“Ellie!”
A heavy-set black woman, just setting a plate down in front of a customer, stepped out from behind the counter to give Ellie a hug.
“Hi, Louise,” Ellie said, almost lost in the arms that enfolded her. “How’ve you been?”
“Oh, I could complain, but it doesn’t do any good. The Lord doesn’t want to hear and neither do the customers,” Louise said. “How about you? You’ve been good?”
Ellie nodded. “I’m good. Keeping busy at the bank.” She turned and held out a hand. “This is Miss Benedetto and Miss D’Armelio.”
“Just Teresa and Bernie,” said Teresa.
“I’ve told them how good the food is here,” Ellie said.
“Well, have a seat, and I’ll see if I can’t live up to that promise,” Louise said with a chuckle. She handed menus out as they slid into a booth.
Bernie put a cigarette in her lips and raised her lighter. “Do you mind?”
“No,” said Ellie. “I don’t mind,” but Bernie had already lit the cigarette and taken a deep drag, aiming the exhaled smoke away, toward the window.
“So, what’s good?” Bernie asked. “You mentioned the burgers and shakes?”
“Everything is good,” Ellie said. “Grilled cheese, steak subs, chilidogs. And the pies. Louise makes all the pies herself.” She looked apologetically at them. “Sorry, nothing Italian.”
“Are you kidding?” Bernie said, picking up her menu. “We eat enough goddamned pasta in a week to build a parade float.”
“It’s nice to have a change,” Teresa agreed.
“What’ll it be, ladies?” Louise came to their table, pen and pad in hand.
Teresa and Bernie each ordered a burger and fries and agreed to split a chocolate shake, while Ellie ordered a grilled cheese sandwich.
Louise paused her pen. “Any extras?”
Ellie considered. “Ten?”
“You got it.”
Teresa looked at Ellie as Louise went to give the cook their order. “Ten what?”
“Ellie!”
Two young women had just entered the diner.
“Hi,” Ellie said. She slid out of the booth to hug each of them.
“You coming back to us this year?” asked one of the women, unwrapping a scarf and taking off her coat.
“Looks like,” Ellie said. “Santa’s bad elf. Can’t get rid of me.”
“Bad elf, my a—” The other woman stopped herself, glancing at Teresa and Bernie. “You sell more than the rest of us every year.”
Ellie laughed. “Y’uns on break?”
“Yes,” said the first woman, checking her watch. She caught Louise’s eye. “The usual, Louise.”
“Already put it in, girls,” Louise said as she bustled by, her arms loaded with plates for another table.
“So, we’ll see you in a few weeks?” asked the second woman of Ellie.
“In a few weeks.”
“Sorry, gotta eat and dash,” said the first woman as another waitress laid their drinks out for them at the counter.
“I know,” Ellie said. “Go.”
She slid back into the booth. “Sorry about that. Lots of the store workers come here on break or sometimes to get together after the store closes.”
“You seem like the popular girl,” Bernie said, stubbing out her cigarette. She pulled out another and was about to light it when Louise appeared.
“Here you go, ladies.”
“Looks wonderful, Louise,” said Ellie. “Thank you.”
“Notice the pickle on your plate.”
Ellie laughed, blushing a deep red. “I noticed.”
Teresa looked curiously at the dill pickle on Ellie’s plate, same as on hers and Bernie’s. She was about to ask, when Bernie moaned next to her, chewing with her eyes closed.
“God, that’s good.”
Teresa took a bite of her burger and sighed in agreement.
“Bennie, you gotta taste this shake.” Bernie slid the tall fluted glass to her.
Teresa stuck a second straw into the thick, chocolaty shake and took a sip. “This is my new favorite place to eat,” she said. “Ellie, this place is the best-kept secret in Pittsburgh.”
Ellie nodded as she took a bite of her sandwich, a thread of warm cheese pulling loose and dangling down her chin. She quickly plucked it away and wiped her mouth. “I know. Louise saved my life.”
Teresa opened her mouth to ask what she meant, but Bernie said, “If you don’t stop talking and eat, I am not saving half this shake for you.”
Teresa turned her attention to her food. Ellie asked Bernie what she did.
“I teach,” said Bernie. “At Holy Rosary in Homewood.”
“You teach in Homewood?”
Bernie nodded as she popped a couple of fries into her mouth. “It’s a hell of a rough neighborhood.”
“Because it’s black?” Ellie asked. Teresa was surprised to hear a note of challenge in her voice.
Bernie must have heard it, too. “No. Because it’s poor. Most of our kids are being raised by their grandmothers because their teenage mothers are still screwing around somewhere or they’re strung out on drugs. And fathers are scarcer than white people in that neighborhood.”
“Bernie!” Teresa scolded.
“What?” Bernie refused to look abashed. “It’s true. The only white people there are a few of us teachers and the nuns.”
“So they need more white people to come in and save them?” There was no doubt now about the challenge in Ellie’s tone.
Bernie smirked. “They need someone to step up. Don’t get all righteous. I don’t give a fuck what color they are. The mothers and fathers sure as hell aren’t doing it. Listen to the news. After screwing the girls, the only thing the men do is get themselves shot. Every night there are two or three murders in Homewood or the Hill District. No one with any sense wants to go into that war zone. It’s just the way it is. Our unemployment rate is double what it is for the rest of the city, so we’ve got too many bored people hanging out doing nothing productive with their time. If it weren’t for our kids’ grandmothers giving them some stability, I don’t know what they’d do. Those grandmothers are the only thing that makes it possible for us to teach those kids anything. We have just as many black teachers as white ones, and they say the exact same thing.”
A tense silence followed.
Louise came over as they finished off their sandwiches. “Dessert, ladies?”
“No, I couldn’t—” Teresa started.
“We’re splurging tonight,” Bernie cut in. She looked at Ellie. “You said the pies here are good?”
“The best.” Ellie passed them the dessert menu, and Teresa recognized that a truce had been called.
“I’ll have coconut crème,” said Bernie, giving Teresa an imperious look.
Teresa gave in with a sigh. “Chocolate.”
“Cherry?” Louise said to Ellie.
Ellie nodded, smiling.
Louise was back in a moment, carrying three plates filled with large pieces of pie and a large paper bag for Ellie.
“What’s with the bag?” Bernie asked.
“Some extra grilled cheese sandwiches,” Ellie said.
“Who for?”
Ellie shrugged. “Friends.”
CHAPTER 6
Teresa lay in the dark, listening to the night sounds of the house. She could hear her father’s snores coming from down the hall. Gianni wasn’t home yet. She might or might not hear him, depending on if he came home at all. Above her bed was a crucifix. Every room in the house had a crucifix on some wall. Her room was still furnished very much as it had been when she was a girl—the same twin bed and matching dresser and chest of drawers, the same mirror on the wall.
“Why don’t you at least buy a double bed?” Ber
nie used to ask.
“Why?” said Teresa. “To remind myself that I’m sleeping here alone?” Except she never said that part aloud to anyone, not even Bernie. She had bought new bedding and curtains several years ago, and had freshened the pale yellow paint on the walls, but there was nothing else—“nothing of me,” she could have said—no photos, no posters, no anything on the walls. If she died or moved out, someone else could move into this room without having to change a single thing other than the clothing in the drawers and closet.
Restlessly, she rolled onto her side, her mind racing around like a squirrel, just as it had the past few nights—ever since the evening with Bernie and Ellie, and she knew it wasn’t Bernie that was keeping her up.
“She’s full of herself,” Bernie had muttered as they left Ellie outside the diner that evening. “She seems young. How old is she anyway?”
Teresa thought. “I don’t know. She never said, and I didn’t ask.” Bernie was right. Something about Ellie did make her seem young—and innocent, said a voice in Teresa’s head. Like she needs someone to take care of her—which was ridiculous. Ellie had been alone since high school. She obviously knew how to take care of herself and had friends like Louise and the girls from Kaufman’s, and yet… What had she meant when she said Louise saved her life, and who were all the extra sandwiches for? Teresa’s mind had been drawn back, over and over, to these questions. She had mentioned her curiosity to Bernie—but only the one time—as Bernie’s immediate retort had been, “I wouldn’t trust anyone who tries to be so mysterious.”
“She’s not,” replied Teresa. The comment had stung in a way that intuitively let her know that this was not something she could talk to Bernie about. Trying or not, Ellie was a mystery to Teresa, one that intrigued her. She kept picturing Ellie’s bright eyes—what color are they? she wondered. She couldn’t remember for sure; in her mind, they were light, maybe blue or gray, because to Teresa, they seemed open and childlike—There you go, thinking of her as a child again.
She punched her pillow into a different shape as she rolled over again onto her other side. She reached for the rosary on her nightstand, forcing herself to concentrate as she said the prayers in Latin until, at last, she drifted into a restless sleep.
It seemed she had barely fallen asleep when the alarm clock woke her with its clang. Even a shower couldn’t completely erase the drowsiness from her brain. She was alone in the kitchen as she made coffee and scrambled some eggs. Sitting at the table, poking at her eggs with a corner of her toast, she realized she was thinking of Ellie again. She finished her breakfast and placed her dishes in the dishwasher before taking her coat from the hook by the back door and letting herself into the early morning cold. Her Bug, parked outside the garage housing her parents’ cars, started up with its putt-putt-putt, and she backed out into the dark. The streets were nearly deserted as she drove, turning down the alley that ran behind the stores. She pulled into one of the parking spaces behind their store, and her headlights caught movement. There, shielding his eyes from the glare, was the homeless man with the dog, camped out near the trash cans. Teresa sat for a moment, wondering if it was safe to get out of her car. She reached for the key and turned the engine off.
The man was getting stiffly to his feet as she got out of the VW.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” Teresa said.
He was folding and rolling up his sleeping bag. His dog bowed down, stretching and yawning before coming over to Teresa, its tail wagging. She reached down to give it a pat on the head.
“We’ll get out of your way,” the man said in a raspy voice.
“You’re not—”
“Come on, Lucy,” he said, not waiting for her to finish. The dog trotted over to him, and, with the rolled-up sleeping bag now tied to a green canvas backpack, the pair of them headed down the alley, the man limping a bit.
Teresa watched them disappear into the darkness and went to unlock the security grate covering the store’s back door. Re-locking the door behind her, she deposited her purse in the office and went to unlock the front grate and sweep the sidewalk as she did every morning.
As she swept, she looked up and down the street, but there was no sign of the man with the dog. Next door, Mrs. Schiavo came out carrying a bag filled with loaves of bread, and she was quickly surrounded by hungry people. Another scuffle broke out, and tiny Mrs. Schiavo was knocked to the ground.
Teresa pushed through. “Get away!” she said as she shouldered her way to where Mrs. Schiavo lay in a heap. “Let me help you.” Other hands reached out to assist, and there were murmurs of apology. Teresa picked up the bag with the remaining loaves, but there were more people than bread. She tore the loaves in half, handing them out. “Take it or leave it,” she said to one man who was balefully eyeing the half-loaf she offered. He snatched it from her and grumbled under his breath as he stumped away.
“Are you all right?” she asked Mrs. Schiavo, who was trembling. “Come on. Let’s get you back inside.” She steered Mrs. Schiavo into the bakery and made her sit down at a table while she poured a cup of coffee. “Here, drink this.”
Teresa sat with her. She saw that one of Mrs. Schiavo’s hands was scraped and bleeding. “Wait here.” She went back to the drug store and got some antiseptic ointment and gauze. She locked the door behind her and returned to the bakery. Dampening a paper towel, she bathed the scrape to gently clean away the blood before smearing the scrape with ointment and wrapping Mrs. Schiavo’s hand in gauze.
“I guess they were hungry today, huh?”
Mrs. Schiavo laughed shakily. “Grazie, Teresa. Grazie.”
“It’s nothing, Mrs. Schiavo,” Teresa said gently. “But I think it would be a good idea for me to come over and help you in the mornings from now on.”
“You’re what?” Sylvia asked angrily a while later when she got to the store and heard what had happened.
“She needs help in the mornings,” Teresa said, bracing herself.
“If she wouldn’t feed them bums, she wouldn’t need help! I’ve told her again and again…”
Teresa turned away and went behind the pharmacy counter. From long experience, she knew better than to interrupt her mother in the middle of a tirade. Once Sylvia got started, she needed to finish, “like a storm blowing itself out,” Lou had said to a young Teresa many times when she would try arguing with her mother. “You can’t win, so just let her have her say.”
Over the years, Teresa had come to appreciate the wisdom of her father’s advice and understood that it was probably the only thing that kept their marriage bearable. “It’s not like divorce is an option for them,” Bernie used to point out. “They gotta find some way of making it work.”
Sylvia was still muttering loudly enough for Teresa to hear when Lou got to the store. Teresa went into the office where he was counting up the deposit from the day before.
“I can take that to the bank today,” she said casually. “I need to do a couple things while I’m out anyhow.”
He glanced up briefly as he punched numbers into the adding machine, its paper scroll of weeks’ worth of numbers curling off the desk into a tangled heap on the floor. “Thanks.”
Teresa briefly considered telling him about the man with the dog but decided against it. She knew her parents would call the police and insist they patrol the alley to chase the man and dog off. They’re not hurting anything, she reasoned. They just want a place to sleep.
Her father called her when the deposit was ready.
“Just leave it. I’ll take it later this morning,” she said from where she was re-stocking the toothpaste.
“Fine,” he said.
Lou left mid-morning to spend a few hours at the Oakland store. Teresa waited a while and then said to her mother, “I’m going to the bank, and I have a couple of errands I need to run. Gianni’s over at Morningside today, but if any prescriptions get
dropped off, I’ll take care of them when I get back.”
Sylvia maintained an icy silence. Teresa sighed and went to the office to get the moneybag along with her purse and car keys.
Backing out into the alley, she saw no sign of the guy with the dog. There were a few people rifling through the dumpsters and empty boxes behind the stores, but not like the numbers there were at night. Where do they all go during the day?
It was nearing eleven by the time she got to the bank. Upon entering the lobby, she saw that Ellie had another customer at her window. She went to the lobby counter where she pretended to be filling out a deposit slip, stalling, waiting for the customer to leave.
“Hi, Teresa,” called Linda when Teresa turned toward the tellers.
“Hi, Linda,” Teresa said, going to Ellie’s window as if she hadn’t noticed that Linda’s was free.
“Miss Benedetto,” said Ellie with a smile. “How nice to see you again.”
“Teresa,” Teresa reminded her. “And it’s nice to see you again, too.”
“We haven’t seen you here recently.” Ellie shook the change out of the moneybag and began sorting the coins.
“No, my father’s been bringing the deposits lately,” said Teresa, feeling self-conscious now that she was there.
“And driving away without his receipt.”
Teresa smiled. “Yes. I, uh—”
“Teresa!”
She turned to see Bill White coming out of his office. “Bill. How are you?”
“Good, good,” he said, cleaning his eyeglasses on his tie. “Better now that the election is over. The financial market should improve with Reagan coming into office.”
“I guess,” Teresa mumbled.
“All set for Thanksgiving?”
“Um, I suppose so,” Teresa said. “My mom and aunts usually take charge of that. I just go where I’m told.”
He laughed heartily. “Give your mother my regards.”
“I will.” She turned back to the teller window where she was dismayed to see that Ellie had already finished counting the deposit. She watched Ellie write up and stamp the deposit slip and, in some desperation, blurted, “What time do you get lunch?”
Cast Me Gently Page 5
