Casual Choices

by Tom Corbett

“Instead of torturing your good mother, I think you should read romance novels like all the other girls,” Meena went on, enjoying the moment.

  Cate was on to a different mission by now. “Uncle, you’re such a typical bachelor, don’t you have any edible food in this place?”

  “Well, I think I can scrounge up some stale donuts, maybe some week- old pizza.” His voice was flat, lacking his Irish-born humorous lilt.

  Cate noticed but went on. “You, sir, need a woman. I’m amazed you have survived to your advanced age.” But Josh did not respond. He was looking at Connie with a sad expression. Cate was confused and slightly flummoxed. “Okay, I’ll find some edible loot. Help me, Meena.”

  Connie walked up to Josh and pulled him by the arm into the guest room where she had spent the night. “Jeremiah Joshua Connelly,…listen to me, some people are leaving today. The last thing they want is to see you standing around making fish eyes at me.”

  “But—”

  “Shush. We will fight after they leave, when I’ll have a clear shot at tearing you a new one. Understand?” Connie looked at him without expression.

  “Gee, that’s something to look forward to.”

  “Until then, you be yourself. People will know something is wrong if you’re not insulting them.” She started toward the door. “One last thing. You better thank your sister that you are not seeing my backside walking out the door.”

  Connie and Josh walked back into the kitchen. Cate straightened up from her food search. “Hey, where’d you two go? Getting in a morning quickie?” “Hah,” Josh responded with his usual demeanor; he was trying hard. “If that were it, I would not finish up until you were halfway to wherever you’re going today.”

  “Oh, he got you there.” It was Meena, laughing again.

  Josh looked at the dark-haired beauty. How much she had changed from the moment she shyly followed Cate off the plane. It had taken her a bit to understand the dynamics of her new situation. At first, she was a bit shocked by the banter and insults that flew back and forth. She had been raised in a family where everyone was more formal and polite. Now she saw people who played with one another, but in a manner done with undeniable affection. Josh realized at that moment just how good Meena would be for Cate whom he looked upon as the child he would never have.

  “Thank you,” he said, looking at Meena.

  “For what?” Meena responded, a smile remaining in place but muted a bit by a quizzical look.

  “For being here, for being who you are, for becoming part of our family.” Josh walked over and kissed Meena on the cheek. Then he reached out and pulled his niece closer. “You two are meant to be together. You love each other. I can see that, feel that. Never lose that love. It is the most important thing in life.”

  “We won’t,” Meena whispered back to him.

  “Thank you, Uncle.” Cate looked deeply into him with her pale blue eyes, mystified by the unsolicited sentiments but grateful nonetheless. She mouthed the words “I love you” before speaking up to change the mood. “Okay, we have our plans finalized. We’re flying to San Francisco this afternoon. A couple of days there, and then I’m taking Meena to Vegas. She wants to see Sin City for some reason. If we have any money left, it will be on to Chicago and then up to Madison, Wisconsin’s Sin City, to join Mom who should be back home by then. Usha has agreed to come down from Toronto to spend some time and work on getting our hoped-for adoptees to the States. I’m going to pull every chit I have in the service, and Usha will help on the legal side. Somewhere along the line, I’ll need to decide what to do about my career but one step at a time.” She turned toward Meena. “Hey, gal, we better not lose all our money in Vegas. Getting the kids here will not be cheap as Usha has stressed, including the baksheesh that will be needed.”

  “How much?” Josh asked.

  “What?” Cate asked.

  “How much might you need? Moneywise.”

  “Not sure, it could be quite a bit.” It was Meena. “I know how things work in that part of the world. All is possible if you can help things along.”

  “You got it, whatever you need.” Josh simply stated.

  Cate jumped on him. “Uncle, don’t be foolish. We could be talking fifty thousand, maybe double that, here.”

  “You have it. No more discussion.”

  This time, Meena leaned up to kiss him on the cheek. “Can I call you Uncle?” Josh nodded. “Cate so often talked about you. She loves you so much. Now I can see why. Not your generosity, I can see the love. There is so much love here. That’s what counts.”

  Connie brushed something away from her cheek. She was about to say something when the door opened. In poured Peter, Morris, and Carla bearing bagels and other goodies. “The cavalry is here with provisions,” Peter proclaimed with gusto. “We knew the owner of this modest establishment is way too disorganized to be prepared for hungry travelers about to set on their journeys.”

  “Food,” Usha yelled, “call off the search for the donuts. Even if located, they would be as hard as a rock though good enough for this guy I am sure.” She nodded toward her ex-husband. “When we were married, I could not believe what he would eat. He would pull something out of the refrigerator that looked green and could walk on its own. After a quick smell, he would pass judgment, ‘probably won’t kill me,’ and in it would go. I kept waiting for him to keel over, but on he went.”

  “That’s because he only looks human.” Connie added, forcing a smile.

  Josh managed a laugh for the first time this morning. “By now, you should all know that the really evil never die young.”

  “True-dat,” Cate offered.

  Later, Josh gathered in the living room with Peter, Morris, and Carla. They would soon be off on the road back to Seattle.

  Peter asked at one point, “Okay, are we better off now or back in the 1960s? I have my thoughts, but I want to hear what you guys think.”

  Morris took the first stab at it. “The great thing about owning a bookstore in a time where fewer people read real books is that one can think about such useless questions. No offense, Peter.”

  Peter smiled. “Considering the source, none taken.”

  Morris leaned back. “Most people looked fondly on the good old days. That’s because their memories suck. A half century ago, when we were in high school, a lot of things were in the crapper. We talk about cyberbullying today, but I had to physically fight my way through gangs of Irish toughs just to survive. That’s how I met Prince Charming over there. Think about this. The air was polluted, Lake Erie was so junked up it could be set in fire. When water burns, you just know you have a problem. We had apartheid in much of the country, half of all kids dropped out of high school, older people died because they had no money to pay for health care and no insurance to cover the cost. Workingmen perished early from accidents that could have been prevented, babies ate paint off peeling porches laced with lead, miners were consigned to an early demise with lung disease unless their lives were mercifully cut short by a cave-in. Women had few professional options and were routinely harassed without recourse. The jobs open to them paid poorly and, by definition, had less status. Our cars were death traps because everything went into stylish frivolities like tail fins and nothing into safety. You never heard of child abuse or women being beaten daily, not because it did not happen, but because men essentially were free to prey on those who were deemed to be private property. I could go on, but you get the picture.”

  “Yet,” Carla added, “Josh had made an excellent point on several occasions. We came of age in an economic renaissance of sorts. The middle class had grown by leaps and bounds in the forties and fifties and sixties. Factory workers could own a car, buy a small house in the suburbs, think about their kids going to college. Poverty was falling though we did not see it at the time. We expected the rich to pay their fair share, and they did, for the most part. And we were about to see a decade of progressive policy making that would expand the federal government’s role in edu
cation, health, the environment, racial and other forms of equality, the economy, workplace safety, and just about every other dimension of public life. If we had taken the time to look back then, we might have despaired less about our failings and worked harder to preserve our successes.”

  Josh realized that everyone was listening now. He did not know how Usha, Connie, Cate, Meena, and even Rachel initially had looked upon these people from his past. They were all friendly, but initially it was a respectful cordiality. Now they were all listening with rapt attention. “And as we have discussed earlier, a conundrum is before us. Did we win many battles but lose the war?”

  “Uncle, you’re losing me.” It was Cate. “Barack Obama was elected president not that long ago. Surely, that says something about continuing progress.”

  “Or the last gasp of a liberal impulse,” Josh countered, “though I desperately hope I’m wrong on that.”

  Peter chimed in at this point. “I still keep tabs with old buddies in the bureau who get together on social occasions. You would be frightened to death if you knew of the rise in hate groups since 08. There are seven or eight hundred such groups out there and ten times that number of hate crimes annually. The nut groups are deadly serious about the end days being upon us, that a massive showdown must take place to determine who will own America.”

  Morris smiled. “Peter, you forget that we were a nut group back in the day.”

  “You guys,” Peter was deadly serious, “were misguided but driven by the best of intentions. These whack jobs are straight out of a moral and ethical swamp.”

  Josh agreed. “I’m not sure I want to know what you know, Peter. The hate has always been there. Our turf wars back in our day between the tribes—Irish, Italian, Jewish, minorities—were all part of a melting pot where little melted together. It is part of our fabric…the Know-Nothings and the Klan. Hitler’s Nazis gave it a push with Fritz Kuhn and the German American Bund along with William Pelley and his Silver Shirts. By the fifties and sixties, we had the Birchers and Norman Lincoln Rockwell with the American Nazi Party. Those were the visible symptoms of a deeper rot. The disease was below the surface, big money interests who would be most willing to use the fears of average men and women to stir up hate and blame and distrust for government and liberals.”

  Morris picked up the thread. “If Josh is right about the demographic trends, and if white working-class Americans feel as threatened as we think they feel, things could get very bad, very bad indeed. I can see a right-wing populist soon riding to power. Already, the Republicans are consolidating power at the state and local levels. They are one vote away on the Supreme Court, on the verge of a congressional sweep given the animus generated by Obamacare, and who knows what will happen in future presidential elections? They have been working steadfastly for this since the aftermath of Goldwater and now they can feel it. And if they succeed, what? They could dismantle all we just talked about just as the world teeters on the verge of a real crisis…apocalyptic climate change just as one example. Josh was right earlier when he said, in his own way, that we went after the shiny bauble as the whole tree was about to fall over. But that’s the next generations windmill to attack in righteous indignation.”

  “Okay,” Peter said. “That’s it! We are off to Seattle. Another half hour of this nonsense and I’m now convinced all of you will be off on one of your crazy apocalyptic adventures.”

  “This time,” Morris looked at him, “maybe we could get you to join us, Peter?”

  “This time, you just might,” the retired G-man chuckled. “One last thing that always got me. I can remember when the GOP started drifting further right. With each election, the more conservative of the party would argue that the candidates were not conservative enough. They had to take even a harder right-wing stand, nominate even more extreme nut jobs and whackos. I thought that argument insane. But son of a bitch, it worked. Oh, the wise men kept saying that the Republican Party was shooting itself in the foot. They were becoming a regional party, appealing only to those backward provincials in the Deep South. Remember those guys who never, and I mean never, get anything right and yet they get paid to spout off crap that even dumb kids would be embarrassed to utter in public? Okay, I suppose they are not that stupid, they just keep saying stupid stuff. What they did not consider was the deep wellspring of anger and hate out there among the unwashed masses. It is there, bubbling and gurgling in places the wise men never visit. They stay in their bubble, far away from reality and those places where the real folk reside.”

  “Aprez-moi, le deluge,” Josh murmured. “Aprez-Barack, le deluge.”

  There were hugs all around amid general confusion. They all filed out to the street to where the car awaited. Josh hugged each in turn. “Listen, I want to come down and see you guys. Better still, let us take a road trip to see Bob. He can have visitors, right? It is not like solitary confinement. I really want to see him again. I just want to see if he is happy. I hope he is happy.”

  “We would love that,” said Carla. “We really would. And by the way, I think he is.”

  “Is what?” Josh asked.

  “I really believe he is happier than he has ever been,” Morris added.

  Josh’s expression changed. “I still cannot believe you guys didn’t spit in my face.”

  “Wait till next time.” Carla laughed as she got into the car with the others after giving Josh one final hug and kiss.

  As Peter Favulli circled around to the driver’s side, Josh called out to him. “Hey, how the hell did anyone as slow as you make the varsity football team?”

  “You always were a classless Mick, Connelly. Should have thrown your ass in the slammer. What was I thinking?”

  “Wait,” Josh yelled as Peter was about to duck into the car. “A serious question, one I wanted to ask decades ago. Why didn’t you go to a Catholic college? I was shocked you went to the same den of Commies and Pagans I did. What was with that?”

  “Great question. I was even offered a football scholarship to Holy Cross. I’m not sure since it pissed off my family. Got up one day and said to myself that I had had enough of this religious stuff. Time for something different. Now that you mention it, I never really gave it all that much thought. Funny, no?”

  “Not really. I’ll come visit, we’ll sort all our crazy choices, like the one where I befriended this lame-ass Wop.”

  Peter flashed his warmest smile and slipped into his vehicle. Josh still stood watching after the car was long out of sight. The others had gone inside but knew he remained behind. They would have to wait until the tears in his eyes had a chance to dry.

  “Who do we get rid of next?” Josh asked with excessive bonhomie as he burst through the door. “Oh yes, my pesky niece. However, her new friend is welcome to stay if she wants.”

  “No luck, Uncle. She is my fiancée, and she has you pegged as a debauched pervert already.”

  “Oh, no I don’t,” Meena protested.

  “Meena,” Cate chastised her with exasperation, “We talked about this earlier. Never say anything nice about this man. He has this oversized ego that needs to be whittled down to size.”

  In an exaggerated whisper, Meena said, “I think you are great. I am definitely calling you Uncle from now on.”

  “You better!” He smiled broadly. “That would be several steps up from what the rest of the family calls me. I’m beginning to think my first name is cretin. Of course, I usually prefer monetary expressions of adoration, but terms of affection will do.”

  Josh glanced at Connie. She was looking at him. Had her expression softened? He was not totally certain, but he had hope.

  Usha and Connie said their goodbyes at Josh’s home. The others arrived at the terminal in plenty of time. Cate’s foreign service credentials usually expedited things at immigration, but you did not take chances these days. They could only accompany Cate and Meena so far, but they all savored each moment.

  “One thing, we’re going to be a family now,” Cate
enthused. “I don’t know exactly how things will work out with the service, but I am determined to be closer to you two.”

  Rachel thought about that for a moment: you two. Cate was joining her and her brother together as one. Had something happened that even she had not fully apprehended? Did others see a filial relationship that had escaped her to this point? Of course, they were good at public display. This was Josh’s business in part, to reach students and political actors. Similarly, her public role as the face of medicine in professional communities had sharpened her people skills. Perhaps they had merely hidden their inner tensions well enough to avoid detection even by those closest to them. On the other hand, perhaps the tensions were no longer there. Such matters kept circling through Rachel’s head.

  While Josh took Meena to a nearby shop to buy her a souvenir of Vancouver, Rachel jumped at the chance to be intimate with her daughter. “I want to thank you once more for opening me up, you know, sensually.”

  “Mom, I don’t know what to say. I want to joke about all the other lessons I have planned for you in the future, but I suspect that a spanking would soon follow.”

  “Wait, did I ever spank you?”

  “No, mom, but you should have. I was a bit of a handful, more than a bit.”

  Rachel cupped her daughter’s face in her hands. “You were a treasure, always.”

  “Well, thank you. But if you really want to please me, don’t screw up your chance for some happiness. Do you understand me? Let me be absolutely clear. If you let Usha slip away, I will track you down and make your life a living hell, even more of a hell than in the past.”

  “Why is everyone threatening me with doom?” Rachel asked, even as she knew.

  “Because the Connelly clan are known screw-ups. I’ve seldom seen people so devoted to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.” Josh said as he and Meena rejoined them.

  “I have something to remember Vancouver by.” Meena grinned.

  “You probably won’t need it since you will be back,” Josh asserted.