Every Single Second (8 page)

(
Maybe this is how Angela felt.
The thought poked the
back of her brain. Weeks later, that thought would make its way to the very front.)

Never in a million years would Nella have guessed Clem worried about losing her.

“Forever,” she said. “That’s how long we’ll be friends.”

Clem grinned. “P2F2!” she cried.

Their newest secret society: Past Present Future Friends.

DAD’S SECRET

then

N
onni’s kitchen clock was the old-fashioned kind that ticked. Nella sat at the table, which was covered with a plastic cloth meant to look like lace. Dad was here to fix Nonni’s leaky faucet, and Nella had offered to keep him company. But that wasn’t the real reason she’d come.

Tick-tock.

Nonni was in the living room, on guard by the window. She was playing a recording of her idol, Mario Lanza, who sang so high your teeth ached.

“Dad?”

He turned around, frowning. Nonni needed a new
faucet, but she was too cheap, so he just kept replacing washers.

Tick-tock.

“Dad?” She felt like she was on the edge of a cliff. “Dad, were you really in jail?”

His head jerked up.

“I heard . . . I heard these rumors,” Nella said.

He looked at her a long moment, then crossed the kitchen and shut the door. He pulled out a chair.

“I was waiting till you were old enough to understand,” he said.

Most of the time, Nonni’s clock ticked so quietly, you didn’t notice. But every once in a while, the ticking ramped up.
Tick tick tick,
so loud you couldn’t ignore it. The clock wanted you to pay attention. These seconds were important.

It did that now.

“I’m old enough,” she said. “I’ve been old enough.”

Dad looked at her for a long moment, then lowered his eyes.

“I’m sorry, Nella,” he said.

Falling. Nella was falling.

Dad kept his eyes on the tablecloth as he talked.

It was May third, he said. A Saturday. That morning, he got the letter saying he’d won a scholarship to the university at the top of the hill. He’d been accepted weeks before
but couldn’t afford to go. He ran straight to Elena’s Beauty Shop, where Nonni and Ernestina were getting their hair done. Nonni burst into happy tears. All the women in the shop hugged and kissed him. Afterward, he stunk of curling lotion.

The day was warm and bright. Word spread fast, and as Dad walked through the neighborhood, everyone shook his hand, clapped him on the back. Bravo! King of the Hill! It was First Communion Day, and the little kids were getting their pictures taken on the church steps. All in white, head to toe. Like a little band of angels, he said.

He kept his eyes on the table.

The clock ticked.

That afternoon, he and his buddies celebrated. They got somebody’s older brother to buy them six-packs and headed into the cemetery, in section 58. Those days, the plots back there were still unoccupied. He’d forgotten to eat lunch, and as he sat in the sunshine, the beer went right to his head. Looking around, he knew he’d be the first man in the family to escape working in a graveyard.

It was the best he’d ever felt in his entire life.

Dad fell asleep on the grass, and when he woke up, his buddies were gone. Had he dreamed the whole thing? He dug in his pocket, and pulled out the letter. Real. It was real.

Something else was in his pocket, too. The keys to
Nonni and PopPop’s enormous Buick LeSabre. Dad had driven Nonni to her doctor’s appointment the day before and still had the spare set of keys.

Nonni.
Dad needed to do something to show how much he loved and appreciated her. He’d get her chocolate. No, flowers. No, he’d drive up the hill to that fancy grocery store and get her persimmons. Nonni loved to tell about the persimmon tree that grew behind their house in Italy. She and her brother, Carlo, would climb up, spoons between their teeth, and gobble the luscious fruit till their bellies burst.

Sitting at the kitchen table now, Nella nodded. She’d heard about that persimmon tree.

Dad had no business driving, after all that beer. But he’d gotten it in his head to buy Nonni persimmons, and from now on, he was going to have whatever he wanted. King of the World.

It wasn’t persimmon season. He went to three or four stores before he gave up and bought artichokes. A whole boxful.

“Nonni hates artichokes,” Nella said. Her great-grandmother refused to even look at the things. “They make her sick.”

“Before,” he said. “Before, she loved them.”

The clock hushed.

Dad didn’t remember driving back from the store. By then, he could hardly keep his eyes open. Maybe he nodded off for a second—he’d never be sure. That enormous tank of a car, hurtling down the hill.

“All I remember is something white.” He jerked his head sideways, like he’d suddenly seen it again. “Pure white, like a snowflake. Like a white pinwheel. It blinded me. For a split second, it was the only thing I could see. And then, gone. It was gone.”

His eyes met Nella’s. Then he quickly looked up at the clock.

“She’d made her First Communion that morning. She and her family were coming out of Mama Gemma’s, where they’d gone to celebrate.”

There was a thin smear of jelly on the fake lace tablecloth. Nella’s head swam. On her own First Communion day, he couldn’t get out of bed. He couldn’t even look at her in her white dress. Her father stared hard at the clock, like he was trying to make the hands go backward.

“They could’ve stayed in the restaurant a little longer. Or left earlier.” He shoved back his chair. “I could’ve put the car keys back, instead of believing I could have whatever I wanted.”

Dad went to the sink and stood there a long moment.

“I did two years,” he said, his back to her. “The judge went
easy on me, since I was an honor student with no record.” He picked up the wrench and put it back down. “Nonni came to see me every single Sunday. She never missed.”

Nella could picture her: straight-backed, grim-faced. A match for the toughest prison guard.

“She never blamed me, not once. She asked me what happened and I told her, and we never talked about it again. Even when PopPop died, six months later. They’ve proven it’s true—people really can die of a broken heart.”

Nella traced the pattern of the plastic lace with one finger, over and over. Where had her own heart gone? She couldn’t feel it inside her anymore.

“You know she never learned to drive. After he died, she had to take three buses to come see me, but she never missed. I watched her grow old right before my eyes, Nella. I felt like I was killing somebody else, only this time in slow motion.”

Dad stared out the window over the sink.

“The first Sunday after I got out, she dragged me to Mass. I wasn’t ready to face people, but she made me. Somebody must’ve said something behind my back. Next thing I knew she clipped the guy in the ear with that black purse. The same one she’s still got.” He shook his head, gave a low chuckle. Another moment passed. “Getting hired is almost impossible with a record. But Nonni
pulled strings and got me the groundskeeper job.”

Nella knew what came next. How one night Dad met Mom at the social club. How she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. How, when he proposed, he never dreamed she’d say yes.

And Nella was born, and all the boys, and here they were, in Nonni’s kitchen. The story made a lopsided circle.

“I kept promising your mother I’d tell you. She said you’d understand. But . . .” He turned around, his face brimming with regret. “I never really knew my father. And PopPop—he was the kindest, most trustworthy man who ever lived. I wish you’d known him, kiddo. That’s the kind of dad I always thought I’d be.”

“That’s the kind of dad I thought you were.”

The anger in Nella’s voice shocked them both. Her father flattened his back against the sink.

“I should’ve told you, Nella. I’m sorry.”

Somebody had stolen her dad and set this other man in his place. The person in front of her was a stranger. A separate, foreign person from the father she’d spent her whole life loving and trusting and believing in more than anyone on earth.

“I’m sorry it happened. Sorry I had to hurt you like this.” He looked away, then back. “I’ll be sorry for the rest of my life.”

He was waiting for her to say something. She saw the pleading in his eyes. The clock hushed, waiting. She could go to him and press her cheek against his chest. She could say she knew it was an accident, he never meant it, he would never hurt anyone, it was all right that he hadn’t told her, she understood. Nothing was changed. She still loved him. With just a few words, she could erase everything.

Tick tick tick.
The clock stuttered forward.

He’d kept it secret from her all these years! How could he do that? She’d thought the two of them didn’t need to talk, that they understood each other without any words. Instead, all this time he’d been deceiving her.

“Is the girl . . . is she buried in your cemetery?”

“Marie. Her name was Marie. Yes, she is.”

Dad waited a moment longer, then slowly turned back to the sink. He worked the wrench in silence. When Nella said she was going home, he only nodded.

Instead of home, Nella went to the cemetery. She looked for a young girl’s grave, marked with the name Marie.

What the Statue of Jeptha A. Stone Would Say if It Could

A
lthough she had her pick of any spot in this vast, lush landscape, the bird has chosen to nest in my lapidarian lap.

To all appearances, she is a foolish fowl.

Hark unto me, the Honorable Jeptha A. Stone!

More often than not, appearances deceive.

Besides. Have you ever tried to argue with a bird?

MARIE

then

A
ll that spring, Nella searched for Marie’s grave.
STONE. BRIDGE. KING. WADE. HUNT.
She tromped past the graves of the rich, powerful people the cemetery was made for. Their names were sharp and quick, like karate chops. The graves of the people who built the cemetery—people like PopPop, with soft, chewy last names—were on the edges, what Dad called less prime real estate.

The cemetery was busy in spring. Nella walked past art school students photographing the monuments with complicated cameras, past straw-hatted garden club women oohing and ahhing over Daffodil Hill, past mothers
pushing strollers and a couple lying on a blanket in the glossy shade of a copper beech. She walked past people with clasped hands and bowed heads, people on their knees praying.

For Nella, the cemetery had always been a peaceful, orderly place, but that spring it was different. She scrutinized the name on each grave. Each was a real, flesh-and-blood person who’d worked and played, laughed and cried, and never wanted to die.

For the first time, she wondered what it was like, really like, to die.

You’d gasp for breath but it wouldn’t be there. Your eyes would be open but you wouldn’t see.

For the first time, she understood why, beautiful as the cemetery was, plenty of people refused to set foot inside.

Last place on earth I’d go!
That was another graveyard joke.

What was it like to kill someone? To watch the life ebb out of them and know it was because of you?

That was as hard to imagine as dying yourself.

One afternoon that spring, Nella sat at the kitchen table watching Mom cut up apples. One second they were whole, and the next they were pieces that could never be put back together.

That spring, the whole world felt like that.

Her father wasn’t who she thought he was. Who he’d made her believe he was. He’d made Mom promise not to tell, and she hadn’t. Mom. Somehow Nella couldn’t be angry at her. All Mom wanted was for them to be happy. She loved them all so much, almost too much.

He’d turned Nella into a liar too. Because she couldn’t tell the brothers. She saw how they ran to him, how they adored him, and the words stuck in her throat.

So many of the old graves were children’s. Babies’. Nella hoped they’d been baptized, so they could go straight to heaven.

Did Marie have brothers and sisters?

She could’ve asked her father where the grave was. Instead, as she searched, she kept an eye out for him. If she heard an ATV or weed whacker, she headed in the opposite direction. After that day in Nonni’s kitchen, neither of them ever mentioned Marie. The more time went by, the more talking about it became impossible.

That spring, Nella and Angela gave up Franny’s doughnuts for Lent, and it was even more terrible than they expected.

That spring, Victoria and Kimmy specialized in behind-the-hand whispering that stopped the moment Nella came near. Victoria had a sleepover that got discussed for days before and after. Victoria braided Kimmy’s hair,
and Kimmy walked around at recess sucking on the tips.

Sister Rosa knew something was wrong. She let Nella and Angela stay in at recess. She gave them homemade brownies, and told the story of how in high school, smack in the middle of a school dance, she realized she wanted to be a nun.

“I was having such a good time. And dancing with a very handsome fellow.” Her face was all dimples, till she shrugged. “All of a sudden, I knew. It was all wrong for me.”

“What was all wrong?”

“All . . . that.” Sister fluttered her hand at the wide world. “I heard a voice calling me, heard it more clearly and irresistibly than the dance music or my handsome beau’s laughter. My heart leaped to answer!” Sister sat back and smiled at them. “When I asked my fellow to take me home, I was as surprised as he was. Now I know. God seeks us out. Even when we try to hide, He still finds us.”

That afternoon, Nella walked all the way to the edge of the cemetery, where the landscape turned wilder. Moss crept over these stones, hard as Dad worked to keep them clean. The trees were thick, the light itself pale green. Rustles, whispers, sighs disturbed the air. People who believed in ghosts did not walk back here.