“Yeah, it’s not the best test. But it’s a start.”
He sat down, and Rochester rested his head in Felix’s lap. “I’ll look over your results and find tutorials you can do online to improve the areas where you’re weak.”
“I appreciate yaw help. You’ve given me some light at the end of the tunnel.” He started to rise.
“Hold on,” I said. “You’ve got homework.”
“For real?”
I laughed. “Get used to it, if you want to go back to school.” I handed him the printout about the goals and objectives of the vet tech program. “As you read this, look up any words you aren’t familiar with, and write out a brief description, in your own words.”
He gave me his email address, [email protected], and we agreed that I’d send him some tutorial links once I reviewed his test results, and that we’d meet again in about a week. “Next week, can you come to my house in Stewart’s Crossing?” I asked. “Eastern will be closed for Christmas vacation.”
“Sure.” He stood up. “I never knew guys like you when I was inside. Maybe I would have come out better.”
We shook again. “I’ve seen you with Rochester. I think you came out just fine.”
The big golden sat on his haunches and watched Felix go, then slumped back to the floor. I logged into the writing lab and looked up Felix’s results. From his answers I could tell he had no clue what the rules were for comma usage, so I found a good online tutorial with lots of practice exercises on the subject.
Late that afternoon when Rochester saw me begin putting on my layers—sweater, coat, scarf, gloves and so on, he knew we were ready to head home, and he began jumping around me. “I’m working as fast as I can, puppy,” I grumbled.
He helped by retrieving his leash from the desk and bringing it to me in his mouth. “Thank you,” I said, taking it from him before it got soaked in saliva. A lesson learned.
We took a brisk walk around the property before getting in the car. It was fully dark by then, and the couple of lights on stanchions cast eerie shadows. I already felt very proprietorial about the complex, and I was looking forward to the time when it would be humming with students and faculty.
When we got home, Lili was lying on the sofa, snoring lightly. Rochester hurried over to her and licked her face, and she awoke. “Tough day at school?” I asked. I sat down beside her and lifted her bare feet into my lap.
“Grades were due at three o’clock. Just like the end of every semester, I spent the whole afternoon going around the department making sure all the faculty there were inputting them, and calling the adjuncts who hadn’t put theirs in yet. I swear, I wish there was an obedience school for faculty members.”
“I can imagine,” I said. “Professor, sit! Stay! Enter your grades!”
I began to massage her feet, and she groaned in pleasure. “That feels so good.”
Rochester kept trying to nose his way in, and finally gave up and sprawled beside us. “I couldn’t get hold of the woman who taught pottery,” Lili said. “I am never hiring her again, even if I have to learn to throw pots myself.”
We sat together for a while, talking about our days, and then Lili sat up. “We should light the candles, and then have dinner.”
It took me a moment to remember that she wanted to light the menorah for the first night of Hanukkah. Fortunately I’d anticipated the holiday, and had found and wrapped presents for both my sweethearts.
We walked into the kitchen, where Lili had set up an eight-branched brass candelabra, with the Lion of Judah as its base. Rochester followed us, then sat on his haunches on the white tile floor of the kitchen, staring expectantly up at us as if he figured the ceremony we were about to begin had to include a treat for him.
“You’re sure Rochester can’t get up there and knock it over,” I said.
Lili leaned down to pet the golden’s square head. “He’s a good boy,” she said. “He’ll leave the candles alone.” She grabbed a dog biscuit from the jar and handed it to Rochester, and he slumped to the floor, chewing noisily. “See, he’s distracted.”
She turned back to the menorah and placed one thin blue candle on the slot on the far right, and another for the shamash, or leader candle, in the center. She lit a match and touched it to the shamash, and I joined her in reciting the blessings I had memorized as a boy, honoring God, who had commanded us to kindle the Hanukkah lights.
Lili had a sweet tenor voice that blended with my baritone as we sang all three of the first night blessings, thanking God for doing wondrous things for our people in times of old, and for sustaining us and bringing us to this joyous season.
“I don’t know that I’ve ever heard you sing before,” Lili said when we were finished, and the two candles were glowing softly on the counter.
“I sing in the car with Rochester sometimes,” I said. “Sometimes he sings along.”
“But not in Hebrew,” Lili said. She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. “Happy Hanukkah, Steve.”
After Mary and I married she bought a modern Plexiglas menorah and expensive beeswax candles made at a resettlement kibbutz in Israel. She put a veil over her head and waved her hands over the candles as she said the blessings, in a tradition as old as time. But after she miscarried for the second time, she put aside all celebrations, because they reminded her too much of what we had lost.
By the time I got to prison all my religious feeling was gone, but a volunteer chaplain contacted me soon after my sentence began, and to break the monotony I began attending the services she organized.
She brought me a copy of the Old Testament, and I read bits and pieces. Prison rules allowed me only ten books at a time, and the Bible became something I could dip into when I’d finished everything else and had to wait for new books to arrive.
Sometimes when the chaplain had a few minutes, she and I talked. One day, I asked her, “In Exodus, God says, ‘None shall miscarry or be barren in your land; I will fulfill the number of your days.’ So how can I believe in a God who would say that, and then take those two innocent babies from Mary and me?”
“We can’t know why God does things,” she said. “All we can do is believe that He has a plan, and that he loves us.” She took my hand and squeezed. “Did the doctor ever tell you the reason for the miscarriages?”
“Chromosomal abnormalities,” I said. “That when the egg and the sperm met, there were some problems with one or both of them, and the fetus didn’t develop properly.”
She nodded. “So God was looking out for those babies, making sure that they were not born into lives of pain and suffering.”
“That’s one way to think of it,” I said.
I remembered something Mary had often said to me – It’s not all about you, Steve, and I began to accept those miscarriages in my heart. They were not about me, or about Mary. The fetuses had failed to thrive because they could not, and even though my sperm or Mary’s egg caused the problem, it was each baby’s life, not ours.
From then on, I began to take comfort in what I read. Psalm 34, in particular, resonated with me: “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.”
By the time I met Lili, I had returned to some level of belief, and we often shared bits of our Jewish upbringing with each other. “Wherever my family moved, we always had a menorah,” she said, as we watched the candles flicker. “Cuba, Mexico, Kansas.”
Lili was a descendant of Eastern European Jews, as I was, but her grandparents had been unable to immigrate directly to the United States before World War II, so instead had landed in Havana. Lili had been born there, too, but had moved to Mexico when she was five and then Kansas City at ten, so she was fluent in both Spanish and English and often peppered her language with Yiddish expressions.
“Thank you for my iPad,” I said. When it had come in a few days before, I couldn’t wait for the actual holiday to open it. “Let me see. I think I have a gift for you somewhere.”
I grabbed a wo
oden chair from the kitchen table and stepped up. “Hmm, what’s this? Why, I think it’s a chew toy for … Rochester!” He jumped up and put his paws on my lower legs. “Mama Lili will open it for you.”
I handed her the toy, a square rubber thing in the shape of a house, with a chimney stuck to the top. “I’m still not sure about that Mama Lili business,” Lili said.
“You want to be Mommy?”
“I’ll get back to you on that,” she said, as she got the scissors to cut open the plastic shell around the toy. Rochester couldn’t control his enthusiasm, dancing around both of us. When she got the toy out and handed it to him, he grabbed it between his jaws and scurried up to the stair landing where he began to chew noisily.
“I was sure there was something here for you, too,” I said, as I pretended to rummage. “Oh, here it is.”
I handed her the square box, which I’d wrapped in paper festooned with menorahs and dreidels. She carefully slit the seam, and I said, “Go on, rip the paper. You know you want to.”
She laughed. “Fine.” She ripped it open. “It’s a lens for my iPhone!”
“Four lenses in one,” I said. “I know you take pictures sometimes with your phone when you don’t have a camera with you. This way you’ll have a 10x magnifier, a 15x, a fish-eye, and a wide-angle, all in one.”
“I love it!” she said. I got down from the chair and we kissed. “Thank you! I can’t wait to try it out.”
“Well, there’s a dog on the stairs who loves to have his picture taken.”
She picked up her phone from the counter and began fiddling with the lens. “You go up there with him. I’ll take some shots of both of you.”
I joined the big golden dog on the landing, sitting down beside him. He ignored me at first, fixated on the rubber house, but I wrapped my arm around him and pulled him close, and he began to lick my ear, then jump on me.
In the background I heard the soft click of Lili’s camera phone. I laughed and rolled around with the dog, and I thought it was the best Hanukkah I’d had since I was a kid.
6 – Ghost Town
Wednesday morning Rochester and I went for a walk, and he moved more easily, which meant that the treatment was working on his infected nail bed. I stopped on the way back into the townhouse to pick up the papers from the driveway.
The front page headline in both papers read “Feds Raid Bucks Grow Houses,” and it was about a DEA operation in Bucks County. Though the southern end of the county is heavily developed, the north end was primarily rural. According to the article, the DEA had raided several isolated houses about twenty miles north of Stewart’s Crossing, where a Philadelphia-based drug operation had been growing marijuana under special lights.
Whenever I see an article like that, with a long list of those arrested, I can’t help but look at each name. I couldn’t help remembering when my name had appeared in those circumstances. The only one that rang a bell at all, though, was someone named Yunior Zeno, who was among those who had been picked up.
I sat back in my chair and Rochester looked up. Where had I heard that name? Was he someone I’d met in Stewart’s Crossing? A student at Eastern? I couldn’t remember, but it made me uneasy to think that I might have come in contact with some North Philly drug lord.
I ate breakfast with Lili. “You have any plans for today?” I asked.
“Work on my photojournalism course,” she said. “I want to talk to Rick and see if he can introduce me to that homeless man he mentioned who lives behind the florist. I’d like to take some pictures of him and where he lives, maybe get a bit of oral history from him. I think it would be a good model for what I’d like students to do.”
“Just be careful,” I said. “Don’t the statistics say that some big percent of homeless people have mental problems?”
“I’ve faced down drug dealers in Mexico and armed militias in Lebanon,” she said. “I can handle a homeless man in Stewart’s Crossing.”
That didn’t reassure me much, but I knew that I had to trust in Lili’s instincts. I spent the morning preparing purchase orders for ads in magazines advertising the programs I was planning at Friar Lake. When I checked my email after lunch, Lili had sent me a shot of the area behind the florist’s. “Great photo session. Lots to tell you tonight,” she wrote.
At least she was safe, I thought. Her homeless project reminded me of the conversation we’d had with Felix Logato about the time he lived on the streets, and I went back to the results of the grammar tests he’d taken, to see what else he had to work on.
Another common problem I found with Eastern students, and with Felix as well, was a failure to understand tense shifts – jumping from present tense to past and back, sometimes within a single sentence. I thought it came from replicating what they heard, often missing the –ed at the end of words.
I found more exercises for Felix to do in that area, and emailed them to him. I was worried that I hadn’t heard back from him about the summary I’d asked him to write, but I hoped that meant he was taking his time and trying to do his best.
It was misty and overcast as Rochester and I drove home that night, and the occasional exterior lights seemed eerie in the darkness. I remembered that article about grow houses and wondered if I was passing any of them as yet undiscovered. Would that mean that Philly criminals were cruising the roads of Bucks County now, armed with all kinds of weapons? What was next? Gang-related shootouts on Main Street? Desperate addicts breaking into pharmacies and doctors’ offices? I knew there was drug activity everywhere, but I was surprised that the operation was so organized and well-hidden.
When I got home, Lili and I lit the Hanukkah candles together. “How was your day?” I asked. “You went to see that homeless guy?”
“Rick drove over with me and introduced me. His name is Jerry Cheseboro, and he grew up in Massachusetts. Moved here with his wife about ten years ago because her job transferred her.”
She had picked up a rotisserie chicken from the grocery for us, and while she prepared a salad to go with it, I put the chicken on a platter and nuked some frozen potatoes.
“Two years ago, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and she died a year ago,” she continued. “He couldn’t afford to keep the house on his salary at the florist’s so he moved in with a friend. But then the friend kicked him out and he lost his job.”
She turned to me. “Life is so tenuous, you know? One day you’re happy and then the next everything falls apart.”
I took her in my arms. “We’ve been very fortunate, sweetheart. Not everyone has had the opportunities we have. No one can know what’s going to happen, but at least we can be prepared. It’ll take a lot of bad luck to knock us down.”
She kissed me. “I love you, Steve. I’m so glad we found each other.”
“Right back at you,” I said, and the microwave timer dinged.
After dinner Lili helped me once again to wash and bandage Rochester’s paw. He was almost healed but I wanted to give him one more treatment. When my phone rang, my hands were still wet, so Lili answered for me. “I’m so glad you called, Edith,” she said. “And I’m delighted that you’re back home. I always feel better around all my own things.”
She sat on the couch to talk, and I played with Rochester on the floor. “We’ll come over to see you tomorrow night,” Lili said into the phone. “I’ll make you a lasagna. You’ll eat that, won’t you?” She laughed in response to something Edith said. “And yes, we’ll bring Rochester with us.”
As Lili hung up, I sat in the ugly but comfortable recliner that had my dad’s butt-print permanently impressed into it. “Edith’s back home, with an aide to help her out through the holidays,” Lili said. “You don’t mind if we go see her tomorrow, do you?”
“Not at all. I’m glad she’s feeling better.”
Lili patted the couch next to her. “You know how much I hate that recliner,” she said. “Don’t make me look at you in it.”
“Fine. I can take a hint.” I moved o
ver to sit beside Lili, and Rochester scrambled up to take my place in the chair. Lili and I scooted around so that we were facing each other, our legs crossed.
“It’ll be nice to have a puppy for a few days,” she said. “That Brody is adorable.”
“Obviously you have never had a puppy around,” I said. “They get into everything. They chew things. They pee in the house. They jump on people. And Rochester’s never had another dog here for more than a few hours. You watch, this house is going to become a war zone so fast it will make your head spin.”
“Come on, it won’t be that bad.”
“I guarantee you, by the time Joey and Mark get back from their cruise and he goes home, you’ll be shouting hosannas of praise and we will be back to a one-dog household.”
“You never know,” Lili said. “There could be another furry bundle of joy waiting for you on Christmas morning.”
I leaned forward and kissed her. “Then it’s a good thing we’re Jewish,” I said. “Any Christmas bundles are undoubtedly at the wrong house.”
* * *
By mid-day Thursday, Friar Lake was a ghost town. Only a few cars and trucks remained in the parking lot, and as I walked Rochester around I couldn’t hear any of the usual sounds of hammering and clanking. We found Joey Capodilupo in the abbey chapel, sitting on the floor refinishing a wooden pew.
Joey and I had made a deal earlier in the fall. The pews didn’t fit into the new design for the chapel, but they were too good to throw away. If Joey would refinish a few for seating around the property, he could have the rest to restore and sell through Mark’s antique store. He’d completed three so far, two for us and one for him.
“Where is everybody?” I asked. I was glad that I had my coat on, because it was chilly in the abbey. Rochester didn’t seem to mind; he sprawled right down on the cold stone floor at my feet.
“I managed to get all the guys shifted over to jobs that will be working next week, and the week after. Don’t worry, they’ll be back after New Year’s.”
Dog Have Mercy Page 5
