Dreaming August (23 page)

“Sadly, no. The restaurant didn’t allow for vacations, even when there was enough money for one. I remember, she used to take the box out every once in a while and just smell it.” Carmen tipped the American soil from her hand into the Italian soil, re-latched the lid and closed Benny’s hand on the old cigar box. “Take it to him,” she said. “Tell him Flora knew him, and she loved him. See if it helps.”

Benny looked at the box in her hand, mouth agape and eyes staring. She held something sacred in her hand—a gift of love, a piece of home. Solace in sad times and comfort a life long. She held the history of the Cuban cigars smoked, maybe by Augie himself, and soil tended when the world was still at peace. Soil from a New World garden that fed the same family all their lives. Now she would bring it to Augie. She would close the circle left open too long. Maybe, indeed, it would help.

“Thank you, Carmen.” She kissed the old woman’s soft cheek. “You are your mother’s daughter. I can tell.”

“The highest compliment I can ever hope for. Thank you, Benedetta. I barely knew him, but I always loved him. I hope he finds peace. And, perhaps, if you wouldn’t mind, pass his story along to the children he had with Katherine, if they still live. They have family they never knew existed, and so do we. If they have any interest, they can contact me here.”

“I will find them,” Benny promised. “There has to be some record in town. My mom has spent decades doing our family genealogy. She knows how to find people.”

“That would be lovely. Now then”—Carmen took her arm—“be a good girl and go fetch those cannoli I promised Tina before she goes looking for them herself. Bulldog of a woman, she is. Just like her father, rest his soul.”

The Wind's Dim Words

Benny drove home. All the way. Aside from some traffic again on Kosciuszko Bridge, she did okay. Summer was high and sunlight lingered long. By the time she reached the rural highways closer to home, the sky was still evening-pink.

Clarice—no longer Clara—Grady mostly dozed while the radio played softly. Benny was content to let her bask in the old memories lingering along with the sunshine, grateful her mother had been satisfied with, “Oh, right. Sadly, she died years ago,” after she asked Benny about the old man’s daughter they went all the way to Brooklyn to find.

“Too bad,” she’d said. “Oh, that’s a shame. But we had a good day, didn’t we honey?”

“A really good day, Ma.”

Clarice had already promised her old friends she would return in September for the Feast of San Gennaro. Benny would be recruited, along with her father and Peter, and couldn’t be happier to oblige.

“Stop at Teddy’s,” her mother’s dreamy voice said. “I want to get your father one of those toffee bars he loves so much. I don’t get down here much.”

“Oh, so you still remember him then?” Benny teased. “I thought Tony Pagano might have swept him right out of your mind.”

Clarice smiled without opening her eyes. “Tony’d have grown out his hair and worn a dress if I asked him to, back in the day,” she said. “Handsome as he was, I didn’t want to marry an Italian man.”

“Really? Why?”

“Maybe I should say, I didn’t want to marry any Italian man of my acquaintance.” Clarice picked up her head. “I wanted an educated man, someone not so set on tradition.”

“And you married Daddy?”

“Oh, goodness, Benny. Where do you think you get your rebellious nature from? Me? Your father was as close to an anarchist as anyone I’ve ever known. He’s mellowed, but he was a wild one, my Peadar, always stirring up trouble, handing out pamphlets and flyers. He was so blonde, back then, like Timmy was, remember? There were no boys like him back home in Brooklyn. Still, we dated, but I wouldn’t get serious about him, no matter how I felt. Not for a long time.”

“Why not?”

“I was always well aware of how lucky I was, Benny. Brooklyn may be New York City, but there were, and still are, pockets that seem to exist twenty years behind the times. I lived in one of them. A young woman going to college wasn’t exactly the norm. I didn’t want to go from high school to engaged to married and pregnant all before the age of twenty.”

“Ma, you married Daddy right after college.”

“Not right after. I was twenty-four, and had been out on my own for two full years before I finally agreed to marry him. He’d been asking for years, my poor man. It seems close to traditional, from your standpoint. But from mine, it was a huge step out of what was, and into a bigger world. There’s Teddy’s.” Clarice pointed. “I’ll just be a minute.”

Her mother hurried into the roadside shop, no longer the same Ma Benny had always known. Until today, Clarice Irene Grady had always been, in her daughter’s eyes, a housewife and mother too wrapped up in her children’s lives to have one of her own. But she’d been a young woman living in Brooklyn once, in New York City. She went to college and got her degree in history. She worked and lived on her own for two years, and Benny had no idea where she’d done either.

“I bought half-a-dozen.” Clarice returned with a little bag, already blooming butter. “It’s a nice treat for all of us, unless Daddy sees them before I set them out for dessert.”

Benny put the car in gear and pulled back onto the road. “Speaking of Daddy, I was just wondering something.”

“What’s that, honey?”

“You said he waited a long time for you to agree to marry him.”

“Five years in all.”

“And you worked and lived on your own for two years after college.”

“I did.” Clarice’s laughter seemed slightly forced. “Where is this going?”

“I have no idea what your job was. Or his, for that matter.”

“I worked for the Museum of Natural History in New York,” her mother answered in a breath exhaled. “In the archives. The pay was terrible, and I only got the job because my father knew someone who knew someone, but it was very prestigious. At least, I thought so.”

“And Daddy?”

“He was a freelance photographer. He worked the department stores taking portraits, and pictures with Santa during the holidays. He made enough doing that to allow what he really loved, doing piecemeal work for the local papers for the most part.”

“Daddy lived in the City?”

“We did, for those two years. I loved it. Those were exciting times.”

“Why’d you move up to Connecticut, then?”

“Because your father was convinced I wouldn’t marry him because he had no steady job. He wanted to be a photojournalist so badly, but he got a job with a big real estate firm taking pictures of houses in Stamford and presented me with this ring.” She held out her hand, the tiny diamond there all the years of Benny’s life sparkling in the day’s last light. “How could a woman refuse after a sacrifice like that?”

“His wasn’t the only sacrifice. You had to give up your apartment in New York.”

“Yes, well…” Cheeks were definitely a shade too pink, Clarice fidgeted. “Our…my apartment was on the shabby side, so…”

“Ma?” she asked, trying not to smile. “Where did Daddy live during those two years?”

“Where did he live? I thought I already told you. In New—”

“—York. Yes, I got that part. But where? In proximity to you, I mean.”

“In proximity to me?” She checked her lipstick in the visor mirror, opened and closed her window. Finally, she said, “We lived together, Benedetta Marie, and you’d already guessed, so I don’t see the reason for torturing me.”

“You could have just said it.”

“It was the seventies. And I told you, your father was an anarchist.”

“You don’t have to defend it to me. What did your twenty-years-behind-the-times family have to say about it?”

Clarice bit her lip. “We hid it from them. And it wasn’t easy when they insisted on dropping by to surprise me all the time, I’ll tell you.”

“And you claim Daddy was the rebel.”

“It was the seventies. Everyone was a rebel back then.”

It wasn’t true, and Benny knew it. Even when she was a kid watching re-runs of
Three’s Company
, unmarried couples cohabitating was still taboo.

“You had a whole life I’ve always been clueless about,” Benny said. “How is that possible?”

“Children think their parents will only ever see them as children, and it is kind of true,” Clarice answered. “But kids are way worse when it comes to seeing their parents as actual people. I’m your mother, the woman who baked cupcakes on your birthday, and went to PTA meetings, and had sex only the three times it took to conceive you and your brothers.”

“Ew, Ma.”

“See? You know what you want to, and let the rest go.”

“I would prefer to stay blissfully ignorant of your sex life, but I do like knowing about your life before Bitterly. And I liked when you told me about Miranda.”

“I liked telling you,” Clarice said. “I should have done it when you were younger, so you wouldn’t have to feel the need to keep things from me. We are women, Benny. Mother and daughter, yes, but not mother and child. I think it’s time we saw one another as adults, who can share things about their lives instead of shield one another from them, don’t you?”

The hair on the back of Benny’s neck prickled. That cold heat of knowing what she should have all along rushed through her. Pulling the car over to the side of the road, Benny put the hazards on. Hands gripping the wheel and eyes straight ahead, she said, “You know about the baby, don’t you.”

Clarice took Benny’s hand from the steering wheel, kissed it. “Of course I do, honey.”

“Since?”

“Oh, since around April when I realized you hadn’t been coming around to whine about cramps like you’d been doing every month since you were twelve.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“It was your news to tell, Benny. Why didn’t you?”

Benny slumped in her seat. “I broke it off with Dan because I was falling for him, Ma. It felt like such a betrayal. To Henny, I mean. I promised him forever. And Dan was one of his best friends, of all people.”

“Oh, honey. He was your best friend, too. You both loved Henny so much, but he’s gone, and there isn’t anything wrong with you two finding happiness together.”

“I know that. Now. But I think I might have messed up really bad.”

“What do you mean?”

“I never told Dan about the baby,” Benny confessed. “I was going to, last night, but he found out before I got the chance and freaked out.”

The Spirit That For Ever Talks

Clarice drove the rest of the way home while Benny spilled her guts. She told her mother everything from falling in love to pushing him away. From realizing she was pregnant to Peter finding the ultrasound picture in his car. From making the decision to let Dan back into her life to completely messing it up by waiting too long. Through it all, Clarice only expressed her surprise that Peter had known but never said anything. As they pulled into the driveway, Benny finally asked, “So what do you think?”

“About what, honey?”

“About Dan, Ma. What have we been talking about for the last half hour?”

“I’m kidding, Benny. You know the answer. He loves you, and will love the baby. Everything is going to be fine, and that’s not just a mother consoling her child. I truly believe it, and have all along.”

“Do you think I should go see him? Or wait for him to come to me?”

“Well”—Clarice put the car in park—“you owe him an apology. And I suspect he’s already been here today, looking for you. I say you go find him.”

“What makes you think he was here?”

She leaned over the dash, drawing Benny do to the same, and pointed awkwardly up at Benny’s apartment, to the bit of paper fluttering in the evening breeze. “Something tells me that’s a note from Daniel.”

Benny was out of the car, taking the stairs two at a time before her mother even opened her door. The ligaments in her groin protested. She slowed down, but ripped the note from the door with the enthusiasm of a child at the candy counter.

Tried your cell. I was looking for you. Sorry about last night. Call me. Dan

No teasing. No joke. But he’d been looking for her, so that was something. Benny pulled out her cell phone. Two missed calls from Dan. How had she not heard it ring? Finger poised to return the call, Benny changed her mind and put it away again.

She wouldn’t call him. She needed to see him, to see his face when he said what he had to say. Note tucked into her pocket, she ducked into her apartment, grabbed her helmet and hurried—carefully—back down the stairs.

“I’m going out,” she called in to her mother, but didn’t wait for a response. Clarice Grady would know where she went, and she’d be very happy about it.

Benny tossed her backpack into the makeshift carrier alongside her gardening tools, and kicked-started her scooter. Only after she hit the first bump in the road did she wish she’d taken a moment to use the bathroom. Cricket was starting to take up more interior space. For the first time since seeing the line appear on the pee-stick, Benny happily imagined herself round as a harvest pumpkin, waddling to the bathroom every ten minutes because her bladder was the size of a grape. The image made her smile, and then it made her laugh. Back was her certainty Dan was going to be happy about this. Maybe he was angry she’d waited so long, but he’d get over it. He loved her. She was certain about that too.

Happiness, pure and untainted, started in Benny’s toes and bubbled up inside her like soda in a glass. The sensation was as familiar as it was alien, once a part of her every day and forgotten. Still too near the apathy marking the last six years of her life, Benny remembered it with a clarity she didn’t have when entrenched in it.

He rode out of this life and onto another road that goes on and on and on. He wants to see where it leads, if it’s okay with you.

“I won’t go back there, Henny,” she said aloud. “I swear I won’t. For both our sakes.”

Instead of driving through town and out to Division Street, Benny continued south to the cemetery. Dan had been waiting all day, but Henny had been waiting six years. For this last time, he came first.

Old habits died hard, but they did die. Benny parked on the road just below Henny’s grave rather than beneath the familiar shade tree. She grabbed her trowel, and headed up the hill to that place for her husband’s bones. Tears rolled down her cheeks, but Benny wasn’t sad. Not really. Kneeling on the ground outside of the gravesite flower garden she’d maintained for years, she wiped the tears from her eyes. She dug up his grave garden, flower by flower. She gave the marigolds to Frank and Louise Dillard, gone since 1946 and 1951. The snapdragons went to little Sally Feldman, all alone in her grave since 1973. Pansies and salvia and petunias, Benny spread them around.