by Clark Howard
“Absolutely,” Kiley agreed emphatically. “Take you and me. We met under the worst possible circumstances—and look at us now. Drinking beer, having a nice talk. You’re right, Hal: All it takes is effort.” Kiley had seen Nate take off his apron and leave, his shift over; he wouldn’t be around for Winston to question about Joe, if Winston was so inclined—which Kiley really didn’t think he was. But he had waited for Nate to leave anyway. Now he drained his glass and said, “Well, I’m going to call it a day—”
“It’s early yet,” Winston objected tentatively.
“I know, but I’m still fighting that change of hours.” Standing, Kiley offered his hand. “Been a real pleasure, Hal. Enjoyed talking to you.” As they shook hands, Kiley leaned down and whispered in mock seriousness, “Don’t blow up any more buses, okay? I wouldn’t want to have to arrest you.”
Kiley laughed at the joke, then Winston laughed also, but not as quickly. Giving Winston a wink, Kiley turned and walked out of the bar.
Twelve
When Kiley went to the Bianco home for dinner the second time, he saw at once that the evening was more planned, more organized. “Come see how nice the girls have fixed everything,” Stella said at the door, taking his hand and practically dragging him to the dining room.
There, Jennie and Tessie had set out what Joe knew to be the good china, the good silver, and the crystal.
“We’re getting everything ready, Uncle Joey,” Jennie said, pulling him down to kiss his cheek in passing.
“I’m helping,” Tessie boasted. She came over to hug Joe while surreptitiously, she thought, patting his coat pocket for jelly beans.
“Tessie, stop that,” Stella scolded. “You mustn’t always expect something—”
“Actually, I brought a strawberry whipped cream cake,” Kiley said. “If you already have dessert, I can give it to Mrs. Levine—”
“No, we want the cake!” the girls shouted in perfect unison.
“All I planned was spumoni,” Stella said. “The cake sounds delicious.”
“I’ll bring it in,” Joe said. “It’s from Dominici’s—”
On the way out to the car, he wondered if he should have mentioned that. Dominici’s was an Italian bakery on Milwaukee Avenue that specialized in whipped cream fruit cakes. Nick had picked up something there at least once a week to take home to his family. Earlier, Joe had thought it was a good idea; now, suddenly, he felt self-conscious about it. But he took the cake in anyway.
“This all looks really nice, girls,” he told the two sisters as he passed back through the dining room to the kitchen. Placing napkins, they smiled primly, then giggled at each other.
“Let’s put that in the fridge,” Stella said when he walked into the kitchen. She took the box from his hands. “They’ve been like this all day,” she nodded toward the dining room. “So excited. It was really Jennie’s idea; tacky me, I was going to make you eat in the kitchen again.” She put a hand on his arm. “How is it on the job, Joe?”
“Not too bad,” he said. “Things seem to have settled down a little. I don’t think there’ll be any problem with your pension; the department has decided to cover Nick and me being off duty.” He did not mention that the department had to drop its investigation of Tony Touhy in order to do so. But she did not know about Tony Touhy anyway, not by name; all she knew was that there was a suspect in Nick’s killing.
“What about your job, Joe? Is that okay too?”
“Looks like.”
“I’m glad, Joey. We need to put this whole thing behind us and, like you said, go on living. That’s what Nick would want.” Turning, she opened the oven door, hot pads in hand. “The lasagna’s ready. Girls—!” she yelled into the dining room. They hurried in. “Take the salads out of the fridge and put them on the table. Joe, you get out the wine—”
Stella Bianco was clearly functioning again.
Dinner reminded Joe of the first time he had ever come to the Bianco home, about a month after he and Nick became partners. Tessie had not been born yet, and Jennie was just a toddler, going back and forth between Nick and Stella for bites from their plates, until finally Stella gave her a bottle and put her down. But the table had been set the same way—smartly, elegantly, in a fashion Stella had copied from a magazine—and Nick had shown off the crystal he was so proud of; crystal he had paid retail for. “I would never, ever, put anything from Maxwell Street on my table, Joe,” he had subsequently told his partner some months later. “Not even food. There’s a guy down there moves USDA Prime for three bucks a pound, Joe. It goes for seven-something a pound in butcher shops—but I don’t touch it. Nothing hijacked goes on my table.”
The first visit, when Joe had met Stella, who was a young, first-time mother then, she had been wearing a Chinese-red dress in which she looked like a dream. Tonight she was in a dressy navy blue pantsuit, and both girls were wearing Sunday dresses.
“You ladies,” Kiley said at the table, raising his glass to them, “look absolutely beautiful tonight. You have got to be the three prettiest girls in the whole world.”
“Well, thank you, kind sir,” Stella replied elaborately.
“Jennie and me made the salads all by ourselves,” Tessie said.
“Jennie and Stella got in edgewise as Joe said, “And fine salads they are. If I ever hear of a salad-making contest anywhere, I’m going to enter you girls in it.”
On thinking about the evening in retrospect, Kiley was not certain whether there had already been an underlying tension among them that he had simply failed to notice, or whether it was his own insensitivity that had generated it. He knew that even though he was enjoying himself very much, he was also acutely aware that it was Thursday night, when the bus bomber usually struck. There had been four blasts on four consecutive Thursdays; then a Thursday was skipped—one of the days Harold Winston was in jail. Now another Thursday had arrived, Winston was loose, and Kiley was restless to know whether, after their meeting in the tavern, Winston would strike again. Kiley did not think he would; he felt Winston was too crafty to risk placing another explosive when the possibility existed that he could be under surveillance. Kiley still felt Winston wanted to be caught—but he didn’t think Winston wanted it to be an in-the-act apprehension. Winston probably wanted to be put on trial—but he didn’t want to be found guilty and put away.
The other thing on Kiley’s mind was that he had come up with a plan to try and connect Tony Touhy to Nick’s murder. It was a scheme that was still fermenting in his mind—he wasn’t sure yet he could even carry it out—but that was there during the evening in addition to the Winston thing, and he supposed he had not been as alert to the atmosphere at the dinner table as he should have been. It was he who ruined the dinner with his loose mouth, trying to be understanding, considerate, empathetic—all the traits that were naturally alien to his personality except in rare instances, with the scant few special people in his life.
It happened innocently enough. Little Tessie said, “Jennifer didn’t take her singing lesson today, Uncle Joey. Her teacher called Mommy.”
Joe saw Jennie stop eating and look down at her plate.
“It’s the second one she’s missed,” Stella told Joe, a little self-consciously, again pointing up the fact that without Nick, she did not have the Bianco household functioning very well. “Her teacher said if she hasn’t been practicing and if she keeps missing her lessons, she’ll have to start all over. But she just didn’t want to go,” Stella shrugged, “so I didn’t make her.”
Now Jennie looked up, looked at Joe as if she had some need for reassurance from him.
“It won’t hurt her to miss a few lessons,” Joe said supportively. “And I’m sure she won’t have to start over. She’s got a voice like an angel already.”
As soon as the unfortunate words were out of his mouth, Joe regretted them. Jesus, just let them pass, he silently implored.
But he knew it was too late when tears started to flow down Jennie’s cheeks.
“My—my daddy—is with the angels—she said in a pitiful little strained voice, the words directed at Joe.
“I know, sweetheart,” Joe said softly. “I know he is.”
“And he’s—never coming back—”
Bursting into hysterical sobbing, she fled the table.
Stella stood and started to hurry after her, but stopped instead and looked at Kiley. “You go up to her, Joey.”
“Me? Stella, I—”
“Please. She needs someone stronger than me right now. Go up to her.”
Feeling he had caused the regrettable reaction himself, and not at all sure Stella was making a wise decision, Joe nevertheless left the table and followed Jennie upstairs.
It was more than an hour before Kiley came back downstairs again. The dining room table had been partially cleared off; Tessie’s plate was gone, and clean plates and fresh napkins were set out where Stella and Joe had sat. Kiley found Stella and Tessie in the kitchen, tidying up.
“Is she okay?” Stella asked, worry shadowing her face.
Kiley nodded. “She’s sleeping. I took off her shoes and put a blanket over her. I had to lie down with her for a long time before she stopped crying.”
“Yeah, she always wants that when she’s sick or when things aren’t going just right for her. Usually it was Nick that did it. I’m glad you were here for her, Joe.”
“I don’t know what made me say what I did about angels,” Joe shook his head, perplexed. “It was such a stupid comment—”
“It was a perfectly natural thing to say,” Stella defended. “Listen, Tessie’s finished her dinner and I’m keeping ours warm in the oven. You and I can sit back down to eat in a few minutes, but first your goddaughter has something to ask you.”
Teresa came over to where Joe was standing and hooked an arm around his leg. “Uncle Joey, will you rock me in the rocker until my bedtime?”
“Sure, I will, beautiful,” he said. “Right now?”
“Yes!” she screeched in delight. “Come on!”
Kiley let the child take his hand and lead him into the living room where there was a very old but still very solid mahogany rocking chair that had once belonged to Stella’s grandmother. It had been given to them when Stella was three months pregnant with Jennie, along with the charge to “Rock’a the un’aborn baby one hour every night, makes’a baby form perfeet, see?” Of course, Stella did; of course, Jennie was perfect; of course, the grandmother gleaned all the credit for that perfection. The sturdy old chair was now cushioned seat and back with pillows covered with material that matched Stella’s drapes.
Kiley settled into the chair, into the depression he knew Nick had made and left. “I had to rock that godchild of yours for an hour last night to get her to go to sleep,” he had occasionally grumbled good-naturedly. “I swear to God, between you and Stella, she’s getting spoiled rotten.”
As soon as Kiley sat, Tessie was on his lap, handing him a book. “What’s this?” he asked.
“It’s a book.” She gave Joe a very impatient look. “For you to read to me.”
“Oh. What’s it about?”
“Read it and you’ll see. It’s about Sleeping Beauty.”
“Well, if I read you this book and you fall asleep on my lap, then you’ll be my sleeping beauty, won’t you?”
“Yes, I will,” she replied primly. Then added: “But I won’t fall asleep.”
She was asleep in twenty minutes.
Kiley carried the sleeping child and Stella led the way back upstairs to the bedroom where Jennie was already asleep. Kiley helped set Tessie up on the other bed and held her while Stella wrestled her out of everything but her panties, then pulled a nightgown over her head and got her into bed with a Barbie doll in one arm and a Panda bear in the other. Finished with the youngest, they did the same at Jennifer’s bed with the oldest: to Joe, a distinctly more difficult job because Jennie was so much bigger.
“Jesus, that’s a lot of work,” he said to Stella as they went back downstairs.
“Tell me,” Stella agreed. “Fortunately, it doesn’t happen all that often.” In the dining room, she said, “Pour us both some wine. I’ll get the lasagna back out.”
When they were finally settled down to eat again, Kiley felt the need to once more apologize for the comment he was certain had disrupted the evening. “Stel, I’m really sorry about what I said. I guess I didn’t think—”
“Joe, it’s okay,” she assured. “I’ve been half expecting it from Jennie sooner or later. Tessie, you know, seems to go in and out of her periods of grief, but Jen, I don’t know, is like moody most of the time. She doesn’t want to do anything, go anywhere, she’s not interested in seeing anybody; this dinner for you is the first thing she’s shown any enthusiasm for since the funeral—”
“Great. And I had to be the one to spoil it.”
“That is not so, Joe Kiley, and I don’t want to hear it again out of you!” Stella scolded with all the authoritarianism she could marshal. Then her voice softened again. “I am worried about her, though. Maybe I expected us all to, I don’t know—regroup faster than we have. We’re not weaklings, any of us—”
“Jen is going to be all right,” Kiley said confidently. “All of you will; you’ll all be fine. It’s just going to take time.”
“Time,” she said wearily. “I hate the goddamned word.” She took a long swallow of wine between bites. “It’s not just a word, you know, Joe: time. It’s an existence, it’s real. The hours of the day drag like a heavyweight on all of us; sometimes the girls and I just sit, not doing anything: We just sit. And the nights—well, sometimes I think the goddamned nights won’t pass at all—”
“It’ll all pass, Stel.”
“I know. I know it will. But, God, when? When, Joey?” That last was a plea, clear and urgent.
“I can’t tell you when,” Kiley said quietly. “Nobody can tell you that. But you’ve got to keep working at it, Stel. For the sake of the girls as well as yourself. Don’t let yourselves just sit. Make yourselves do something.”
Kiley tried not to lecture; he wanted only to support, reinforce, bolster whatever needed bolstering in Stella’s present shaky foundation. And he was aware that what he was offering her was limited by his own narrow view of life—life that was either good or bad, white or black, with no shades of gray; life jaded by fourteen years of the badge, the gun. He was aware that all he kept offering was a repeat litany of “Time heals everything”; aware that he was incapable of approaching subjects like the years of love Stella had enjoyed with Nick, the enormous physical pleasure they obviously had together, the beautiful little girls they had produced, the pride she could take in Nick’s years as a police officer—because, the Valentino suits and a few other things aside, Nick Bianco had for the most part been a goddamned good cop. The drug peddlers, rapists, muggers, child molesters, purse snatchers, drunken wife beaters, brutal pimps, and all the other gross street trash that Nick had been involved in arresting for a dozen years, more than made up for a weakness he indulged in expensive suits—a weakness he knew helped support warehouse burglars and truck hijackers.
But Kiley could not speak of those things to Stella Bianco; they were, to his mind, subjects on the other side of an imaginary line that he felt he could not cross. It would have been like talking to Stella about Gloria Mendez. So Kiley kept to his own side of that line, the side he had always stayed on, the familiar side, and spoke to his late partner’s widow in a series of clichés about strength, time, responsibility. She had probably already heard exactly the same things from her priest.
“Joe,” Stella said after several moments of silent eating, “I feel so selfish telling you about all my problems, when you’ve got so many of your own. I know you must miss Nick very much too—” She let her words hang, providing Kiley an opening to speak if he wanted one.
“I do, Stella,” he told her earnestly. Up until then, he had not verbalized to anyone the depth of his own loss. “I know it’ll
sound like a line from some soap opera, but I really feel that I lost a part of myself; not like an arm or an eye, anything like that; like something inside of me has been taken away. Nick and I had reached the point where we worked so smoothly together, where we functioned like synchronized gears in a machine of some kind; we always seemed to know exactly what each of us was supposed to do, because we knew what the other one would be doing. And neither one of us even had to think about it; we just knew.” Joe looked away from the table and seemed to stare off into space. “There are some old-timers in the department who believe they can actually read their partner’s mind; I mean, seriously believe it. There are two cops in burglary who’ve been partners for thirty-one years. Their minds are supposed to be so attuned to each other that when one of them is having an argument with his wife, the phone will ring and it’ll be the other one, and he’ll say, ‘What are you two fighting about now? You’re keeping me awake.’ And once one of them left a theater in the middle of a movie, saying, ‘My partner needs me,’ and sure enough, his partner had just been in a car accident and was on his way to the hospital. True stories, both of them. Really happened. I know they’re extreme examples, but they show that between cops who are longtime partners, some kind of connection does exist. Nick and I were partners for eight years; not a long time by some standards—but long enough for us to bond, to link up. When two cops fuse like that, especially street cops, it’s like something invisible between them is spliced together. After that happens, when one of them loses the other, the one left behind feels like he’s had an organ removed. He feels like he’s been through major surgery, only without being cut.” Kiley looked back at Stella and smiled slightly, self-consciously. “Yeah, Stella, I miss him very much.”
Stella rose and came around the table, and as if he had been waiting for her, desperately needing her, Joe also rose, and met her. Their arms went around each other and Stella pulled Joe’s head down onto her shoulder, his face against her neck, and held him there as he began to sob.
