people aggravated. She’s tired of having people make decisions about her life.”
Sal arrived with the hamburgers. “Mr. Scanlan, medium,” he said, putting the one with the blue stick in its bun in front of Tommy. “Mr. Scanlan, medium rare,” he added, putting the one with the red stick in front of Mark. Tommy wondered where he’d found the little sticks, and how special the occasion needed to be for Sal to use them. Tommy had been ordering hamburgers at Sal’s for years and had never had a stick in his before.
Both men ate in silence, ketchup dripping onto their plates. Then Mark said, his mouth full, “People are talking about your wife.”
“I don’t want to hear this,” Tommy said.
“Joe says he went over to St. Pius School to drop off a case of votive candles and he sees her out back with some guy playing hopscotch. She’s jumping around like a kid with some big guinea—”
“Hey!” Tommy said, so loudly that two of the men at the bar turned.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry. Anyhow, she waves at Joe like it’s the most natural thing in the world for her to be there with some guy. Now, Joe sees her, he makes allowances. Other people are going to wonder what the hell is going on.”
Tommy was wondering the same thing himself, but he was damned if he would say anything to Mark. His brother went on talking. “She’s always out with those guys who are building those houses,” he said. “That’s where she was when Pop went into the hospital that day. People have been seeing her out their windows talking to those guys.”
Tommy put down his hamburger, wiped his hands on a paper napkin, and sat back in the booth. “She knows the guy who’s running the project. He’s from her old neighborhood. He’s a nice person. She knows his mother. She went out with his brother.” He picked up his hamburger. “We’re not talking about this anymore. You’re all against her. All of you. Always have been.”
Tommy was angry and perplexed. That morning he had noticed that the valleys of Connie’s face were lavender, the peaks yellow, her eyes as bright as black marbles. She was always ill when she was pregnant, as though it was an early warning. Joseph was beginning to talk in sentences; in a few years he would be saying things she neither liked nor understood. This was the way it was for her, being a mother: a sickness and then a cleaving to her heart, a time of pure love and then the horrible moving away. Sometimes the only way she could love them was to remember them when they were small, pressing her face into the box of flannel receiving blankets in the linen closet, nappy and soft as a baby’s head.
Several nights ago, Tommy had been watching the ball game on television, yelling insults at the Yankees pitching staff, throwing pillows at the screen, when he had noticed that Connie was not in the house. Neither were the older children; he was alone with Joseph, who was snoring through a stuffed-up nose in his crib, the night light throwing strange shadows across his fat face. There had been no one on the streets outside, no sound except for the soft murmur of people several houses down talking on their front steps. But in the backyard, just past the dusty bare spot in the center of the grass where home plate had always been, a solitary figure stood looking out toward the development. At first Tom thought it was Maggie, mooning about, but the posture was wrong, the shoulders a little too soft and irresolute, the arms cradling the midsection not angular or awkward enough. It was his wife.
A couple stumbling from the development, a pair of teenagers who lived a few blocks away, nearly ran into her, quiet and small as she was, but they veered off at the last moment, clutching each other’s waists, the boy’s eyes as blind as a night animal’s, his shirttail a crumpled rag outside his chino pants. Connie followed them with her eyes, and then she threw back her head and stared at the stars. Tommy felt afraid.
He went back to the television, back to the armchair, and when she came into the room with a glass of iced tea he pretended she had been with him all the time, just a little out of his line of sight. And she pretended, too. He had told his brother