by Cora Brent
When I glanced up again Anya was drinking out of Jack’s coffee mug while he absently stroked her hair. I had to admit I was pretty grateful to see her happy, even if being in the midst of all that happiness grossed me the fuck out sometimes. No one deserved this kind of joy more than Anya.
It did still seem a little weird that she’d found it with Jack Giordano. He was the eldest brother in the family and I’d always thought of him as old, but that was probably just because he was Claudia’s father. Until recently I had never realized how young he must have been when she was born. Fifteen, Anya had confirmed when I’d asked out of curiosity and the fact left me a little speechless.
What the hell had I been doing when I was fifteen? Trying out my dick for the first time and stealing Anya’s wine coolers so I could get drunk with my buddies in the bleachers behind the high school.
I said a quick prayer to some unnamed force of the universe that none of my epic screwing around had ever had consequences. I couldn’t handle those kinds of consequences, couldn’t even imagine them. It would sure as shit be tough to move a thousand miles away and play ball with some preschooler clinging to me.
That had to be why Jack had always lived in the same house and worked at his dad’s garage. I wondered what that had to be like for Claudia, how it felt knowing she was the reason why he had stayed stuck in the same place, doing the same shit for eternity.
“What time will she be here?” I asked. Anya and Jack gave me identical puzzled looks. We hadn’t been talking about Claudia. I’d only been thinking about her.
Jack caught on and sighed though. I didn’t think it was because of me. Apparently Claudia hadn’t visited much the last few years. Anya had said she wasn’t sure that Claudia would agree to fly out for the wedding. Then she’d bit her lip and admitted Jack’s daughter probably didn’t like her, and not just because she was screwing him. I didn’t want to talk about that but my sister had seemed sad and vulnerable so I told her not to worry about it, that Claudia had always been a bitch anyway, which wasn’t really true.
“Rocco’s picking her up,” Jack said and checked his watch. “Her flight doesn’t get into La Guardia until four.”
Anya was eyeing me. “So are you gonna be okay with us gone for almost a week?”
I rolled my eyes. “You serious? Jesus, I’m nineteen, Anya. In two months there will be about ten states between us and I’ll be on my own.”
My sister slumped a little at my words. She wanted the world for me, but was still having a hard time with the idea that I was going to look for it so far away.
“Hey,” said Jack softly as he gently tipped her chin up. “You’ve got me, baby.”
She smiled at him and wrapped her arms around his neck. Jack really didn’t look old at all, especially not when he hugged my sister. He was thirty-eight, twelve years older than his bride, but he could pass for much younger. He had a thick head of dark hair, could bench press two fifty and wore such a perpetual rascally grin it was tough not to like him.
Anya and Jack got together at a time when things were pretty low for us. Mom had been dead nearly two years and the only money coming in was from Anya’s waitressing job. The bank was threatening to foreclose on the house while my sister grew increasingly thin and drained from trying to figure out how to keep me in Lutztown High for another year so I could graduate. She wouldn’t even let me get a job to help out because she worried my grades and my pitching might suffer.
Jack drove by one day when I was trying to figure out how to make a forty-year-old lawn mower work long enough to cut back the small forest growing in our front yard. He parked by the curb, strolled across the lawn, looked at the innards of the Reagan-era rusty relic and told me he would be back in five minutes.
It actually took less than five minutes for him to return with a gleaming mechanized monster that made short work of the mess in the front yard. Then he handed me a rake and together we filled eight black garbage bags with grass and fallen autumn leaves. Somewhere in the middle of all that Anya crept outside. She chewed on her fingernail and watched Jack until he looked up and saw her there. He stopped what he was doing, leaned on the wooden rake handle and stared at her a good long time.
“When did you get so beautiful?” he asked softly.
Even though everyone knew Jack was kind of a dog about women, when he talked to Anya he sounded awed, completely sincere. He took us both out to dinner that night. Then he took Anya out alone the next night. And the night after that. I’d never really seen love happen up close like that. It was amazing and awkward all at once. Anya regained the golden spark she’d lost some years back when she struggled under the weight of being a caregiver to a dying woman and a surrogate parent to an unruly teenager. In a way I was jealous that Jack was able to ease her burdens in a way that I couldn’t. I had sworn up and down that I would make it to the major leagues, that I would bring home cargo vans full of cash and make sure my sister never had to worry about anything ever again. But that was still a long way away. Too fucking long.
There was so much owed on the house in delinquent payments and back taxes that Anya had to let it go at the end of the winter. But by then Jack had asked her to marry him and we moved into his house around the block. Jack didn’t bat an eye over keeping a roof over my head, but I was glad no one objected when I asked to take the garage apartment. It had belonged to Jack when he remained living at home so his folks could help him raise Claudia. It had no bathroom but it was semi-private so I didn’t have to listen to the walls shaking while the two lovebirds went screw-happy.
I chewed my egg sandwich in silence while Jack and Anya stared sappily at each other, probably thinking honeymoon thoughts that I really hoped they would keep to themselves.
The sound of shuffling slippers reached my ears and Jack’s grandfather wandered in with his brown pajamas hanging off his skinny frame and a shock of white hair sticking out of his head. Everyone else in the world called him ‘Papa’ so I called him that too.
He touched Jack on the shoulder and said, “You get that transmission done, Car?” He’d long ago forgotten that his son, Carmine, was dead. He had dementia.
“Almost,” Jack answered cheerfully even though he probably didn’t have any idea what Papa was talking about.
I rose from the chair and a fraction of a second later Papa sank into it. He didn’t seem to see me. I stood by the door and finished eating my egg sandwich. Papa wasn’t in any shape to take care of himself so the plan was that Claudia was going to hang around all week while Anya and Jack were on their honeymoon. The idea that Claudia was going to be so close got me excited again so I rinsed off my plate and excused myself to go take a shower.
For all I knew the years hadn’t been good to Claudia Giordano, but there was no harm in a little imagination. I had the hugest one-sided crush on her from the time I got interested in tits. She didn’t have the biggest set around or the even the hottest body in the county, but there was just something about the way her big brown eyes coolly surveyed the world as she tossed her thick hair over her shoulder and unleashed a torrent of profanity-laced sarcasm. Damn, she’d been something. I hoped to hell she still was. Would be nice to have a week of in-house pussy.
All I knew about Claudia these days was that she lived in Arizona and had some kind of nuclear blow up with the limp-dick dude she was supposed to marry. He’d been filmed feeling up another chick or something.
She was probably looking to feel better about all that.
And hell yes, I could help her feel better about it.
What a god almighty privilege it would be to get Claudia on her back. I would eagerly shove that hot joystick inside her while I sucked those soft tits with her her hands yanking on my hair as she begged me, (begged me!) not to stop. And oh yeah, I would insist on making her beg for awhile before I got her off. I couldn’t wait to hear her beg…
FUUUUUCK!!!
I hoped no one was standing near the bathroom door because a loud groan escaped me as I
finished off into the warm shower stream. I had to lean against the tile for a few seconds because I had just spent myself hard and needed to catch my breath.
When I started to feel normal again I lathered up my chest and whistled an ancient Bon Jovi tune while I got cleaned up. After I dried off and got dressed I wiped off the mirror on the medicine cabinet and blinked at my reflection.
I looked too much like my father. He’d split when I was five and Mom had already started stumbling around. It was obvious by then that the disease had found her, as she had always known it would. She watched her mother die from it and now she would die from it too. Slowly. My dad cried a lot and said he couldn’t stand to watch. Then one day he was just gone. On that morning Anya was sitting alone in the kitchen when I woke up. She swiped at her watery blue eyes and told me to get dressed because we were walking to Bagel Box. She marched me down there with her head up, bought a dozen bagels, and then sat me at the kitchen table while she made me an egg sandwich.
Robert Malone sent money but he wasn’t regular about it and most of the time all we had to rely on was Mom’s disability check. He resurfaced one wintry day when I was thirteen. He was waiting in the front yard when I got home from school and he held his arms out, like I was the same five-year-old kid he’d left behind eight years earlier. By then Mom couldn’t walk, could barely talk, and Anya was stretching herself thin to keep us all in the house. I didn’t feel like playing at some imitation of a family reunion. I spat at my father’s feet and elbowed past him as the smile vanished from his inexplicably suntanned face. He sporadically continued to send money for a few more years and then just stopped, like he’d been working with an eraser since the day he walked out the front door and everything that was left of us had finally been removed. Or he might have been dead but I hoped not. I hoped he was alive somewhere and in pain.
Anya and Jack weren’t in the kitchen anymore when I headed back that way. Papa was sitting at the table alone with a bowl of maple oatmeal.
“Today’s Wednesday,” he said without looking at me.
“Yeah,” I agreed even though it was Friday.
He brought a spoonful of oatmeal to his lips, rolled it around in his mouth for a while and then swallowed. “How’s your girl these days?”
I didn’t know who he thought I was or what girl he figured I had. When Mom’s disease started messing with her head she never mistook me for anyone else. She forgot me altogether. Sometimes when I walked into the room her eyes would get this kind of panicked glaze because her mixed up brain had decided I was a stranger, an intruder.
“She’s fine,” I told Papa. “I’m seeing her tonight.”
“That’s good,” he nodded. Then he rose from the chair, farted loudly and shuffled back down the hall to the bedroom that I knew had once been Claudia’s.
I returned to the garage for a while but felt stifled, almost hyper. I found my phone and texted some of my buddies from the team to see if they wanted to meet and toss around a ball for a while. They all had better things to do so I headed out to the field behind the high school alone. Jack had given me the use of a wheezing old Malibu he’d had sitting around at the shop and I was damn grateful for the wheels. The air conditioner made the engine stall so I just avoided turning it on. I drove the two miles to Lutztown High and parked in the empty lot. As I jogged onto the field, I was depressed for a second when I realized I wouldn’t ever pitch from that mound again. I took a ball from the pile I’d stuffed into a duffel bag, drew back and hurled it knuckleball-style at the chain link backstop. Then I did the same thing with every other ball in the bag. I paused long enough to gather them up and then rocketed a series of sinkers.
By that time the sun was getting pretty high so I scooped everything back in the bag and decided to coax the old Malibu out to the beach. I’d worked up an appetite though so first I stopped at Delgato’s Pizza and shoved two slices in my mouth. Marie, Delgato’s busty daughter who’d graduated the year before me, was behind the counter and in a chatty mood. All I wanted to do was eat and get out of there but she kept trying to make it a social event.
“So you think you’ll go pro, Easton?” she asked me and hunched on the counter so I could see halfway down her shirt. I didn’t feel bad about looking at what was right there on offer. Marie smiled at me, showing her snaggletooth was hosting a speck of oregano.
“If I’m lucky,” I said smoothly, and popped the plastic lid off my drink so I could chug the soda.
“There’s all kinds of ways to get lucky, Easton,” Marie said and I chewed on an ice cube while trying to puzzle out if she was talking dirty or was just grasping for shit to say. Either way it didn’t matter because I was done eating and Marie didn’t really do much for me. I thanked her for the good service and left her a nice tip, which she frowned at. I hoped I hadn’t insulted her. I hadn’t meant to. She was all right. And if I ever got bored enough I might be back for more than pizza.
I opened up all the windows in the car and enjoyed the breeze on the parkway. The lots down by the beach were packed but I found a spot after a few minutes. As I headed over to the boardwalk I was slowed down by a family of four who were right in front of me. The mom and dad were fortyish, the girl was around ten and the boy probably about six. They were loaded down with plastic pails and shovels and those inflatable arm things. Walking behind them was like getting caught in a jet wash of sunscreen.
Still, I made no move to get around the little family. The kids were excited and smiling. The parents walked hand in hand and gazed at their spawn with proud affection. And then suddenly I was sick of being close to them so I quickened my pace and cut a wide arc, surging ahead without looking back.
I was part of that family once. Me and Anya, and Mom and Dad. I didn’t remember how old I was when it was explained to me that my mother was a ticking time bomb.
Somehow it seemed like I’d always known.
It was deadly and it was genetic. Somewhere in my mother’s body was a recipe for slow destruction. It stretched back through an untold number of generations and usually struck between the ages of thirty and forty-five although the symptoms could begin earlier. Once the hands started shaking and the mind started going there was no stopping it. From there it usually took anywhere from five years to a decade to die.
And here’s the real hell of it; any child born to a parent who carried the gene would have a fifty percent chance of being afflicted.
I pulled my shirt off and let the full force of the summer sun find my skin. I was damn well not going to waste a day like this by brooding. This was a happy time. My sister was marrying a good guy who’d brought her smile back. In eight weeks I would be a college freshman and I planned to bring my best stuff. I would make it to the minors and from there I wouldn’t let up until I got the call to join the big leagues. It would happen. I wouldn’t let anything stand in the way.
Unthinkingly I flexed my left elbow and was satisfied that there was none of the troubling stiffness I’d been feeling on and off again. I’d been more worried about it than I let on to anyone.
I had always loved the beach. When I was a kid we used to come down here all the time in all seasons. There was something particularly serene and beautiful about the beach in winter. The wind would be so fierce you’d worry it might blow a hole through you but the angry power of the cold waves was hypnotic. So you’d just stand there. And watch.
I walked all the way down to a less occupied section of the beach. In certain spots on crystal clear days you could make out the ghostly skyline of Manhattan. But a haze had come out of nowhere, dimming the sun and taking a little bit of the magic out of the day. I lingered on the boardwalk for a good while, gazing out at a distant sailboat bobbing in the waves, before I started the long walk back to the car.
By the time I got back home it was getting close to dinnertime. I knew Anya was planning on serving pulled pork sandwiches and bowls of macaroni salad. Jack’s brothers, Rocco and Getty, would also be around to hang out with Claud
ia and go over plans for the wedding tomorrow.
I heard a thump and felt one of the balls escape from the bag and roll into my foot. I grabbed it off the floor mat before closing the door to the car. As I headed toward the house I tossed it lightly in the air and caught it a few times. I paused because the rumble of the engine at my back was unmistakable. It was Rocco’s Mustang.
Anya and Jack must have been waiting at the window because they opened the screen door even before Rocco cut the engine. Anya was holding onto Jack and giggling. I understood that she was nervous. She had every right to be. Claudia was still Jack’s daughter even if they weren’t close. Anya would have to find a way to smooth over whatever old grudges stood between them.
Claudia Giordano managed to stumble as she tried to exit Rocco’s car. I heard a rip and saw a peachy flash of upper thigh as she cursed and pushed her skirt down. She glanced at me but didn’t show even a flicker of recognition.
I, on the other hand, would have known her anywhere.
There was no reason to worry about saggy tits. She was what she’d always been; a fucking knockout who couldn’t hide it if she tried.
Claudia gave me a second look and her brown eyes widened.
Yeah that’s right, you know who I am, I told her with a silent nod.
And baby, this shit’s about to get real.
CHAPTER THREE
CLAUDIA
I yelled at Rocco when he sped out of the terminal like a bat escaping from hell.
“You trying to kill us both, you asshole?”
Rocco grinned and dodged the Queens traffic. “No. I’ve missed you, Claud.”
