“How do you lose an arm and not know what happened?”
“How the hell do I know?” he said. “She said something once about it being in a locker at Penn Station, but she doesn’t always make sense. I’m working on getting her a prosthetic, but it takes time, and I’m not sure she wants one.”
“This is insane,” I said.
“No, it’s not. It’s just life. She’s better now than when she first arrived. It’s not so bad, really. I’m not home that much. She watches TV and drinks Mountain Dew. She started a little garden in the back: tomatoes, basil, cucumbers.” He stepped back, looking away. “We had a rough childhood, Donnie. You have no idea, and you never will. I made it out okay, but she didn’t. I can’t tell you what to do, but it might be a good thing for you to spend some time with her.”
He rubbed his temples and squinted, his headache face.
“Look, you can fly back to San Diego tonight and never come home again, pretend she doesn’t exist…but why would you do that? Maybe Amy isn’t the only one who needs you to stick around for a while.”
He turned to the shelf and grabbed a five-pound bag of onions and a jar of minced garlic, tossing the onions straight at me, just like the old days, when I followed his lead without question.
“That’s enough of this. I need to get an order ready, twenty large cheese and five orders of knots.”
And there it was, our escape hatch: when in doubt, make pizza. My strongest memories of Uncle Dan, the ones that stuck, were always at the Jaybird, the two of us side by side at the prep table, rolling dough and spreading cheese. Some kids remember their fathers tossing a football or holding onto the seat the first time they rode without training wheels. Me? I’d never learned to ride a bike and, outside of gym class, a football had never touched my hands. Instead we had pizza and garlic bread and small garden salads arranged in aluminum tins.
“Do you need any help?”
Uncle Dan smirked. “A California boy in my kitchen? What do you guys do, put sprouts or kale on everything? Vegan cheese?”
“Pineapples,” I said. “Avocados and kumquats.”
“Don’t use that kind of language around here. This is a family joint.”
He walked to the closet in back, edging it open with his foot, and pulled an apron from the hook, not just any apron, my apron, from my high school days at the Jaybird, Donnie Pizza – Apprentice Chef stitched in red across the chest, Donnie Pizza an old, forgotten nickname. All these years he’d kept the apron hanging in the closet like a retired jersey, like I was due back the next day for the lunchtime shift, and sure enough, when I slipped it over my neck and tied the strings in back, the apron still fit, a little snug around the waist perhaps, but still the right size, and even though I’d made thousands of pizzas back in San Diego, this felt different, like the real thing.
It felt like home.
. . . . .
That night, while Kelly slept, I snuck out and drove to the hospital.
We’d checked into a motel, spending the night at Uncle Dan’s house out of the question now that it was Nancy’s house, too. Nancy—my mother. The whole idea loitered in my stomach like an undigested burrito—the enzymes unable to break it down and shoot it into my bloodstream. Worrying about Amy—a more familiar, comfortable crisis—made it easier to pretend that a mentally ill one-armed fat woman didn’t exist in relation to me. For the moment, I could avoid it. Amy needed me.
I waited for Kelly to nod off before grabbing my shoes and keys, tiptoeing in the dark like a second-story man. (Did I feel like a jerk for doing this? Yes, of course, he said!) Fifteen minutes later I was in the parking lot looking up at the third-floor windows of the Ocean County Medical Center, my heart beating hard against my chest as if I’d ran the whole way, my skin sweaty and electric.
I walked across the parking lot, hoping I’d see Amy’s reflection in a window. It would be impossible to tell, but I felt that if I saw her, even in silhouette, my body would sense it. It was dark, and the moonlight threw ribbons of light across the hoods of the parked cars as I strode zombie-like toward the entrance, and for a moment I thought I saw her standing by the door—but it was only a potted plant and my fermenting imagination. It was past midnight—she’d be asleep for sure, curled under stiff hospital sheets, an anti-depressant cocktail surging through her veins, but that didn’t stop me from calling out to her, from throwing my head up toward the black sky and shouting her name as if I could magically bridge twenty years and make her happy, as if I could conjure both Amy and Sarah and, somehow, find a way to keep them safe.
INTERLUDE
I’m seventeen, and I wake up with a head like a closet stuffed with costumes and props and wild soliloquies waiting for their cue; seventeen and every moment is improvisation, say “yes” and build the scene, say yes and yes and yes. I jump out of bed and already I’m someone else, spouting nonsense to the empty house in a bad British accent as I peel a banana, holding it aloft like Hamlet contemplating Yorick’s skull, alas, poor Chiquita, I knew him; and then I’m showered and dressed and out the door, in the car, blasting Dramarama and the Pixies as I glide my four-door, double-dented Saturn left, left, right, left, right, and three Dutch gable roofed American Dreams later I’m parked by the curb of chez Willingham, Amy’s father, a business casual coffee cup of a man, his white shirt pulled tight around a gut stuffed with bagels and undigested dreams, her
