City of Margins

by William Boyle

  “If you don’t want the books anymore,” Mikey says, “I’ll take them.”

  She leans over the box and takes out the note, flattening it against her thigh and tracing her finger over the letters. “Sure, I’m glad someone who wants them will get them. Gabe loved to read.”

  “I like it, too.”

  “Gabe liked to write. He wanted to write plays, at one point anyway. Do you like to write?”

  “No, I can’t write. I always got Cs and Ds in my writing classes.”

  She stands up. “Will you come in? I can make coffee. It’d be nice to have a little company.”

  “Okay,” he says.

  She folds the letter, inserting it in the pocket of her blazer. “Just leave the box,” she says. “You can get it on your way out.”

  Mikey comes in and wipes his feet on the mat inside the door.

  She guides him through the living room. She notices that he looks at her records first.

  In the kitchen, she pulls out a chair for him. He sits, scooching the chair in, trying to figure out what to do with his arms. He settles on putting his elbows on the table.

  Donna fills the percolator, the outside dewy with condensation. She scoops Folgers into the basket and then fits the lid on, placing the percolator on a medium flame.

  She thinks about what’s in her fridge. Some vanilla yogurt that’s pretty old, a box of raisins, a last hunk of Entenmann’s crumb cake. “You want a piece of crumb cake?” she asks.

  “I’m good,” he says. “I just ate dinner. I’m pretty full.”

  Donna sits across from him at the table. “Do you have an apartment?”

  “I live with my mom.”

  “You’re in college?”

  “Not anymore. I dropped out. I went upstate.”

  “Upstate where? I have distant cousins in Coxsackie.”

  “New Paltz.”

  She nods. “About the note,” she says.

  “We don’t have to talk about it,” he says, his voice gentle.

  “Thank you. I know.” She looks over her shoulder at the stove. The coffee isn’t perking yet. She continues: “I want to. Gabe, he was fifteen.” The tear’s there on her cheek before she even realizes she’s crying again.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I’m okay. You’re young. Gabe was young. He was having a hard go of it. He was just sad. I tried to get him help.” She feels, suddenly, so open with this strange kid. She hasn’t been able to talk to anyone about Gabe. Not at work. Not the therapist she tried those first three months. Maybe it’s because he’s close to Gabe’s age. Gabe would be in college now. Mikey could’ve been a friend of Gabe’s. Maybe it’s meant to be, her leaving the note, Mikey finding it and bringing it back.

  “My father killed himself,” Mikey says, and she’s struck by his lack of hesitation.

  “That’s awful,” Donna says, pushing forward in her chair. But she’s even more intrigued. It’s another thing that makes this feel meant to be. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I was eighteen when he did it. He was in trouble.”

  The coffee starts perking rapidly. Donna goes over and lowers the gas, the blue flame sputtering under the percolator. Two mornings ago, she’d left the burner on and had woken up to the smell of gas and thought how easy it would be if the apartment just blew up with her in it. But she’d probably take poor Suzette and her cats out, too.

  She gets two clean mugs out of the dish drain and sets them on a cutting board next to the stovetop. “Do you take anything?” she asks Mikey.

  “Just black,” he says.

  She waits there at the stove, hunched over the percolator, rubbing her neck. “I lost hope,” she says.

  Mikey doesn’t say anything.

  She elaborates: “After Gabe died, I lost hope. It’s hard to have hope. I used to go to church. How can I go to church? You know what Father Borzumato said to me? He said we couldn’t bury Gabe in my family plot. He said Gabe was going to hell. I don’t believe that. I don’t know what I believe, but I don’t believe that.”

  “He said the same thing to my mother,” Mikey says. “But my mother accepts it. She thinks that’s what happens.”

  “You go to church?”

  “Not anymore. I did, growing up.”

  “You lost hope, too?”

  “I guess. I’m not sure I ever really had hope. I don’t even know if I know what hope is.”

  The coffee has perked for a few minutes. Donna takes the percolator off the stove and sets it on a burnt brown oven mitt. She pours the mugs full of coffee, bringing one over to Mikey and then getting the other one for herself.

  She sits back down. “That’s a good question,” she says. “About what hope is, I mean.”

  “I don’t know,” Mikey says, holding the mug up to his lips and taking a sip of coffee. “I’m not good at thinking about stuff like that. I’m not really very smart.”

  “You seem smart.” Donna leans back in her chair, the steam from the coffee rising in front of her. “You have a job since you dropped out?”

  “Not right this sec.”

  “You want mine? I can’t stand it anymore.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “Bishop Kearney. I’m off for a couple of weeks now.”

  “Really? I went to Our Lady of the Narrows.”

  “I should’ve figured. Gabe went to Lafayette for high school. I don’t know why. It’s not like it was when I went there. Maybe I do know. He said he didn’t want to go to an all-boys school.”

  “It sucked.”

  Donna’s thoughts stray back to Mikey’s father. “Can I ask you a question? You said your father was in trouble. What kind of trouble?”

  “Gambling,” Mikey says.

  “He wasn’t the man who jumped from the Marine Parkway Bridge, was he?”

  “That’s my old man.”

  She remembers hearing about it. Word was that Mikey’s dad—she can’t remember his name, though she remembered people saying it—was in the hole to Big Time Tommy Ficalora. Donnie used to work some for Big Time Tommy. He didn’t think she knew, but she did. He probably still does. Maybe that’s his only work since he stopped being a cop. She thinks of Mikey’s dad, painted into a corner by bad decisions, so desperate he had to jump. She didn’t read the story in a paper, but it was the kind of thing where you run into someone on the street and they ask if you heard the news and they tell you about this stranger killing himself. It’d happened that way with Gabe, too. He became gossip for all the people who had nothing better to do than talk.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says.

  “It’s okay,” Mikey says. “He did what he did.”

  “Can I ask you something else?”

  “Okay.”

  “I heard about your father—what was his name?”

  “Giuseppe.”

  “I heard about Giuseppe just from people shooting their big mouths off. Did you ever hear about Gabe like that?”

  “I didn’t, no.”

  “You sure? The neighborhood talks.”

  “The neighborhood talks, but I don’t listen.” He pauses, sips some coffee. “You know, there’s a lot of . . .” He searches the air for what he’s trying to say. “I don’t know what word I’m looking for. There’s a lot of something in our stories.”

  “Synchronicity?” she asks.

  “Maybe. That sounds good. What’s it mean?”

  “I took psychology in college. It means that coincidences can be meaningful, basically. Things just line up, you know? I think that’s what it means. I think it fits.”

  “You talked about Gabe, but you didn’t mention being married. What happened?”

  “We split up after Gabe died. I couldn’t look at him anymore. Gabe was all we had to keep us together. We were married sixteen years. I don’t really want to talk about my ex too much, if you don’t mind.”

  “You don’t mind me asking, how old are you?” Mikey asks.

  Donna laughs. “I like tha
t you asked me that. You’re young enough not to know.”

  “Not to know what?”

  “You don’t ask women that question.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I’m thirty-nine. I look older.” She says it not as a question because she knows it to be true. The last three years have beaten her down, and she feels like she’s aged ten years. “Somebody at work thought I was in my late forties.”

  “You don’t look old.”

  “It’s okay. I don’t take any offense. I’m okay with looking my age. I’m okay with looking older than my age. I don’t want to look like a girl. I didn’t want to look like a girl when I was a girl.”

  “I’m twenty,” Mikey says, suddenly nervous. “I turn twenty-one tomorrow.”

  Donna lights up. “Well, happy birthday.”

  “Thanks. Doesn’t mean much to me, really.”

  “You have a girlfriend?”

  “She broke up with me a while ago.”

  “Gabe was in love with this girl he was afraid to talk to. Carissa, that was her name. He didn’t even give himself the chance to get his heart broken.” She pauses. “You sure you don’t want some crumb cake? I wish I had more to offer. My mother would’ve said I should be ashamed. Have someone over and have nothing good to put on the table.”

  “I’m okay, thank you.”

  “My parents are dead, both of them.”

  “All of my grandparents are dead.”

  “We’ve got a lot of dead people between us, huh?”

  Mikey shifts uncomfortably in his chair. He wraps his hand around the mug of coffee. “Death is weird,” he says.

  “It sure is,” Donna says, and she laughs again.

  Mikey laughs, too. He stands up, pushes away from the table. “I should probably go. Thank you for the coffee.”

  “It was nice talking to you. Really. I’m off tomorrow. I know it’s your birthday, but come by, if you want. I’ll just be here with my records.”

  Mikey’s eyes drift back to her crates full of LPs in the living room. “You’ve got a lot of records.”

  “I enjoy listening to music. Do you?”

  “I’ve got some tapes.”

  “If you come back, we can listen to music,” she says, and she can’t really believe that she’s said it, but she has.

  Mikey nods.

  She walks him back through the living room to the front door. “Don’t forget the books,” she says.

  “You’re sure?” he asks.

  “I want you to have them. Now that I know you a little, especially. I’m happy they’ll go to a good home.”

  Mikey leans down and picks up the box.

  Donna opens the door. “Thank you again for bringing back the note,” she says.

  Mikey stops as he crosses the threshold to outside. “If I come by tomorrow, can I just come by? Or should I call first?”

  “Just come by,” Donna says, smiling. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  When he’s gone, she goes back to the table and sits down in the seat where Mikey had been sitting. It’s warm. She touches the handle of his mug, considers the bit of coffee that he’s left, and she feels something she hasn’t felt in a long time.

  It’s desire. She knows that. But she can’t really distinguish what kind of desire. Is he a potential stand-in for Gabe? Someone she hopes to mother?

  Or is it the other thing?

  He’s practically a kid, but she likes the way he looked at her, and she likes the way they talked, and she’s bowled over by the things they have in common.

  What she feels now is that there’s a line between them, something that goes from A to B, and that maybe that line has always existed somehow, even though she’s almost forty and he’s only twenty going on twenty-one, but that it only came alive in the moment of meeting.

  She lets out a heavy sigh and drinks what little is left of his lukewarm coffee.

  NICK BIFULCO

  Nick’s making the rounds. First Donnie and now Mikey Baldini. He wants the true story of what happened that night in the schoolyard. He’s thinking that’s his opening scene for the script: Donnie going after Mikey with the bat. Was he drunk? Was he sweet on Antonina Divino? Was he legitimately concerned for her, trying to play father since his own kid was dead and buried?

  He remembers where Mikey lives because once he gave him a ride home from Bay Ridge. It’s a pretty far hike. There were always a few boys from the neighborhood at Our Lady of the Narrows. Nick avoided them on the bus, but if he had the car—especially late, after a basketball game or a school play or some bullshit—he didn’t mind giving them a lift. That bus ride could be torturously long, especially at night if you had to wait.

  The time he’d given Mikey a ride nothing of note had happened. They must’ve conversed, but he doesn’t remember about what. It was after a basketball game. Maybe they’d talked about the game. It was probably five or six years ago, before Mikey went up to New Paltz and got into whatever he got into, before the incident with Donnie Parascandolo, before his old man killed himself. He knew Mikey was back in the neighborhood because he’d heard it secondhand from Ava, who’d heard it from Rosemarie, who wouldn’t stop talking about how worried she was for his future.

  The Baldini house is sad and slumped, with green-speckled siding, loose roof shingles, and a rotting porch. There’s still an Easter wreath up on the front door.

  When he rings the bell, he’s not sure what he’s expecting. He’s got it in his head that Mikey will answer and be amped to talk.

  But it’s Rosemarie who answers. “Ava’s son?” she says. “What do you want?”

  “Hi, Mrs. Baldini,” Nick says. “I was hoping to talk to Mikey.”

  “Talk to Mikey about what?”

  “Just a writing project I’m working on. Nothing to worry about.”

  “Are you loaded? You’re like my son. He was loaded last I saw him, too.”

  “He’s not home?”

  She waves her hand, disgusted. “Who knows where he went? The lies. I can’t anymore.”

  “I’ll come back another time. I’m sorry.”

  “Twenty-one tomorrow. He was less trouble when he was a teenager.”

  Nick backs away. “Goodbye.”

  She swats the air and closes the door.

  His next bright idea is to go see Antonina Divino. Antonina lives right around the corner from Donnie with her parents, Sonny and Josephine, so he backtracks. He should’ve just gone there first. She must be going into her senior year of high school. Nick’s seen her around in her Bishop Kearney uniform. Model-pretty. Her hair’s long, usually dyed pink or purple. Maybe it’s not the smartest idea, a drunk guy going over to talk to a high school girl, but he’s so excited he can’t think about anything else. He’ll talk to Sonny first. He’ll be respectful as hell. Sonny will understand.

  The Divino house is on Bay Thirty-Fourth, in the middle of the block. He can throw a rock and hit the back of Donnie’s house. He stumbles through the front gate, leaving it open behind him, and nearly knocks over their metal garbage cans. Sonny’s motorcycle is parked in the garden next to a Mary statue encased in glass. Flowers grow in the garden. The little purple ones you can pinch with your fingers and make a puff of air with. A piece of tape on the mailbox has their last name printed neatly in Sharpie. Nick presses the bell three times. And then he bangs at the edge of the screen door with his fist.

  When Josephine Divino answers finally, Nick steps back so as not to seem intimidating. She’s wearing gym shorts and a Bart Simpson T-shirt. She’s only a few years older than him. Thirty-three or thirty-four. She had Antonina when she was seventeen, a neighborhood scandal. Sonny was a dropout who worked at a garage on McDonald Avenue and had a few girlfriends. Antonina was something like twelve when Josephine was Nick’s age. He can’t imagine having a kid, let alone a near-teenager, under his command about now. Josephine’s almost as pretty as her daughter, with dark hair and sharp features. She could pass for mid-twenties. He was three g
rades behind her at St. Mary’s. He remembers looking at her during assembly when he was in the fifth grade and she was in the eighth. All the boys in the school had a big crush on her because she was angelic and sweet and looked like a woman. He remembers her plaid skirt, which she wore high on her waist so it rode above her knees, and he remembers the pale blue leggings she wore that the nuns weren’t fond of.

  She talks to him through the screen. “Nick Bifulco?”

  “You remember my name,” Nick says. “I’m impressed.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m not selling anything, I swear.” He focuses on trying to stand absolutely straight but then wavers and loses his balance and falls forward into the door.

  “Are you wasted?” Josephine says.

  “I’ve had a few. I’m celebrating. Is Sonny here? Can I talk to Sonny?”

  “Sonny’s not here right now.”

  “His motorcycle’s here.”

  “That thing doesn’t work.”

  “Maybe I can talk to you?”

  “About what?”

  “Antonina.” He pauses. “Is she here?”

  Josephine eyes him askance. “Why do you want to talk to me about my daughter?”