Blue Stars (9 page)

When they pulled to a stop in front of her two-story A-frame on Carroll Street—you could always find parking out here—Otis said, “Yeah. She’s sitting in the window. You’re screwed.”

“Look, no more with the screwing, all right?” Otis snickered. “You know what I mean.”

He jogged up the steps and the front door opened instantly. “Hi, Lolo!” “Hi, baby.
Finally
.” Lacey got the grocery bags from the trunk. Lolo hadn’t e-mailed her list until yesterday at 6:00 p.m., which meant then she and Otis had been out at Wesselman’s and the discount grocery place until ten. She shouldered open the door and carried bags right into the kitchen. “Hi, Mom.”

Lolo came in the doorway, one arm tightly wrapped around Otis; they were about the same height. Petite, fully made up, hair done … it was clear that the visit wasn’t a casual one for her mother-in-law. Lacey put away the milk and eggs, lugged the cat litter under the bathroom sink. She felt scrubby and huge, as usual, whenever she was out here. “They didn’t have Genoa salami. This is the same thing, right?”

Lolo barely glanced at the package she held up. “It is what it is. Let me get my checkbook.”

“Forget it, Ma.” Otis grinned. They went through this each time.

“I’m not a charity case. Now tell me the total.”

Lacey put the soda liters on the lower shelf of the pantry. “Zero dollars, and zero cents. Today’s bargain only.”

“Well…” Lolo shook her head at the ceiling,
what can I do
, deeply disappointed yet again.

“Otis? You waiting for an invitation?” Lacey pointed to full grocery bags on the floor.

“No, no, he has to come tell me every single thing about school. Get a glass of milk first, sugar.”

Otis shrugged happily. “I have to go tell her every single thing about school.”

As he reached into the fridge, Lacey gave him a noogie. Actually, she was glad for a moment’s quiet in the kitchen. And for the ferocious love Lolo had always shown Otis, another man’s son, even if it was on the bossy side. It had been five years, but Lacey still felt like Lolo was judging her, waiting for her to mess up. She’d confided this to Martine once, who had snorted and said, “Uh,
yeah
she is. You married her only son, what do you expect? She was hoping for J.Lo, she got you.” Lacey didn’t think it was the PR stuff standing in the way, though—Eddie’d had a white dad. In fact she and Lolo had more common ground than they admitted. Lolo had raised Eddie on her own, after his father split. She’d put in long hours as a secretary in a career that went from medical offices to local colleges to working for the Bronx borough president. But for whatever reason—
the obvious ones,
Lacey could hear Martine say—they couldn’t get along.

In the living room, a plate of almond sugar cookies,
mantecaditos,
was set on the table. Tego, the cat, jumped into Lacey’s lap, but she shoved him off with a forearm. She went over to the front windows, which gave out practically right to the street, and looked at the houses on the other side: modest, neatly kept up, several American flags. Attached to Lolo’s window with a plastic suction cup was her red-and-white service banner, same exact one Lacey had. She lifted it to peek at the blue star on its front; several others of the same flag were hanging in windows on this street alone.

“Sit down and relax, Lacey. What are you doing over there?”

“Nothing.” This place always made her feel antsy. “I printed you out a couple of e-mails. We should get a call from him any day, but you know when they first arrive it’s all so—”

Lolo was motioning,
give me, give me.
She took the folded papers and put on her glasses to study them. Otis flopped sideways on the couch whispering
pleasepleasepleaseMom
—he’d been begging to stop at Seafood City on the way out for hot dogs and video games. She made a
just chill
face.

“What does he mean about ‘not happy but I’ll get over it’?” Lolo pointed to a page.

“Some drama with one of the other unit COs. They had a mix-up about supplies, and Eddie didn’t get what he wanted.”

“So why didn’t he?”

“I don’t know, Mom. It doesn’t always go his way over there.”

“Pff.” Then she told the story of the time in high school when Eddie and a friend got rear-ended in a “borrowed” car out by the Co-op City complex. The friend ditched, but Eddie owned up to everything. He had to do chores nights and weekends for a month until Lolo let him off the hook. And he never ratted out his buddy. Otis was rapt—he liked the part about Eddie in trouble—but Lacey had heard it before. She knew, she knew, Eddie could do no wrong, even when he
was
doing wrong.

Lacey let her gaze travel around the small room, worn flowered furniture, Lolo’s cane leaning against her chair, no TV, framed photos everywhere, mostly of Eddie, one of Otis. There was one from her own wedding on a side table: Lacey angled to the side, bangs falling into her face, idiotic smile; Eddie, straight-on, jacket off, calm. But the biggest one, the best—they would all agree—was Eddie in ACU battle dress, digital cammies and black beret. Last year, Lolo had paid for him to go to a studio in town here, since he’d never had an official portrait done after ROTC. Lacey remembered him bitching about it, but now she was glad Lolo had won. Framed and huge and placed on a shelf all alone, it showed the real Eddie: confident, determined, unsmiling.

There was so little to talk about here. Eddie had made her promise not to bring up any news, no matter what. After a few more minutes of chatting, Lacey couldn’t contain herself. “Okay, Mom, you got a list for me?”

“Why are you in a hurry?”

“It’s a school night. Otis has homework. What do you need me to fix?”

“Well, I don’t keep a
list,
like for a handyman.”

“All right. Then we need to—”

“But the TV upstairs. I can’t figure out what’s happened.” The three of them trooped upstairs. Lacey let Otis take care of the TV remote situation—Lolo had pressed an input button and couldn’t get out of a black screen that said “Video 2”—while she popped into the bathroom to check the medicine cabinet.

“Mom, you’re low on Prandin.” She shook the pharmacy bottle of diabetes pills. “You have to take these three times a day, before each meal.”

“I have another in the kitchen,” Lolo called. “This one’s just if I forget. So I don’t have to go back down the stairs.”

“Right, well, the idea is not to forget,” Lacey said to herself. She checked the bedroom—fine, tidy—and picked up the laundry basket. Above Lolo’s protestations, she started a load and then attended to other things on the list. Lolo had, in fact, made a list. However, Lacey point-blank refused the last item.

“Lolo, I am
not
clipping any cat’s toenails. Disgusting.”

“But it only takes a minute! He won’t hold still for me. You should see what the claws are doing to my bedspread! Here, Tego. Come here, Tego!”

“Uh-uh. Negative. Let’s go, O.”

In spite of her theatrical disappointment—you only just got here!—they gathered coats and hugged Lolo and said good-bye. Lacey could almost feel herself lighten, out on the street, unlocking the car.

“You call me,” Lolo ordered from the doorway. “Any minute that you hear from him.”

“Of course we will, Mom. Love you. See you next week.” Pulling away, Lacey glimpsed her mother-in-law in the window, curtain aside, watching them above her service flag.

“Mom.
Pleasepleaseplease
. I am so hungry. I’m starving.”

She glanced at him. He was a good kid. “All right, I’ll make you a deal. We can stop for dinner, but I’m not going to that seafood place, it gives me a headache.” And it was insanely expensive; eighteen dollars for a paper plate of fried clams. “Bring your backpack.”

They went to the Snug, a recently renovated pub next door to the diner. The Yankees were on three TV screens, and only two or three people were sitting at the bar. Lacey led Otis to a table along the side of the room and went up to the bar for menus.

“I got you,” the bartender said, waving her back to the table. He came over with menus, place settings, and two glasses of water.

“What’s the score?”

“Detroit’s up by two. Something to drink?”

“He’ll have milk and—”

“Sprite, please, Mom?”

“One Sprite and I’ll have … what the hell is ‘City Island Beer’?” she said, squinting at the tap.

One of the barflies called back over his shoulder, “It’s six-dollar Michelob with a fancy label.” Cackles.

“I’ll take a Miller Lite.” Meanwhile, Lacey was unpacking Otis’s backpack and handing him his math workbook and reading folder. “No watching the game until I’ve checked these.”

“Mom, Jeter’s up!”

“Look, I’m working too.” Lacey pointed to her thick, stuffed binder: a combination agenda, scheduler, and file folder. She turned to the section labeled “FRG Group.” Each woman had filled out a sheet with some basic information as well as a space for what Lacey had called “Concerns and Life Stresses.” Anne had suggested that she have each person describe what her main problems were, and then take notes based on that. But Lacey had wanted the women to put it in their own words. Which, thank God, because the first meeting had not gone as expected.

There had been six of them in a dingy room in the Yonkers Community Center. Two black women who were longtime friends and had husbands in the National Guard; one bitchy girl with a newlywed in the Marines; one freaked-out mom of an army PFC; and one woman who didn’t say a word the entire hour. Nervous, Lacey had been too energetic. She aimed for Anne’s funny enthusiasm but landed on loud and manic.

In any case, no one had listened much to her. They immediately took over the discussion with intense questions and arguments about TriCare, the DoD’s health care plan. Which plan, Prime or Standard? Why those hellish new deductibles in Standard? And how come they were so slow to reimburse? One woman said her kid’s broken wrist from last winter was still on her credit card. Lacey listened, agreed—and tried to change the subject. Weren’t they supposed to be doing feelings?

The women ran right over her overtures. Next up was pay grade, of course, that endless source of gripes and confusion. Right away, Lacey got tense. As the wife of a reserve NCO, Anne had told her, she was supposed to be mentoring these women on good personal finance practices. But the truth was, she was already scrambling; Eddie’s active duty pay was less than three-quarters of what he made at Hess. Last time, they toughed it out for a year, but now deployment meant fifteen months. So they were making up the difference out of savings. Problem was, they’d used a chunk of savings last year to help Lolo after her surgery … and now with Lacey having to reduce her private-client hours to spend more time with Otis, it could get ugly. She didn’t like to think about it, to be honest. But most of the women were in similar situations, and they volleyed questions at Lacey about basic pay, allowance for housing, loss of BAS food money, hazardous duty pay, family separation pay …

Then it was over, Lacey feeling dazed and disappointed.

“You’re from Great Neck, aren’t you?” The bartender had just put down Otis’s cheeseburger and was staring down at Lacey. “Did you go to North?”

She glanced up at him and away. “Maybe. Can we get some ketchup?”

“Thought so.” To her surprise and relief, he merely brought a ketchup bottle from another table, and went back behind the bar.

“Mom. I can’t do this one.”

The sum of the interior angles of a quadrilateral is equal to 360 degrees. How many degrees are in the fourth angle of a quadrilateral whose other three angles are 80 and 110 and 95?

Lacey’s heart pounded. She ate some of Otis’s fries and read the problem for the third time without understanding it. Who was this guy? How did he know her from high school? Worst thought: What if he’d been one of the Asshole’s friends? What if he mentioned him to Lacey, asked about him, saw the resemblance in Otis, said the Asshole’s name out loud?

“Is this what it looks like?” Otis had sketched a crazy, tilted four-sided shape on his paper place mat.

“Okay, but drawing it might actually be more confusing. Try this.” She wrote out an equation next to it subtracting 80 and 110 and 95 from 360.

She snuck looks at the bartender. Fortyish white guy with salt-and-pepper hair, a little potbelly, decent face. He watched the Yankee game for a minute, and then turned back to rinsing glasses. When he caught her looking, he pointed to her empty beer glass without expression. She nodded.

“So how do you know Great Neck?” she asked when he brought her a fresh one.

“I graduated ’89 at North,” he said. “Just a few years ahead of you. Your brother Bob—right?—was in my class.”

“He lives in San Diego now.”

“Nice. Good for him.”

“Is this right, Mom?” She tilted her head to check Otis’s equation.

“Yes. Now copy it real neat into the workbook.”
What’s the problem, just be normal.
“Lacey Diaz,” she said. “And this is Otis.”

The bartender wiped his hand on his towel and held it out to both of them. “Jim Leahy. You don’t live on the island, do you?”

“Which one?” They each laughed. “No, we’re in Mount Vernon. You live here?”

“Pelham. I’m managing a place out there, and then I fill in here most weekends.”

“You got a family?”

“I got three pretty girls, but no. Divorced.”

After a bit of silence, Jim rapped on their table and went back to the bar. Lacey took a big swallow of the beer. So, that was it. She wouldn’t have to account for all the shit that happened back then, maybe she’d been able to skate right past those screaming fights with her parents, the bad places she’d been stuck in, the way the Asshole had messed her up.
This is who I am,
she told herself.
Not that girl, not anymore.

The beer filled her with warmth from deep inside. The Yankees went up by a run on an A-Rod homer. Otis whipped through the rest of his homework with no whining; Jim brought him over a small dish of ice cream, on the house. Lacey read here and there amid the group members’ Concerns and Life Stresses; she couldn’t remember who was who, couldn’t put faces with the names. She didn’t focus on the content of the comments so much as on the handwriting. One woman had pushed down so hard on the ballpoint she nearly went through the page. Another had schoolgirl script. One added smiley faces. Another used feathery, incoherent lettering.