'I could always check with Donna, you know.'
Byrne looked at his watch. 'Look at the time.'
Jessica laughed, letting him off the hook. She fell silent for a few moments, looking around the attic. It occurred to her that she would never be back in this room. 'Man.'
'What?'
'My whole life is in these boxes.' She opened a box, took out some photos. On top were pictures of her parents' wedding.
Out of the corner of her eye Jessica saw Byrne turn away for a second, giving her the moment with her memories. Jessica put the photos back.
'So, let me ask you one more thing,' she said.
'Sure.'
Jessica took a few seconds. She hoped that her voice was going to be steady. She put her hand on one of the boxes, the one with the piece of green yarn around it. 'If you have something, some memento that is a part of your life, and you know that the next time you see it, it's going to break your heart, do you keep it? Do you hold onto it anyway? Even though you know it is going to cause you pain the next time you look at it?'
Byrne knew that she was talking about her mother.
'Do you remember her well?' he asked.
Jessica had been five years old when her mother died. Her father had never remarried, had never loved another woman. 'Yeah. Sometimes. Not her face, though. I remember how she smelled. Her shampoo, her perfume. I remember how in summer, when we went to Wildwood, she smelled like Coppertone and cherry Life Savers. And I remember her voice. She always sang with the radio.'
Heaven Must Have Sent You. It was one of her mother's favorites. Jessica hadn't thought of that song in years.
'How about you?' she asked. 'Do you think about your mom a lot?'
'Enough to keep her alive,' Byrne said and leaned against the wall. It was his storytelling pose.
'When I was a kid, and my father used to chew me out, my mother would always run interference, you know? I mean physically. She would physically get in between us. She wouldn't make excuses for me, and I always ended up getting punished, but while my father was upbraiding me she would stand with her hands clasped behind her back. I'd look at her hands, and she always had a fifty cent piece for me. My father never knew. I'd have to do my time, but afterwards I always had fifty- cents to blow on a water ice or a comic book when I got paroled.'
Jessica smiled, thinking about anyone — especially Paddy Byrne — intimidating her partner.
'She died on my birthday, you know,' Byrne said.
Jessica didn't know. Byrne had never told her this. At that moment she tried to think of something sadder than this, and found herself at a loss. 'I didn't know.'
Byrne nodded. 'You know how you always notice your birthday when you see it printed somewhere, or hear it mentioned in a movie or on television?'
'Yeah,' Jessica said. 'You always turn to the people around you and say hey… that's my birthday.'
Byrne smiled. 'It's like that for me when I go to the cemetery. I always do a double take when I see the headstone, even though I know.' He put his hands in his pockets. 'It will never be my birthday again. It will always be the day she died, no matter how long I live.'
Jessica couldn't think of anything to say. It mattered little, because she had never met a more perceptive person than Kevin Byrne. He always knew when to move things along.
'So, your question?' he asked. 'The one about whether or not to save something, even though you know it will break your heart?'
'What about it?'
Byrne reached into his pocket, pulled something out. It was a fifty-cent piece. Jessica looked at the coin, at her partner. At this moment, his eyes were the deepest emerald she had ever seen.
'It's a strange thing about heartbreak,' Byrne said. 'Sometimes it's the best thing for you. Sometimes it reminds you that your heart is still beating.'
They stood, saying nothing, cosseted in this drafty room full of memory and loss. The silence was shattered by the sound of a breaking dish downstairs. Irish and Italians and booze always led to broken ceramics. Jessica and Byrne smiled at each other, and the moment dissolved.
'Ready for the big bad city?' he asked.
'No.'
Byrne picked up a box, headed for the stairs. He stopped, turned. 'You know, for a South Philly chick, you turned into kind of a wimp.'
'I have a gun in one of these boxes,' Jessica said.
Byrne ran down the steps.
Chapter 25
By ten o'clock they had everything in the new house. What had seemed like a reasonable amount of goods in the Lexington Park house now filled up every room, every corner, every cabinet. If they put the sofa and two of the dining-room chairs on the roof, they could just about make everything fit.
Byrne stood across the street from the row house. A pair of older teenage girls walked by, reminding him of Lucy Doucette.
When he had first met Lucy at the group regression-therapy sessions she had seemed so lost. He did not know much about her life, but she had told him enough for him to know that she was troubled by a traumatic event in her childhood. He recalled her efforts at the regression-therapy group, her inability to recall anything about the incident. He didn't know if she had been molested or not. Running into her accidentally in the city reminded him how he had promised to look in on her from time to time. He had not.
'Kevin?'
It was a tiny voice. Byrne turned around and saw that it was Jessica's daughter Sophie, bundled up, standing on the sidewalk in front of the porch. The front door was open, and through it Byrne could see Peter Giovanni inside, leaning against the handrail, keeping one eye on his granddaughter. Once a father, always a cop.
Byrne crossed the street. For a long time Jessica had insisted that
Sophie should call him Mr. Byrne. It had taken a while for Byrne to change that, and it looked like it had finally taken hold. Byrne got down to Sophie's level, noticing that she wasn't as small as she had been even last year at this time. 'Hey, sweetie.'
'Thanks for helping out.'
'Oh, you're welcome,' Byrne said. 'Do you like your new house?'
'It's small.'
Byrne looked over her shoulder. 'It's not that small. I think it's pretty cool.'
Sophie shrugged. 'It's all right, I guess.'
'Plus your school is only a block away. You can sleep late.'
Sophie giggled. 'You don't know my mom.'
The truth was, he did. He soon realized the folly of his statement.
Sophie glanced up the street. The looming structure of Sacred Heart Parochial School was silhouetted against the carbon-blue night sky. She looked back at Byrne. 'Did you go to Catholic school?'
'Oh yeah,' Byrne said. He wanted to tell her that he still had ruler marks on his knuckles to prove it, but decided against it.
'Did you like it?'
How to answer this? 'Well, do you have a kid in your school who is always goofing off, always getting into trouble?'
'Yeah,' Sophie said. 'In my school it's Bobby Tomasello.'
'Well, in my school that kid was me.'
'You got into trouble?'
