Last Night In Twisted River

That Daniel was coming to dinner at Avellino alone was fine with Tony Angel, but that his son was alone (and probably would remain so) made the cook cry. If he worried about his grandson, Joe-for all the obvious dangers any eighteen-year-old needed to be lucky to escape-the cook was sorry that his son, Daniel, struck him as a terminally lonely, melancholic soul. He’s even lonelier and more melancholic than I am! Tony Angel was thinking.

“Table of four,” Loretta was saying to Greg, the sous chef. “One wild-mushroom pizza, one pepperoni,” she told the cook.

Celeste came into the kitchen from the dining room. “Danny’s here, alone,” she said to Tony.

“One calamari with penne,” Loretta went on, reciting. When it was busy, she just left the two cooks her orders in writing, but when there was almost no one in Avellino, Loretta seemed to enjoy the drama of an out-loud presentation.

“The table of four doesn’t want any first courses?” Greg asked her.

“They all want the arugula salad with the shaved Parmesan,” Loretta said. “You’ll love this one.” She paused for the full effect. “One chicken paillard, but hold the capers.”

“Christ,” Greg said. “A sauce grenobloise is all about the capers.”

“Just give the bozo the red-wine reduction with rosemary-it’s as good on the chicken as it is on the braised beef,” Tony Angel said.

“It’ll turn the chicken purple, Tony,” his sous chef complained.

“You’re such a purist, Greg,” the cook said. “Then give the bozo the paillard with a little olive oil and lemon.”

“Danny says to surprise him,” Celeste told Tony. She was watching the cook closely. She’d heard him cry in his sleep, too.

“Well, that will be fun,” the cook said. (Finally, there’s a smile-albeit a small one-Celeste was thinking.)

MAY WAS A TALKATIVE PASSENGER. While Dot drove-her head nodding, but usually not in rhythm to whatever junk was playing on the radio-May read most of the road signs out loud, the way children who’ve only recently learned to read sometimes do.

“ Bellows Falls,” May had announced, as they’d passed that exit on I-91-maybe fifteen or more minutes ago. “Who would want to live in Bellows Falls?”

“You been there?” Dot asked her old friend.

“Nope. It just sounds awful,” May said.

“It’s beginnin’ to look like suppertime, isn’t it?” Dot asked.

“I could eat a little somethin’,” May admitted.

“Like what?” Dot asked.

“Oh, just half a bear or a whole cow, I guess,” May said, cackling. Dot cackled with her.

“Even half a cow would hit the spot,” Dot more seriously proposed.

“Putney,” May read out loud, as they passed the exit sign.

“What kinda name is that, do you suppose? Not Injun, from the sound of it,” Dot said.

“Nope. Not Injun,” May agreed. The three Brattleboro exits were coming up.

“How ’bout a pizza?” Dot said.

“BRAT-el-burrow,” May enunciated with near perfection.

“Definitely not an Injun name!” Dot said, and the two old ladies cackled some more.

“There’s gotta be a pizza place in Brattleboro, don’tcha think?” May asked her friend.

“Let’s have a look,” Dot said. She took the second Brattleboro exit, which brought her onto Main Street.

“The Book Cellar,” May read out loud, as they drove slowly past the bookstore on their right.

When they got to the next traffic light, and the steep part of the hill, they could see the marquee for the Latchis Theatre. A couple of the previous year’s movies were playing-a Sylvester Stallone double feature, Rocky III and First Blood.

“I saw those movies,” Dot said proudly.

“You saw them with me,” May reminded her.

The two ladies were easily distracted by the movie marquee at the Latchis, and Dot was driving; Dot couldn’t drive and look at both sides of the street at the same time. If it hadn’t been for May, her hungry passenger and compulsive sign-reader, they might have missed seeing Avellino altogether. The Avellino word was a tough one for May; she stumbled over it but managed to say, “Italian cooking.”

“Where?” Dot asked; they had already driven past it.

“Back there. Park somewhere,” May told her friend. “It said ‘Italian’-I know it did.”

They ended up in the supermarket parking lot before Dot could gather her driving wits about her. “Now we’ll just have to hoof it,” she said to May.

Dot didn’t like to hoof it; she had a bunion that was killing her and caused her to limp, which made May recall Cookie’s limp, so that Cookie had been on the bad old broads’ minds lately. (Also, the Injun conversation in the car might have made them remember their long-ago time in Twisted River.)

“I would walk a mile for a pizza, or two,” May told her old friend.

“One of Cookie’s pizzas, anyway,” Dot said, and that did it.

“Oh, weren’t they good!” May exclaimed. They had waddled their way to the Latchis, on the wrong side of the street, and were nearly killed crossing Main Street in a haphazard fashion. (Maybe Milan was more forgiving to pedestrians than Brattleboro.) Both Dot and May gave the finger to the driver who’d almost hit them.

“What was it Cookie wanted to put in his pizza dough?” Dot asked May.

“Honey!” May said, and they both cackled. “But he changed his mind about it,” May remembered.

“I wonder what his secret ingredient was,” Dot said.

“Didn’t have one, maybe,” May replied, with a shrug. They had stopped in front of the big picture window at Avellino, where May struggled out loud to say the restaurant’s name.

“It sure sounds like real Italian,” Dot decided. The two women read the menu that was posted in the window. “Two different pizzas,” Dot observed.

“I’m stickin’ to the pepperoni,” May told her friend. “You can die eatin’ wild mushrooms.”

“The thing about Cookie’s crust was that it was really thin, so you could eat a lot more pizza without gettin’ filled up,” Dot was remembering.

Inside, a family of four was finishing their meal-Dot and May could see that the two kids had ordered pizzas. There was a good-looking man, maybe fortyish, sitting alone at a table near the swinging doors to the kitchen. He was writing in a notebook-just a lined notebook of the kind students use. The old ladies didn’t recognize Danny, of course. He’d been twelve when they’d last seen him, and now he was a whole decade older than his father was when Dot and May had last seen the cook.

Danny had looked up when the old ladies came in, but he’d quickly turned his attention back to whatever he was writing. He might not even have remembered what Dot and May looked like in 1954; twenty-nine years later, Danny didn’t have the slightest idea who those bad old broads were.

“Just the two of you, ladies?” Celeste asked them. (It always amused Dot and May when anyone thought of them as “ladies.”)

They were given a table near the window, under the old black-and-white photograph of the long-ago logjam in Brattleboro. “They used to drive logs down the Connecticut,” Dot said to May.

“This must have been a mill town, in its day,” May remarked. “Sawmills, paper, maybe-textiles, too, I suppose.”

“There’s an insane asylum in this town, I hear,” Dot told her friend. When the waitress came to pour them water, Dot asked Celeste about it. “Is the loony bin still operatin’ here?”

“It’s called the retreat,” Celeste explained.

“That’s a sneaky fuck of a name for it!” May said. She and Dot were cackling again when Celeste went to get them menus. (She’d forgotten to bring the old biddies menus when she brought them their water. Celeste was still distracted by the cook’s crying.)

A young couple came in, and Dot and May observed a younger waitress-Celeste’s daughter, Loretta-showing