“Uh.”
“You think I’m just humoring him?”
“Sorry. I guess I was.”
“There’s nothing wrong with his mind, Mr. Acquillo. He’s just old.”
“I can see that.”
She brushed past me and put a full kettle on the stove. “He was almost fifty when I was born,” she said, apropos of something that wasn’t apparent to me.
“Can I take a look at the stuff relating to this property?” I wrote out Regina’s address on a memo pad.
She took it out of my hand and studied it.
“Sure, but you’ll have to do the digging. We don’t have much of a research staff.”
“The files are here?”
“In the basement. My father is loathe to discard such things.”
“I have a feeling he’d know right where to find it.”
“A minute ago you thought he was off his rocker.” It was my turn to shrug.
“And now you’d like him to find what you need.”
I did, of course. She looked at the memo pad again.
“I do have other things to do,” she said, studying the slip of paper as if it held the secret meaning of my mind. She handed it back to me, then opened the old Hotpoint dishwasher and got out mugs for the tea. The way she bent over the dishwasher made it hard to avoid noticing she was female. I kept my eyes on the mug while she poured the tea.
“Do you have any children?” she asked me.
“I have a daughter living in the City.”
“Did she go to school in Southampton?”
“No, Connecticut. Why?”
“I work at the high school. Thought maybe I knew your kids. That’s usually how I get a fix on people.”
“She got out sometimes in the summer.”
“With you and your wife.”
“Yeah. Now ex.”
“Oh. But your daughter still comes out.”
“No. She exed herself as well.”
“Sorry. Certainly not forever.”
I had a hard time not looking into those sad, patient eyes.
“Yeah. Hope not forever.”
“I have an ex, too. No kids.” I thought about the old crows back at the coffee place.
“Happens.”
“All too often. Mostly miss all that regular sex. You?”
I laughed. “Not regular enough to miss.”
“There you go,” she said, resonating again to some private frequency. “What happened to your face?”
I guess women with big noses and pretty blue eyes get to pry into anything they want.
“A rock-hard Filipino middle heavyweight named Rene Ruiz got me to look over my shoulder for a second. Caught me when I turned back.”
She nodded. “Boxer.”
“We called ourselves fighters. ‘Boxer’ seems kinda refined. Too removed from the actual endeavor.”
“Which was to beat the hell out of each other?”
“Basically.”
I resisted the urge to touch the right side of my head where my hair covered the stitches. I knew she’d make me explain.
“You only fight Filipinos, or did a few demons creep into the ring?”
“I’m too tough for demons,” I said, showing her I’d learned to duck from Rene Ruiz.
She took a slow sip of her tea, looking up at me over the rim.
“Yes, I’m sure you believe that.”
“What do you teach?”
“I’m the school psychologist. What did you study?”
“Avoidance. Graduate level.”
She toasted me with her mug and drifted back out of the kitchen. I followed her toward the living room, but she made a right turn before getting there and went down a narrow basement stairway. I followed her. The basement was filled with musty wet air and exhausted clutter. The file storage, about twenty Bankers Boxes, was in a corner lit by a pair of hundred-watt utility lamps.
Everything was organized by date, and then coded by account numbers and some other designation I didn’t understand. It was very tidy and clearly labeled, but the scale was daunting.
“Sure your dad isn’t looking for something to kill the time?”
“Long as the air down here doesn’t kill him first.”
“Not as fast as an easy chair.”
“Leveraging my concern for my father to facilitate your project?”
“Yeah, something like that. A little leverage is good for an old guy—taken in moderation.”
I got her to laugh an honest little laugh. She stuck an index finger into my sternum and gave it a shove.
“What was your name, again?”
“Sam.”
“Rosaline.” She put out her hand.
I gave her mine, then had a little trouble getting it back again.
“When I get a chance I’ll look through the files. See what I can find.”
“I appreciate it.”
“I know you do, because you should. Let’s go have another cup of tea.”
She flicked off the big lights and we swam back out of the dead time that had settled under the house like a stagnant pool.
Sonny’s Gym was wet with ambition. Lots of tough, mostly stupid young guys and older guys who hadn’t wakened to the realities. They strutted or lumbered around scratching their nuts and looking nervous or fierce depending on their confidence. All wanted to prove something, to make their time on earth count, at least within the arc of their circumscribed lives. All I wanted to do was maintain a decent heart rate, hold down the fat and maybe hone whatever reflexes I had left. And at this point, maybe regain some of what I lost since getting my ass kicked.
The soggy sweat smell was worse than usual, in contrast with the scrubbed luminescence outside. I wrinkled my face at the towel guy, but his sense of smell had dimmed long ago. His nose had a big black mole with a hair about the size of a three-penny nail growing out of the middle. He sat on a short stool with his inflated midsection pouring over the top of his shiny polyester pants. He moved in a steady one-eighty swing from counter to hamper, handing out towels the size of cocktail napkins and with the delicacy of medium-grade sandpaper. I was impressed that Ronny knew to hire an authentic towel guy, just like they had back in the City. Maybe they had to. Maybe towel guys have a union that sets the standard. Maybe I’ve spent too many years hanging out in boxing gyms.
“Smells like a beer fart in this place,” I told him.
The towel guy ignored me, looking past my shoulder at the fix on reality he’d established out there in middle space.
I went into the locker room and pulled all my stuff out of the old canvas duffel bag that once belonged to my father. That shrink I had to see told me I started boxing because my father was beaten to death. He thought this was a brilliant insight. I said, yeah, I started boxing because my old man was beaten to death. Wouldn’t you?
When I was younger, I was mostly afraid my father would be the one doing the beating. Which never happened, that I remember, but he sure threatened a lot, and yelled a lot, and came close a few times. All out of sheer meanness. What I remember mostly was the back of his hand, raised in sudden threat. I think, under those circumstances, you either get some confidence or you wrap yourself up in fear and let your insides die an early
