“You gonna be okay, Dad?” I asked, but, again, the question deserved no answer. He was okay enough to have survived this long without me—and also he wasn’t.
I didn’t take out my phone and look up train times for tomorrow. New York City already felt flimsy, fading. Eyes shut, feeling my way in the familiar dark, I went down the hall to my room.
My Walkman was where I’d left it, beside my bed. Thick with dust. I plugged my headphones in, switched on the radio. Static filled my ears, and then, against all logic, music. How did the thing still have battery life after lying silently for so many years?
I got into bed fully dressed, my head still spinning with withdrawal and the general weirdness of the evening’s chain of events. Stinking like sweat and booze and Hudson sidewalks. Scrolling through my mentions, letting the chatter of strangers distract me from the fresh hurt of my father’s fallen state. It was working, still, but it wouldn’t work for much longer. In the morning I’d have to find myself an actual drug.
“This is Ms. Jackson, here on the Graveyard Shift,” came the scratchy familiar voice, the DJ who’d soothed all my lonely late nights. As baffling as my batteries, her still being alive all these years later. “It’s coming up on eleven fifty-seven. So this will be the last song of today. Always a difficult challenge for a DJ. How best to sum up everything we’ve been through, and prepare us for doing it all again tomorrow? Tonight I feel like dedicating something to the lonely hearts, the people tucking themselves in tonight. One may be the loneliest number, but remember that we come into this world by ourselves and that’s how we go out of it, and everything in between—all the love and togetherness that fills our hearts—that’s all temporary. So if you find yourself by yourself tonight, just know that you have a leg up on the rest of us. An insight every happily coupled person lacks.”
“One Is the Loneliest Number” came on and I wasn’t mad at it, didn’t feel sad about it. I appreciated her. Like she could see into my heart, just like she always had, and was speaking directly to me and me alone.
Chapter Seven
The meeting has mostly broken up by the time Dom gets home. A couple of people around the kitchen table with Attalah, drinking beer and laughing.
“Dom,” says Joe Davoli, getting up. Shaking hands.
“Joe. What’s the word?”
“Same old,” Joe says, avoiding eye contact.
Joe’s brother is an addict. Dom has never busted him, but sooner or later he probably will. The guy is dumb about the risks he takes, hawking stolen goods on Craigslist or saying on Facebook that he has Percocets for sale. Half the town, it seems, has a hard time looking Dom in the eye. Like they’re afraid he can see their sins glinting there, or the guilt of their loved ones.
“Everything okay?” Dom asks, sitting down at the table. Attalah had baked. Whatever it was is gone, but the room smells like cinnamon. Their kitchen, like the rest of the house, is small but never feels that way. She makes it feel right.
“Planning a rent party for Susan,” says Ohrena Shaw, who is several years younger than them but has a creative mind his wife admires. “Her rent went up in January and she’s a couple months behind already.”
“Awesome,” Dom says, thinking, That’s not awesome. A rent party might buy one, two months max. Not a sustainable business model. Especially not when half of Hudson is scrambling to pull together rent parties of their own. He listens as plans are put together, Attalah typing away on her tablet—who will cook, who will collect the cash, who can borrow a credit card swiper to take donations that way. Eventually Joe and Ohrena drift toward the door and depart.
“Sorry,” Attalah says, returning. She wears a long red and black and green dashiki. Resplendent as always.
“Don’t be,” he says. “You know I appreciate the work you do. But what you should apologize for is not saving me any of whatever that was.” He points to a baking sheet where droplets of watery white icing are splattered.
“Blame Joe,” she says. “You know Becky never feeds him.”
“I’m glad, actually. I need to not eat so much. I’ve let myself go.”
She comes up behind him, puts her hands on his belly. “I think you’re perfect.”
“You’re sweet to say so.”
She goes to the sink. Dishes clatter. He shuts his eyes, savors the silence beyond their walls. There is space, now, between their lives and that of their neighbors. Three years in a house and he still hasn’t gotten used to it, after spending his whole life in the ceaseless rumble of Bliss Towers.
“Who died?” Attalah asks, handing him an opened beer. Then she gets one for herself and sits down beside him. In the house she moves around as swiftly and gracefully as she had in high school, using its familiar surfaces to propel herself from point A to point B without the cane she needs to use outside of it.
“Ossie,” he says.
“Oh, lord,” she says. “That is so sad. How? Someone so young, there’s no good answer.”
“Suicide, seems like.”
Attalah makes a small sound of pain and shuts her eyes. There’s Katch right there, on the fridge. Not five feet away. Huge smile, and the year he was born, and the year he died.
He almost mentions the salt water. He doesn’t know why he doesn’t. And then he doesn’t know why he would.
“We were . . . me and Ossie . . .”
Dom doesn’t need to finish the sentence. She knows how it ends. He feels like tears are imminent and wonders why they don’t come.
“Oh, honey,” Attalah says, and takes his hand.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I know you prefer not to know.”
She laughs, a short, kind noise. “That’s just when it’s someone I might have to look in the eye,” she says.
“You’re not threatened by dead women?”
“Threatened differently,” she says, and smiles.
He lowers his head to the table and kisses her hand, then rests his cheek against the cold Formica. It feels good.
“Ronan Szepessy is home,” he says, when the silence has gone on long enough to give weight to the words, to communicate the nameless inexplicable fear he feels about Ronan’s return. “I just picked him up off the sidewalk in front of where his father’s shop used to be.”
She curses softly, kindly. Of course she feels it, knows it. What this might mean. How it might disrupt the fragile status quo that has so far kept the Pequod Arms project at bay. Who knows how. Maybe Ronan will talk his father into selling. Or get a power of attorney, sell it himself. They sit there for a long time, and then they head to bed.
When Dom comes out of the bathroom, she has switched on the radio. Their favorite DJ is midway into her set.
“This is Ms. Jackson, here on the Graveyard Shift,” comes the scratchy familiar voice. “It’s coming up on eleven fifty-seven. So this will be the last song of today. Always a difficult challenge for a DJ. How best to sum up everything we’ve been through, and prepare us for doing it all again tomorrow? Tonight I feel like dedicating something to the lovers, the couples tucking themselves in tonight. The world is a cold, dead, sad, scary place, and love is the one thing that makes it livable. So cuddle closer, to the sound of Otis Redding, who knew love like nobody else before or since.”