A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself

by William Boyle

  Mo says, “Shit, sorry, I hadn’t heard that song in forever. ‘Thunder and Lightning.’ Last time, I remember, I was in a supermarket in Salinas, coked up, just wandering the aisles with an open box of Fruit Loops. I went straight to a bar afterward and looked for it on the jukebox, but they didn’t have it. That would have been the eighties. Song was a hit back in the summer of ’72. Chi Coltrane, she’s the singer.” Mo starts singing. “Oooh, what a good thing I’ve got,” that’s the part she’s belting out. “Oh, it’s such a good thing I’ve got! Oh, thunder and lightning, ooohooo! I tell you it’s frightening, oh yeah! Thunder and lightning, ooohooo! Thunder and lightning, I tell you it’s frightening, oh yeah!”

  “We’re in a bit of a bind here, Mo,” Wolfstein says.

  Mo picks up a bottle of wine and takes a long slug. “Nothing you could tell me could bring me down. Mama croaked two days ago, Wolfie. I’m free. That’s why I’m tying one on. Been a nonstop boozefest since I left the hospital. I had Joe Petrovic from the Captain’s Table here last night, otherwise I would’ve called to tell you the news.” She places the wine back on the counter and puts out her hands, showing her palms. Rena sees that Get trash bags is written in black magic marker on her right palm. “You’ve got cigarettes, right?” Mo continues. “Tell me you’ve got cigarettes. Otherwise you’re driving me over to the Shell near ShopRite.”

  “I’ve got smokes,” Wolfstein says.

  “I’m sorry about your mother,” Rena says.

  Mo waves her off. “Shit happens. She was ancient. Had dementia. Point is, I can breathe easy a little for the first time since I moved in with her. No more changing her diapers. No more wiping her ass. No more making her Cream of Wheat. No more cleaning up the coffee and creamer that she spills everywhere. No more talking through a megaphone because she can’t hear me and she won’t put in her hearing aid. No shit, I actually did that. No more listening to her talk about how there’s dead people everywhere. I mean, I know she was hallucinating or dreaming, but it freaks you out at a certain point.” Mo pauses. “I’m sorry,” she says, coming back down to Rena, Lucia, and Wolfstein on the landing and extending her hand to Rena. “I’m Mo Phelan. Me and Wolfie go way, way back.”

  “Rena Ruggiero,” Rena says, shaking Mo’s hand. “And this is my granddaughter, Lucia.”

  Mo turns her gaze to Lucia. “How old are you?”

  “Fifteen,” Lucia says.

  “You’ve got this kind of heavy feeling you’re giving off.” Mo puts her hands over Lucia’s head as if she’s checking for strings or ruffling her aura.

  “What’s happened isn’t good,” Wolfstein says.

  “Well, come on in,” Mo says, strutting back upstairs, motioning for them to follow. “Tell Mo all about it.”

  Wolfstein does all the talking at first. They’re sitting in the living room on plastic-covered sofas under paintings Mo’s mother made before the dementia kicked in. Some fruit. A jar of dill pickles. Fields and farmers. Waterfalls. Wolfstein walks Mo through meeting Rena and explains what Rena was running from. Enzio. The ashtray. She gets to Adrienne, Lucia, Richie, and how the whole mess got set up. She backtracks to cover the Bobby problem. Dumb Bobby with his dumb piece. Crea the madman showing up after Adrienne got shot. What he did. His Vic history. Then the chase on the GWB.

  Mo’s eyes grow wider every time the story takes a turn. She’s smoking cigarette after cigarette from Wolfstein’s pack. Lucia tries to sneak one, but Rena puts a stop to it. Lucia snaps at her again.

  When Wolfstein’s done talking, Mo exhales and drops the smoking filter between her fingers into the empty wine bottle at her feet. “Well, that sure as shit sobered me up a little. So you think the cops’ll come sniffing around up here?”

  “I’d wager they will,” Wolfstein says. “Only a matter of time before one of the neighbors tells them you’re the owner.”

  “And Bobby—I remember that little shit. You said he had out a letter I sent you. How do we know these other guys were chasing you didn’t see it and get my address from the envelope?”

  Wolfstein puts her hand over her mouth. “We don’t. Bobby left it on the counter.”

  “So they’re maybe headed here right now?”

  “It’s a long shot but a possibility, I guess.”

  Lucia jumps to her feet and goes to the window, carrying the briefcase. “Let’s just go now,” she says.

  “Hold on a sec,” Wolfstein says.

  “I’m going to get the gun, at least.”

  “What gun?”

  “In the trunk.”

  “I can’t tell if I like this kid or if she scares me,” Mo says.

  “Who does the gun belong to?” Wolfstein asks.

  Rena: “It’s Richie’s. When we went in the trunk, it was there with the money.”

  Lucia: “I’m not afraid.”

  Wolfstein: “What kind of gun?”

  Lucia shrugs.

  Rena tilts her head and looks under a coffee table holding a gaudy swan lamp and some large-print puzzle books. She notices a bundled diaper. She starts to think about Mo’s mother and feels ashamed that Mo seems happy the old woman is dead and that she’s only really concerned with freedom. Freedom is a strange thing. You get it, you don’t always need it or want it to last. Like her time at Gershwin’s. Nice as it was, by the last couple of days, she was climbing the walls. “A machine gun,” she finally says.

  Wolfstein laughs. Mo does, too, as she lights another of Wolfstein’s Marlboro 100s.

  “I don’t think any of this is funny,” Rena says.

  “It’s not, sweetie,” Wolfstein says, lighting her own cigarette now.

  “It’s definitely not,” Mo says in a scratchy voice. “But it’s fucking exciting.” The last word trailing off in a cough, Rena trying not to watch but watching anyway as the tops of Mo’s old, wrinkled boobs rumble as she talks and laughs and smokes. Her skin is leathery and about as dark as pale Irish skin gets, as if she took the sun in Florida as often as humanly possible, probably sitting topless on a beach chair with one of those aluminum foil reflectors under her chin. Rena is astounded that Mo hasn’t gone to put a top on yet, no matter what their situation is. And the wild beads she’s wearing around her neck—which look as if they were bought at some parking lot market in the East Village thirty years before—only accentuate the boob shimmying.

  “So what are we gonna do?” Wolfstein asks.

  “Well, the way I understand it,” Mo says, crossing her legs, “you guys are pretty much clean. I mean”—she aims her cigarette at Rena—“this one clocked an old perv with an ashtray, and you, Wolfie—well, you’ve got your Florida history that might catch up with you, but I just don’t see how it will if Bobby got clipped. Of course, it’s a shame about—What was her name? Adrienne? Truly a shame. But it’s a good thing you’re not running from the cops. You’re running from these other psychos. If you can avoid them, when the cops finally find you, all you’ve gotta do is say, ‘Look, these are the bad guys you’re looking for. We were hiding from them.’ Right?

  “So, we hide. Worst-case scenario is they have my address and they’re on their way here. We could get in the car and just drive like the kid suggests, but the cops could also be on the way here. Let those two parties figure it out, is what I’m saying. All we’ve gotta do is stay out of sight. Simple: we go next door.”

  “What’s next door?” Rena asks.

  “Next door’s vacant.” Mo jerks a thumb in the direction of the dark, dreary house on their left. “Couple lived there got a divorce a couple of months ago. All these two did was scream at each other. Wife took off to Paradise Island with her hedge-fund boyfriend, husband is balling the Slovenian skank who bartends at Doc Carlisle’s and living with her now. House is up in the air. I don’t know why, exactly, but it’s empty. The husband—Goose, they call him—left a key with me, asked me to let in the gas guy. We pull your stolen car in their garage, leave the house lights off, and just huddle up in the downstairs. If these psych
os ever get to my joint, they see I’m not there, they think you picked me up and we split for parts unknown. In the morning, the cops show.”

  “What if we sabotage them?” Lucia says. “Like rig your door with explosives.”

  “You watch too many movies, kid. One: Where we gonna get explosives? Two: I don’t necessarily want to blow up my mom’s house even though it smells like old-lady diapers.” Mo drops her cigarette in the wine bottle and turns to Wolfstein and Rena: “What do you say?”

  Wolfstein nods to Rena. “I told you she was full of good ideas.”

  Moving next door does seem like something of a solution to Rena. Mo gathers up her boombox, some cassettes, a laptop with a bulky charger cord, two more magnum bottles of wine, a flashlight, a box of Saltines, and throws it all in a canvas ShopRite bag with a handle that’s about to snap. She takes off her beads and finally puts on a top, a T-shirt that reads GOOD GIRLS GO TO HEAVEN, BAD GIRLS GO BACKSTAGE, and then she leads Rena and Lucia downstairs through sliding glass doors into the backyard, illuminating their path with the flashlight, while Wolfstein goes to move the Eldorado. Lucia is still clutching the briefcase with Richie’s money.

  From what Rena can see, Mo’s backyard—or, more accurately, her mother’s backyard—is full of ceramic birdbaths, marble gnome statues, bubble stakes, and overturned patio furniture dirtied with puddle residue. Rena almost stomps a citronella candle in a metal bucket. They tread lightly across the grass in the dark, hopping a small chain of bushes into the yard that belongs to the divorced neighbors. An aboveground pool sits covered in a sad tarp weighted down by rainwater. Aside from a grimy soccer ball and some battered barbells on the back patio, Rena doesn’t see much of anything.

  Mo unlocks the back door on the ground level, and they enter the dark, cool house into what must’ve been a sort of family room, given its shape and size. Rena can easily picture a comfortable sofa and a shelf full of photo albums, wedding photos on the wall, and a flat-screen TV where a couple could watch cable on a Friday night to avoid conversation. She walks carefully behind Mo, following the dancing flashlight, holding onto Lucia’s shoulder.

  “Is there electricity at all?” Rena asks.

  “I don’t think it got cut,” Mo says. “I hope not. We’ve gotta open that garage door for Wolfie.”

  This house, like Mo’s, is a split-level. It’s devoid of furniture and life. It feels like the kind of place where a tragedy unfolded. Rena believes in ghosts. She believes that unhappy spirits can linger in a place. It’s not that. Not exactly. More a reflection of the quality of the lives that were lived in the house. How the stress of the husband and the wife leaked into the structure. Maybe Rena’s just projecting that feeling, but it seems real enough. Toxicity. Dankness.

  They fumble down a blue hallway. Mo’s light shines briefly on an open electrical panel. A door at the end of the hall leads them to the garage, which seems even emptier and draftier. They can hear the Eldorado idling outside. Mo finds a switch and punches on a small overhead light, and then she presses the heel of her hand against another button and the door rises with a groan. Rena notices a pink umbrella stroller hanging from a nail on the wall and wonders if the divorced couple had a child or children. Stupid to ask. Doesn’t matter. Maybe the child died. Maybe that accounts for the bad feeling in the air.

  Wolfstein backs in the Eldorado slowly. It feels swollen and alive in the small garage. Wolfstein shuts off the lights and then the engine. Mo hits the button again. The door reverses track, grinding shut.

  “Jesus, was somebody murdered in this joint?” Wolfstein asks, getting out of the car with her bag of dough.

  “You feel that, right?” Mo says.

  “Like a brick in the face.”

  Rena: “What is that?”

  “Bad energy,” Mo explains. “Those unhappy bastards cultivated the shit out of it.”

  “This couple, did they have a child?”

  “Nope. Don’t know what that stroller’s all about.”

  Back to being led by Mo’s flashlight. Back down the blue hallway. They decide to hide in a small room at the far end of the ground level. Mo plops down her canvas bag in the far corner. Wolfstein does the same with her bag. Lucia won’t let go of hers. Since the room has no windows, Mo turns on the light. It’s a typical suburban setup, with a ceiling fan swirling over four energy-saving bulbs in cased white glass. Only one of the bulbs works. The room remains pretty dim. The walls are dotted with nail holes and dusty outlines where frames used to be. The floor is bare except for a pile of dirt swept up and abandoned. In the pile is a torn tampon wrapper.

  “One of us can go upstairs and keep watch, if we want,” Mo says, “but I think we’re better off just staying put.”

  “We’re just gonna sit here?” Lucia says, dropping to the floor and sitting with her legs crossed.

  “Don’t worry.” Mo digs around in her canvas bag. “I brought along some distractions. Kid, you wanna see pictures of me and Granny Wolfstein from our heyday?”

  “Don’t call me Granny,” Wolfstein snaps back.

  “I don’t think that’s appropriate,” Rena says.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll only show her the tasteful ones. Artful, even.” Mo takes out her laptop and flips it open, powering it up. She clicks around on the keyboard and then sets the laptop in front of Lucia. “This is from White Apples magazine. Summer of ’77. The Buxom Belles issue.”

  Wolfstein smiles. “Jesus, Mo, come on.”

  “She loves it,” Mo says to Rena. “She wants everyone to see what a knockout she was.”

  “I’m still a knockout,” Wolfstein says.

  “Hey, knockout, give me another cigarette, huh?”

  “Shit, I left them in the car.” Wolfstein shuffles out of the room, heading back to the garage.

  Rena, curious, sits next to Lucia and leans in to see. Luscious Lacey and Maureen Swallows is looped in pink curlicue script at the top of the screen. And, below that, there they are, earlier versions of Wolfstein and Mo, posed together on a tiger rug, touching hands, as if they’re mirror images of each other, in electric blue baby doll lingerie. Butts in the air. Hair feathered and blown out, Mo’s more candy apple red than the burgundy it is now and Wolfstein’s somewhere between sable and nutmeg. Makeup muted. Wearing choker necklaces, mood rings, and blue star sapphire bracelets.

  “You’re Maureen Swallows?” Lucia asks Mo.

  “Hell of a stage name, right?”

  Wolfstein comes back in with the Marlboro 100s. Wolfstein and Mo light cigarettes. Rena coughs into her hand.

  “Hot numbers,” Mo says. “That’s what we were. You get old enough, kid, see a movie called Tumbling Wives. Our finest work, in my opinion.”

  “Not my favorite,” Wolfstein says.

  “Here we go again.” Mo blows smoke at Wolfstein.

  “It’s your best performance, I’ll give you that,” Wolfstein says.

  “Marty Savage was a stone fox.” Mo turns to Rena and Lucia. “We called him Pecker Tracks. Everyone called him that. He was like Jackson Pollock flinging paint.”

  “Gross,” Lucia says.

  “He’d just splatter his batter everywhere. One time, it was a misfire obviously, it kind of cometed up to his mustache somehow and it looked like he had all these beads of candle wax hanging there.” Mo’s laughing. “It was a miracle. I mean, people see the Virgin Mary in their soup, that’s great, but I saw Marty Savage shoot”—Mo mimes an upward hose blast with her free hand—“like a geyser into his own mustache.”

  Rena’s a little lost, not exactly sure what Mo’s even saying right now.

  “That’s really gross,” Lucia says, shaking her head.

  “Kid, you don’t know gross. Gross was Valerie Sugar queefing ‘God Bless America’ behind the scenes on Ambrosia. Gross was Willa Starch cramming a whole package of raw hot dogs up her cooch and shooting them out one by one. Gross was Stump Lady going to town on Herschel Stone while she gobbled up pickled eggs.”

  �
��Stop . . . I think,” Rena says.

  “I know, I know,” Mo says. “That’s all gross. Pecker Tracks was an artist.”

  Wolfstein laughs behind her cigarette, swatting the smoke out of her eyes. “Mo’s a character. I’m telling you, the first time we met, the stars aligned. Like me and you, Rena. We clicked.”

  “I looked up from underneath grunting Marty Savage and could tell Wolfie was a like-minded individual,” Mo says. “The Bronx connection helped. We went out for Italian and talked all night.”

  Rena’s trying to imagine what Wolfstein could possibly see in her that’s anything like what she saw and still sees in Mo.

  “I’ve got more pictures,” Mo says, “but we’ll hold off on those for now. I run this little website. Got a following among the old Golden Age crowd. You want to hear Wolfstein’s voice from our radio show?” Digging around in the bag again. Coming out with a cassette labeled The Naughty List.

  Wolfstein protests.

  “Just a sec. Just to let them hear your voice.”

  “I’m sorry,” Wolfstein says to Rena.

  Mo takes the tape out of its case and pops it in the boombox. Presses play. Wolfstein’s talking in hushed tones through the dust-specked speakers about what a sweaty night it is and how she hopes her listeners are feeling good.

  “Okay, enough,” Wolfstein says, moving in and slamming the stop button. “All that’s happened, it’s probably not the time for memory lane.”

  Truth is, Rena’s thankful for some distraction, any distraction, even if she feels a little out of her element.

  Wolfstein and Mo simultaneously stub out their cigarettes on the floor, crunching up the filters like tiny accordions. Wolfstein flicks a piece of tobacco from her lip.

  “You know what the last thing my mother said to me before she stroked out was?” Mo says.

  “What?” Wolfstein says.

  “‘You want to play rummy?’” Mo smiles. “Far as last words go, I like those. I’d ask you guys if you want to play rummy, but I forgot to bring cards. Did you used to play I’m Going on a Picnic in the car as a kid? Wolfie, I know you probably didn’t go on many road trips. I always liked I’m Going on a Picnic. I mean, we didn’t go far. The Catskills, Lake Placid once. I always liked that game. ‘I’m going on a picnic, and I’m bringing artichokes. I’m bringing alfalfa sprouts. I’m bringing arugula.’ I was always good. Top of my head, I could think of ten things for every letter. Not silly things, either. Things you’d really bring on a picnic. I was sincere. I could use more wine. Anybody want wine?”