“Cry if you need to,” said Baker. “It’s hard to learn who you are.”
“I wanna sit down.”
“Go ahead,” said Baker. “But we ain’t finished yet.”
Alex and Vicki made love after he had come home from his visit with the Monroe brothers. It was unexpected for both of them, happening at once as Alex slipped into their king-size. He had expected her to be sleeping, as she almost always was when he came to bed, but she was awake, and she turned toward him and fitted into him the way a wife and husband do, comfortably and naturally, after so many years. They kissed and caressed each other for a long while, because this was the best part of it for both of them, and completed it with Vicki’s strong thighs squeezed against him, her lips cool, Vicki and Alex coming quietly in the darkness of the room.
Afterward, they talked about his night, Vicki’s head on his chest, Alex’s arm around her.
“He wasn’t angry with you?”
“The older brother? No. Indifferent is more like it. He paid his debt, and I guess he’s past hating. It’s like he didn’t care about my presence one way or the other. He’s trying to get beyond everything that’s happened to him. It hasn’t been easy to do that.”
This led to a discussion of Charles Baker, and the mistake James had made in editing the letter.
“Are you worried about this Baker character?” said Vicki.
“No,” said Alex. It was a lie.
“But what if he comes around? You promised the younger brother that you wouldn’t involve the police.”
“I never promised anything,” said Alex. “Besides, there’s no sense in worrying about it now.”
It felt good to be with Vicki, naked in bed, talking as they had not talked for a while. He told her about his tentative plan to turn the business over to Johnny, and she was happy and held him tightly and admitted that she was also scared, asking him what would come next, after he let their son take control of the coffee shop.
“I’m a young man,” said Alex. “I am. I’ve got another twenty years of work in me, maybe more. This time it’s not going to be about obligation. It’ll be about passion.”
“But what will you do?”
In the dark, Alex stared up at the ceiling, pale white from the moonlight seeping through the bedroom blinds.
After Vicki had gone to sleep, Alex got out of bed and went to the kitchen, where he poured himself a glass of red wine. He took it to the living room and had a seat in his favorite chair. His intention was to sit here, nurse his wine, and wait for Johnny to come home. Go upstairs at the sound of Johnny’s car as it pulled into the driveway, so as not to embarrass his son. A young man Johnny’s age didn’t need to know that his father still stayed awake at night, worrying about his son.
Having lost one boy, he found it hard to let the other stand on his own. But he knew he’d have to do that so he and Vicki could move forward. The window was closing. As the years progressed, it seemed to Alex that time moved faster. He wanted to be rid of that thing, the pinch on his shoulder that had nagged him for thirty-five years. Now it felt possible. He was ready to be rid of it and run to what was next.
Alex was glad Ray Monroe had walked into his shop. He was glad to have met James. In a way, it was as if the clouds had broken, if only just a little.
Alex thought of the Monroes and the conversation that had gone on in the garage hours earlier. The usual topics discussed among men, the rhythmic banter, the gentle ribbing that went on between brothers. A look that had crossed Ray Monroe’s face.
And he thought: Something is not right.
Twenty
Pete Whitten walked into Pappas and Sons around two thirty, after the lunch rush, when most of the customers had cleared out. He took a seat on the stool closest to the register, where Alex stood counting cash. Alex stopped, put a stack of bills into the tens bed, and closed the register drawer. He reached across the counter and shook Whitten’s hand.
“Pete.”
“Alex. Long time.”
“Too long.”
It had been over twenty years. The last he’d seen Pete, not counting when he’d seen his photograph in the newspapers, was at the funeral of Billy Cachoris’s father, Lou Cachoris. Mr. Cachoris had died in the eighties, a dozen years after the incident in Heathrow Heights. Some said he deliberately drank himself into his grave after the murder of his son, but that was Greeks being Greek about death; the newspaper said that the cause of his passing was cancer of the brain.
It was at the viewing of Lou Cachoris, held at the Collins Funeral Home on University Boulevard, that Alex had run into Pete, recently married and sporting a wide-shouldered, wide-lapeled suit with a red power tie. His hair was gelled and spiked with Tenax, in the de rigueur “punk” businessman look of the time. If he had been outside he would have been sporting Vuarnets.
“Meet my wife, Anne,” said Pete.
Alex said hello to her, a good-looking blonde, thin waist, thin ankles, wearing something expensive, and introduced them both to Vicki, wearing something off the department store rack. They all seemed aware of their status and where their lives were or were not headed, though they were only in their twenties, and still, Alex was proud to be with Vicki and to show her off. She looked, well, nicer than Anne.
Alex had debated going to the service, knowing that he would be on the receiving end of the mootrah, the whispers, long faces, and stares from the Cachoris relatives. They all knew he had been in the car that day and had done nothing to help his friend. But he felt that it was proper, due to his relationship with Billy, to pay his respects to the father.
After talking with Pete and Anne, Alex went to the open casket. He kissed the ikona, did his stavro, and looked down at the corpse of Lou Cachoris. His face seemed to have been flattened by a mallet. Someone had slipped a photograph of a teenage Billy under the sleeve of his burial suit, and Alex impulsively bent forward and kissed Mr. Cachoris’s forehead. It felt as if he were kissing one of the artificial apples his mother had always kept on their dining room table. He said a silent prayer for Billy, and for the way things had gone for the father and son. As he opened his eyes, an uncle or cousin was standing next to him, telling him quietly and firmly that the family didn’t want him there and that it was time for him to go.
He looked around, not seeing Pete or his wife, who had already left the building, and got Vicki’s attention. They walked out together as the priest from Saint Connie’s arrived. Going down the center aisle of the viewing room, Alex felt many gazes directed at him, the boy who had not stood beside his friend against the mavres, who now carried the mark, the ugly eye. Out in the lobby, he heard the attendees begin to sing the “Everlasting Be Thy Memory” song, which was supposed to make everyone feel better but instead made them feel sadder than shit. That, at least, was how it felt to Alex whenever he heard that song thereafter. Sadness, and something close to shame.
And now Pete Whitten was in his shop, handsome, successful, and relatively unravaged by time. The suit would be a Canali, the tie Hermes, the sunglasses in the breast pocket Revos. His hair was perfectly disheveled, and his jacket fit him impeccably. Pete did look good.
“I’ve got to apologize,” said Pete.
“For what?”
“I’ve been working a few blocks from here for most of my career, and I’ve never stopped in to say hello or patronize the place.”
“It’s okay.”
“Mostly my lunches are business lunches. All of them expensed. So normally I’m in restaurants.”
“This is a restaurant,” said Alex.
“You know what I mean.”
“Sure.”
Pete took his arm off the counter and brushed something that was not there off his sleeve. He looked around
