The High Season(55)
Fine.
Because saying This has saved him would not go over well. Even at ten and twelve and fifteen she had known this, that her father was one of the charmed people in the world whom love had transformed. Angela was wrecked by love. Maybe she’d gotten over Lou, but she never got over being left.
Angela sold the fish store and got cheated in a collusion between lawyer and buyer so devious it still had the power to visit Ruthie at 3 A.M. and send her blood pumping in anguish for her mother, so lost and alone she put her trust in two men who saw a way to make an easy buck. Angela took the money and they moved to a smaller apartment in another neighborhood. She took a bookkeeping course (she never got cheated again) and got a job for a furrier in Astoria. They moved again. Then again, to someplace smaller. It was a time of rent hikes, and they moved every year for much of Ruthie’s childhood. She went to three different high schools.
Angela developed fears. She couldn’t make a left turn in the car, she had to make a series of rights before getting to the destination. She couldn’t go to movies because they were too loud. She couldn’t buy fish, she couldn’t travel, she couldn’t attend Ruthie’s school events because people expected to talk to you.
Then she began to go to church again. This is what Catholics did with heartbreak, threw themselves into rosaries and jealously guarded their special friendship with Father Peter or Father Anthony.
Ruthie drew. Ruthie did the grocery shopping. Ruthie painted. Ruthie got an after-school job. Ruthie made collages of fish out of parchment paper. Ruthie hung with the art kids and got into Cooper Union, a day she still remembered as one in which elation finally filled up every empty space. Tuition was free and she was about to take the E train to a new life. On high school graduation Angela gave her a check for ten thousand dollars. The amount of sacrifice it must have taken for her mother to save that much almost broke Ruthie enough to decide to give up her future and stay home (for that minute, anyway), but all they did was hug. “Don’t embarrass me,” Angela whispered in her ear.
In the middle of college her mother got sick. Angela’s friends from church rose to help, bringing meals, rides to chemo and doctor visits. Lou called but did not come. Angela’s sister, Nancy, arrived from California and slept on the couch for a week. Ruthie dropped out for a semester. Her mother bore it all with no complaints except for the food. A constant stream of casseroles showed up at their door. Ruthie, after all these years, still couldn’t look at baked ziti without pain.
They didn’t say much, in those last months. There were appointments and hospital stays and sudden fevers, but there were quiet days of sitting, Ruthie reading aloud or both of them staring at the TV. Everything was painful for her mother to watch except black-and-white movies and baseball. It was a good season for the Yankees. On one of those unbearably long afternoons they had been watching the ball fly across the green field and Ruthie had said, “I’ll get us some lunch,” and her mother had said, “Not yet,” and taken her hand. They had watched an inning holding hands, Angela’s dry and all bone. To be in the middle of that much terror and find that much love was a surprise that could shatter a heart.
“So what is it, kiddo? Berte just honked. Maybe we can talk tomorrow? Hang on, no, Vanessa is showing up with the grandkids at eight A.M. sharp. We’re all heading to Disney World.”
Ruthie swallowed. “Let’s just talk next month,” she said. “It’s fine.”
* * *
—
ACROSS THE BAY were dinner parties under shady trees, where the food was never fried and the wines were exquisite, where the women were slender and fresh as stalks of green grass and the men, bare feet in thousand-dollar driving shoes, wore watches worth as much as a house.
She’d always been a scrupulous rule follower of a person. She had always told the waiter if he left something off the bill. She had never cut in a line or gone through a red light, even at one in the morning. Have a headache? Ruthie has aspirin in her purse. A sweating glass? Ruthie will run for the coaster. Heartbreak? Ruthie will bring the wine and the tissues.
Now she was a door off its hinges, and she was ready for the gust of wind that would blow her free. She wanted the bang. The crash. Then a whole lot of open air rushing in.
Would it be a crime, exactly, to take a watch thrown away into a junk pile?
She could walk in the door of her own house and write a check to Mike and the house would be hers. With no rent, only taxes and upkeep, maybe she could cobble together a freelance life, make it through the years before Jem left for college.
Didn’t she need it? Didn’t she deserve it? Didn’t Jem?
A sudden, lucid thought: She was thinking like a criminal. Because wasn’t justification the second step, after desire?
31
LOGISTICS.
How does one broker an expensive watch? The best option would be privately, through some sort of watch dealer to the extravagantly rich. She would need an introduction. When she ran through a list of all the wealthiest people she knew, they were hardly the people she could ask—Mindy, Helen, Carole.
She was still mulling the question when she drove to the farm stand the next day to pick up Jem. Joe Bloom cruised the aisles.
She could ask Joe. Discreetly. If he didn’t run at the sight of her. She collided with the fact that living in a small town had enormous disadvantages if you turned into the kind of person who humiliated herself at parties.