed each other off, laughing because we were so happy to be all together, and it was spring.
Jamie stayed on the sunporch the afternoon of Billy’s funeral, and I knew he was thinking what I was thinking, of the cold, frozen ground and the coffin, and the graveyard, and the mourners with their black umbrellas.
I thought of that night in the parking lot, how Jamie’s arms had gone around Billy and he’d rested his cheek against Billy’s back, and how I should have seen that he was managing to calm Billy with his embrace, with his words, in a way that I never could. I thought of how he’d driven all night to get to me, how he’d bathed my face and brought me a blanket and made me tea, and how I’d paid him back by ordering him to stop crying. I could hear the exact tone of contempt that had been in my voice, and I thought that out of every bad thing I’d done, that could be the worst.
Quietly, I went into my purse, and Muddie’s. In my fists I carried the coins, and I walked onto the cold porch. Jamie’s eyes were on his book but he wasn’t turning pages. I moved around the room, placing the pennies, heads up, on the windowsills and the bookshelf and the arms of the chairs. I felt him watching me. I saved one last penny and opened his hand. I put the penny heads up in his palm, then closed his fist over it.
Then, without looking at the title, I took a book from the bookshelf. I sank into the couch on the other end, nudging his stocking feet aside. I wiggled into my space, put my feet up, and opened my book.
I thought of the first day we’d spent together, of Billy kneeling in the sand with his camera, grinning at us, the wind whipping his hair. It was a good