The coffee was like battery acid but it packed the kick I needed. Two swallows and I was wide awake, ready to do what I had to do. The phone number hadn’t changed since my childhood.
“Hello?”
“Mom, it’s Mickey.”
“Oh my God, you sound so close!”
I swallowed. “I’m in New York, Mom.”
“Oh, my God! My God!!”
“Mom—”
“Are you all right? What happened? What’s wrong?”
“Why do you ask if something’s wrong?”
“You just show up out of the blue, and I’m not supposed to wonder?”
“Listen, Mom, I’m coming home for a while, okay? Would that be all right?”
She made a weird sound, the marriage of a cry and a laugh. “You don’t need permission to come home!”
“Well…thanks.”
“Where are you?”
“The airport.”
“Which one? Want your father to pick you up?”
“I’ll take a cab.”
“They’re so expensive!”
“I’m on my way, Mom.”
She had more to say but I hung up the phone, half sorry that I’d called. Now there was no turning back. My mother was waiting for me.
I hailed a yellow cab and of course the Muslim driver wasn’t delighted to be taking me to an address on the edge of Queens, knowing he probably wouldn’t get a return fare. As we got rolling I thought he was muttering about it to himself, but then I saw that he had a small cell phone clamped onto his ear and was chattering away to someone in his native language. I asked him to please hang up until the end of the ride. He nodded and did as he was asked but his eyes flashed with anger. Maybe he was a terrorist, talking about plans for another attack on the city, and I’d interrupted him. Maybe I was a hero.
I tipped him four bucks, and as he roared away I stood in front of my childhood home and stared in wonder at the little green asbestos-shingled house on Glenwood Street.
I had not been home in twenty years.
In the early days of my career I stayed at places like the Plaza Hotel whenever I came to New York (and sometimes wangled a room for my parents).
But I’d avoided the old neighborhood until now, until I had no choice.
The house seemed to have shrunk. Be it ever so humble, it was fully paid for, thanks to me. When the “Sweet Days” money rolled in I paid off the balance on my old man’s mortgage, $22,000. That was probably the only smart thing I did with my money.
So I had a right to be here, if only for that. My knees trembled as I approached the front door, climbed the three cement steps to the stoop and froze.
I didn’t know whether to walk right in, or knock on the door. How ridiculous was this? How many thousands of times had I barged in after school, dropped my books on the kitchen table, and headed straight for the chocolate milk in the refrigerator?
But that was a long, long time ago. Things had changed. Everything had changed.
Like a timid salesman I tapped on the door, almost inaudibly, but my mother heard it, all right. The door swung open and there she was, looking up at me as if I were a star in the night sky she was trying to recognize.
I’d forgotten about how short she was, barely five feet when I was in my teens, maybe four-eleven now with the shrinkage of time. But her wide-set eyes were still as I remembered them, radiant beneath a wide brow. Her short hair had gone salt and peppery but she still combed it straight back, like a duchess of discipline in a British boarding school.
“Michael,” she said, and then her arms were around me, briefly but tightly, as if she’d just pulled me in off the ledge of a skyscraper. She’s never once called me “Mickey,” hating it when the promoters decided my nickname would sell more records than my proper name.
Her hair was rich with the smell of the meat loaf she’d been cooking, and when she let me go she said, “Is that it?”
She was referring to my luggage. I nodded, setting down my green duffel bag.
“Yeah, this is it.”
“You’re shipping the rest of it?”
“Mom, there is no rest of it. This is it.”
Her nostrils widened with an insuck of breath, just as they used to when I was a child showing her a math test with a failing grade. After all this time it was nice to know I hadn’t lost my gift for disappointing her, and who wouldn’t be disappointed by a son who had nothing but socks, skivvies and T-shirts to show for himself after thirty-eight trips around the sun?
“Well,” she said, “come in, come in. Dinner is ready.”
My mother called the Sunday afternoon meal “dinner,” even though she always served it at four in the afternoon.
I realized I was still standing on the stoop. I took a deep breath, picked up my bag and stepped inside the house.
My father was standing by the tiny gas-jet fireplace they never used, hands hovering over the side pockets of his jeans, as if he were ready to reach for a pair of six-shooters.
“Hello, Dad.”
“Mick.”
We approached each other but stopped a few feet apart. He seemed shorter, too, and beefier, but he still had Popeye forearms. He’s an auto mechanic, and he’s always had these amazingly powerful forearms. He never missed a day of work, and that’s why he was known around Little Neck as Steady Eddie DeFalco.
His hair had gone totally gray but it was all there, and those brown eyes still burned out of his face with a weird kind of sorrow, the sorrow of a disappointed man who can’t even remember what it was he wanted and never got.
“I could have picked you up, you know.”
“The cab ride was fine.”
“Yeah, but they rob you.”
“Not so bad.”
“How much?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Fucking crooks.”
“Eddie!”
He ignored my mother’s outcry.
“A twenty-minute ride, a dollar’s worth of gas. How do they hit you for twenty-eight bucks?”
“You got me, Dad.”
“That
