“Okay, Jake, you win. Here’s two hundred dollars for walking around money and a list of hotels where you can stay for under two-fifty a night. We’ll cover your mileage at the IRS rate, which I think is over half-a-buck a mile now, so you should make out okay on that. No sense going up ’til Sunday because Thanksgiving weekend tourists will be filling every hotel room in the city through Saturday night.”
“Got it.” I took the page and the money from him.
“I want you goddamn back here by Tuesday morning and in one piece.”
“Will do. Thanks.”
He sighed and left. For the second time in thirty seconds I reached for the mouse to click off my blog. I heard a little boink!, indicating that I had just drawn another comment. Probably darrowIwish telling me that donkeys don’t go to college because no one likes a smart ass, or something just as screamingly original. I glanced at the new message:
“Didn’t anyone ever warn you about strangers with candy, Streetdreamer?” demoticdiscretion.
Chapter Ten
As soon as I tasted the gravy I figured Vince’s second marriage was a done deal and the only question was when I could stop at Sully’s to buy the rice. Lainie Banacek hadn’t poured this stuff from a jar into a saucepan to heat it up on the stove. She’d made it from scratch, in-the-pan, with turkey broth, turkey drippings, flour, milk, salt, pepper, and butter (not margarine) that she’d left out on the counter overnight to soften. I couldn’t believe the flavor. I closed my eyes to savor my first mouthful. I wondered if it would be too gauche not to bother using the turkey and potatoes as carriers and just pour a slug of the stuff into a coffee cup so I could drink it straight.
Seven of us gathered at 2:30 Thanksgiving afternoon around the Banacek table—strike that, tables, plural. To make room for seven, Lainie had had Vince and, unofficially, me hump the kitchen table into the dining room and put it end-to-end a tad unevenly with the dining room table. Lainie’s oldest daughter, Barbara, and her husband, Stan, joined us along with their pair of rug rats whose names I didn’t bother to remember. Lainie seated herself at the head, with Barbara to her right and Vince to her left. I sat between Barbara and her six-year-old boy, across from Stan, who was sandwiched by Vince and an eight-year-old girl. No one sat at the end, but a full place setting, including folded napkin, wine glass, and goblet filled with ice water, occupied the table space in front of an empty chair.
“Who’s the plate at the end for?” the girl asked after her third mouthful of turkey.
“For family members who can’t be here because they’re serving with our armed forces,” Lainie said. “Mr. Jakubek’s son, Mike, is a sergeant with the Army in Afghanistan.”
“Oh.”
Stan and Barb exchanged glances.
“It’s a family tradition,” Lainie continued. “Your great-grandmother always set an extra place on Thanksgiving and Christmas when Mr. Banacek was serving in the Vietnam War.”
“Oh.” The girl took a second to digest that, then looked back at Lainie. “We’ve been in, like, lots of wars, haven’t we?”
“Yes,” I answered, after no one else seemed anxious to field that one. “Most of them someplace else—which beats the alternative.”
“Oh.” She took a stab—literally—at some stuffing, without moving her eyes from me. “That’s a nice ring.”
“Thank you.”
“Does it mean that you’re going steady with someone?”
“Something like that.”
“Ms. Jakubek is engaged, dear,” Barbara explained.
“You’re getting married?” The girl’s widening eyes left no doubt that I had just become a vastly more interesting person.
“That’s the plan.”
“Have you set a date yet?” Stan drew a glare from Barbara, who must have recognized this as a potentially delicate topic.
“Not yet. We’re sort of at the L-O-I stage.”
“I’m sorry.” Barbara now turned her gaze to me. “L-O-I?”
“Letter of intent. Like for a business merger? It’s like we have an agreement in principle, but we’re still dotting i’s and crossing t’s and we’re not ready to close yet.”
“Law school humor,” Vince said with a bemused head shake.
“I see.” A millisecond after this response Barbara swiveled her head toward Lainie. “How do you always get the stuffing to come out so crisp on the outside and so moist on the inside?”
Vince picked that moment to ask Stan how business was.
“You know what, it’s not all that bad. If you can turn a wrench and tell a differential from a brake pad you can make a living anywhere in this country, no matter what the economy is doing. Unemployment rate goes up, people figure they’d better nurse the old buggy through another winter and they bring ’em in to get ’em fixed.”
“That’s the gospel according to Pro Tools all right,” Vince said.
“Well, they got that right. You know what’s got the biggest enrollment at Allegheny County Community College, term after term?”
“I’m guessing automotive mechanics.”
“Yep.” Stan emphasized the syllable with an emphatic nod. “They got more than sixty students this term, and they’ve put out an RFP for eighty starter tool kits for next September. Eighty! Barb saw a copy of the paperwork.”
“So cash for clunkers didn’t hurt?”
“You kiddin’? At least half those clunkers never made it to the junkyard, and someone had to fix ’em. And I’ll tell you something else. Any parts department manager who didn’t knock down twenty thousand for himself on side deals during that little boondoggle just wasn’t trying.”
This is interesting, I thought. I don’t have the faintest idea what he’s talking about, and I have a funny feeling I should.
I was about to jump in with a probing question when Vince and Stan segued into the Steelers, which they could talk about in perfect sync. Stan would talk while Vince chewed and swallowed turkey or dressing, and then Stan would shove some dressing or turkey into his mouth while Vince said something. In its own way it was a thing of beauty, like a Rockettes routine.
I turned back toward Barbara, only to catch the tail end of her next question to Lainie.
“…love the way your yams always come out tender without being mushy. How do you do that?”
With a brief shrug, I shifted my attention to the six-year-old. “Looks like we have a date, tiger.”
He looked at me for three seconds before making his opening gambit. “Have you ever been in a war?”
“No. I avoided detention once by knowing who won the Battle of Bemis Heights, but that’s not really the same thing.”
“Girls don’t fight in wars, dummy,” the eight-year-old told her brother scornfully.
“You’d get an argument from Sergeant Mike on that one,” I said.
“See?” the boy gleefully retorted to his sister. “You’re the dummy.”
“All right, that’s enough, you two,” Stan snapped. “Less lip and more jaw. Clean your plates.”
Given the shortage of conversational partners, I started doing a little arithmetic: .55 x 370. The distance from Pittsburgh to New York City is 370 miles, and .55 cents per mile is the current IRS car-travel reimbursement rate. I’d checked. So that meant that if I drove Vince’s Chevy to New York and back I’d be able to give Mendoza a chit for $387, plus parking in the Big Apple. After taking out enough to cover the gas that I planned to pay for with my credit card, Vince would still net well north of $300 for letting me use the Chevy over the weekend.
This multiplication was part of my being totally pumped about going to New York. I mean totally. Not because I particularly gave two rips about stalking Walter Learned. That was fun and games, an interesting break from cubicle grunt work. No, I was totally pumped about going to New York be
cause I saw this trip as a foretaste of my real legal career—my real life. I’d been held up at the terminal gate for sixteen months now. This little jaunt wasn’t anything close to a takeoff, but at least I was taxiing toward the runway.
Let’s see. Three-hundred-seventy miles at, let’s be realistic here, sixty per. If I pull out of the driveway by nine a.m. Sunday and if Paul can cab it from Grand Central, we can be in a hotel room together by 3:30 Sunday afternoon. No, wait, I forgot about Mass. Nuts. Vince will freak out if I skip Mass. So, eight o’clock Mass, pull out by nine fifteen, we’re still in the room before four. Or I could go to Mass at 5:00 Saturday evening and—No, wait.
At that point a very interesting idea starting taking shape. I got a little tingle from it, and I definitely didn’t need any more conversation. The buzz carried me through the pumpkin pie.
The look on Stan’s face when Vince offered to help with the dishes was priceless. Lainie responded exactly as I had predicted.
“No, of course not, dear, you’re our guest. Barbara and I can handle it.”
I suddenly found myself in a rather delicate position. Barbara was as much Lainie’s guest as Vince was. True, she was Lainie’s daughter, but just because someone gave you time-outs when you were eight doesn’t mean she can stick you with chores when you’re over thirty and have kids of your own. What really distinguished Barbara from Vince was that in Lainie’s world women did the Thanksgiving dishes and men watched the Detroit Lions lose a football game on television. Way fifties, but so what? If I shirked KP I’d still feel like a jerk. I decided not to feel like a jerk. I loaded up an armful of dessert plates and squeezed through the kitchen doorway with my burden.
“That’s all right, dear.” Lainie gasped audibly at the site of a non-Banacek holding more than one piece of her best china. “Barbara and I are used to this.”
I suppose I could have taken that as a no and waltzed out, but I’m stubborn. I knew that I wouldn’t be trusted with anything really important, like hand-washing the silver and the stemware and putting them out to air-dry on dishtowels laid out on the kitchen counter. I thought, though, that I might be allowed to scour the broiling pan or load the dishwasher. Then I saw the turkey carcass still sitting on the cutting board where Vince had sliced off the breast meat and the drumsticks. Taking care of that thing was a sloppy, greasy job that mom had always cajoled Vince into doing.
“Tell you what. How about if I handle the leftover turkey?”
“Well, actually, that would be a help, Cindy, if you really don’t mind,” Lainie said.
“Do you have any, like, Tupperware for the meat?”
Barbara, to her credit, managed not to show her undoubted disgust at my ignorance of elementary kitchen jargon. She brought out a china casserole dish and lined it deftly with wax paper. Then she got out of the way as I started making things happen with the carving knife and a long-handled fork.
This kind of thing takes about twenty minutes if you do it right. And you really should do it right. Cold turkey sandwiches for the rest of the weekend are even better than the roast turkey hot from the oven on Thanksgiving day itself.
While I was slicing away, I glanced a couple of times through the window at the backyard. The rug rats were throwing a football around, shyly joined by a kid from down the block who looked about seven. It was so genuine. So real. So American. Yeah, I thought, this is what I really want. This is exactly what I want. I want to see kids playing in the yard of a single-family home. I want to see it once or twice a year, through a window in someone else’s house. The rest of the year I want to look out my window and see smog and concrete.
I folded the wax paper over the salvaged turkey meat and then covered the whole shebang with aluminum foil, just to make sure, before I slid it into the fridge. I felt thoroughly satisfied with my work. The turkey skeleton looked like the booby prize at a buzzards-and-jackals convention. Taking the top off the kitchen trash can, I dumped the remains into the garbage bag inside, which pretty much filled it up. I pulled the garbage bag out, tied it up, lugged it over to the kitchen door, and set it next to another bag that Lainie and Barbara had filled.
I thought of summoning the eight-year-old to carry the bags out to the garbage cans in the garage, just to raise her consciousness about stereotyping gender roles. But I didn’t. I took the greasy things for their last walk myself. I returned to the kitchen ready to take the rest of the afternoon off with a clear conscience. Lainie and Barbara had things well in hand. The dishwasher was humming, the dish-drainer beside the sink was laden with assorted pots and pans, and the silver and stemware were soaking in clean, sudsy water.
“Let me know if I can do anything else.” I said this with polite insincerity as I headed for the door. I already had one foot in the dining room when Lainie promised that she would.
I was checking my Droid when I joined Vince and Stan in the den, watching the Lions lose, albeit not quite as disgracefully as they usually do. They—Vince and Stan, not the Lions—took up rather more than two-thirds of the couch between them, so I dropped to the carpet.
“Stan’s right about the request for proposal from ACCC, Dad. It’s posted online. ‘Highest scoring responsible bidder.’ I’ll print out a copy for you when we get home.”
“Like I have a shot at that.” Vince shook his head with world-weary disgust. “That’s a central sales office thing, not something for independent distributors. Pro Tools, Matco, and Cornwell will all be bidding on it. When the elephants dance, the squirrels get crushed.”
“Right.” I switched my Droid to its PDA app and pecked in prnt out rfp.
Okay, back to the weekend. The idea that sprouted while I was doing mileage-math had pretty much blossomed by now. I was so excited that I almost broke our rule and called Paul instead of waiting for him to call me. I held off, though. What if he was cranking out six, seven pages an hour when my ringtone distracted him and broke his concentration? How could I ever handle the guilt? Instead of speed-dialing him I gazed at the TV screen and wondered how much of professional football is passion and how much is habit. It could be worse, of course. We could be watching golf.
Paul’s number finally showed up on my Droid screen a little after five. I had nodded off, but the ring galvanized me. I popped up and brought the phone to my ear as I sprinted for the porch.
“Two thousand words. Almost.”
“Get out.”
“Scout’s honor. I did an entire chapter.”
“That’s fantastic, lover.”
“So what’s new in Pittsburgh?”
“I’ve had a fabulous idea about the New York trip I sprang on you last night.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Do you want the long version or the Cliff Notes?”
“All the gory details, please.”
“Okay. Number one, I still have over thirteen thousand dollars out of the fifty thousand Calder & Bull sent me. Taxes took a bite, but my burn rate for the last six months has only been a little over a thousand a month, so with just two months to go and the last 10K CD maturing in mid-December, I’m feeling pretty flush.”
“You realize, of course, that because you’re both smart and beautiful, other women will have two reasons to hate you.”
“That’s a chance I’m willing to take. Number two is that US Air will fly me to New York and back for only a couple-hundred more than the mileage reimbursement I’ll get from Mendoza. And number three is that the Hilton New York in midtown will charge me close to two hundred a night more than the hotels on the approved list Mendoza gave me, and I just realized that I don’t care. I mean, I’ve got the money. I’ve only got two months left before I start earning a decent salary. Why not go ahead and drop, say, twenty-five hundred bucks doing New York right instead of cheaping out?”
“I love the premise. What’s the plan?”
“We go
up Saturday instead of Sunday. I’ll fly in instead of driving. We can stay two nights. The Hilton still has rooms.”
“You’re a genius.”
“Can you get off work?”
“Screw work. I mean, Cindy, this is just so great. It makes the whole thing seem so real.”
“Exactly.” No other adverb would do. My fiancé had just nailed it.
“Only thing is, being a kept man at a Holiday Inn on Seventh Avenue is one thing. Having that status at the Hilton will require some adjustment.”
“Don’t worry. You can pay off your share of the hotel bill by giving me back rubs.”
Our conversation took a more intimate turn at that point. At that moment I felt deeply, truly happy in a way that I couldn’t remember feeling for a long time. Which is kind of sad, when you think about it, but there it is.
Chapter Eleven
It’s not like the Hilton New York is a luxury crib. Most lawyers with AmLaw 100 firms would probably call it middle of the pack. A good, solid hotel with decently sized rooms, reliable plumbing, clean sheets, Wi-Fi, some premium cable channels, and waiters who can speak English.
When I finally got into my room around 3:10 Saturday afternoon, though, it seemed like a little piece of heaven. I’d had the usual aggravations negotiating the security checkpoint at the airport after shuffling through a long, snaking line to get there. My flight sat on the ground in Pittsburgh for forty-five minutes after boarding so that they could change a lightbulb in the control panel or something. After we finally took off, the pilot managed to find every patch of turbulence east of the Allegheny Mountains, and it must have taken us twenty minutes after we landed at LaGuardia to reach the gate. No courtesy van for the Hilton at the airport. My cabbie drove like a suicide bomber and scowled at a ten percent tip. The Hilton didn’t have my room ready when I checked in, so I had to leave my TravelPro and its duct-taped handle with the concierge and kill two hours briskly striding along Broadway and Fifth Avenue in cold, late November weather. When I got to the discount ticket booth near Father Duffy’s statue the cupboard was bare, at least for any show that was worth a damn.
But Remember Their Names Page 9
