Sorry for Your Loss

by Jessie Ann Foley

  “Okay,” said Dec at last, now that the suspense had reached peak levels. “I got offered a scholarship. A full scholarship.” He smiled then, baring his perfectly straight white teeth, which had recently emerged from several years of expensive orthodontics to reveal a megawatt smile just ready and waiting for the ESPN cameras. Pup subtly moved a hand to cover his own overbite. Damn, Pup, his brother-in-law Matthew had once observed. With teeth like those, you could eat a head of lettuce through a tennis racket!

  “It’s nothing formal, yet,” Dec said after the applause around the table had died down. “The formal offer won’t come until senior year. But I’ve given them my commitment. So I guess it’s official: I’m going to be a Georgetown Hoya!”

  “Georgetown.” Pup’s dad rummaged through his pasta in search of a meatball. “Is that a good school?”

  “Ted!” Jeanine’s husband, Matthew, laughed indulgently. “It’s a great school. One of the best in the country. Presidents went there. Supreme Court justices went there. Bradley Cooper went there.” Matthew ruffled his handsome son’s hair. “And one day, people are gonna be sitting around dinner tables and saying, ‘Declan Spenser went there.’ We couldn’t be prouder.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” Declan said, shrugging with fake modesty. “People act like it’s so hard to get into an elite college, but it’s really not, if you put your mind to it, you know?”

  “Dick,” Pup muttered. Everyone looked at him, because Pup barely ever made a peep during Sunday dinners. Usually, he just wolfed down his food and disappeared out to the alley to shoot free throws, or into the kitchen to hang out with his younger nieces and nephews, who were so much more fun to talk to anyway.

  “Pardon me, Pup?” Jeanine was leveling him with her sister-mom stare that indicated she’d heard exactly what he’d just said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Hey, Uncle Pup,” Dec said, shining his blazing smile in Pup’s direction, like an interrogation lamp. “I forgot to ask. How’s your art grade?”

  A couple dozen pairs of eyes rested on Pup. Even his niece Chloe, who’d been sitting on his lap and happily gumming a piece of garlic bread, stopped what she was doing and swiveled around to train her big blue eyes on his face. He could feel the spaghetti he’d eaten like a brick in his stomach.

  “That’s right!” Jeanine clapped her hands so that her fat diamond rings clattered together. “I always forget you two are in the same class! Pup, do you have a college plan yet?”

  “Not really,” Pup said, running a nervous hand over Chloe’s mostly bald head. “I mean, I’m only a junior.”

  “Exactly. You’re already a junior, and almost a senior. You should have started thinking about this months ago. Who’s that counselor at school that you like? Mrs. Barbero or something?”

  “Mrs. Barrera.” Pup leaned over to feed Chloe a tiny chunk of meatball.

  “Well, why isn’t she talking to you about college? Is she going to write you a letter of recommendation?”

  “Maybe? I don’t know.”

  “Well, if she won’t even write you a rec letter, what good is she?”

  “She isn’t that kind of counselor,” Pup explained, trying to keep his patience. “She’s a social worker.”

  “A social worker?” It was now Mary’s turn to jump in. “I need a social worker. You should’ve seen the call I was on last night. Neighbors called 911, reported this awful smell. We go into the apartment building, find this poor old guy in the upstairs unit who’s been dead on his bathroom floor for two solid weeks. With the radiator on full blast. He’d practically turned into soup!”

  “Mary, not while we’re eating!”

  “Sorry, Mom. I’m just saying—that kind of thing can scar a person. But what the heck do you need a social worker for, Pup Squeak? When’s the last time you had to scoop a pile of human stew into a body bag?”

  “Not while we’re eating, for Chrissake!” Pup’s dad threw down his fork.

  “She’s got a point, though,” Jeanine said, which was typical, because the sister-moms always had each other’s backs. “I thought social workers were there to report the kids in black trench coats before they go shooting up the school! You’re not planning on shooting up the school, are you, Pup?”

  “Yes, Jeanine.” Pup sighed. “I can’t wait to get to first period tomorrow so I can detonate my homemade bomb.”

  “You shouldn’t make jokes like that.” She pointed her garlic bread at him. “Not in the climate we’re living in these days.”

  “And you shouldn’t be so ignorant about what social workers do,” interrupted Annemarie. “They help kids with all sorts of issues.”

  “Right,” said Elizabeth, crossing her arms over her massively pregnant belly. “But what’s Pup’s issue?”

  “I don’t have an issue.” Pup shrank into his seat while Chloe squirmed on his lap. “God.”

  “See, that’s the problem with your generation, Pup. Gen Z or whatever they’re calling it.” Matthew could never resist an opportunity to blame a given problem on kids these days. He never included his own children in these critiques, of course. “Every kid’s got an issue. Depression. Anxiety. ADHD. What’s the thing that teacher told Pup he had once? Executive functioning disorder? Come on. What a load of crap. What Pup needs is a college counselor to talk to him about his applications and to write him a stellar rec letter that makes up for his crappy grades. Not some kumbaya social worker.”

  “Seriously,” agreed Mary. “He’s the most well-adjusted kid I know.”

  “Except that he’s failing art,” added Declan.

  “I’m not failing art,” said Pup.

  “Dammit,” said Pup’s father. “Judy, I told you we forgot to ask him about his grades.”

  “Pup,” Jeanine scolded, “how can you be failing art?”

  “Hey.” Annemarie’s voice was sharp; it cut through the din of clinking forks and nosy questions. “Will you guys all shut up already and let the kid eat his dinner? Jesus.”

  Jeanine’s face immediately crumpled into a pile of hurt.

  “There’s no need to be rude about it, Annemarie,” she said. “I only wanted to include Pup in the conversation.”

  “You’re not including him. You’re prying into his business and talking about him like he’s not even there.”

  “Prying?” Jeanine lifted an offended hand to her heart. “I would never—”

  “Judy,” Sal, Annemarie’s fiancée, interjected, “this Bolognese tastes especially delicious today. You really are an amazing chef, you know that?”

  “Oh!” came the squeak of surprise from Pup’s mother, her neck and cheeks mottling pink. Judy Flanagan had been feeding her family Sunday dinner for so long that it no longer occurred to anyone to compliment her, or even notice, the prodigious effort it took to make sauce from scratch every week for over two dozen people.

  “I actually added some veal this week,” she explained. “Just to try something different.”

  “Well, it’s just wonderful.”

  Good old Sal. Annemarie’s fiancée had been around long enough to know that changing the subject was usually the best way to defuse a family crisis. The rest of Sunday dinner was enjoyed in a cautious peace. Georgetown was not brought up again. Luke’s absence continued to be carefully and thoroughly ignored. Shamed a little by Sal’s kindness to their mother, everybody went out of their way to rave about the veal.

  Pup didn’t even wait for the pineapple upside-down cake to be served before he made his escape out to the alley to shoot free throws. Privacy was a nonexistent commodity in his house, but he at least hoped for maybe five minutes to himself before one of his sisters or nieces or nephews came out and annoyed him some more. And sure enough, he hadn’t even made it through his warm-up before he heard the squeak of the chain-link gate and footsteps into the alley.

  “Sorry about that in there.” Annemarie handed him a slice of cake wrapped in a paper napkin. “The sister-moms can be pretty intense.”

/>   “Maybe I should start skipping Sunday dinner.” Pup rolled the basketball to his sister and took a large bite of cake, wiping the crumbs from his mouth with the back of his hand. “Luke may be on to something.”

  “Seriously. I love how Mom thinks he’s at study group.”

  Pup blinked. Apparently he wasn’t the only one with suspicions.

  “You think he’s lying?”

  “Of course he’s lying. When I was in law school, those study groups always met on Saturdays. Only the most hard-core nerd would be in two study groups a weekend. And that’s not Luke. I guarantee he’s off somewhere drinking and watching the Cubs. Or just drinking. Either way, he’s not studying. But we’ll let Mom have her little fantasy.” She picked up the ball, bent her knees, and shot from the chalked-in free-throw line. It went straight through the net.

  They took turns shooting free throws for a while, lapsing into an uncharacteristic silence that Pup knew could only mean one thing: Annemarie was waiting for him to talk. She was good at that, at waiting him out until he just started confessing. It was why she was such a successful lawyer.

  “Can I ask you something?” Pup finally said, shoving the last bit of cake into his mouth and slumping down against the garage.

  “Anything, anytime.” Annemarie heaved the ball under her arm and sat down next to him. “You know that.”

  “What was your worst day of high school?”

  “Hm. That’s a tough question.” She laughed. “There are so many to choose from.”

  “I mean the absolute worst.”

  She thought for a minute, looking up at a squirrel scrambling across the power lines above them.

  “Okay,” she said at last. “It was the day when someone wrote ‘DYKE’ across my locker in red Sharpie.”

  “What?” Pup sat up. “You’ve never told me that story before.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s not exactly the type of pleasant memory that I like to tell around the campfire.”

  “Who did it?”

  “Well, they never caught anyone, but I’ve got my own ideas.” She began spinning the ball between the tips of her fingers. “Anyway, that wasn’t even the worst part of it. The worst part was that I’d been all ready to come out to you guys. I was planning on doing it right after I graduated, at Sunday dinner, which was, like, three weeks after it happened. But I figured, if there are kids my own age who are still homophobic assholes, then how the hell are my old-school Catholic parents going to take the news? So I ended up waiting three more years, until the pretending became so excruciating, I couldn’t take it anymore.”

  “So I was, what, seven, when you told everybody? I don’t even remember it.”

  “Well, that’s probably because it was pretty anticlimactic. I don’t know why I was so afraid. I should have given Mom and Dad more credit—they were totally fine with it. Everybody was fine with it. Even Matthew and Jeanine, who, as you were reminded tonight, can be real pains in the ass.”

  Pup took the ball from her and started spinning it through his fingers in just the same way Annemarie had. It was a family habit. The cool, nubby surface was comforting to him, like a loved blanket, a tactile memory of his childhood. “When you came out,” he said. “What did Patrick say?”

  “Patrick?” Annemarie looked at him quickly. “Oh, he just gave me a hug and said he loved me. You know what Patrick was like.”

  But that was the problem. Sometimes Pup felt like he didn’t know. Not anymore. Sometimes he felt like he was no closer to getting over it, or getting through it, as Mrs. Barrera would say, than he was the moment he walked out of that central Illinois hospital into the darkness and the rain.

  “What are you asking me about my worst day of high school for, anyway?” Annemarie asked. “What’s going on? Don’t tell me this has something to do with Izzy.”

  Pup looked down at the spinning ball between his hands and nodded.

  “Oh no. What happened?”

  “Nothing happened, exactly. I just realized that I have no chance with her. All this time, I’ve been kidding myself.”

  “Oh, Pup.” Annemarie reached out to pet his hair, like she’d done when he was a little boy, but she stopped herself in time and her hand fell back to her lap. She knew he hated that gesture, now that he was nearly seventeen.

  “I know you’re not going to want to hear this,” she said, “but I think this is a good thing. Now you know for sure. So now you can let her go.”

  Just like you did with Pat, he thought, remembering the day, a few weeks after the funeral, when she and Sal had come over to gather up Patrick’s biology textbooks and donate them to a program for underserved high school students. Patrick would have wanted this, they’d said, which of course was true. But still.

  “Me and Izzy have been through a lot together,” Pup said. “And she helps me with my homework sometimes.”

  “Well, shit. Let’s award her the Nobel Peace Prize.”

  Pup couldn’t think of a witty response, so he said nothing.

  “Pup, let me ask you something: What do you actually have in common with Izzy?”

  “Lots of things.”

  “Name one.”

  “Um, we’re both juniors at Abraham Lincoln High School, for starters. We were born in the same month. We both like sports.”

  “Izzy does not like sports.”

  “She does! Remember she came over to our house last year to watch the World Series?”

  “The Cubs won the World Series last year for the first time in over a century. Every single person in the city of Chicago watched it, even people who don’t know the difference between a home run and a hole in one.”

  “What’s your point, anyway?”

  “My point is, if you really stop and think about it, if you really sat down and listed to yourself the reasons why you think you love Izzy Douglass, you couldn’t do it.”

  “Because love isn’t about lists! Jeez, Annemarie, will you stop being a lawyer for five seconds?”

  “This has nothing to do with me being a lawyer. Face it, Pup: The only thing you two have in common is that you both have brothers who died. That’s it.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s not nothing!”

  “I know that! But it’s also not everything!”

  “I’m going inside.” Pup scrambled to his feet and tossed her the basketball, a little harder than he meant to.

  “Wait!” Annemarie caught the ball and hugged it to her chest. “I’m sorry. I know you think I’m being harsh. But I’m just trying to tell you, Pup. In high school, relationships evolve. And sometimes not for the better. You know, the day after somebody decorated my locker with hate speech, I remember sitting in history class next to my best friend, Andi Trotter. My pen ran out of ink, so I asked her if I could borrow one of hers. When she opened her pencil case, guess what it was full of?”

  “Um. Pencils?”

  “Red Sharpie markers.”

  Before Pup could respond, the alley was flooded with white light as a car screeched around the corner and came barreling toward them. It swerved to avoid some recycling bins, and in doing so, caught the corner of the D’Amatos’ garbage can, which sent two bags of rancid trash exploding down the alley. Pup and Annemarie scrambled out of the way to avoid being hit just as the car jerked to a stop in front of the garage right beside theirs. The headlights switched off, the driver’s-side door swung open, and Luke, with two-day stubble and the beginnings of a black eye, tumbled out of his white Jeep.

  Annemarie dropped the basketball and ran down the alley to where her younger brother, swaying on his feet, was standing in front of the neighbors’ garage, holding his arm out in front of him with great concentration.

  “Luke!” Annemarie, the tallest of the five sisters, was the only one with the height to look her brother in the eye, and she was staring him down now with a fierceness that might have scared him if he hadn’t been too drunk to notice. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “I am trying,” he sai
d grandly, waving a small black device in the air, “to open the garage door, except the stupid thing doesn’t seem to be working.”

  Annemarie snatched the opener out of his hand, marched over to where Pup stood, pointed the opener to the Flanagan’s garage, and pressed the button. A grinding noise filled the alley, and the garage door began creaking upward.

  “Oops.” Luke laughed, leaning against his hood as the door yawned open. “Stupid garages all look alike. We need to paint ours different. Stripes. Polka dots. A great big ‘F’ for Flanagan.”

  “Or ‘Felony DUI.’ Give me those fucking keys.” She yanked the keys out of his hand, pushed past him and climbed into the driver’s seat. “Get out of the way. I’m parking this for you.”

  “No, you’re not.” Luke hoisted himself up on the hood and lay sprawled across it, facedown. “I’m staging a sit-in,” he called. “Conscientious objector. I will not go gently into that good night. Brother’s rights! Justice for Luke!”

  “Pup, help me,” commanded Annemarie. “Get him off of there.”

  Pup hesitated. When Luke was this drunk, he was completely unpredictable. He might seem fairly harmless at the moment, laughing as he spread-eagled across the hood in mock protest, but it was entirely possible that in another moment he might veer into darkness, even violence. Pup had learned this the hard way. Just a few weeks earlier, Luke had come crashing up the stairs in the middle of the night, kicked his pants off, and starting peeing all over the clean clothes in Pup’s laundry basket. When Pup had tried to stop him, tried to steer him in the direction of the bathroom, Luke had looked up at his younger brother with a flat blue lolling gaze and, with pee still splashing all over Pup’s clean T-shirts, had taken a lazy, wobbling swing, which had just connected with the corner of Pup’s jaw. It hadn’t hurt—much—but it hadn’t exactly been pleasant, either. After Luke passed out on top of his covers, underwear still tangled around his ankles and bare ass gleaming white in the moonlight, Pup had to spend the rest of the night with a sore jaw, rewashing all of his soaked clothes in the basement so that his mother wouldn’t know what had happened.