The Lonely Witness

by William Boyle

  Vincent comes out. He sits on the bench, vaping. Another guy follows fast on his heels and sits down next to him. This other guy is pasty, wearing red, low-hanging basketball shorts, flip-flops, and a plain softball T-shirt with black sleeves. He and Vincent are talking. Vincent looks mad. Amy can’t hear anything. She moves around to the side of 3 Stars, afraid she’s right in Vincent’s sight line. She leans against the glass window. Her feet are getting sore. She should leave. She wants to leave. But she’s glued there.

  Vincent is motioning wildly with his hands. He stands up suddenly. Amy thinks he might throw a punch. He doesn’t. Instead, he storms back into Homestretch. The other guy follows him.

  Amy stands there for another forty-five minutes. A little girl in the Laundromat makes faces at her. Amy curls her tongue and crosses her eyes. The girl laughs. Amy decides it’s time to go. Seeing the little girl has set off something in her. Vincent’s a waste. Creepy, sure, but that’s it. She leaves, taking a different route back to the church. She turns around a few times to make sure Vincent’s not following her now. She thinks she sees him once and then realizes it’s someone who doesn’t look anything like him.

  3

  Amy drops the communion set back at St. Mary’s and stops to light a candle on the way out.

  She lights a candle at least once a week, always under the stained glass St. Thérèse. Therese was the name she chose for her confirmation. When you grow up and move away from the church, you forget about things like confirmation names.

  Her full name is Amy Lynn Therese Falconetti. She loved St. Thérèse as a girl. The Little Flower. She read whatever books she could find about her in the library. Thérèse’s childhood, how young she was when she became a nun. Her years at the Carmel of Lisieux. Her tragic death at twenty-four from tuberculosis. Amy had even read The Story of a Soul, Thérèse’s autobiography. Her confirmation gift from her mother was a St. Thérèse medal. She lost that medal when she was in college, drunk one night. Showering in the dorms with a bottle of gin, she took it off and left it coiled on the ledge by her shampoo bottle and forgot all about it. When she remembered the next morning, she went back to check and it was gone. She has always wondered if the medal is still out there somewhere, worn around someone’s neck, kept in someone’s bedside table drawer.

  When Amy regained her faith post-Alessandra, she started thinking about St. Thérèse again. Her words on charity, especially. Amy realized how much of her life had been devoted to selfish, empty things, and she wanted to help a little. She knew she was no saint, but she thought she might be able to bring a little light into people’s lives: a visit to the nursing home, a trip to the grocery store for someone who is homebound, praying with and talking to people who are alone.

  The stained glass St. Thérèse—like all the representations of saints in the windows at St. Mary’s—is made of jagged shapes. The original church in this spot, built in 1889, burned down in 1967. The church that’s there now was built soon after that and opened in 1971. It’s very much marked by architectural decisions specific to the period. The layout is bell-like. The altar is spare, the windows trippy. Candles flutter with a sad radiance. The church is quiet now and smells of myrrh. It’s mostly quiet these days, the congregation having shrunk significantly. Many old Italians remain, but the young in the parish are Chinese, Russian, Mexican.

  Praying is hard. Amy’s never sure what to pray for. She finds herself thinking about Vincent and Bob Tully as she kneels in front of St. Thérèse and the candles. She prays for Mrs. Epifanio and for Diane and for Vincent and for Bob Tully and for the man he killed, too. Prayer is strange.

  Back outside, she clicks recent calls on her phone and tries Diane again. No answer. She doesn’t have Mrs. Epifanio’s number saved, but she somehow remembers it and calls her to check in. Mrs. Epifanio says everything is great, she took a nap like a baby, and she feels less worried. Amy says she’s glad and reminds her to call if she needs anything.

  It’s a short walk to the house where her apartment is. Mr. Pezzolanti, her landlord, is standing outside by the open front gate, flipping through a Rite Aid circular, when she arrives. Amy is thankful every day for him. He lets her rent out the basement apartment in his three-family house for almost nothing. Four hundred dollars a month. He’s a regular at St. Mary’s. She used to know bar regulars; now she knows church regulars. He’s a nice guy. Genuine. He takes the collections at Mass on Saturday evening. Wears a tweed blazer and clips his nose hairs and slicks his hair back for church. Now, he wears a blue cotton work shirt she can see through, a plaid Italian cap, dark pants, sandals. He has moles on his shoulders and arms.

  Mr. Pezzolanti’s only son died of a heart defect at seventeen. His wife died of cancer in 2001. He has money saved up; he doesn’t have to rent her the apartment. He doesn’t rent the upstairs anymore. He treats Amy like a daughter. He tells her often that he doesn’t want her to pay. She insists. Four hundred is what she can afford. Most of what she does is volunteer: Eucharistic Minister, running clothing donation drives, working at soup kitchens in other parts of Brooklyn. For money, she babysits and cleans houses when she needs to. She does a little bookkeeping for the church and a doctor’s office on Bay Parkway, but that’s only now and then. Occasionally, someone asks her to help out with their elderly mother or father at Sea Crest in Coney Island or Haym Salomon on Cropsey. A couple of months back, Kathy D’Ambrosio paid her twelve bucks an hour to sit with her mother at Sea Crest Mondays through Thursdays while she was at work. That was nice. Mrs. D’Ambrosio told her stories about Coney Island, and they watched the Game Show Network. If Amy’s really desperate for money, she gets a register job at one of the Russian markets on Eighty-Sixth Street for a few weeks. She’s only had to do that three times, and they’re always happy to have her in reserve, the way they go through girls over there.

  “Guy came around looking for you a little while ago,” Mr. Pezzolanti says.

  “What guy?” Amy says. Her mind goes first to Vincent. It wouldn’t be hard to find out who she is and where she lives.

  “Older guy. Never seen him before.”

  So, not Vincent. “He say what he wanted?”

  “He was a little shaky. Had a little bit of—you don’t mind me saying—a bum quality. Didn’t say much, just he was looking for you.”

  “Thanks, Mr. P.”

  “You need anything? You good down there? How’s the hot water?”

  “Good. Everything is good. Thank you.”

  She’s waiting for what she knows is coming: Mr. Pezzolanti asking why she doesn’t have a boyfriend. A lot of eligible bachelors around, guys with good jobs. Sanitation workers, electricians, lawyers. They should be lining up. Amy again chooses not to deal with it, never taking the time to explain. If he ever saw her around with Alessandra before she moved in, he must’ve thought nothing of it. And no one comes home with her these days, so there’s not much she needs to account for in the way you need to account for things with nosy old-timers.

  “I see this bum-looking guy,” Mr. Pezzolanti says, “I think, When’s Amy gonna get herself a nice boyfriend? You know Nicky DiMarzio’s son? Little younger than you, but he works at the gym on Twenty-Fourth Avenue. Nice kid. Respectful. Doesn’t drink.”

  “I’m good, Mr. P. Thanks.”

  “You do a lot for a lot of people. Let someone take care of you for a change.”

  Amy smiles and walks past him. The entrance to her apartment is down a small flight of cement steps. Mr. Pezzolanti has wrapped the railing in tinfoil and glued red felt flowers in rows on the sides. She’s never asked why. The front door has a little brass knocker. She takes out her key and sees scratches around the keyhole she’s never noticed before. They’re probably normal marks from inserting and removing the key several times a day. She turns the knob and pushes in the door.

  The studio apartment is pretty bare. She likes it that way. A box TV with a digital antenna that someone up the block had put out for trash; twin mattress on the floo
r; foldout table with folding chairs. She misses her records and the artwork she had up on the walls in her old place in Queens, but she feels so far removed from that version of herself. She’s kept a few things—a small stack of records, sketches of her tattoos, three of her favorite outfits— and they’re in an egg crate on the top shelf of the apartment’s only closet.

  She doesn’t have a dresser or a couch. She keeps her new clothes—blouses, slacks, underwear, socks, jeans, a hoodie, a few T-shirts—in a plastic bin. She has a mini fridge stocked with yogurt and juice and ice pops. The apartment doesn’t have a stove. She makes do with a hot pot and an electric kettle, mostly for rice and tea. In the corner is a stack of books she has out from the library, Dorothy Day’s diaries, her book about Thérèse of Lisieux, and a book about the Catholic Worker Movement. Amy’s Walkman is next to the books, the headphones coiled over a small stack of cassette tapes. What looks like another closet in the back is actually her bathroom, a tiny space just big enough to fit a toilet, a sink, and a shower stall. She’s never been in a mobile home, but it’s the kind of bathroom she imagines she’d find in one.

  Who is this man who came to see her? She can’t stop wondering about him. She’s grateful at least that he’s pushed Vincent from her thoughts for the time being.

  She thinks about going to get lunch at Liu’s Shanghai. It’s her one vice. The food is excellent. And she loves to see Xiùlán, who works the counter seven days a week. Xiùlán was born in Bath Beach. Her parents own the restaurant. She and Amy don’t seem to have much in common, so they talk about the weather. Sometimes they talk about the news or the neighborhood or something strange one of them has witnessed. Xiùlán is beautiful, and Amy most definitely has a little crush on her, but nothing will ever come of it outside of a loose, casual friendship. She knows the mechanics of such encounters. Plenty of bar patrons developed crushes on her simply because she was their bartender and they liked the routine of knowing her, or the easy way she struck up conversations, or how she poured drinks. That didn’t mean fire. That didn’t mean connection.

  Amy has seen Xiùlán with the man who must be her boyfriend. She never asks about him. She doesn’t want to know. She doesn’t think she’ll go to Liu’s Shanghai today after all. It’s too much to go four times in four days. Yesterday had been so busy that Xiùlán only had time to look up from the phone and say hello.

  What Mr. Pezzolanti said about her doing a lot for a lot of people, she guesses that’s true. Lately, at least. But she doesn’t feel like doing anything else for anyone today. She sits down on the bed and kicks off her shoes. Plain, boring shoes with plain, boring laces. She crosses her left leg over her right knee and rubs the bottom of her foot. Maybe she should take a nap, like Mrs. Epifanio. Just read a little and see if she can’t close her eyes. Try to shed some of the anxiety she’s managed to pick up.

  Amy rubs her other foot and then curls up on the bed. She doesn’t even reach for a book. Times like this, she feels intensely alone. There were plenty of other women before, but she mostly misses Alessandra. Gravesend is, after all, Alessandra’s neighborhood. Bensonhurst, too. Bath Beach and the blocks around it. She goes to church in one of the two churches Alessandra went to as a child. She attends meetings with the monsignor who presided over Alessandra’s father’s funeral. The streets are haunted by Alessandra’s stories. Where those new condos are, that’s where the D’Innocenzios lived. And here’s the Calabrese house. And that’s the Rite Aid where Stephanie Dirello worked. Amy is glad that Stephanie and her mother decided to move to Jersey last year. She’d still see Steph around every once in a while before that, and it was always uncomfortable. She can’t think too hard about how much she misses sleeping with Alessandra. She’s not sure what to do with the pain that accompanies such yearning.

  A knock on the door.

  “Hold on,” she says. She wonders if it’s the stranger who came around looking for her before. Her curiosity carries her to the door. She wishes for a peephole. “Who is it?”

  “It’s Mr. P. The guy who stopped by looking for you before, he’s right here with me.”

  Amy is glad that Mr. Pezzolanti had the forethought to stay with the man, not to just let him knock and find Amy on his own. She opens the door.

  The man standing beside Mr. Pezzolanti is her father.

  4

  Fred Falconetti is nervous and shaky. He’s wearing a red sweatshirt with holes around the neck and battered chinos and dirty black Nike sneakers. He’s got a gray beard that’s so unkempt, it’s almost dreaded, arrow tips of tangled hair crawling up his cheekbones. His neck is sugared with tufts of hair that look like balls of dust. His hair is wavy, mostly gray, and he seems to have tried to comb it for the occasion. He has a surprised look on his face, one she recognizes from her days at Seven Bar: an alcoholic who’s sober and risking his dignity to ask for something. In this case, what? Forgiveness? A few years ago, she might’ve told him to fuck off. Now, the way she is, the way her life is, what can she do but allow him in and give him a chance? He has tears in his eyes.

  “You know this guy?” Mr. Pezzolanti says.

  “Amy Lynn,” Fred says.

  “Who is this guy?” Mr. Pezzolanti says.

  Amy is speechless.

  “I’m her old man,” Fred says.

  Mr. Pezzolanti looks at him, shocked. “Her old man? I didn’t think she had an old man.” To Amy: “You’ve got an old man? He’s your old man?”

  Amy nods. “I didn’t know I had an old man anymore, either, but I guess I do.”

  “Missing in action, huh?” Mr. Pezzolanti says.

  “Something like that,” Fred replies.

  “Last time I saw him, I was twelve,” Amy says.

  “Good Lord,” Mr. Pezzolanti says. “You two have a lot of catching up to do, I take it.”

  “Can I hug you?” Fred asks Amy.

  Amy nods again, and he moves in. He smells of cigarettes and bad cologne. His beard sandpapers her cheek. She’s the one with tears in her eyes now. She’s thinking about her mother. Fred’s laughing a little, awkwardly, nervously, probably thinking how he expected things to go south, fast, that she’d turn him away. That’s what she suspects. She feels it in his body language, the tender hug and quaking arms.

  “I’ll leave you to it,” Mr. Pezzolanti says. “You need me, Amy, I’ll be right upstairs.”

  “Thanks, Mr. P,” Amy says, pulling away from Fred and wiping her eyes with the heels of her hands.

  “Can I come in?” Fred says.

  “Sure,” Amy says. “It’s not very comfortable. I only have a couple of folding chairs.”

  “I don’t care about comfortable.”

  They sit across from each other at her little poker table, the folding chairs stiff and hard. Fred puts his elbows up on the table and smiles.

  “I don’t believe this,” Amy says.

  “Me neither,” Fred says.

  “All these years.”

  “How are you?”

  “How can I answer that?”

  Fred leans back in his chair. “I know, I know. Do you want me to start?”

  Amy gets up and paces. “Why now?”

  “It can take your whole life to wake up to certain things, when you’re like me. I had my priorities all out of whack. I’m sorry for that. I wish I could go back.”

  “I don’t want to just start going through each other’s histories. How we got here. Who we are.” Amy catches herself. This is her old voice. This is the way she would’ve responded a few years ago. She should try compassion. But she can’t make her lips say anything that might be perceived as a willingness to start over.

  She sits back down. “What do you want? Are you in trouble?” Such doubt and anger in her tone. The man must be here for selfish reasons. He’s broke and needs to mooch from her. He’s homeless. He’s on the run from a crime. He’s dying and can’t pay for treatment.

  He hesitates.

  “I don’t have much money,” she says. “Mostly
I just volunteer through the church.”

  “You go to church? That’s good.”

  “I pretty much stopped after Mom died, except when they made me go at school. I just started again a couple of years ago.”

  “I’ve been going to church again, too. Not here, obviously. Over where I live in Queens. It’s nice to feel welcome somewhere. I wore out a lot of my welcomes over the years.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “I put out feelers.”

  “You’re in Queens?”

  “I moved around a bit. Wound up back there about three years ago.”

  “You put out feelers how?”

  “Most people, seems like, you can find them on the Internet if you really need to. But you don’t have social media or anything, huh? That’s healthy. Shit’s poison. All these zombies on their phones. Now you’ve got this batshit reality TV show president Twittering and whatnot.”

  “Who’d you talk to?”

  “I went back to the old neighborhood. Found someone you went to high school with at St. Agnes. That led me to the bar you worked at in the city. This was more than a year ago. They told me Brooklyn, but Brooklyn’s big as hell. From there, I had to do some serious investigative work. I was pretty impressed with myself, actually. It was the hardest I ever worked at anything.” More laughter. “I’m not here for money or anything, I swear.”

  “Okay,” Amy says.

  “I’m sorry I left. I’m sorry about your mother. I’m sorry about everything.”

  “Okay.”

  Fred stands up and crosses his arms. “Listen, I’m in your hair. I don’t want to crowd you. I know it’s not great, showing up unannounced like this. You need time to process this. Maybe I can come back another time and we can get lunch or coffee or something?”

  She nods. “Sure,” she says. It’s the best she can do.

  “Tomorrow? Same time?”

  “That’s fine.”