Jason’s mother shrugged. He could see her pulling up the drawbridge, walling herself up behind a thick slab of brittle-minded certitudes. “It’s been at least a dozen years now,” the boy pressed his point. “The jerk doesn’t care if Adrian’s alive or dead?”
“She disgraced her family.”
Jason snorted sarcastically. “And in the next breath I suppose you’re gonna tell me her old man’s a freakin’ saint?”
His mother’s eyes flared, her lower jaw flattening like a battering ram but the middle-aged woman held her tongue.
Jason and Adrian grew up next door to each other. Jason remembered Adrian as a round-faced imp with coal black hair cropped short.—a persnickety tomboy with sparkling eyes, a burnished coppery complexion and stocky frame. When they were in fourth grade Adrian took Jason aside. “My father told my mother she’s got shit for brains.”
Jason didn’t know what to say.
“Mom called him a two-timing louse.” Jack Flanagan, a pot-bellied Irishman, was a loud-mouth braggart who made it big in the durable medical supply business. Adrian’s mother was a hypochondriac and compulsive, non-stop talker. In later years, Jason developed the rather bizarre theory that his best friend had been switched at birth. Adrian’s parents—that is, the bogus couple who brought her home from the maternity ward—couldn’t possibly be biologically related to this angelic soul. “My parents hate each other so they’re getting a divorce.” Adrian reached out and grabbed his hand. They were sitting on a plump sofa watching a Simpsons rerun. Because of endless pranks at school, Principal Skinner had Bart sent off to France where he was working in the wine fields as an indentured servant. “You’re my best friend,” Adrian continued in a faltering voice.
Again, Jason didn’t know what to say. He was nine years old and still struggling with long division. A few months later, Adrian was gone from their lives, dragged off to live with the garrulous mother’s extended family. Jack Flanagan remarried the following year and his new wife, who was really just a repackaged, jazzed up younger version of his old wife, got down to business. Bang. Bang. Bang. They produced three children, all daughters, in rapid succession. No one ever talked about Adrian anymore. Ten years passed. One day Jason’s sister, Jenna, took him aside. “Saw Adrian Flanagan last night.”
“Where?”
“Went to a musical in Boston.” A couple years older than her brother, Jenna was a prettier version of the mother with a less pointy nose and equally blunt temperament. “She was in the Theater District just off Tremont Street near Park Square working the crowd.”
Jason’s face clouded over. “I don’t follow you.”
“Adrian was gussied up like a hooker. A car pulled up and the driver rolled down the passenger side window. They negotiated a price. Adrian jumped in and they drove off.”
Jason felt nauseous, light headed. “Did you say anything to mom?” His sister shook her head.
“Sure it was Adrian?”
Jenna nodded once. His favorite playmate from elementary school still wore her dark hair in a close-cropped, pixie style. The same squat, compact torso. “She’s all grown up now,” Jenna said with a sober expression. “Got hips and breasts.”
Adrian Flanagan as streetwalker decked out in a flimsy halter top, neon hot pants and stiletto heels. Like the missing piece to a salacious, X-rated puzzle, this latest bit of titillating garbage fit neatly with the other outlandish fragments of hearsay, idle gossip and innuendo that filtered back to Jason over the years. A friend of a friend who knew Adrian’s mother once removed heard that the young woman—she wasn’t a teenager any more—was a speed freak. Adrian Flanagan ricocheted in and out of prison, was living on the streets selling her body for crack cocaine and worse. Another remake of the saga had her cloistered away in a halfway house for recovering addicts. She’d found Jesus, Krishna, Buddha or consecrated her mortal soul to some occult, fundamentalist group. Still later, Adrian was dead, buried in a potter’s grave. Who the hell knew?
On Tuesday evening, Jason drove over to the Brentwood Nursing Home. He sat in the car with the engine idling for a good twenty minutes before mustering the nerve to enter the building. “Adrian Flanagan?”
“Over in the west wing.” The receptionist waved a hand in the direction of a passageway. “Check with the nurse’s station at the far end of the hall.”
The Brentwood Nursing Home had a distinct odor—an odd mix of body wastes, cleaning fluids, and herbal ointments. Several bedridden women in adjoining rooms were moaning in a repetitive, sing-song fashion. As Jason passed the elevator, an emaciated gentleman dressed in a white johnny tried to rise from his wheelchair setting off a shrill beep. A nurses aide came running and eased the fellow back down. As soon as his withered rump made contact with the padded leather seat, the hidden noisemaker fell silent.
At the nurse’s station a colored woman was writing in a patient’s chart while a male orderly sorted pills in paper cups arranged neatly on a medicine tray. A stocky, attractive woman with short dark hair and a pink smock exited a room carrying a carton of juice. The stocky woman hurried past toward the nursing station. There was no recognition. Nothing. “Adrian?”
The woman in the pink smock abruptly turned and came back. She stared at him for the longest time before her features dissolved in a curious smile. “Jason Mangarelli all grown up!” She leaned forward and, as though it was the most ordinary thing in the world, brushed her lips across his cheek.
At the nurse’s station a telephone rang. The fellow with the pill tray was locking the medicine cabinet with a brass key. For a split second, it was like they were back on the sofa at his parent’s house. On the television screen, Bart Simpson was telling the French gendarme that he had been abducted by evil wine merchants, who were watering down the spirits with automotive antifreeze. “I get off in ten minutes. Wait for me outside in the parking lot.” Like an apparition, Adrian floated off down the corridor disappearing into an adjacent room. Jason went outside and sat in his car. He felt mildly disoriented, as though time had begun flowing in the wrong direction, leaking back into the past and forward into an, as yet, unfathomable future. Einstein’s theory of relativity turned upside down. A dozen years flushed down the toilet. Nothing had changed.
Well, that wasn’t completely true. The girl Jason knew back in Thatcher Elementary School was a husky tomboy through and through. Back then, Adrian Flanagan’s lower torso was fused with the upper half, as though a metal pole was solidly fixed from tail bone to the nape of the neck. Now her hips rocked with a supple, feminine grace. Adrian had blossomed into a woman.
A little after eleven o’clock, a steady stream of employees began dribbling out of the building. “Want to grab a coffee?” Jason asked.
Adrian shook her head. “Got to get home to my baby, but you can follow in your car. I only live a few miles down the road.”
Jason went back to where he parked. Adrian was a mother. Yes, a rumor to that effect circulated for years. At fifteen, Adrian delivered a baby out of wedlock but signed away all maternal rights at birth. Sadly, like everything else, the ephemeral truth was buried beneath a bruising avalanche of tall tales, hearsay, melodrama and patently bad fiction.
Adrian lived on the second floor of a modest apartment complex in the Maryville section of town. When they opened the door, a small dog barking hysterically rushed to greet them. “My baby,” Adrian said by way of explanation.
“And I thought …” He left the sentence hanging.
In the kitchen Adrian removed a plastic container from the refrigerator. She scooped a serving into a bowl, warmed it in the microwave and placed the food on the floor.
Adrian held the container under Jason’s nose. “Bowtie macaroni, sweet potato, peas, carrots, corn, sliced apples, chicken livers and ground turkey.” The dog, a dirty gray shiatsu, ugly as sin, devoured a chunk of turkey then went to work on the macaroni. Wolfing down the entire bowl in less than thirty seconds, it licked its chops, then began rushing about the
kitchen in a frenzy with its corkscrew tail arched over the hind quarters.
“You cook your own dog food from scratch?”
Adrian nodded. “The glutton wants more but that’s all she gets.”
Adrian’s dog, Mitzi, previously belonged to an elderly woman brought to the nursing home from the West End Trailer Park. Multi-infarct dementia. The lady had suffered a series of mild strokes each of which further sapped her sanity and physical strength. The addled resident had been living at the Brentwood Nursing Home the better part of a week before she let slip that her dog was locked up, abandoned in the trailer. Adrian located a house key in her bedside table and made a frantic trip to the trailer. Half starved and badly dehydrated, the dog could just barely stand up. The floor was rotting out and the roof leaked. The smelly trailer was littered with dog filth, fleas and newspapers dating back to the Kennedy assassination.
Adrian brought Mitzi to her apartment and nursed the animal back to health on a steady diet of homemade dog food. Half the mutt’s teeth fell out. The rickety hind legs were so badly bowed that it could only run at half-speed in a frenetic, geriatric waddle. Once Mitzi was on the mend, Adrian brought the dog to the nursing home for a visit. She licked the old woman’s face and cuddled beneath her bony rib cage. In the morning the old woman was dead.
“How’s my dad doing?” Adrian asked.
“Okay. We sometimes get together at the holidays,” Jason replied. “He had three more daughters with his second wife.”
“So I heard,” Adrian’s lips turned up ever so slightly in a dry smile. “Are they nice?”
She’s never even met her half-sisters! Jason thought a moment. “The first two are obnoxious, but the youngest, Dawn, is sort of sweet. Reminds me of you.”
Adrian scooped the dog up in her arms and nuzzled its face with her chin. “My father got himself into a legal mess a while back. I read about it in the Providence Journal. Whatever came of that?”
Five years earlier, Jack Flanagan’s mug was smeared all over the Providence Journal when the IRS indicted him for tax evasion. A private accounting firm was sent to review his business records at the medical supply company and discovered the flamboyant businessman, who favored Cuban cigars, Lincoln Continentals and off-colored jokes, was ‘cooking the books’. A slew of hospital beds and motorized wheelchairs that never left the showroom had been billed to Medicare along with a hundred eighty-five bogus claims for medical services. In one instance, an elderly woman with rheumatoid arthritis who was supposedly receiving inhalation therapy had been deceased a half dozen years.
Rumors circulated that Mr. Flanagan was heading to Connecticut for a little R and R courtesy of the federal government. A minimum security facility with an outstanding law library, soft ball field and state-of-the-art exercise gym. Nolo contendere. In the end, he copped a plea, paid a hefty fine and received a two-year suspended sentence. Case closed!
Throughout the ordeal, the man never showed a speck of remorse. The week before his final court date, he was yakking it up like a remorseless jackass at a Fourth of July pool party. Dressed in Bermuda shorts and a garish print shirt, Jack Flanagan poked fun at the district attorney. Everyone cheated on their income tax, right? The unfortunate glitch with the hospital beds, bottled oxygen and wheel chairs was just sloppy bookkeeping. Sloppy bookkeeping to the tune of over two hundred thousand dollars!
“He beat the wrap. Walked away with a shitty fine and slap on the wrist.”
“Sounds about right.” The wistful smile remained, but now her eyes turned flinty hard. “And what have you heard about me over the years?”
The question caught Jason off guard. “A lot of hooey—outrageous lies and innuendo,” he stammered.
“Lies and innuendo.” She lobbed the words back at him like a tennis player parrying a well-placed shot. “And how do you know it isn’t all true?” Jason didn’t know what to say.
“Other people have surely heard that I’m back in town,” Adrian continued, “but you’re the only one with the common decency to look me up.” She took a step forward and draped her arms around his shoulders. “It means a lot.”
After an awkward silence, Adrian refilled the dog’s water bowl and watched as Mitzi drank her fill.
She put the kettle on and when the water sent up a wheezy hiss, poured tea. “The staff at the nursing home can’t pigeonhole me. I’m just the new girl who showed up on the west wing a month and a half ago. They don’t know my father is a thieving bastard or that my mother’s a compulsive talkaholic who would sooner slit her wrists than be alone with her own vacuous thoughts for two seconds strung together.”
Switched at birth. Luck of the draw—Adrian Flanagan got dealt a pair of duds, jokers from the bottom of the deck. Toxic Parents. Parents who should have had their reproductive organs cauterized at birth. Mitzi scurried up to the table and began pawing at Adrian’s leg. The dog, which was near death, only a few months ago, was bursting with vitality. “There’s this woman, Mrs. Galway, at the accounting firm where I work,” Jason said. “Her dog, Jeremiah, got sideswiped by a car last month and is laid up with a broken hip. The vet patched him up and sent the pooch home a week ago, but he won’t eat much of anything and just sulks in the basement.” Jason pointed at the empty dog bowl. “Jeremiah sure could use some of your secret recipe.”
“What breed?”
“Beagle. Cutest little thing. Mrs. Galway’s husband passed away in August. When the dog got injured, it was like the double whammy.”
“I don’t work weekends.” Adrian sipped at her tea. “Come by Saturday afternoon and we can whip up a fresh batch.” She went to the cupboard and located a carton of sugar cookies. “But now, tell me everything that’s happened to you since fourth grade and don’t skimp on the details.”
An hour later, after the sugar cookies and tea, Adrian walked Jason to the door. She snaked her arms around his waist and leaned forward. He could feel her chest rising and falling with each breath. A minute passed in total silence, then another. Adrian’s face was cradled just beneath his collar bone. At some point Jason realized his own arms had involuntarily snaked up under the small of her back, wrapping the girl in a fierce bear hug.
When he reached home, Jason showered and got ready for bed. He was curled up under the covers reading an article in Fortune 500 Small Business when his mother entered the room.
“Something interesting?”
“A story about Ruth Handler, the businesswoman who invented the Barbie doll.”
His mother cleared her throat. “About our conversation earlier,...” Jason put the magazine aside. “What with November just a few weeks away, we wouldn’t want the holidays turning ...”
“Ugly,” Jason volunteered.
Mrs. Mangarelli smiled stiffly. “The Flanagans will be joining us for desert later in the afternoon on Thanksgiving, and I have no intention blindsiding them with any unpleasantness.” Her son had nothing to say. There was a bittersweet anecdote Jason’s father once told at a family gathering several years back. Mr. Mangarelli served in the infantry during the Vietnam War. One day in the early sixties before being shipped overseas, the man was traveling through rural farmland on the outskirts of Tyler, Texas. The bus pulled up at an intersection. A sign on a dilapidated whitewashed building read: Laundromat: Whites Only.
The odd sign threw Mr. Mangarelli for a loop. Why limit potential profits? From a business standpoint, the notion was utterly impractical! Ridiculous! What about towels, blankets, colored skirts, blouses and sweaters not to mention coats and suit jackets? The bus was a good six blocks beyond the decrepit, abandoned shack before the truth of the matter sunk in.
Laundromat: Whites Only. How was it any different with Adrian? The grade-A, select members of Jack Flanagan’s nuclear family were welcomed at the Mangarelli’s Thanksgiving table. Pariahs, slatternly sluts and assorted social riff raff should make other arrangements.
“You’re going out with Mrs. Polla
ck’s daughter tomorrow night?” Mrs. Mangarelli asked, shifting gears.
“Yes,” Jason replied.
Mrs. Mangarelli had a friend, a parishioner from Saint Mark’s, whose daughter was recently divorced and looking to date. The girl, who was a year older than Jason, owned her own consulting firm. That his mother would conspire with Mrs. Pollack to arrange a blind date came as no great surprise. All through high school and well into his college years, Mrs. Mangarelli had been an incorrigible ‘helicopter’ parent, hovering over her son and second guessing his every move.
“She’s probably homely as sin.”
Mrs. Mangarelli shook her head violently. “I’ve seen the girl in church. She’s a stunning brunette with boobs out to here.” She held her hands a good foot in front of her own, smallish chest.
Just like Barbie! Jason cringed inwardly. “Thank you, mother, for your graphic description.”
Mrs. Mangarelli went to his closet and began picking through the various clothes. “What are you wearing?”
Jason wanted to finish reading the article about Ruth Handler and the ubiquitous doll, who he had just learned was named after the woman’s daughter, Barbara. “Haven’t decided.”
“The navy Dockers are nice, but then the darker colors tend to show lint. No I’d go with the tan slacks.” She removed the pants from the hanger and headed for the door. “I’ll press them for you first thing in the morning.”
When she was gone, Jason finished the Ruth Handler article, killed the light and lay back on the bed staring at the ceiling. There was a darker side to Adrian Flanagan. In her mid twenties, she could easily pass for thirty-five. Not that Adrian had lost her good looks. If anything, she was considerably more attractive as a young woman than a gawky adolescent. The unflattering changes were less definitive and emerged in a certain harshness that lingered about eyes and rigid set to the chin when she asked Jason how much or little he believed of the ‘outrageous lies and innuendo.’