Absolute Brightness (5 page)

Once Josh had loped across the room and disappeared into the kitchen, Leonard leaned over and looked toward the entrance as if he were expecting someone. A person would have to be blind not to notice that Leonard was acting weird, even for him. Mom shot a glance at him.

“Leonard, I don't know what's up with you, but you're acting very queer.”

“Mother!” I said, using my restaurant voice. “We have told you six trillion times that ‘queer' is not a word you should be using.”

What I didn't tell her was that “queer” was a word I had stopped using anywhere near Leonard—not in the same sentence, not in the same room, not in the same thought. Words like “faggot,” also “fruit loop” or “poofta,” “fairy-pants,” “sissy,” “girlyboy,” “freakazoid,” “nellie,” “big Nell-box,” “Nancy,” “Mary,” and “Margaret Anne” were, for the time being, also off-limits. I had forbidden myself to even consider what these words meant—especially since the kids at school had started using them in broad daylight.

Leonard, on the other hand, never seemed to mind. Whenever I happened to be walking with him and someone lobbed a word bomb like “queenie-boo” in his direction, he acted as if there were a faint electrical buzzing in the air, one that had no discernible source to bother complaining about. Once, Leonard just looked at me, sighed, and then drew my attention to the shine coming off his new oxblood penny loafers.

“Do you think these shoes make my feet look small?” he asked, oblivious to the threat that was breathing down his neck.

At moments like that, I couldn't tell whether I wanted to hug him or to step all over his new shoes. I suppose if I had been a better person, I would have found the nerve to stand up to the local bullies. I would have told them to their faces that they couldn't go around terrorizing people who were posing as my cousin. But the last thing I needed was to get a reputation as a smart-mouthed do-gooder and defender of the local queenie-boos.

“Stop turning around in your seat,” my mother said to Leonard.

“I know. But I really shouldn't be sitting with my back to the door,” Leonard said.

Whenever we went out to a restaurant, Leonard insisted on a seat facing the front door of the restaurant. He claimed that it was an old Italian custom.

“You never know who could walk through the door,” he told us.

But that night at the Fin & Claw, my mother put her foot down and made him sit across from her with his back to the door.

“You aren't even remotely Italian, Leonard,” she told him, “so don't start.”

He raised his little eyebrows (I swear he plucked them) and said, “Haven't you ever heard of it happening? Middle-aged men in sweat suits get shot over a plate of spaghetti all the time. They forget to watch their backs.”

“Leonard, you've been watching way too much TV,” was all I had to say on the subject.

Just then all the blood drained from Mom's face and her features seemed to disappear. She looked as though she had just spotted a hit man toting a machine gun the moment before he opened fire. We all stopped breathing.

When you are connected to a person by blood or by the force of love, it's as if you had some kind of internal Geiger counter that begins to tick quicker, louder, whenever that person gets close to you. At that moment, mine was ticking like crazy, and even without turning around, I knew my father had just walked into the restaurant and he was coming toward us.

“Go get Deirdre,” my mother said without looking at me directly. “We're leaving right this minute.”

I got up from the table, raced across the dining room toward the ladies' room, and bumped into Aunt Bet (who is not our actual aunt); her small, compact body was right in my path, and it didn't look like she was going anywhere fast. Aunt Bet had an apple-shaped face and a pear-shaped body; her hair, which had been permed and tinted a pale champagne color by my mother, always looked a little crooked on her head. She locked me in her gaze and then shot me a smile that was entirely false.

“Ho there. Where's the fire, young lady?” she asked, putting on her people-pleaser voice and taking hold of my arm. “Slow down. We don't want to be rushing you to no emergency room, not on Thanksgiving Day.”

Just then Deirdre came out of the ladies' room and stopped in her tracks. She was trying to figure out what was going on between Aunt Bet and me. But when Aunt Bet let go of my arm, Deirdre focused her gaze beyond us and saw what was happening over at the booth. She saw Dad, large as life.

“Come on,” I said to her. “We're going. Mom said we're outta here.”

Mom was making a beeline toward the front door of the restaurant. Deirdre and I decided to fall in behind her, though I had made the decision for both of us by grabbing hold of her sleeve and pulling her along with me. We'd almost made it to the exit when Mom came to an unexpected halt. She just stopped like a woman in a dream who suddenly realizes she's forgotten her clothes but is too afraid to look down and find out that she really
is
naked. Because Deirdre and I were literally right on her heels, there was a pileup.

“Our coats,” Mom said, realizing that we were about to leave without essential outerwear. It was November, after all. The next thing I knew, Mom was headed back to the booth, where Leonard and my father were sitting.

“Uh-oh,” I said to the back of Mom's pumpkin-colored pantsuit as I tried to get my shoe back on. “Mom? We ought to be leaving here. We ought to be leaving this minute.”

But Mom was already standing beside the booth and glaring down at Leonard and my father as if they were felons. It's a good thing she didn't have a gun handy.

“Hey, look who's here,” Leonard said to her as he pointed to my father. “How about that? Something, right?”

I looked Leonard hard in the face and tried to control his brain with my thoughts, but he was very dense when family matters were involved, so it didn't work. He merely straightened in his seat and said, “It's him. It's your father,” as though there had been some confusion about the identity of my own flesh and blood.

I always thought of my father as a handsome man. I once admitted to my best girl friend, Electra, how I thought he looked like a more golden version of George Clooney. She laughed out loud and then caught herself when she realized that I was being serious. “I guess, sort of,” she conceded, and then added, “but not really.” In any case, there was a resemblance—at least to me. He had pale, freckled skin and coarse, ginger-colored hair. His features were all sharp and to the point, his lips were thick and cushy, and the fine yellow hairs on his forearms glistened. Whereas I had inherited all the darker traits of our mother's southern Italian clan, Deirdre had inherited the good looks, bright tones, and green eyes from our dad.

That afternoon, he looked older than I remembered, and tired. He was sitting with his fists on the table, wearing a pale-green plaid short-sleeved shirt and looking over at us as if we were insane. We just stood there. He didn't say a word. Nothing. His mouth tried to smile, but his eyes were sorrowful, and they began to fill with tears. I looked away. I couldn't stand it. Deirdre was staring up at the fish netting as though she had just located some lost thing up there. She looked hopeless and utterly alone in the middle of the crowded restaurant. We all were.

Meanwhile, Aunt Bet was flitting around the room from one table to the next chatting up the customers. She had her eye on us; she knew enough about the situation between my mom and dad to know that this could be trouble, but she was playing it down and pretending not to notice our unscheduled stop at what was now my father's table. It was obvious that something was wrong.

“Everything's fine,” I heard her say to three old women with sweaters draped over their shoulders and hair the color of their dinner napkins. They were craning their necks to see what was going to happen next. Something was obviously up with us; but Aunt Bet just said, “It's nothing. Just family matters.”

The idea that the previous three years and everything we'd been through—the separation, the divorce, living without my father, watching Mom trying to make ends meet—amounted to
nothing
in the minds of other people made me crazy. I wanted to scream or scratch somebody's eye out, but instead I just stood there like everybody else, waiting for the next thing to happen.

“Come on, Leonard,” Mom said. “We're going home.”

“Ellen…?” My father's voice came as a surprise. We all looked at him. He took a heavy breath, as if he were about to make a big speech and appeal to my mother's sense of fairness.

“Don't. Okay?” Mom said to him. “Just don't.”

And then she stretched her left hand flat out for emphasis. I noticed that she wasn't wearing her wedding ring. When did that happen? I wondered. Maybe she never put it back on after that night when Leonard touched the diamond chip and introduced her to the Titanic cocktail.

“Coats,” Mom said to us over her shoulder, which was her way of ending the possibility of a conversation and getting us out of there as fast as she could.

Leonard got up. We all tried not to look at one another as we put on our late-autumn, early-winter outerwear, but I could see that Leonard was a nervous wreck.

Then I heard my father say, “I'm sorry.” But he said it low and into his chest and not quite loud enough for it to do any good.

Mom said, “Excuse me?”

He looked up at us and then in a louder voice he repeated himself. “I'm sorry. Believe me, this never should've happened. It's my fault. I'm … I'm so, so sorry.”

The words came out of his mouth, but each syllable sounded cheap and flat. I suppose these were the words that we all wanted to hear from him. We had wanted him to be sorry, to cry, to see him squirming in his seat and then begging for our forgiveness. But as it was happening, I felt like it wasn't really enough.

Aunt Bet came over to the table. She was slightly stooped over and she was wearing the most pitiful expression.

“Girls, please,” she said, “let's not block the aisle.”

We all looked at her as though she were an alien creature as she moved on toward the kitchen. That's when Deirdre seemed to come back from whatever far-off planet she'd been visiting. She blinked a few times and laughed. It was not a happy laugh. It was low and smoky and slightly menacing.

Then she reached over and grabbed a handful of lettuce from the salad bar beside her. She tossed the lettuce at my father lightly, almost as if she were showering him with rose petals. The individual curls of lettuce landed on his shoulders and in his hair, a few fell to the floor and onto the table. I heard one of the nearby diners gasp in horror. Everyone was stunned—my father, too. He just sat there examining the mess in front of him.

Deirdre reached behind her again, but this time I was ready for her. I was able to grab her arm and stop her. But then she pivoted her whole body and got a hold of a handful of lettuce with her other fist. This time her aim was off, and the stuff flew wildly through the air, hitting no one in particular but everyone in general. It landed in water glasses and dessert flutes.

Aunt Bet came rushing back. She was looking at the lettuce scattered on the carpet like it was broken dishware. She was really upset. She had had it, she was saying as she pushed Deirdre and me and Leonard toward the door. Under her breath, she threatened us with police action, and said over and over that we would
not
be allowed in her restaurant anymore because of our outrageous behavior. We were, she hissed, a disgrace.

Deirdre and Leonard and I stood in the parking lot for at least twenty minutes wondering what to do next. We waited for Mom to walk out the door, get into the car, and then drive us away so we could all sulk at home as a group; but she kept not coming out. We discussed going back inside to rescue her, but none of us wanted to risk another scene with Aunt Bet. Leonard agreed to investigate. He walked around to the side of the building and peeked through the window like a spy. When he came back, he reported that Mom was seated across from my father in the booth. They were chatting. “Like old friends,” he said cheerily. The shreds of lettuce had been picked up from the carpet and everything looked pretty normal.

“We should go back in,” Deirdre said.

“Why would we ever want to do that?” I said.

“To get Mom.”

“No way. Personally, I plan to never set foot in there again. I will certainly not eat there. Ever. In fact, I might not eat another meal for the rest of my life. I don't know about you, but I could die over this. I could literally die. For real.”

That was it—my big speech.

“I think it's kind of funny,” Leonard said.

“Funny?”

“Yeah. Isn't the Fin & Claw where your parents first met?”

“Yes,” Deirdre said. She was perched on the hood of Mom's car in her hat and scarf, looking like a bundled-up beauty queen after the parade had passed by. “What's that got to do with anything?”

“Nothing,” Leonard replied. “I'm just saying.”

As I whipped my head around, I happened to catch him smiling, more to himself than to anyone in particular. When he saw me looking at him, he dropped the smile, raised his plucked eyebrows, and said, “What?”

When I didn't respond with anything other than a mean, all-knowing look, he added, “Wha-at?”

Mom came striding out of the restaurant and made her way across the parking lot. Her keys were in her fist, and she looked as if she might hit anyone who tried to stop her from getting into the car. For once, she wasn't smiling. We all hopped down from our perches and waited for her to unlock the doors, but instead of aiming her keys and giving the car the beep, she walked straight up to Leonard and grabbed him by his coat collar.

“If you ever,
ever
, pull anything like that again, I will personally kick your sorry ass back to wherever it came from and be done with you. Do you hear me?”