as she watched them walk away and they began to play cards again.
“Tommy looks tired these days,” said Gail as they drove along in her black sedan, Connie thinking to herself that Gail really did not know how to negotiate a corner properly.
“He is tired,” Connie said. “He works hard all day and he goes to the hospital a lot in the evening.”
“How does he think Dad looks?” Gail asked.
“Like hell.” There was silence for several blocks, then Connie said. “Tell Mark to get John to leave him alone. He’s driving him nuts with all this about the house and the company. Tom feels bad enough about his father. It’s not fair to be holding him up on this now.”
Gail touched her barrettes and smoothed back her hair. She had never heard Connie say so much before. “I think Tommy should talk to Mark about it. I don’t get involved in his business.”
“Oh bullshit, Gail,” Connie said, plucking at the fingers of her gloves. She realized it was the first time she had ever said the word out loud, and she liked the feel of it in her mouth, the sound of it, like a powerful and disdainful sneeze. “Everybody’s business is everybody else’s business in this family. Nobody’s made a decision on their own in all the years I’ve been around.”
“That may be how you feel—”
“Who picked out your house, Gail?”
Her sister-in-law’s narrow lips tightened. “I did.”
“John Scanlan did. He heard it was for sale the day after the old man who lived in it died and Mark bought it that afternoon. So don’t tell me about keeping your business private. If you hadn’t bought it, he would have tried to get Tommy to buy it. If not Tommy, Joe. Margaret gets passed over because of the convent. Pull over.”
“Excuse me?”
“Pull over,” Connie said, “or I’m going to throw up on your upholstery.”
When she was finished and they had pulled away from the curb, they were both silent again. Finally Connie reached out tentatively and touched her sister-in-law’s arm.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just don’t want Tommy to worry. He worries all the time.”
“He has to take some responsibility for the family, Connie,” Gail said primly.
“Why? Why does he have to? They’re all adults. He takes enough responsibility in his heart.”
They turned onto Park Street and the trees arched over them, a tunnel lined with brick and stucco façades, closed doors with impenetrable screens. From somewhere they could hear children yelling, and the sound of bulldozers. As they pulled into the driveway, the windows of the car a blur of reflected sunlight and tree branches, Connie thought she saw Terence sitting on the steps of the house, his big shaggy head hanging heavy between his knees. But as he looked up she realized it was Joey Martinelli, and she swung open the car door fast, feeling for the ground with her patent-leather high heels, still a little faint. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he called, not moving.
“Thanks for the ride,” Connie said.
“Is that—?” said Gail, and stopped.
“Is that who, Gail?”
“Mark said that you were—friendly with one of the—workers at the construction sight.” Gail got the words out as though she was speaking English as a second language, and Connie smiled.
“Now, I managed to figure out that workers meant greasy dagos but I’m not quite sure about friendly. Does friendly mean I talk to him in the kitchen when he comes over for a drink of water, or does friendly mean I’m meeting him in my slip behind the bulldozers?”
Gail inhaled audibly. “I don’t know why you have to be like this,” she said. “No one means anything by what they say and yet you take everything as an insult. Any other woman would be thrilled to have her in-laws buy her a big house. It’s much bigger than any of the rest of us have, but I don’t begrudge it, with all these children. But to have a family that takes an interest, and then to be so critical—I just don’t understand it. At the smallest thing you take offense, you assume that somehow you are being insulted, you …”
“What does my illicit relationship with the Carpenters’ Union have to do with a big house I don’t want or need?”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” Gail said, her face unpleasantly mottled with emotion. “Everything with you is a struggle. What would be just part of life for other people has to be some sort of big complicated thing with