Wot a whiz. You could draw a line across your throat and Sal would think you were talking necklaces. “Mr. Livemore, perhaps we should go. We can continue our investigation in Mahwah.”
“Ma-what?” Sal said, more Ringo Starr than anything else.
I jerked a thumb toward the Chippendale entrance and stopped short of saying ime-tay to am-scray.
Sal nodded and gave me a jaunty thumbs-up, game as any World War II doughboy. “All righty. Tally-ho! Pip pip.”
Pip pip?
Mr. Henry and I stared at him in stunned silence.
Later, we drove back toward the city with the convertible top down, the sun so low in the sky it reflected in the car’s outside mirrors. I was drafting a subpoena in my head for the dealership’s sales and test-drive records, but Sal wanted rave reviews. “Didn’t I do good?” he kept asking.
“Until you started chewing the scenery.”
“What?” Wind buffeted his thin gray hair and his Adam’s apple protruded like a figurehead. “What does that mean?”
“It means you did great. Terrific.”
He grinned so broadly that the silver edge of his eyetooth caught the sunlight. “It was like I was in the movies. It was like I was a movie star.”
“You sure were.”
“I was like Cary Grant or something!”
If he were still alive. “Yep.”
“Didja like what I did about his desk?”
“I liked what you did about the desk.”
“Didja like when I told him I was shocked?”
“I liked when you told him you were shocked.”
“He was gonna call and I
“You sure did. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you.” It was true, actually. “I mean it.”
Sal squinted against the wind. “Why did we have to leave?”
“Because we found out what we needed to know.”
“Oh.”
“Okay?”
“Okay,” he said, but he seemed to deflate visibly in his seat, like a child after all the birthday presents have been opened.
“You had fun, huh?”
He nodded.
“Fun is good, Uncle Sal.”
He didn’t say anything, just kept squinting as the wind blew his wispy hair around.
“What do you do for fun, Unc?”
He thought for what seemed like a very long time. “I like music.”
“What kind of music? You a rap fan, MC Sal?”
“No, no.” He didn’t even smile.
“What then?”
“Big band. Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey. Like the old 950 Club.”
“What’s the 950 Club?”
“On the radio. In the afternoons.”
“Like now?”
“Yeh,” he said, without checking his watch. “They don’t have Ed Hurst no more, but they got the music.”
I turned on the radio and scanned until I reached the station. Even I recognized the song “Sing, Sing, Sing.” “That’s Benny Goodman, isn’t it?”
“Yeh.”
“I like this song.”
“Your mother, she liked it, too.”
Out of left field. “Did she like music?” I had no idea.
“Loved it.”
“Really?”
He nodded.
I wondered. “What else did she like?”
“She liked to dance. She never sat still. She liked to go, your mother.”
I guess. “That why she left, you think?”
He nodded again.
“Go where, though?”
“Anywhere. She liked action.”
“Action?”
“Attention, like.”
I considered this. A Canadian blonde among the dark Italian butchers, grocers, and bakers, like a yellow diamond on a coal pile. A woman who liked to go, married to a man who wanted only to stay. “She didn’t really fit in, did she?”
“Like a sore thumb.”
“She never would have stayed, would she?”
“Not for long. Vito was the only one who didn’t see it comin’.”
It hurt inside. For my father, then for me. “You don’t think I’m like her, do you?”
“Nah. You got dark hair.”
So he wasn’t Phil Donahue. Morrones weren’t known for their introspection. “I meant her personality, not her looks.”
“Nah.”
“Not even a little?” I almost hit a Saab in front of me for watching him, but Sal’s only reaction was to shake his head. “Uncle Sal?”
“Can you turn up the radio, Ree?”
I laughed. “Is this the end of the conversation, Unc?”
He nodded, then smiled. “She was a wise guy, too.”
Our highway entrance came up suddenly, City Line Avenue onto the Schuylkill Expressway, and I turned onto the on-ramp. I thought about pressing him on the subject, but let it go. It was the longest talk I’d ever had about my mother, and somehow it was enough. More words wouldn’t make it any clearer, or any different. It was up to me to figure out anyway, for myself.
“The radio, Ree?” Sal asked again.
“Sorry,” I said, and cranked the music way up. The clarinet and horns blasted in the wind as Benny Goodman hit the chorus and we hit the open road. At this hour, rush-hour traffic was going the other way. “You can at least catch the end of the song, huh?”
“Yeah. I like the end.” The wind was stronger now that we had picked up speed. I pressed the button to close my window. Sal fished in his jacket pocket and found the Ray-Ban aviators I’d bought him, then slipped them on like a flyboy.
“Lookin’ good, Uncle Sal,” I shouted over the drums.
“You know, Ree, I kinda liked bein’ a lawyer,” he shouted back. “Maybe we’ll do more lawyer stuff.”
