“That’s not true,” Val said. “I never wanted Mama to be sick, and there was nothing Daddy could do about that.”
“But she was a Castaladi,” Kit declared. “If only by marriage. It’s the rest of the world you think you own, the way your father owns mine. The way you own me.”
“I don’t own you,” Val said. “And Daddy certainly doesn’t own Jamey.” She looked away, at the wall where a painting once hung.
“I want you to leave,” Kit said. “I’ll be your employee’s daughter, but I won’t be your friend.”
“That isn’t fair,” Val said. “Look, there’s got to be a way out of this. I’ll tell Daddy I don’t want Jamey to come with me. I’ll find someone else.”
Kit remained silent.
“Terry,” Val said. “I’ll ask Terry to come instead. That’s perfect. She’s been a nervous wreck all week, and this way she’ll know everything’s okay between Daddy and her family. Sure she’ll cry, but that’s okay too. I bet I’ll be crying. And with Bruno along, he’ll know how to get us on the airplane and find us cabs and all that. Terry’s just right. She was Mama’s best friend, and she vowed to Mama she’d look after me. I’m sorry I ever thought of Jamey. Terry’s much better, and that way you and Jamey can spend tomorrow together the way you wanted.”
“What if Terry doesn’t want to go?” Kit asked.
“She’ll want to,” Val replied. “If Daddy asks her, she’ll want to.”
Kit laughed. “It’s that easy for you, isn’t it,” she said. “You’re still just snapping your fingers.”
“Maybe I am,” Val said. “Maybe you’re right about that. But I can’t change overnight, Kit. At least give me the weekend to become a completely different person.”
“My mother once told me that once you lose your innocence, you can’t ever find it again,” Kit said. “Change or don’t change, Val. That’s up to you. But don’t think you’ll find me where I was last week. I’m not there anymore, and I’m never going back.”
Val stood up. “I can’t go back either,” she said. “So I wouldn’t have been looking for you there.” She grabbed her books and her jacket. “Have a good weekend,” she said. “I’ll see myself out.”
“Val,” Kit said, but Val ignored her. Kit had one set of demons to deal with. Val had enough of her own.
Chapter 11
The house, on the outskirts of Buffalo, was small, maybe a quarter the size of the one Val grew up in. She tried to imagine what it had been like, with five young children elbowing for room, but it seemed overcrowded enough with just her, Bruno, Terry, and Carmela Primo inside it. The weather had turned ugly, and there was a raw wind that seemed to cut into the walls. The windows made a disconcerting, rattling sound.
“If you want, I’ll lower the storms for you,” Bruno offered.
“That’d be nice,” Carmela replied. “Usually one of the boys does it, but the older they get, the less I can count on them.”
“That’s how it is with boys,” Terry said. “I’ve got a batch of them myself.”
Val looked around at the grownups and wished she had an army of contemporaries to protect her. Bruno began his self-appointed task.
“Would you like something to drink?” Carmela asked Terry. “Coffee maybe?”
Terry shook her head. “I’ll just wait in the kitchen,” she said. “You and Val can have your visit.”
“Help yourself if you want something,” Carmela said. “There’s plenty of food in there.”
“Thank you,” Terry said.
Val sat down on a chair in the living room. Over the sofa was The Last Supper. Above the TV set was a painting of Jesus surrounded by little children. The furniture was covered with an orange-and-rust floral material, and the curtains were a green-and-brown plaid. She wished she could let Amanda loose on the room. Slashing could only improve it.
“You’re a pretty girl,” Carmela said. “You look like Charley, take after the Primo side.”
Val nodded, as though she had always known that. She could see no resemblance between herself and Carmela, a heavy-set woman with graying hair and stubby, reddened hands. Her mother had had beautiful hands. She’d gone for manicures weekly before she got sick.
“I’d love a smoke,” Carmela said.
“Go ahead,” Val replied. “It won’t bother me.”
“I quit two years ago,” Carmela declared. “The kids were after me to stop for years, and I finally did. My biggest accomplishment, quitting. But I’d sure love a cigarette now.”
“Lots of people have trouble quitting,” Val said. “Bob, that’s Terry’s husband, he must have tried quitting a dozen times. Daddy used to smoke, but he stopped when Mama got sick.” She hadn’t known whether she should say Daddy and Mama in front of Carmela, but she was too nervous to stop herself.
“It took me a couple of times too,” Carmela said. “The kids, especially Marcie, were always leaving propaganda around the house. Things they’d get at school saying how bad smoking is for you. When they saw I wasn’t reading it, they started reading it out loud to me. I’d be doing the dishes, and all of a sudden I’d hear this anti-smoking sermon. I quit when a friend of mine came down with lung cancer. I think it takes something like that to make you believe what cigarettes really do. My friend Marie. We went to school together, started smoking around the same time. I figured if it could happen to her, it could happen to me, so I quit. She died last winter.”
“I’m sorry,” Val said.
“Your mother died of cancer too, right?” Carmela replied. “What was it, lung?”
“I’m not sure,” Val admitted. “Nobody ever really told me. She was sick for a very long time, I know that, and she had all kinds of treatments and surgery, but nothing seemed to work.”
“That’s a rough break,” Carmela said. “Losing your mother when you’re young like that. It was hard on my kids when their father died, and a father is nothing like a mother. At least Charley wasn’t. It wasn’t that he didn’t love the kids. But he wasn’t one for diapering or making Kool-Aid. I look at TV, and there are all these young fathers on, doing that sort of thing for their kids, and I try to picture Charley, and I just laugh. So how’re your grades? You like that high school you go to?”
“It’s fine,” Val said. “I’ve been going there since kindergarten. My grades are all right.”
“I always said Charley had a brain if he would only apply himself,” Carmela declared. “But he wasn’t a book kind of a person. Neither am I. I never read, except the magazines. I must read two or three magazines a month, plus the ones at the beauty parlor. I like the papers you can buy at the check-out lines. They’re the only ones that tell you what’s really happening with the stars. I pick them up sometimes. You like to read?”
“I read a lot when Mama was sick,” Val replied. “We had to keep things pretty quiet, so reading was a good thing to do. I haven’t done that much reading since then though. I guess I associate it with sickness.”
“I’ve never been sick a day in my life,” Carmela said. “Six times I gave birth, and all six times I was on my feet the next day. Of course with a lot of kids, you don’t have time to get sick. Nobody’s going to pamper you if you start sneezing. Charley didn’t get sick much either. Sometimes his stomach would upset him a little, but I always thought that was nervousness. Charley could be a real nervous kind of a guy.” She paused for a moment, then laughed. “Funny. I haven’t talked this much about Charley in years. I haven’t even thought about him this much. But ever since Rick called, well, it’s natural I should think about Charley, and what things would have been like if he hadn’t gotten himself killed like that. Sixteen years. I used to kid him about what an old man he was, he was a couple of years older than me, but now I can’t believe he died so young. He was just thirty-one. He didn’t like turning thirty at all, let me tell you. I gave him a big surprise party, and he damn near killed me. Not that he didn’t love parties, or surprises for that matter. It was just turning thirty that got
him down. His own father died when he was thirty-four, and Charley was always convinced he’d die at thirty-four too. He didn’t make it even that long.”
“How did his father die?” Val asked. Her grandfather.
“Car crash,” Carmela replied. “Charley’s mother was in the car too, and she was never much use after that. She died a couple of years after. It was natural Charley would run wild, his parents being like that. I come from a completely different type of family, the Rinaldis were much classier. My parents thought it was a big mistake, me marrying Charley, but I saw to it they had to agree. Charley Junior was born seven months to the day after Charley and I got married.”
“Are your parents still alive?” Val asked.
Carmela shook her head. “Poppa died right after I got married,” she said. “Heart attack. He was a young man too, younger than I am now. Mama died when I was pregnant with Marcie. The doctors never could figure out what was wrong with her. She was sick a long time, and had test after test, and the doctors would just shake their heads until finally she died. Marcie favors Mama, and I think it’s because she was born so soon after Mama died. I wish she had a little more of Mama’s personality though. I have five stubborn kids, and Marcie’s the worst.”
Six, Val thought. You have six stubborn kids.
“Sorry,” Carmela said. “Leaving you out like that. Of course I don’t know if you’re stubborn or not. But if you take after Charley, you must be. The man was a mule. It’s just … after I gave you away, I told everybody you died. The older kids knew different, but I didn’t have much trouble convincing everybody else. I was crying all the time anyway, from missing Charley and being so scared, so they all thought I was crying because the baby died too. And my parents were dead, and so were Charley’s, and suddenly Charley’s brothers and sisters and my brothers and sisters were nowhere to be seen. I don’t know how much Rick told you about Charley dying, but there was a mixup, and Charley was blamed for a lot of it. He might have even been to blame. Charley was a great one for playing the odds and ending up with a losing hand. Anyway, the Primos chose to forget Charley was a Primo, and the Rinaldis chose to forget I was a Rinaldi, and there I was with six young kids, and I wasn’t even thirty, so I cried a lot. But I could never make myself tell people the truth about you. I guess I was too ashamed, that I’d actually let one of my babies go like that.”
“Why did you?” Val asked. It wasn’t an accusation, she was too grateful she’d been adopted to accuse. But she still had to know.
Carmela scratched her chin. “You cried a lot,” she said. “No, that’s the truth. Out of the six of them, you were the screamingest. Maybe you sensed what was going on. I always thought you were smart. You used to look at things different from the other kids. From the very first, I was afraid there was something wrong with you.”
“Is that why?” Val asked. “You thought I wasn’t good enough?”
“It wasn’t a question of good. It was just different,” Carmela said. “But if Charley had lived, nothing else would have happened. Maybe you wouldn’t even have cried so much. It was just after he died, we had nothing, no money, and a mortgage on this house so big you could choke a horse, and kids gotta have food and shoes and heat in the winter. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Usually in a situation like that, the widow’s given some kind of settlement, but because of the mixup and everything, I figured I was lucky nobody was shooting at me. If Louie Castaladi hadn’t shown up on my doorstep the way he did, I don’t know what would have become of us.”
“But you didn’t want to give me up,” Val said. “My father said you had to be persuaded.”
Carmela laughed. “Louie Castaladi was a very persuasive man,” she declared. “He had a lot of different ways of persuading.”
“Did he threaten you?” Val asked.
“You sure you’re not thirsty or something?” Carmela asked. “I bought soda for you. I don’t drink much soda myself, and now with the kids all gone, I almost never have it in the house, so I bought three different kinds. I didn’t know what you liked best.”
“No, thank you,” Val said. “Maybe later.”
“I’ve only been on a plane once,” Carmela said. “It sure made me thirsty.”
“How did he persuade you?” Val asked.
Carmela laughed again. “You are Charley’s daughter,” she said. “He never let anything go. I remember once, I paid seventeen dollars for a dress and he thought it was way too much, I should’ve only paid ten, and he threw that in my face for years. I bet you’re just like that, never forget a thing.”
“Are you scared to tell me?” Val whispered. Maybe it was having Bruno, or even Terry, in the house that was keeping Carmela from admitting what actually had happened.
Carmela shook her head. “Not the way you think,” she said. “You want to know the truth, fine, here’s the truth. First I get some phone calls from people saying they represent Louie Castaladi. Now Louie is not exactly a stranger to me. He’s godfather to our boy Vince. But we don’t exactly travel in the same circles. So I start getting these phone calls, and the people say Louie’s heard all about Charley, and what a shame it is, and me with six young kids, and the littlest one they hear is just a baby, a girl right? Like this makes a difference. So I’m crying, and the kids are screaming, and the baby’s giving me these weird looks and refusing to nurse, like my milk’s poison or something, and I don’t know what the hell these guys are getting at. If Louie wants to give me some money, help out, fine. I’ll take anything at that point. But they’re not saying that. They’re asking if the baby’s okay. So I say sure. I mean, she was. She was strange maybe, but okay.”
“You didn’t suspect?” Val asked.
“Why should I?” Carmela asked. “Nobody’s been calling me over the years saying Barbara Castaladi can’t have kids. Not that it surprises me once I learn. My mother’s cousin married into that family, and all you ever heard about them was how sick they all were. Anyway, I keep thanking these representatives of Louie Castaladi for their phone calls, and nothing really seems to be getting said. Then one evening, the doorbell rings, and there’s Louie himself. Looking very handsome. And he strolls in like he’s always in this part of Buffalo, it’s practically his second home, and his bodyguard hands me a bag of groceries that Louie says he just picked up in case I need anything. I don’t even have food for breakfast the next day, and there’s milk and bacon and eggs all in this bag. So I start crying. I think Louie’s come to save me. Now we won’t starve. Now the welfare people won’t start sniffing at my heels. Now I won’t have to pick which kids should end up in foster care, which kids can I keep. Louie Castaladi has arrived with groceries. It’s all going to be all right.”
“You were thinking about foster care?” Val asked.
“I have six kids, no money,” Carmela replied. “Charley Junior is twelve, already he’s getting into trouble. I was thinking maybe if I put two, even three, kids into foster care, I’ll be able to take care of the rest. It wasn’t what I wanted. I hated the idea of my kids being shuffled around like that. But nobody was offering me a lot of choices.”
Val looked around the living room. She could hear Bruno and Terry in the kitchen. Bruno must have finished with the storm windows, and she hadn’t even noticed. All these kids Carmela was talking about, Charley Junior and Marcie and Vince, were her brothers and sisters. She didn’t know any of them, and yet she could imagine their pain at being torn away from their home, their mother, to go to live with strangers.
“So Louie sits down,” Carmela said. “The kids take one look at him, at his bodyguard, they all run to their rooms. The baby, for a change, is not screaming. I’m crying, but it’s more from gratitude than anything else. Louie Castaladi remembers our connection. He remembers Charley is part Castaladi, they share blood. He’s our savior. I would have kissed his ring if he’d asked me.”
“But he asked for the baby instead,” Val said.
Carmela nodded. “He starts out with a lot of
questions,” she declared. “How am I doing, do we have enough. We don’t, so I tell him so. He asks after the health of all the kids. He even remembers their names. Finally he comes to the baby, says he loves babies, would I mind if he had a look at her. I’m not going to turn this man down anything, so we go to the girls’ room, and there you are, looking so peaceful and innocent, it had to be an act. Only Louie doesn’t know this. He thinks you’re always like this. ‘An angel,’ he says, and I don’t say otherwise. Maybe if he thinks you’re an angel, he’ll bring us more groceries next week. So we go back downstairs, and he offers me some sympathy. How rough it must be, losing Charley that way, especially with all the misunderstandings going on, and he’s talked to the head of the Petrollis to see what can be done, only they spit at the name of Charley Primo. So he doesn’t think I can look for help from them. And I open my heart to him, tell him how the Primos and the Rinaldis all have forgotten I even exist, and what am I going to do, six kids to feed, and a mortgage to pay off, and Louie’s sitting there listening and nodding his head like this is the worst problem he’s ever heard, and it’s going to take a lot of thinking for him to come up with an answer, but he’s going to try if it kills him. I even stop crying. The kids are quiet for the first time in their lives, and there’s a kind of a peace all around, and Louie is nodding.”
Terry laughed suddenly in the kitchen. Both Val and Carmela stopped for a moment, startled by the sound. “She’s a nice woman,” Carmela said. “Coming all this way to be with you.”
“She was my mother’s best friend,” Val said. “She made a vow to look after me, when my mother was dying.”
“That’s good,” Carmela said. “To have people who love you. You’re a lucky girl.”
“I know,” Val said. “I really do.”