The Lonely Witness

by William Boyle

  The guy doesn’t even look up as he counts the money. When he’s done, he brown bags the bottle and hands it to her. She unscrews the cap and takes a slug.

  “Come on, don’t drink that in here,” the guy says.

  “Leave me alone,” Mrs. Mescolotto says. “I’m in mourning.”

  The guy shakes his head.

  Mrs. Mescolotto turns her attention back to Amy. “I know you’re not Vince’s girlfriend,” she says.

  “How do you know that?” Amy says.

  Mrs. Mescolotto smiles. “Vince only spent time with one woman. He had a special sweetheart.”

  “And who was that?”

  “You’re not a detective, huh?” Mrs. Mescolotto takes another drink.

  “Lady, I’m asking you nice,” the guy says.

  Mrs. Mescolotto waves him off. “Shush up,” she says. And then back to Amy: “Vince was a sweet kid. I’ve known him a long time. He went to school with my Dom.”

  “Were you seeing him? Is that what this picture’s about?”

  “Who are you, exactly?”

  “I’m not really anybody.”

  “You’re just curious?”

  “Right.”

  “And you don’t work for my husband?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Come on. ‘Just curious,’ you expect me to believe that shit?”

  “What were you fighting with your son about?”

  “You were watching me? Or you were over at the wake? Who the fuck are you?”

  “I don’t work for anybody.”

  “Tone must’ve hired you.” Another slug of vodka. Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

  “Okay, lady. I warned you.” The guy puts down his sci-fi book and picks up the phone. “I’m gonna call the cops.”

  Mrs. Mescolotto holds up the bottle. “You call the cops, and I’ll have this fucking place blown up with you inside. You know my father, Jimmy Longabardi? You know that name?”

  The guy puts up his hands like, Whoa, whoa now.

  “Tell me about Vincent,” Amy says.

  “You didn’t know him?” Mrs. Mescolotto asks.

  “What was he like?”

  Tears in Mrs. Mescolotto’s eyes now. “No one was like Vince. He was the kind of guy who knows what flowers you like and what your favorite color is. He was shy.” She pauses. “Never mind.”

  “You loved him, huh?”

  “Never mind, I said.”

  They walk outside. Darkness settles on the neighborhood. Capelli’s is in view, a few people in black milling around out front. One guy eats a slice of pizza over a white paper bag. Amy recognizes him as the guy who was wearing the softball shirt that first trip to Homestretch. He’s also in the picture. He stuffs the last hunk of crust in his mouth, drops the bag to the sidewalk, and then walks away from Capelli’s.

  Mrs. Mescolotto steps out of her heels and sits down on a dry patch of sidewalk under the awning, setting the bottle between her legs. Her back is against the red brick, beer and soda ads plastered on the window above her head.

  Amy sits next to her. She can’t see Chris’s. She wonders if Alessandra and Fred have come out looking for her or if they’re just there with the food, waiting.

  “I did love him,” Mrs. Mescolotto says.

  “That’s why you’re drinking?” Amy says.

  “I drink. That’s what I fucking do. That’s what me and Vince did together. Let me see that picture again.”

  Amy passes it to her.

  Mrs. Mescolotto laughs a little, wipes tears from her eyes with the heel of her hand. “This was the night of the Lopez–Ledbetter fight. We got so drunk. It was the first time we were dumb enough to go to Homestretch together. We’d been screwing around for a long time, but we’d always been discreet. Not out of respect to Tone. Fuck Tone. I was worried about Dom. We didn’t know he was there and then, suddenly, he was, watching us.” She traces her finger from Vincent to Dom. “I didn’t want to upset Dom.” She glances at Amy again. “Who are you? Why am I even talking to you?”

  “I’m here to listen,” Amy says. “I’m a friend.”

  “Yeah? You just come out of nowhere? You’re like an angel?” Mrs. Mescolotto pushes the bottle over to her. “Have a fucking drink, angel.”

  Amy tilts the bottle back and lets it burn against her upper lip, but she doesn’t swallow much. It’s strong stuff.

  “Friends are good,” Mrs. Mescolotto says. “I wish Vince had more real friends.”

  “You know who killed him?”

  Mrs. Mescolotto grabs the bottle back. “A lot of things killed him.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Means stop pressing. Poor Vince shouldn’t be dead, but he is. That’s the way of things. My father once told me, ‘You either get luck, or you don’t.’ Vince didn’t, okay?”

  Amy’s not sure why she’s sitting there with Mrs. Mescolotto. She’s not at all sure why she ran across to her like they were pals. Same reason, she guesses, that she went to Diane’s. The story is closing in on itself. Her decision to follow Vincent has led to this. Alessandra, Fred, Vincent, Dom, Diane, Monsignor Ricciardi. Her life. Her lives. All so close. Tangled. The mess of it.

  “What’s your name?” Mrs. Mescolotto asks.

  “Amy.”

  “Amy Winehouse. Amy Adams.” Mrs. Mescolotto searches the sidewalk, her head a bit booze-wobbly now. “I’m trying to think of other famous Amys.”

  Amy smiles. “Amy Poehler.”

  “She’s funny,” Mrs. Mescolotto says, and she rises slowly, using the bottle for leverage. Her stockings have runs in them now.

  Amy stands, too.

  Mrs. Mescolotto slips her heels back on, clamping a hand on Amy’s shoulder as she does it. “I like you, Amy the Angel,” she says.

  Amy wants to say, I saw it happen. She’s not sure what that will lead to, though. Maybe Mrs. Mescolotto knows something but not everything. Maybe she doesn’t know it was Dom. Maybe she thinks her husband had Vincent killed. Maybe it’s better to leave it this way.

  “You want this picture?” Amy asks, holding it up.

  “You can just toss it. Makes me too sad.” Mrs. Mescolotto stumbles back to Capelli’s, slugging from the brown bag like a front-stoop drunk, her sunglasses still up on her head. It’s beautiful, actually, watching her walk and drink, the little quake in her heels. She opens the door of the funeral home and lurches in.

  Amy goes back to Chris’s. Alessandra and Fred are still at the table, food spread out in front of them. Neither of them is eating yet.

  “What was that all about?” Alessandra says.

  “I felt like I had to talk to her,” Amy replies.

  “And?”

  “Everything keeps getting stranger.”

  Alessandra stabs at a cheese blintz with a fork. “Why don’t you just go into the wake and give everyone your regards?”

  “Tell me what’s really going on here,” Fred cuts in.

  “Your services are no longer required,” Alessandra shoots back.

  Fred looks crushed. “I’m nothing but a fuckup.” He slouches over his plate. “I’m trying. I’m sorry.”

  “Fred, I got news for you,” Alessandra says. “We’re all a bunch of fuckups.”

  Amy’s eyes have drifted back across the street. Andy Capelli comes out. Hearing aid. Turtleneck. Big wooden cross hanging over his chest. He’s plucking at his right ear with his thumb and index finger.

  “Is that Andy Capelli?” Alessandra says. “Christ, he looks like a pedophile. Who the fuck wears a turtleneck and one of those big crosses?”

  Diane comes out next, accompanied by Monsignor Ricciardi. He’s holding her by the arm, helping her watch her step, making sure she doesn’t take a flop. Diane’s wearing a black shawl with the price tag still on it and black slacks. Amy can’t tell if she’s leaving or if she’s just getting some air. She stops walking and leans against the wall in almost the same spot where Mrs. Mescolotto had been.

  Andy
and Monsignor Ricciardi are yapping at Diane, probably saying comforting things about God’s plan and how Vincent’s in a better place and all the typical garbage that people say at a wake. Even on her most faithful days, Amy can’t take that type of stuff. It’s just talk. Monsignor Ricciardi’s a pro at it. He isn’t a bad guy, but he’s most definitely a bullshit artist.

  Then again, maybe they’re not doing that at all. Maybe something happened inside.

  Diane’s looking up and down Eighty-Sixth Street. Amy wonders if Diane’s looking for her, if she’s counting on her showing up at the wake. She feels so sad for Diane. She can’t help but think of the woman in ten or twenty years, battered by the world, dying alone in a slim, dirty bed with crinkled gray sheets, thin and raw-eyed. Amy obscures herself a bit behind a paper menu taped up in the window so that she can still see Diane but Diane can’t see her, if her eyes wander over in this direction.

  Fred and Alessandra are quiet now, resigned to a doomed situation, eating with their heads down.

  Amy starts talking. “It was horrible when my mom died,” she says. “I saw death everywhere. It was horrible having a father who’d left, who didn’t give a shit. I’ve been searching for an identity my whole life, trying all these different lives. I’ve never felt comfortable anywhere.” Her eyes stay on Diane, Monsignor Ricciardi, and Andy Capelli. They’re huddled together. Monsignor Ricciardi has his hand on Diane’s back.

  Fred is listening closely. So is Alessandra. She seems shocked by how much Amy’s opening up, by what she’s saying. She knows how unlike her this is.

  “I can’t ever love you, Fred,” Amy says.

  Fred’s crying.

  Across the street, Dom throws open the door of Capelli’s and struts outside. Mrs. Mescolotto is with him, wasted, staggering, and Tony trails behind her. They stand in a circle, Mrs. Mescolotto fumbling with a new cigarette, Tony struggling to light it for her, Dom looking at his phone.

  You do things because you have to be near the beating heart of terror, Amy thinks. “What else is there in the end?” she says aloud, to no one in particular.

  “What are you saying, Amy?” Alessandra says.

  “I’m going back over there. I’m gonna tell Mrs. Mescolotto it was Dom. No way she knows. And I’m gonna show Diane who I really am. And Dom, well, I don’t know.” She’s thinking, too, that maybe Vincent wasn’t that bad. Maybe he just got chewed up and spit out by a world he couldn’t figure out how to exist in. You can’t pretend to know a stranger. All their secrets. Maybe he loved Mrs. Mescolotto with his whole heart. Maybe he was just another person out on the streets, hauling his pain around from decision to decision. Maybe the love was enough to give meaning to his life.

  “Don’t,” Alessandra says. “Stay out of it.”

  “I can’t,” Amy says. “I’m already in it.”

  The door clangs behind Amy as she leaves Chris’s again, Vincent’s picture pinched between her fingers in her outstretched hand. This time, Fred and Alessandra follow, Fred scrambling to leave some money on the table, Alessandra slinging the backpack over her shoulder.

  Diane notices Amy as she approaches Capelli’s and looks relieved. Amy can tell that what remained of Diane’s world hinged on whether this stranger who had been kind to her would show up at her son’s wake. She has. And maybe that means there’s something still worth living for. Diane smiles.

  Amy greets her by touching her arm.

  “I’m glad you came,” Diane says, reaching for Amy’s hair, her eyes revealing that she’s relieved the wig’s gone for good.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” Amy says.

  Diane looks at the picture in Amy’s shaking hand, but it’s held in such a way that she probably can’t see who’s in it. Now she looks over Amy’s shoulder at Fred and Alessandra, clearly seeking introductions.

  Dom notices Amy then—it seems to take him a second to register it’s actually her—and he keeps his head tucked into his chest. He pockets his phone.

  All of these people standing outside the funeral home know a different Amy. She has been different things to them. Daughter, girlfriend, parishioner, stranger, friend, witness.

  “What are we doing?” Alessandra says in a whisper, reaching out and squeezing Amy’s elbow with urgency.

  Amy doesn’t respond. She’s light-headed in a mystical way. Everything’s slowed down. Alessandra’s hand on her arm is spongy. Cars on Eighty-Sixth Street zoom by as if underwater.

  “I’m not dressed for a wake,” Fred says.

  Amy’s shaken back into full-speed reality. She walks into Capelli’s, right past the Mescolottos. Dom doesn’t say anything. Mrs. Mescolotto, puffing hungrily on her smoke, her bottle gone somewhere, doesn’t even see her.

  Inside: heavy flower smell, paintings of oceans and vineyards on the walls, swirling red carpets that seem flattened by grief. A sign that says Vincent’s name points to the first room on the right. Amy thinks of her mother’s wake, how she sat on a folding chair, people kissing her cheeks and her grandmother bringing her water constantly. Heavy flower smell then, too. Her mother in the casket, with so much makeup on, wearing a black dress Amy had never seen her in. So skinny and severe against the white satin. The memory is as strong as the flower stench, crashing on her in waves.

  Vincent is alone in the room, the only people left at his wake the ones now standing outside. High in his casket in the suit she retrieved. An eight-by-ten picture of him propped on a nearby table. The Popsicle-stick picture Diane showed her next to that. Amy moves close to pay her respects. Fred and Alessandra followed her in, and they sit in chairs off to the side, confused, swept up in whatever Amy has brought them into. Alessandra’s got the backpack in her lap.

  Vincent’s collar covers where the knife went in. His suit has been ironed; it’s stiff. He’s stiff. There’s a blue handkerchief in his pocket, and he’s wearing a dark blue tie. His face is gaunt. She barely remembers talking to him. She doesn’t remember what they said to each other at Mrs. Epifanio’s. Clearer is what he looked like from behind as she followed him. Vaping. On his phone. Through the window at Homestretch. She tries to picture him kissing Mrs. Mescolotto’s neck. She tries to picture them in bed together. Probably twenty-five years between them. She wonders when it started. When Vincent was in high school?

  Amy holds the picture over Vincent, and then she reaches down and stuffs it inside his jacket, finding a slit for the interior pocket. She feels something hard lodged there as she pushes the picture in. She can tell it’s the knife before she draws it out and turns it over on Vincent’s chest. Dom must’ve put it there as a final fuck you. She jabs it back into the interior pocket. She kneels on the bench in front of the casket and studies Vincent’s face. She tries to think of a prayer to say, but all her prayers are gone.

  Noises behind her, everyone from outside tumbling back in. Amy’s not prepared to make a scene, but she’s not sure how to avoid it. She turns around slowly. Diane sits in the front row, Monsignor Ricciardi next to her. Andy Capelli is off in the back of the room, sweating under a painting of a Mediterranean beach. Sand, grapes on a plate, blue water. Tony is holding up Mrs. Mescolotto, trying to talk her into leaving, but she’s cursing under her breath, saying she wants to stay. What Diane thinks of this, Amy can’t make out. She can’t imagine she knew anything about Vincent and Mrs. Mescolotto. No one seems to have even acknowledged that she’s bombed. Protocol. Dom is pacing in the hallway outside the room. Bernie from Homestretch is with him, and they’re talking. Dom’s heated. Bernie throws up his hands and then comes in to pay his respects. He stands next to Amy.

  “Hey, it’s you,” Bernie says.

  Amy half smiles at Bernie.

  Diane stands and makes for the casket. It’s as if she’s seeing Vincent for the first time. She throws herself over his body and starts wailing. “‘Que sera, sera,’” she sings through tears. “‘Whatever will be, will be. The future’s not ours to see. Que sera, sera. What will be, will be.’” She weeps harder,
the song trailing off, her hands on his chest. Amy wonders if she’ll feel the knife there.

  As if on cue, there’s music in the hallway, the rising thrum of “Eye of the Tiger.” Dom’s phone. He silences it fast, but not fast enough. Diane whirls around and looks to see whose phone the music came from. She knows right away it’s Dom’s. He’s got his phone out in his hand. Diane looks at Amy, as if to say, What’s going on here? The sadness in her eyes has transformed into fear. “Dom?” she says. And then she passes out cold, crumpling forward.

  Monsignor Ricciardi leaps forward to try to catch her, but she goes down pretty hard. Andy Capelli jumps into action. He runs back to his office to get whatever he gets when people pass out. Probably a cup of water, a wet washcloth, maybe smelling salts.

  Amy leans over Diane. Alessandra and Fred look on, dumbstruck.

  “Diane?” Amy says, touching her cheek.

  “That was some fall,” Monsignor Ricciardi says. “Maybe we should call an ambulance.”

  Andy Capelli comes back with a bag of frozen peas.

  “What’s that for?” Monsignor Ricciardi says.

  “What?” Andy says, not hearing Monsignor Ricciardi, falling to his knees next to Diane. “Hold it up against her head.”

  “Why do you have frozen peas in a funeral home?”

  Andy drops the bag of peas to the carpet. “Is she okay?”

  “We’re not sure,” Amy says.

  Diane’s eyes flutter open. Amy looks back to see if Dom’s still there. He’s gone.

  Mrs. Mescolotto is now swatting at her husband’s chest. “You did this, didn’t you, Tone? You son of a bitch! You did this!”

  Tony seems genuinely taken aback. “You’re drunk, Karen.”

  “Vincent, my love!” Mrs. Mescolotto says, and Amy’s glad that Diane’s not fully conscious to hear it.

  “This is wild,” Bernie says.

  Amy makes a move toward Mrs. Mescolotto, but she knows the woman’s too drunk to have any sense talked into her. She wonders what Diane will think when she wakes up. Will she be able to piece together a narrative that makes Amy look like she did something wrong? Did Amy do something wrong? There’s nothing wrong with staying quiet. It’s a way of life.