The Antiques

by Kris D'Agostino

  When she heard about George, Manuela swept in, weeping and embracing and making the sign of the cross. “I pray, Miss Charlie! We pray!”

  “Thank you,” Charlie said.

  Abbott was so enraptured with his new backpack that he didn’t notice her tears. Part of her hoped he would intuit her sadness and offer a consoling hug, a pat on the head, anything. He remained his usual stoic self, though, seated at the table and splashing syrup. Rey sat sorting papers into his satchel. They hadn’t spoken since the couch incident and she couldn’t have cared less. She left Abbott with Manuela and took off without saying a word to Rey.

  On Hollywood Boulevard she filled the tank and went next door to Umami Burger. She pulled on the doors, was surprised to find Umami Burger wasn’t open at 8:13 a.m., then felt embarrassed and hoped no one had seen her try to go into Umami Burger at 8:13 a.m. She ran back to the car and drove over to McDonald’s and ordered an Egg McMuffin and one of those hash brown bar things, parked, and sat attacking the food in large, sloppy bites. A few blocks later she stopped to lean out the door and vomit into a sewer grate. Concerned she might also have expelled an undigested Enabletal, she took two more.

  Her father was dead. Her marriage was dying and her son suffered obstacle after obstacle. His life would be more difficult than the average person’s, and let’s be honest, the average person’s life wasn’t all that easy. Her sweet little guy, her cowboy, and she wanted everything to be happy for him. That was her job as his mother. If she failed at that task, what did it say about her?

  She found Melody stomping around her trailer and throwing things.

  “I’ve had a lot of wine,” Melody said when Charlie came in.

  “It’s not even nine o’clock!”

  Melody explained that she had received a call from one of her lawyers informing her that after the drink-throwing nightclub debacle, Patrick had filed an emergency request to amend their joint custody agreement, citing “mental- and job-related stress and gross concerns for the child’s immediate safety.” So much for quelling the beef. Melody had since learned that because the petition was pending, she wouldn’t be able to take Dustin to Italy.

  “We’ve gotta get you to set,” Charlie said.

  “I don’t want to go to set!” Melody said. “I’m freaking!”

  Charlie took Melody out around to the side of one of the studio warehouses. “Take a deep breath.”

  “I know! I’m selfish!” Melody sobbed. “I can’t help it. I’m a shitty person. I’m a shitty mother.”

  “You aren’t. I wasn’t going to say that. You’re a good person. You’re perfect to Dustin. He loves you. Just take it easy.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “I’ll tell you what to do. Focus on the film. Finish the film. Then you can deal with Patrick and all this other shit.”

  A golf cart zoomed past, shuttling two men dressed in togas and laurel wreaths.

  Melody threw her arms around Charlie and began to weep. Charlie heard the unmistakable click of a camera and spun to catch the tip of a lens retreating into a potted palm frond. She charged and pushed aside the leaves to reveal a paparazzo squatting behind the lens of his digital camera. He kept shooting, stumbling backward to get away from her. She stepped into his line of sight. He tried leaning one way, then the other. Charlie put out her hand and pushed the front of the camera. “Touch me, I’ll sue!” he yelled.

  “Oh yeah?” Charlie grabbed him by the shirt collar, drew back her hand, and punched him in the jaw. The explosion of pain in her knuckles was spectacular. “Oh my God, that hurt!” She shook out her hand.

  “Holy shit!” Melody hopped up and down with her hand in front of her mouth.

  “You cunt!”

  The guy fled, narrowly avoiding another zooming golf cart, this one shepherding an astronaut and a large, many-limbed alien. Melody screamed after him, pointing a finger, “You tell Patrick I’m going to cut his cock off!”

  Charlie’s fist had gone numb.

  “Oh my God, oh my God,” Melody said. “We’re going to jail. I just know it. They’ll take Dustin. I bet Patrick sent that guy, knowing we’d fuck it up, and then he can come now and arrest me and take Dustin and I can’t do anything and we’re fucked. I’m fucked—”

  Charlie slapped her. “Get a grip! You lunatic. Why would they arrest you? I hit him! You didn’t do anything. You never do anything! All you do is whine and complain like a grown-up baby!” Charlie waved her throbbing hand over the studio’s general vicinity. “You’re all a bunch of babies. You know what? You know what? Fuck it. I’m done. I quit.”

  “What?”

  “I quit.”

  “You can’t,” Melody said. “I need you.” Charlie threw up her hands. She started back toward the car. “Where are you going?”

  “My father’s dead,” Charlie said. “I’m going to New York.”

  * * *

  Armie found her sitting on Josef’s old bed, holding the urn. He eased the urn out of her hands and put it on the floor.

  “Mom. Where’s the letter?”

  “Which?”

  “Dad’s letter?”

  “It’s in his desk.”

  “We need to know what it says. What he wanted us to do.”

  “We need to bury him, Armie.”

  “You know that’s not what he wanted.”

  “We need a priest to say a funeral Mass. Your father—”

  “Didn’t want to be dumped in a clay pot with antennas.”

  “You think I’m selfish?”

  “He’s dead and he doesn’t have much of a say, so I think we need to do what he wanted us to do. Let’s get the letter.”

  “You get it. I’m not going in there.”

  He didn’t want to leave her alone. He wished his sister were there. She would know what to do. Charlie always had things under control. He didn’t have a clue as to what he was supposed to be doing. He suggested they take a walk to check on the store.

  “It’s raining,” she said.

  “So? We could use some fresh air.”

  He carried a flashlight and wore a hooded sweatshirt and the old boots. There was no point in taking umbrellas. The eaves of all the buildings gushed. The sewer grates at the corners were like small ponds. Ana trudged along in a glossy green slicker beneath which she wore loose tan slacks and a gray sweater. He took her hand and led her around the deeper puddles.

  There was no power on the east end of Warren Street. They saw a tree with its trunk cracked, its upper mass sprawled across the middle of the street, perfectly positioned between two parked cars, damaging neither. A block ahead was another fallen tree. This one had squashed a pickup and the pickup looked like a flattened soda can. Paper and branches and windblown garbage littered the sidewalk and the street. A telephone pole sagged at an unnatural angle.

  “Oh, Armie,” his mother said. “The window.”

  The front window of the shop was gone. A jagged portion of glass along the bottom edge displayed the lower bits of the gold-leafed signage. All that was left was GEOR. She watched Armie kick in the remaining glass.

  “It’s my fault,” Ana said.

  “It’s not your fault.”

  The store’s interior was dark and eerie. What they found in the basement made Ana cry out and wobble on the stairs. A lake down there; a watery, antiques-strewn chaos. All the stock—lamps, credenzas, mirrors, sofas, bookshelves, vases, knickknacks, glass and clay artifacts, baubles—was half submerged in dark, viscous water.

  “Don’t go down there,” Ana pleaded.

  “It’s okay.” He descended, guided by the flashlight. Dust motes flitted. Ana teetered behind him. He danced the light from one soaked relic to another. It was like a horror movie, she thought. She would not have been surprised if he cast the beam upon a lurking monster.

  “You’ll be electrocuted!”

  “I’m not getting in it,” he called over his shoulder.

  They went back to the Warren Street house. Sh
e called the insurance company, got the office voice mail, and left an awkward message she was certain would only baffle whomever listened to it.

  * * *

  Ana said she was tired. He helped her up to the bedroom and she lay down on the bed in her wet clothes. He could not bring himself to embrace her. He felt shameful for that. “I’m going to check on Shadow,” he said. “I’ll just be right downstairs.”

  “I’m alone. I see that now.”

  “You aren’t alone. I’m right here. And Charlie will be here. Soon.”

  “He was always so angry. I did love him, though. Even with all the fighting, I loved him.”

  “I know you did. We all did. He didn’t make it easy.” Armie wiped at his eyes.

  “I love you all so much.”

  “We love you too, Mom. I’ll just be right downstairs. If you need me.”

  The kitchen was an ominous silver-gray. He crushed a pill and mixed the powder into a spoonful of applesauce. Shadow hadn’t moved from his bed, or if he had, there was no evidence to indicate he had. Armie knelt and tried to coax the dog to eat. Something in Shadow’s face, the sad-eyed droop, conveyed that he knew George was gone. Dogs were like that: you didn’t have to tell them a thing. They just knew. They smelled it on you. People, on the other hand, you had to tell them things. You had to call them and break the news.

  In the living room he looked at the Magritte. It was hard to make out the floating figures in all that darkness.

  When night came, he and Ana went to Mass. They’d lit hundreds of votive candles and placed them throughout the church. The effect was stunning, and despite the weather, the evening service had drawn a good number of worshippers. Everyone was dour and hushed. They wore rain gear and boots and floppy hats. They spoke in low voices and said to each other, “Is there power at your house?” and “What about you, do you have power?” and “Oh, yes, we have power,” and “Our children came up from the city to ride out the storm with us,” and “It’s been quite fun.”

  Armie saw Audrey, she waved to him, and he waved back.

  He sat listening to Father Chuk and collected his thoughts. Without power there was no organ, just the voice of the soloist—the same large-bosomed woman from his childhood. She sounded haunting and austere in the candlelight. A calm settled over him. A hyperawareness and a clarity of thought.

  A strange new sensation: he was fatherless.

  The homily pertained to the persecution of Jesus Christ and the many connections to be made between his hardships and the hardships now facing the Hudson community at large, as well as many other communities up and down the coast. Father Chuk asked for everyone to pray for those places hit hardest: Far Rockaway, Coney Island, the Jersey Shore. Armie thought it was a fine lecture, timely and appropriate.

  After receiving Communion they returned to their pew. Armie said a quick prayer for his father. He asked God to speed him along to wherever it was he was headed.

  “I need to speak with Father Chuk,” Ana said when Mass ended.

  “Okay, I’ll meet you out front,” Armie told her. As he went down the aisle he passed Audrey, stepping out into the aisle. She wore a simple white dress and a green fleece jacket over it. She smiled when she saw him and her black hair fell into the jacket’s thick collar. They exchanged an awkward embrace. “Do you have power?” he asked.

  “We were lucky.”

  “How’s your grandmother doing?”

  “She slept through the whole thing!”

  “I wish I had!” It was a little joke and he was happy when she smiled. He made a conscious effort to stop fidgeting. Not knowing what else to do with them, he put his hands in his jacket pockets to affect an air of nonchalance. This made him feel foolish, so he took them out and just let them hang there. He looked behind him at the altar.

  “And how’s your father doing?” Audrey asked.

  “He’s . . .” Armie didn’t know how to proceed. He wanted to tell her but didn’t want to drop such a massive emotional bomb so casually. He knew she was a sensitive person and she would take the news badly. He was also uncomfortable because he thought that the knowledge of his father’s death, the sympathy this information would evoke when passed along to Audrey, to anyone, was a form of emotional exploitation on his part. Father Chuk arrived, with Ana behind him.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said in his thick Kenyan-informed English. “Your mother’s just told me. I’d been praying for him and for your family.”

  Armie looked to Audrey, who put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, Armie, what happened?”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t mention it. I . . . He . . . He passed away last night.”

  She threw her arms around him and he felt the guilt solidify. She was hugging him because his father was dead. There was no other reason, he told himself.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Do you need anything? What can I do?”

  He wanted to return her hug, he did, but instead he just stood lamely with his arms dangling at his sides and his voice caught in his throat.

  The candles flitted on the mosaics and the stained glass, and the church was, at that moment, with Audrey holding him and a whimper hitched in his throat, a wonderful and terrifying place.

  - WEDNESDAY -

  JFK had partially reopened. She found a flight. Rey argued against her taking Abbott on such short notice.

  “You go now and I’ll bring Abbott later, when things have settled down and it isn’t so crazy over there. You know what your family’s like when they all get together.”

  “No, Rey, I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me ‘what we’re all like?’ ”

  “Don’t eat my head. It can be a little intense. I don’t know if I want him around that.” Rey’s accent, his little colloquial inaccuracies, had the uncanny power to make his condescending remarks extra condescending.

  They were in the kitchen. Abbott sat regally in his chair, spooning granola onto the floor while singing. What, if anything, he was processing remained a mystery.

  “You’re just turning my own words back around on me. You can hardly handle him when I’m here and now you want to be alone with him?”

  “I’ll have Manuela.”

  “Ha!”

  “I don’t think it’s a good environment to bring him into. He’s vulnerable right now.”

  “I don’t give a shit. He’s coming with me. It’s not up for debate.”

  Rey looked at his phone. “I’m going be late. We’ll talk about this later.”

  “No, we won’t.”

  “Just think about what I’m saying.”

  “Sure. I’ll think about it.” Charlie tapped her chin. “Okay. I’m done. He’s coming with me.”

  Rey took his bag and stooped to kiss Abbott on the forehead.

  “Don’t!” Abbott said with startling authority. He winced and shook his head, sending milk and chewed mush onto Rey’s shirt.

  “Oh, come on!” Rey threw up his hands. “Daddy has to go to work.” He went to the sink and dabbed at the splotches with a wet paper towel.

  “And for your information,” Charlie said to his back, “the expression is ‘don’t bite my head off,’ you smug French a-s-s-h-o-l-e.”

  Rey dropped the paper towel into the sink and left out the back door. She listened to him get in his car and then to the sound of the car reversing out of the driveway. Without clearing the table she took Abbott upstairs, wiped him down, and dressed him in his trademark blue pants and striped shirt. She was not surprised that he wanted to hold his new backpack.

  “I love ponies,” he said.

  He rubbed the fabric against his cheek. Her love for this little creature, this piece of her that she had carried inside in her belly for eight and half months and that had popped out all early and wrinkled and old-mannish—a miniature intact human being with all his fingers and toes and idiosyncrasies, like all of us—made her teary-eyed. Or was the medication making her teary-eyed? Or was it because her father was dead?

  The idea tha
t her father was no longer alive kept recurring in weird undulating waves. Like she forgot and then some little thing would trigger and she’d remember that no, he is not coming back. And she felt shitty because she hadn’t seen him in months.

  “School?” Abbott asked.

  “Not today, buddy. You and Mommy are taking a trip.”

  “Totally?”

  “Totally.”

  “Horse?”

  “Better! Airplane!”

  He shrugged.

  * * *

  It took negotiating. First on the curb, then in front of an overflowing and noxious Dumpster. “Just tell me what it will take, right now,” Josef said.

  He’d instructed her to “wear something sexy” and she had: a slim black dress, heels, and her hair knotted in a tight bun.

  “I’m not sure there’s anything you have to offer,” Ariel said.

  “Try me.”

  They were standing in front of the One-PASS Inc. offices. He’d made Nora walk back across the bridge with him.

  “Make your girlfriend go with you.” Ariel wiggled her fingers at Nora, who was on the street trying to hail nonexistent taxis. Nora turned to them and put up her hands.

  “There are no taxis!”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “I don’t care who she is.”

  “If this thing falls through, that’s it. My kids out on the street. Their lives ruined. Is that what you want? Do you want to put those two beautiful girls out on the street?”

  “That crap doesn’t work on me.”

  “Okay, I understand that. You’re a smart girl. That’s why I hired you. So let’s back this up. Tell me what you want.”

  “I want my job back.”

  “As far as I’m concerned you never quit.”

  “And a twenty percent raise.”

  “Ten.”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Done.”

  “No wonder your kids hate you.”

  “Only one hates me.”