A Little Love Story

Acclaim for Roland Merullo and

A Little Love Story

“Merullo has a graceful way with dialogue, allowing his characters’ wit—sometimes caustic, sometimes sweet—to unfold naturally…. For all its sadness, his narrative is never maudlin; for all its familiarity, it’s never trite. No tears are jerked in the delivery of this solidly satisfying little romance.”

—
The Washington Post

“Merullo … once again shows his gift for drawing characters you feel that you know…. You can hear their voices. They breathe from the page.
…A Little Love Story
is about the courage people can find in themselves because love doesn’t leave them much choice but to find it. And it is a story told with humor, warmth and good sex.”

—
The Philadelphia Inquirer

“There is nothing little about this moving, perceptively written and unexpectedly poignant love story…. Clear-eyed, realistic and evocative…. Layers and levels of emotion surface and dissolve in a prose that’s so fine-tuned it feels effortless.”

—
Providence Sunday Journal

“Merullo is a writer of great talent.”

—Robert Stone

“Merullo has a knack for rendering emotional complexities, paradoxes, or impasses in a mere turn of the phrase.”

—
Chicago Tribune

“A grand, moving story, believable characters, and a graceful dialogue that, taken together, reminded a few critics of Erich Segal’s 1970 classic,
Love Story. A Little Love Story
will rekindle the reader’s trust not only in love but also in love stories.”

—
Bookmarks
magazine

Roland Merullo
A Little Love Story

Roland Merullo is the critically acclaimed author of
Revere Beach Elegy
and
In Revere, In Those Days
. He lives in western Massachusetts with his wife and two children.

OTHER BOOKS BY
R o l a n d  M e r u l l o

In Revere, In Those Days (2002)

Revere Beach Elegy (2000)

Passion for Golf (2000)

Revere Beach Boulevard (1998)

A Russian Requiem (1993)

Leaving Losapas (1991)

for

Steven Merullo

Kenneth Merullo

Peter Grudin

Dean Crawford

and

in memory of

Gerard X. Sikorski

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other
.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace
.

— AMELIA EARHART PUTNA

A portion of the author’s earnings from this book will be donated to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation
.

Acknowledgments

M
Y FORMER MENTOR, Michael Miller, once told me that no one writes a book alone, and in my case at least, that has always been true. I’d like to mention here some people whose names do not appear on the cover but who made contributions, small and large, to this novel.

First thanks, as always, to Amanda for her good faith, spirit of adventure, and steady love.

My gratitude also to: Alexandra and Juliana for the gift of their presence; everyone at the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, especially Dr. Preston Campbell III and Allison Tobin; Dr. Mark Pian, Dr. Geoffrey Kurland, Dr. James Yankaskas, Dr. Ronald Kahn, and Dr. Marlyn Woo, all of whom generously offered their time and expertise and helped me get the medical details right (any errors here are my own and not theirs); Dr. Janice Abbott, Ph.D., for help with the psychosocial aspects of cystic fibrosis; Dr. Robert Gerstle, Dr. Francis Duda, Dr. Anabel Quizon, and everyone at the Springfield, Massachusetts, CF center for their excellent care; Joe Merullo for his optimism and encouragement, and for suggesting I write a love story; Eileen Keaffer and Senator Stanley Rosenberg for their assistance with the physical details of the Massachusetts State House; my friend, the fine painter John Recco, and Sara Brigham for information about painting techniques and equipment; Maria Recco for help with Greek culture; Avery Rome for two wonderful assignments; Matthew Joyce and his family, David Manglos, and Fred Phillips for their courage and time—while this is not their story, they were surely an inspiration for it; a thoughtful and helpful group of readers: Amanda Merullo, Craig Nova, Peter Grudin, Dean Crawford, Barbara Cheney, Lisa Ahlstrom, Sydne Didier, Katherine Weinstein, Melissa Preston, and the person who taught me to read and to love books, Eileen Merullo; Cynthia Cannell for placing this novel and for years of support; my editor and friend Shaye Areheart; Jenny Frost, Cindy Berman, Julie Will, Darlene Faster, Tara Gilbride, Debbie Natoli, Kira Stevens, Tina DeGraff, and everyone at Shaye Areheart Books for their tireless efforts; Jeff Foltz, Patrolman Rick Camillo of the Boston University Police, and Coach David Sanderson of the Boston University varsity men’s crew for refreshing my memory about the school and the sport; Darra Goldstein for menu advice; Edward Steriti for the way he lives; and Officer Wise of the Dover, Massachusetts, Police Department.

Last, I would like to express my gratitude to and admiration for all the CF patients, doctors, nurses, and family members I have spoken with or interviewed over the past four years. May every blessing come to you.

F
IVE MILES BELOW I dreamt the blue Pacific, scalloped with whitecaps and looking like it had been frozen in time. In my lap the sleeping black-haired bundle of life stirred and sighed and curled closer against my shirt. I cupped one hand gently against the back of his small head. When he was quiet I turned to the window again and saw four atolls gliding under us, an impossible cluster, four specks of cream-edged green on the immense watery background. I wondered about painting them.

Strange how the demons do their work. With that fragile life sleeping against me, and two more dark-haired creatures close beside, and riding a run of good luck like I’d never known, my mind traveled along the ridges of its flying-fear, bumped and tilted, flipped upside down, and crashed into Brian. It occurred to me for the first time that he might have done some great heroic thing in the last minutes of his life, to make up for the not-so-great things he’d done before that. Alright, a voice in me said, let it go now. Let it be true. Let it go.

The atolls coasted along in their dreamy, improbable stillness. Beside me I thought I heard a cough. I turned—too quickly—and her dark eyes held an expression that no one could paint. Don’t worry, they said. Just an ordinary breath, a good ordinary puff of life, part mine and part yours and part someone else’s. Be happy while we can.

Book One

S e p t e m b e r

1

M
Y YEAR OF MOURNING
was over, and I decided to mark the anniversary by treating myself to a doughnut.

By my own choice, I had not had sex with anyone during those twelve months. I’m not sure why I did that. Maybe it was out of respect for the woman I had lost, though she wouldn’t have wanted anything like that from me. My older brother is a monk, so maybe I was trying to prove I could keep up with him in the abstinence department. Or maybe I was just afraid I would meet someone I liked and sleep with her, then start to think about her all the time, then start to want to have children with her, and then she would be torn away from me and spirited off to some better world—if there is a better world—and that is not the kind of thing you want to go through twice in one year.

So on that wet September night my year of abstinence was finished, and I went out looking for a doughnut as a sort of offbeat celebration. That’s all, really. A doughnut says: Listen, for your eighty-five cents I’m going to give you a quick burst of feel-good. No soul connection. No quiet walks. No long foreplay sessions in a warm one-bedroom. No extinction of aloneness. No jealousy. No fights. No troubles. No risk.

On that night, the risk I thought I was willing to take extended only as far as chocolate-glazed. Steaming cup of decaf next to it, little bit of cream, the shabby comfort of my favorite doughnut shop. It seemed a small enough thing to ask, after the year I’d seen.

The steady rain that had been falling during the afternoon and early part of the night had quieted to a light drizzle. The streets were black and wet, streaked with color from storefront neon and traffic lights. I worked my old pickup out of its parking space—foolish move, giving up a parking space in that neighborhood at that late hour—and drove to Betty’s.

There is no Betty. Once there might have been, but at that point Betty’s was owned by Carmine Asalapolous, a rough-edged, middle-aged man who had told me once that he wished he’d done something heroic in his life so he’d have a piece of high ground to fall back on when the devils of self-doubt were after him. Carmine, I said, just being a decent person, good father, excellent doughnut-maker—that’s enough heroism for one life. But he shook his big head sadly and said no, it wasn’t, not for him.

Carmine went to a two-hour Orthodox service on Sunday mornings. During the week he liked to make off-color jokes with his regular customers. He had some kind of mindless prejudice against college professors, a scar between his eyebrows that looked like a percent sign, and two young daughters whom he adored and whose pictures and drawings were taped up on every vertical surface in Betty’s. He took his work seriously. If you got him going on the subject of doughnut-making, he’d tell you the chain doughnut shops used only the cheapest flour, which is why you left those places with a pasty aftertaste on your tongue.

I parked in front. The roof of Betty’s was dripping and one cold droplet caught me on the left ear as I walked in. I remember that odd detail. In line at the counter I held a little debate with myself—how wild a night should it be?—then asked for two chocolate-glazed instead of one, a medium instead of a small decaf. Carmine was counting money in the floury kitchen. I could see him there through a sort of glassless window. He looked up at me from his stack of bills, pointed with his chin at the waitress’s back, and made a John Belushi face, pushing his lips to the side and lifting one eyebrow, the expression of a man who had not a millionth of a chance of ever touching the waitress in a way she liked, and knew it.

I carried my paper cup of coffee and paper plate with two doughnuts on it to a stool at a counter that looked out on Betty’s wet parking lot. In a minute a trim, balding man sat beside me, with a black coffee and the Sports section of the
New York Times
. “Nice truck,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“I saw you get out of it,” he said.

I could not think of any response to this.

He kept trying. He said: “You don’t see many of them still around. Fifty-one Dodge?”

“Forty-nine.”

“Gorgeous,” he said. “Like you.”

I looked away. I was waiting for my coffee to cool, and was not really in the mood to talk, and though I understand sexual loneliness as well as the next person, there was not much I could do about this man’s loneliness. Just at that exact moment—it was after midnight—a woman walked out of Betty’s carrying a small bag and got into her car and she must have had a slippery shoe or been distracted by something because she put her new Honda in reverse and drove it across about fifteen open feet of parking lot and straight into the back of my truck.

“Whoa!” the man beside me yelled.

I took a good hot sip of coffee. I watched the woman get out, rubbing the back of her neck with one hand and looking as if she wished she had never been born. And then, very calmly, I went outside to talk to her.