Final Appeal raa-2

by Lisa Scottoline

  Odd.

  I didn’t see him when we came. There’s a newspaper on his lap, but he’s not reading it. I take another stitch and yank the yarn through quickly. I look up at the man on the opposite bench.

  He’s still there, but too far away for me to make out his features. His hair is dark, and he seems broad-shouldered underneath the bulky V-neck sweater. Something about him looks familiar. Then I remember. He looks a lot like the man I saw at the police station and the memorial service, but I can’t be positive.

  Still.

  I turn around to the police car. It’s there, but it’s empty. No adolescent cop, no newspaper. I swallow hard. The cop was here a minute ago. I look down the street. He’s standing in front of the borough library, talking to an old woman carrying a stack of books. He’s too far away to see or hear me.

  Jesus. Stay calm.

  I look back at the man on the bench, watching him as he scans the playground, apparently harmlessly. His sweater is much too heavy for such a balmy day, and it’s bulgy enough to accommodate a gun in a shoulder holster. He could be with the Mob; he looks the part. Is he the same man as at the police station?

  That man had a black car with Virginia plates.

  I take a quick stitch and casually look over the cars along the street. There’s my wagon, then another wagon and a minivan. His car isn’t there; so far, so good. I glance at the library lot next to the playground. The chrome grill of a dark car peeks at me from around the library, glinting in the sunlight. I bite my lip. It looks like the black car, but it also looks like a zillion other American cars. It’s parked with the front end facing me, and there are no license plates in the front. Maybe it’s from Virginia, maybe not.

  I can’t stand this. I feel more nervous by the second.

  I take another stitch and peek over at the cop. He’s nodding as the old woman unloads her pile of plastic-covered books into his arms. Terrific. My yarn snags; a notch of kelly green explodes through a yellow thatched roof. I hate needlepoint.

  I stare at the man. He’s still sitting there, but now he’s checking out the swings. Maddie’s not the only child on them, but he appears to be watching her. I look back at him, then at her. She’s between us, but he’s closer to her than I am.

  Relax, I tell myself. You handled back labor, you can handle this. I weave the needle into the scrim border for safekeeping.

  Maddie sails back and forth, her cotton skirt billowing each time she swings forward. The man in the sweater watches her, unsmiling.

  What the hell? Is he the man from the school playground? Is he the man from the police station? Why is he watching my daughter?

  Suddenly, the man takes the newspaper off his lap and stands up.

  I set my needlepoint aside and stand up.

  He looks up at the swings and so do I. With a start, I see that Maddie’s swing isn’t going nearly as high as it was; she’s beginning to slow down. She slows to a low arc, dragging an untied Keds on the ground, kicking up loose, dry dirt. She’s getting ready to jump off.

  My heart starts to pound.

  The man takes a step toward the swings.

  The cop rearranges the books. The old woman takes his arm.

  I feel breathless. I open my mouth to scream but nothing comes out.

  The man walks right toward Maddie. Unmistakably.

  My scream breaks free. “Maddie! Maddie!” I shout. I’m off in a second, running toward the swings. “Help, police!”

  Maddie looks confused, then terrified. The man glances back at me, then sprints in the opposite direction.

  I pick up my pace, running as hard as I can. “Help! Police!” I scream, full bore.

  My panic sets off the other mothers. One of them gathers her children together, hugging them to her legs. The other, a young mother, takes off like a shot after the stranger, who’s fleeing across the grassy common. She’s a short-haired woman in bicycle pants, and she passes me in no time. “I got that bastard,” she says, hardly puffing as she whizzes by, cowlick flying.

  I keep running until I get to Maddie, who’s frozen with fear in front of the swings. I scoop her up and hug her tight. Over her shoulder I watch the young mother almost on the heels of the man. I pray to God he doesn’t have a gun as she grabs him by the sweater and they both fall hard to the ground.

  The cop comes running from the entrance to the playground, but the young woman doesn’t need his help. She clambers onto the man’s back and wrenches his arm behind him. A group of teenagers playing basketball at the far side of the playground stop their game and come running over. It’s a done deal by the time the cop and the teenagers reach the middle of the huge field, which is when I guess the young woman must be an undercover cop, sent by Winn just in case.

  “What’s happening, Mommy?” Maddie says in a small voice. “What’s going on?” She wraps her arms tighter around my neck.

  “That man who was running, was he the one you saw on the playground at school?”

  “Yes.”

  I watch as the basketball players ring the prone man. “It’s okay now, baby. It’s all over.”

  “What are they gonna do?”

  “They’re gonna put him in jail.”

  “Why?”

  Because he’s a killer, I think to myself, and hug her even closer. I pick her up and walk over to the crowd around the man. The cop has handcuffed him and flipped him over on his back. The woman has her running shoe at his Adam’s apple. She gives me a brusque wave as I approach.

  “We got him,” the cop says.

  Please. “You had an assist, I think, from the FBI.”

  The cop and the woman exchange looks over the unconscious man. “Are you with the feds?” the cop says.

  “Me? Are you kidding?” The young woman laughs. “I’m a librarian.”

  “What?” I say. “But the way you tackled—”

  “Arrgh,” the man moans, regaining consciousness. He’s older up close but still a scumbag, like Winn said.

  “He’s waking’ up!” one of the ballplayers says.

  The librarian presses her ribbed toe into the man’s throat. “Stay right there, asshole.”

  “Grace?” the man says, disoriented, looking up from the grass.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “I gave it to you, for chrissake.”

  “What?”

  He spits grass out of his mouth. “I’m your fuckin’ father.”

  Bernice glares through the gate of her Fisher-Price prison, eyeing with canine distrust the stranger who is my father.

  “Lucky for me that dog wasn’t with you today,” he says. Underneath his sweater is a ropy gold chain; no shoulder holster, as far as I can tell. “That’s a big mother dog.”

  “Watch your language.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You want coffee or not?”

  “Yeah.” He holds up his mug.

  “How do you take it?” I pause over him with the pot of coffee. Maybe he needs a hot shower.

  “Black is fine.” He looks up at me with blue eyes that eerily mirror my own, which stops me short. I can see the years on him; the deep crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes and a softening around the jowls. He must be over sixty, but he looks fifty. His hair is jet black, like Robert Goulet’s; I wonder if he dyes it. I pour him some coffee, then myself, avoiding his eyes.

  “You’re mad, aren’t ya?” he says.

  “You know me so well, Dad.”

  He winces when he sips his coffee. “Christ, this is hot!”

  I stop short of saying, Good, you burn yourself? “So what are you doing here? In the neighborhood, thought you’d drop by?”

  He frowns at my sarcasm but evidently decides not to send me to my room. “Look, I wanted to see my granddaughter.”

  “Why?”

  “I just wanted to see her, okay?”

  “Why now? She’s been around for six years. It’s not like she’s been booked up.”

  “I just retired.” He clears his thr
oat, but his voice still sounds like gravel. “I moved back to Philly.”

  “So you were in the neighborhood.”

  “I figured it was time to settle up, you know?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “When you’re my age, you’ll know.” He slurps his coffee, wincing again.

  “We have a telephone. You could have called.”

  “I know, I looked you up in the phone book. That’s how I knew where she went to school.” He glances into the living room, where Maddie’s teaching herself to make a cat’s cradle with a pink string he brought her. “She’s a little lady. Just like you were,” he says wistfully, but I have no patience for his wistfulness.

  “You scared her, you know. And me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I pull out a chair at the side of the table, two seats away from where he sits. Even from here I can smell his aftershave, something drugstore like Aqua Velva. He doesn’t say anything for a minute, staring down into his mug. I’ll be damned if I’ll fill this silence. I sip my coffee.

  “Okay, so it wasn’t the best way to go about it,” he says finally.

  “On the contrary. It was the worst possible way to go about it.”

  “Now I got your Irish up.” He laughs softly, but I’m not laughing.

  “You want a drink? Little sweetener for that coffee?”

  He looks at me, stung. “I haven’t had a drink in a long, long time.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “Good for you. Where do you live?”

  “Philly, now. South Philly.”

  The Italian neighborhood. “What do you do?”

  “I used to teach.”

  “You were a teacher?” I can’t hide my surprise. I would have figured him for a bartender, maybe a trucker. But a teacher? “What did you teach?”

  “English.”

  “What?” He can barely speak it. I almost spit out my coffee.

  “You’re surprised at your old man, eh?”

  “Please. Let’s not leap ahead with the ‘old man’ stuff. Where did you teach?”

  “In high school. In Virginia.”

  It was his car, the black one. It’s parked out in front of my house like an official Mafia squad car. “Have you been following me?”

  He shifts heavily in his seat. “Not exactly. Just watching, a little.”

  “Why?”

  “Tryin’ to decide, you know. When to make my move. In the beginning, I just wanted to see what you looked like.” He appraises me for a minute. “You grew up nice, pretty. Very pretty.”

  Let’s change the subject. “So they let Italians in Virginia. You like it there?”

  “No. No calamar’, no nothin’. I had nothin’ keepin’ me there, so I came back. That’s my life story.”

  “Never remarried?”

  “No.”

  “No other kids?”

  “Not that I know of.” He laughs, then spots my glare. “No.”

  I shake my head, and another silence falls between us. We have nothing to say to each other; we have everything to say to each other.

  “You’re a lawyer?” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “Here’s a good one. You’re in a room with Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, a lawyer, and a revolver loaded with two bullets. What do you do?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He waves his hand. “It’s a joke.”

  “Okay, what?”

  “Shoot the lawyer twice.” He laughs, but I don’t. “Okay, strike one. Here’s another. What’s black and brown and looks good on a lawyer?”

  “Listen—”

  “A Doberman.” He laughs again, his eyes crinkling at the corners. An attractive man for his age, with a kind face. Except that he’s a wife beater. Did I mention that appearances are deceiving?

  “You beat my mother, didn’t you?”

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “In a way.”

  He exhales heavily. “Madonn’.”

  “Well?”

  “I never laid a hand on your mother. Never.” He points a thick index finger at me.

  “Bullshit. I remember.”

  “You remember wrong, lawyer.”

  “The hell I do. Don’t you dare come here and tell me what I remember,” I say, my voice rising. “I know what I remember.”

  “Mom?” Maddie calls uncertainly from the living room. The child has been traumatized enough; now her mother is going off the deep end.

  “You want to go play outside, honey?”

  “No.”

  “You want to watch a tape?”

  “Even though I watched cartoons this morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yeah!” She leaps off the couch.

  “You know how to put it in?”

  “I do it all the time, Mom. Jeez.” She rummages under the TV for her tapes.

  My father watches Maddie slip a tape in the VCR. “Smart little girl.”

  I feel a knot in my chest. “She sure is. So was I.”

  He pushes his mug away and folds his hands. “You want to know why I left?”

  “For starters.”

  He looks down at his wrinkled hands, the only giveaway as to his age. “I met your mother at the Nixon, at Fifty-second and Market.”

  “We’re beginning at the beginning, I see.”

  He gives me a dirty look. “As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, the Nixon was one of the biggest ballrooms around. Cost a couple bucks to get in. Had a mirror ball, spotlights, ten-piece band. Soup to nuts. You had to wear a tie and jacket.”

  “Very classy.”

  He nods, missing the irony. “Very classy. Why your mother was there that night, I still don’t know. She was from Saint Tommy More. She was a great dancer, the best.”

  “My mother, dancing?” I blurt out. It’s inconceivable, she barely smiles.

  “God, yeh.” He nods. “I was there with the goombahs, the boys from the corner. Louie, Popeye, Cooch. She was there with the Irish girls. They were all in a corner, talkin’ to each other. The Italians never asked the Irish to dance, the Irish never asked the Italians to dance. They weren’t from the neighborhood. Lady of Angels.” He smiles, lost there for a minute. “I remember her eyes, she had gorgeous eyes. Bedroom eyes.”

  “So?”

  “So I asked her to dance, but she wouldn’t dance with me. I kept after her for the slow dance. Finally she did. I remember the floor was slippery from the powder.”

  “Powder?”

  “Yeh. Talcum powder, on the floor. Made it even more slippery, for slide dancing. Slow dancing, you know. Big band. Ah, your mother was good. So was I. You had to be good; otherwise you’d slip on your goddamn ass.” He laughs thickly. “They had a contest, too, for the best jitterbug. We won some money, coupla bucks, I forget how much.”

  I hear the first strains of Cinderella coming from the living room and Maddie jumps back up on the couch, already lost in the fantasy world of Disney. Someday my prince will come. I should burn those tapes.

  “Then we went outside for a drink. You couldn’t drink at these things, but we found a way to drink. We always found a way to drink. Then we got married and you came along.” His smile fades. “I decided to stop then, went to AA, the whole bit. But she didn’t.”

  I don’t understand. “You mean Mom drank?”

  “I tried to get her to stop, but she couldn’t.” He leans back heavily in his chair.

  “But Mom doesn’t drink. Not even beer.”

  “Maybe not now, but then she did. I tried everything. Hiding the bottles, throwing them away, pouring that shit down the toilet. I dumped her whiskey and she came at me—”

  “Came at you?”

  He reddens slightly. “That was the last straw. I couldn’t take it anymore. I knew if I stayed, I’d go down with her. So I left. Took off. The only thing I did wrong, the thing I regret, is I left you.”

  My chest grows tight. I can
’t say anything.

  “I can’t even tell you I tried to get custody, because I didn’t. They wouldn’t have given it to me, not in those days, but that’s no excuse. I heard she stopped drinkin’ after I left, but I still didn’t go back. We were bad for each other, we would’ve gone down together. And you too.”

  I swallow hard, disoriented. This isn’t my family history. My history is altogether different: a father who drank, a no-good, and a mother who suffered. A victim, a saint. I don’t know whether to believe him. I can’t look at him. “You should go,” I say.

  “I’m not so dumb that I expected everything to be all right with us. I came because I wanted to make it up to you. I have a little money. Maybe I can help out.”

  “You can’t. You should go.”

  “Maybe you need to think about it. I know I sprung this on you. You can call me any time.” He puts a card down on the table. EMEDIO “MIMMY” ROSSI, CERTIFIED ESL INSTRUCTOR. “I’m startin’ a little business. I teach English as a second language. To Koreans, Vietnamese, like that.”

  “Am I supposed to clap?”

  “You’re tough, you know that?” He gets up to go, but I still can’t look at him. I have a thousand questions for him, but only one keeps burning in my head.

  “Did you hit me?” I ask, when he’s past me.

  “What do you mean, hit you?”

  “When you drank, did you hit me?”

  “No. Never.” His voice sounds louder; he must have turned around to face me. “Why?”

  “I’m remembering things.”

  He’s silent for a moment. “You’ll have to ask your mother about that,” he says. I hear him call good-bye to Maddie and leave by the screen door.

  It closes with a sharp bang.

  “Roarf!” Bernice says.

  21

  I spend a long time at the dining room table, feeling awful as Maddie sits enchanted by her tape. What is he saying? That my mother drank too? That she was the one who hit me?

  It never even occurred to me.

  I’m not sure what to do; I can’t process it all fast enough. I can’t even deal with the fact that I have a father now. What does a grown woman want with a father? And is there room for a mother, especially one who would wallop a child? Then a more urgent concern pops into my head.