by Jeanne Ray
“Blood?” Romeo said.
“Not too much. You could get a stitch or two.”
He asked Tony for a wet, warm washcloth, a cotton ball, and a bottle of alcohol, all of which would clean things up and give him a better look at the situation. While he cleaned and dabbed, I just kept quiet.
Suddenly I was hoping for a bad report. A night in the hospital, maybe two, would be nearly as good as the Charles Hotel. I would have a button I could push when I needed something, not that I would ever abuse it. I could fluff my own pillows. No, it was really just a matter of peace and quiet, and the lack of stairs.
“No,” Dominic said, blowing lightly on the back of my head to take the sting off. “I really don’t think it’s worth the trouble of stitches. It isn’t bad at all. Take a couple of aspirin and put some ice on your shoulder. I think you’re going to be fine. I can check on it when I come back tomorrow.”
I stood up slowly and swayed a little. I was ready to go.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Romeo asked. He was a good man. I knew if the circumstances were different, he would have gone for the ice.
“I’m fine.”
“I’d never met Nora before,” Dominic said. “That’s really something, her having triplets.”
“It is indeed.”
“What with her on bed rest downstairs and this one on bed rest upstairs, we really couldn’t have let you go to the hospital anyway,” Dominic said.
I knew that was supposed to be my laugh line, but I didn’t laugh. I just left them there, talking about medicine and what Tony’s future held.
Ice sounded like a wonderful idea. I was almost to the kitchen when I heard Nora’s voice.
“Mother?”
I walked back and looked at her. She was off the phone. She still had her headset on but the wand was pointing down toward her collarbone. “Yes?”
“I think I’m ready to eat something.”
“What would that be?”
“There’s still some organic chicken salad, right? So I’ll have that, wheat bread, toasted, no extra mayonnaise, lettuce, red grapes on the side. Do you have red grapes?”
“Yes.”
“Seedless?”
I wanted to ask her if seeded grapes posed a threat to her pregnancy, because otherwise she could just spit the seeds out like the rest of us. But they were, in fact, seedless grapes, so I didn’t have to go there. “Yes.”
“And a Pellegrino with just a splash of cranberry and a lime.”
I started to nod, but it made my head hurt, so I just said okay and went out to the kitchen.
“Mother?”
I went back.
“You’re sure you got the organic chicken salad?”
And this time I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t say anything, unless it was going to be something I would very deeply regret later on. I just looked at her in a way that I hoped said, Yes, it is organic, now never ask me that question again, then I went back to the kitchen.
Father Al was there, rifling through my kitchen drawers. “What do you need, Al?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He looked like he’d been caught trying to steal a spoon. “I’m looking for Baggies.”
“Under the sink.”
“Sit down,” he said, and pulled out a chair for me.
“I need to make Nora’s lunch.”
“I can do that,” he said.
“I’m not going to have you waiting on my children,” I said.
He took out two Baggies, a big one and a little one, and filled them both with ice. He draped a dish towel on my shoulder and very gently placed the first bag across it like a saddle. Then he wrapped up the second one and handed it to me. “Hold this on the back of your head.”
I did that, then I took the aspirin he gave me.
“Now, tell me what she wants to eat or I’ll just make it up.”
I didn’t have the energy to argue and make the meal and hold the ice on my head, so I told him with all the specificity I could remember what Nora wanted on her sandwich. “I really can do this,” I said, but oh, the cold was sweet. It bit into me slowly and froze the pain.
“I’m going to tell you a story,” Al said, putting the two slices of bread in the toaster. “Can I make one for you, too?”
“I’m really not hungry, but thanks.” I was unused to priests offering me food from my own kitchen, but it didn’t actually feel like a bad thing.
“So here’s the story.” He opened the refrigerator and took out the lettuce from the crisper drawer. “A great flood comes along and a very devout man is in his house praying for the Lord’s help. The water comes in through the door, and he goes up to the second floor, then he goes up to the roof, all the while praying to God to be saved. Have you heard this one?”
“Honestly, no.”
“Good.” He ran the lettuce under the tap one leaf at a time, then began to pat it down with paper towels. “After awhile a man with a boat comes, and says, ‘The water is still rising. Get in my boat, and I’ll take you to safety.’ But the man on the roof says, ‘No, the Lord will protect me.’” He opened up the refrigerator and starts looking around.
“Third shelf.”
Al took the chicken salad out and started again. “It’s still raining, and the water’s still rising, and after some time there is another boat with several people in it, and they offer a spot to the man on the roof. They beg him to come, but he says, ‘No, the Lord will provide for me.’ More rain, more water, the man is now balanced on top of his chimney, and a motor raft goes by, and the pilot says, ‘I’ll throw you a rope! I’ll save you!’ But again the man on the roof turns down the help. And when the water swells again, he drowns.”
“Great story.” I readjusted the ice pack on my shoulder. “Thanks.”
Al looked at me and shook his head. “But it’s not over. The man goes up to heaven and meets Saint Peter at the gate and Saint Peter sends him straight to God, who greets him warmly. And the man from the roof says, ‘Lord, I prayed to you. I believed in you, and you didn’t save me.’ And God says, ‘I sent you three boats. What more did you want?’”
With that, Al garnished the plate with grapes and picked up the Pellegrino and went into the living room to serve my daughter lunch.
Chapter Eleven
NORA WASN’T THE ONLY PERSON WHO HAD MOVED into the living room. Though no one exactly mentioned it, Alex was living there, too. He got home very late and he left very early, but if you happened to be up at the right hour, there he was in the kitchen wearing a pair of pajama bottoms, drinking coffee in the dark. I would have thought, with all the people living in this house and all the other people coming and going, that I wouldn’t even notice one extra son-in-law. But the first time I ran into him at five o’clock in the morning, the morning after I fell off the chair, I almost screamed.
“Sh!” he whispered. “Nora’s still asleep.”
“When did you get here?” I pulled the swinging kitchen door shut behind me. I was whispering, though I felt a little stupid doing it. I had woken up too early because my shoulder was still sore, and I had a hard time getting comfortable.
He looked at the clock over the kitchen sink. “About seven hours ago.”
“Where do you sleep?”
He pushed his eyebrows together as if he were suddenly worried that what he was doing might be against house rules. “With Nora?”
“In a single bed?”
He shrugged. “She doesn’t roll over anymore.” He got up and poured me a cup of coffee which I accepted gratefully.
“Have you slept here before?”
He nodded. “I always sleep here.”
“And I just haven’t seen you?”
“I guess not.”
I wracked my brain for some evidence of Alex in my house. Yes, come to think of it, the coffee was made most mornings when I came downstairs, but I’d chalked that up to Big Tony. Usually Alex came by in the evening, but I always thought he left after I went to bed. I couldn�
�t remember seeing so much as an extra shirt or tie around the house. “Where are your things?”
“I keep stuff at the gym, or I just run by the condo and shower.”
“Alex, you don’t live anywhere near here.”
“It’s not so bad,” he said. “Anyway, Nora thinks we’ve already taken up as much space over here as we need to.”
“Well, you’re certainly welcome.” But in truth, it was difficult to imagine one more person waiting for the shower or one more extra towel in the wash. I liked Alex, though I never really felt like I knew him. Like Nora, he worked all the time. He was always on the run.
“I appreciate that.” He smiled at me, a handsome shirtless man in my kitchen who in the dim light looked no older than a skinny high school boy. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Julie. If Nora had to stay home by herself all day—” He shook his head. “Well, you know Nora. It would be a disaster for her. Nora always has to be around people.”
Did she? Maybe I didn’t know Nora.
Alex looked at his watch. “I ought to get cracking.”
“I’m going to take some coffee up to Romeo,” I said.
“How’s he doing up there?”
“Oh, he’s great. He’s going to be downstairs any day now.”
“That’s great,” Alex said. “I’ll look forward to seeing him.”
Alex was the only person in this traffic jam of family who didn’t make himself at home on the second floor, and, frankly, I appreciated it.
The truth was, I really didn’t know when Romeo would come downstairs. Had we kept a chart of his recovery it would have looked like the stock market: he was up, he was down, he was flat. Some days I found him fully dressed and on the landing at the top of the stairs. “I’m ready,” he’d say, but then he’d look down those stairs like a man in a barrel peering over Niagara Falls. I once saw him put one foot down, then bring it right back up.
“What if we put Tony on one side and me on the other and we’ll just walk you down?”
“That’s it!” he said. “That’s the perfect idea. We’ll do it tomorrow.”
But then tomorrow would roll around, and Romeo would be flat out again. Something would have gone funny in the night, and he couldn’t even sit up in the morning.
When I brought him his coffee this morning, he was on the phone.
“No, I really thought today was going to be the day.” He smiled at me when I walked in the door and blew me a little kiss. “It’s crazy. Maybe I’ve developed some sort of stair-related phobia. It doesn’t feel like a phobia. It actually feels like my back, but I don’t know. With everybody else who’s coming in and out of here, maybe I should hire a psychiatrist to come by, too.”
I put the coffee down on the bedside table and waited.
“That’s true,” he said. “Al has some training in that stuff. He might be able to talk me down…. I know, it’s crazy that I haven’t seen you. But you’re all right? You’re feeling all right?…That’s great…. No, you don’t have to tell me. The service in this place is terrific.” At this Romeo winked at me. “That’s right. We may just stay in bed forever. Well, you take care of yourself…. Yeah, with any luck I’ll get to see you soon. Okay. That’s right, you too. Take care.” Romeo inched himself up enough to get to his coffee. “Great girl,” he said.
“Which great girl?”
“That was Nora. She was calling from downstairs.”
It never occurred to me that upstairs and downstairs, the two completely separate parts of my existence ever communicated with one another.
“I really need to go downstairs and see her,” Romeo said.
“I think you should just relax and stay where you are.”
“For how long? You can’t spend the rest of your life running up and down the stairs, bringing me coffee and sandwiches.”
“I could.”
“My mother doesn’t even want to talk to me anymore. I call over there on the phone, and she says to Theresa, ‘Tell him I’m busy.’ I don’t think she remembers who I am.”
“She’s remembered you for sixty-three years. It isn’t going to kill her to forget you for a few weeks.”
Romeo puzzled on this one for a minute, then came up with another angle. “And what about work? I have to get back to work.”
But work was going suspiciously well. When I managed to grab a minute to run by the stores, they both seemed to be thriving. Word had gotten out that the hottest floral designer in New York had landed temporarily in Somerville, and everyone was changing their events in order to get a spot on her dance card. Because Plummy was a minimalist, we had nearly doubled our sales while ordering almost no extra flowers, except of course for those tiny orchids, which were practically her signature. Fewer flowers, higher volume, and all for more money (she had raised the prices). Sandy was right about Plummy’s being a genius.
Plummy had only planned to stay for a week, but when her week was up none of us mentioned it, and she didn’t seem so eager to go. One night after work there was a chipper knock on the bedroom door. Plummy and Sandy burst into the room like a couple of giggling junior high school girls. Sandy was carrying an incredibly tall, slender clear vase, a nearly unusable size that we kept around for sending out bunches of sunflowers.
“We brought Daddy some flowers,” Plummy said, and then leaned over to kiss her father’s forehead. “Hi, Daddy!”
But neither Romeo nor I could say a thing, and when the girls saw us mesmerized by the flowers, they started laughing again. The whole arrangement existed inside the vase. Not a single leaf tip came over the top. The bottom was weighted with round gray stones, and the flowers were all tiny, swirls of pink and lavender with a few bright smears of yellow. It was something you wanted to hold in your hands and turn like a kaleidoscope. There seemed to be no end to the different ways you could consider it.
Romeo sighed, “Plummy, I don’t know what to say. This is magnificent.”
And then the girls howled. “Not me!” Plummy said. “I didn’t do one blossom. Not one thought. It’s Sandy’s!”
“Sandy?” I said.
“Don’t act too shocked, or you’ll hurt my feelings,” Sandy said, but the smile on her face was huge. “Plummy’s been giving me and Raymond some pointers.”
“Raymond’s a little less open-minded,” Plummy said.
“She taught you how to do this?” I said. I couldn’t believe it. If this was what she was teaching, then I wanted to go to the class.
“This is all Sandy,” Plummy said. “I’ve only shown her how to take some risks.”
“I want to do aquarium-inspired pieces,” Sandy said. “I want to put the flowers under glass.”
“Then I think you’re a genius, too.” I got up and gave Sandy a kiss, and she threw her arms around my neck. I could all but feel the energy vibrating out of her curls. She was so excited by what she had done, and I had to wonder when the last time was that Sandy had a second in the spotlight. “I think we have two floral geniuses in the same family.”
Soon after that Big Tony came in with Little Tony and Sarah from ice-skating, and they all made a raucous fuss over Sandy’s arrangement.
“You’ve got to bring it to my school,” Little Tony said. “I want to show it to my class. You could give a talk about flower arranging.”
“She’s bringing it to my class,” Sarah said.
“We sent two of these out today, and both of the people called up and said they wanted to send out three more tomorrow,” Plummy said. “Pretty soon we’re going to be so busy, we’re going to need a third store.”
“Hopefully one we can run out of the bedroom,” Romeo said.
When the phone rang, I was the one who answered it.
“What’s going on up there?” Nora said. “It sounds like you’re trying to teach moose how to foxtrot.”
“We are,” I said. “It turns out they’re very graceful.”
“Well, somebody should come downstairs. It’s a little lonely down here.”
I looked at the clock and saw that it was past six, just about the time that Nora would be getting off work. There was no one left to bark at on the cell phone after six o’clock, there was only us.
“I’ll send down an ambassador. The rest of us will be down in a little bit. We’re talking flowers.”
I asked Sarah if she’d be a good sport and go visit Aunt Nora, and as quick as a shot she was out of the bedroom and taking the stairs in sets of three.
“One stair at a time,” Sandy called after her, but Sarah was already gone. In another minute we heard the opening bars of Wonka, that faux-Strauss waltz of pouring chocolate and dancing lollypops. Everybody in the room groaned.
“That’s ridiculous,” Sandy said. “She knows better than to have the volume up that loud.”
“What is it?” Plummy asked.
We all just stared at her. Even Romeo had been in the house long enough to feel itchy when he heard the music begin.
“It’s Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” Little Tony said.
“Oh!” Plummy said. “The one with the blond guy? The one with the curls? I’ve always wanted to see that movie. Don’t you want to watch it?”
“I’ve seen it,” he said in perfect deadpan.
“Well, I’m going downstairs. I’ve been working all day, and I’m ready for a little mindless entertainment.” Plummy kissed her father and left us there.
“My own sister,” Big Tony said. “I feel I have a responsibility to keep her from getting sucked into the vortex.”
Sandy shook her head. “She’s already lost. There’s no saving her now.”
But the two Tonys went as well. Somehow the novelty of Plummy never having seen the movie made you want to go and watch her watch it. It was like bringing an Amish child into Times Square. She was so pure, so uncorrupted, that it was hard to resist being there to see it all fall apart.
“You should at least go downstairs and show Nora your arrangement.”
“Nora has no interest in my arrangement.” Sandy had studiously avoided her sister since she had taken up residence in the living room. She didn’t do it in a way that anyone else would notice, but I saw it. She stayed at work longer. She made herself busier in the kitchen, she took it upon herself to fold all the laundry, she read the children an extra story at night. She was perfectly nice to Nora, and when it was incumbent upon her to fetch one thing or another she always did so with kindness and efficiency, but mostly Sandy was making herself scarce.
