smiled. She can walk, she said. She can walk up the basement stairs. It’ll be dark.
You’re kidding me, Joey said.
I always believed in you, Joey. Even with that crazy wall. I always believed in you. That’s why I stuck, through thick and thin.
I have to go to the bathroom, I said.
You wanna take her? Joey said.
Let her piss herself, Angela told him. She looked me straight in the face. Whatta we care?
Can you guess the rest? Joey put the gun to my temple. Angela duct-taped my mouth. She checked the rope around my wrists and my neck. She pulled me out of the car and down the basement steps. Joey wanted to put out a mat so I could lie down. Angela said no. I’d piss on it, remember I had asked to go to the bathroom? And then she’d have to throw it out and Clorox the place. She’ll be lying down forever, Angela said. Just like the other one.
In the end, they put some blankets on the floor and pushed me down. I could smell dog on the wool but I was glad just to lie there and close my eyes. I heard them leave. I watched the light go away as the sun went down. I heard the scrape of the trowel. I heard one of Buddy’s kids call out to Joey, asking him why he was working on the wall, it was nighttime. I think I slept. And then they were pulling me up. Angela and Joey. And walking me up the stairs.
There was no moon. I wondered what Buddy would think—if he would think that, like his first wife, I had just up and disappeared. Gotten cold feet? Left him at the altar? And the kids . . . would they feel abandoned again? Miss me? I noticed when I got close to the wall how wide it was, wide enough to lie down on. The wall was different heights in different parts. I wondered how high it would go in the end. I realized I would never know.
Angela took my arm and walked me to a place where the wall was low, maybe four feet, and she made me lie down. I felt the stones that jutted through the layer of cement hard against my back, my shoulders, my head, and then she picked up a boulder, so big that it blocked my vision. It would have blocked out the moon if there had been one in the sky, and she brought it down with all her strength.
Buddy came home early the next morning. When he woke up, he took his coffee into the yard where Joey was working on the wall. The kids were rolling stones. They were still in their pajamas.
It’s really coming along, Buddy said. This wall is going to be here after we’re all dead, Joey. It’s like the goddamn Colosseum.
The phone rang and someone inside picked it up. Is that for me? Buddy shouted.
You expecting a call? Joey said.
I thought it might be Annemarie. She never showed up last night.
She ever done that before?
No, Buddy said. Never.
MOTHER LOVE
Piero would ride in a basket that his mother had set upon her head. She would cover him with a white cloth and go walking in the streets of the city.
From the basket he would put out his hand and snatch off the hats of the men passing by. The men would look around and they would see a woman with a basket on her head, a basket covered with a white cloth.
These were his beginnings.
Piero and his mother were everything in the world to each other. The father had gone long ago. “America ate him up,” the mother said when Piero asked. “But you are my little man, and I don’t need any other.”
When she said this, she would wet her fingers in her mouth and smooth down his hair. His hair was thick and black like his father’s before he went to America.
Piero would stand very close to his mother when she did this. He marveled that he could feel the heat of her through all the skirts she wore, one over the other like the gypsy women at the edge of the city.
The gypsy women would steal him, his mother said, if he weren’t careful. They would cover him with their skirts and take him away. No one would know where, his mother told him. Piero secretly wanted to go close to them, to be caught under their skirts. He wanted to know if they had heat like his mother but he was too afraid.
On Saturdays Piero and his mother would go to the market to sell the hats. He would set up the table for his mother and step back when he was finished. And then he would think about slipping under her skirts. He wanted to sit with the silk of her underskirt in his fingers while she bargained for the price of the hats. He liked the darkness under her skirts. He closed his eyes and remembered the smell of her. It was their secret.
“Go away now,” she would shout at him when he came close, loud enough to make the shutters open. She would sit on the small stool she had carried from home and spread her skirts around her. “A boy must not stay too near his mother,” she told him in a whisper. “Remember Anzio? Anzio who stayed near his mother? Remember Anzio?”
“Was that God? Did God do that to Anzio?” Piero asked, terrified.
“The witches did that,” the mother said, “the witches here in the rione. They don’t like a boy who stays near his mother. They’re jealous.”
Piero was afraid when he though of Anzio. His mother’s words made him run away and he would not come back until it was time to take down her table and carry it home.
But when they came to the small room where they lived together, Piero’s mother would close the curtains on the window that looked over the street and she would call him to her, even before she made their meal.
Everyone in this city stayed where they were born. Everyone stayed in their rione and married in their rione and died there. But not Piero’s father. He went outside to marry. His bride was a stranger in the rione and she had red hair. He married outside the rione which is not what young men should do.
“So many beauties here,” the gossips said. “Why did he go outside?”
Piero’s mother called them witches. When Piero was born she hung cornetti of coral and silver and even a tiny one made of gold over his cradle. He was such a beautiful and strong baby boy, Piero’s mother said, that they were powerless to harm him and so they used their evil magic on his father and his father went away.
This is what Piero’s mother told him.
“Won’t he come back? Don’t you think he’ll come back?” Piero wanted to know.
“No,” his mother said.
“Why? Why won’t he come back to us?”
“The witches,” his mother said. “There was black rain when he left. He is never coming back.”
“Aren’t you sad? Don’t you cry for him to come back?” Piero asked her.
The mother kissed the top of his head where the black hair parted.
“Don’t I have you?” she said. “How can I be sad?”
Piero would put his head in her lap and close his eyes when she said this. He didn’t care about his father or the witches who worried her. He
