Author:

By Bud Smith

Last night I broke a rib kicking a balloon. I went flying like Home Alone, Marv and Harry, landed on my side and damn it hurt.

Sometime around sunset the following day I was at Miriam’s 80th birthday party, sat mostly alone at an oblong table, lacking the power to laugh. 

The backroom of the restaurant overlooked the turnpike. Half her family stared out an endless window at an endless peel of traffic. The other half took turns briefly holding whoever’s baby.

The sprite-like server asked if I was all right.  

In my own way I signaled, Not at all. 

He brought more table wine. 

I sipped non-dominant, explaining how I’d been wounded in battle the previous midnight, but neglecting to mention my opponent: a rubber bladder full of breath, color of bubble-gum, hovering low along the hardwood floor of the upstairs guest room. 

How the house had shook and woken two sisters, two nieces, all the tetra, even the cherry barb. 

The server left. The baby echoed all around.

Unable to dance or mingle, I watched Giada loom over an elderly man at table five. I saw how she was disguising her hatred, making what appeared to be pleasant small talk, though he was a known-enemy, a pink-faced gentleman-fuck in a baby blue suit and teal tie. She was nodding. Was smiling cool even. 

We’d been married eleven-and-a-quarter years. I’d studied and was fluent in her many gifts. 

I, in fact, was one of her gifts. 

Another of her gifts was ‘forever-patience.’ 

Another was ‘resting angel face.’ 

Then there was her ability to conceal absolute repulsion. 

Who could ever guess, during the car ride over, Giada had instructed me to slowly choke the life from this bloviating man.

His exact relation was unclear. 

Her father’s first cousin? Second cousin? Third cousin? Forth cousin? No cousin at all? Luca. Former dean of colleges, retired fifteen years but the way he bragged about campus, you’d never know.

Maybe she would snap, fetch up the potted tiger lily centerpiece, and brain him. 

A silver mylar balloon struck the ceiling fan but my table mate bopped it away with an unconcerned backhand. 

Gold foil on the balloon read “80?!” 

And Miriam? Perhaps Miriam was a great aunt? 

I had no clue, except I loved Miriam, wanted her cloned two thousand times. A moment before I had seen the bartender letting the baby pull ice cubes from the bucket. But Miriam had objected. Now Miriam was rocking the mystery baby. Giada’s family had conquered this backroom with toasts, and gossip, and four courses of food already. Espresso was brewing. I limped to the remainder cocktail shrimp. 

Not two minutes later, someone tapped my shoulder. I turned, expecting to be offered a pig in a blanket—not so—another server bestowed upon me the baby. 

“I’m hurt,” I said, indicating my side. 

Big Nico saved me, took the young one and spoke in his low baritone, “Who’s your daddy? Who’s your daddy?” Our world was built of questions, posed to those who lacked the ability to speak. “No, really. Who’s your daddy?” He gently shook this baby over his head. “Is there a daddy in the house?” Big Nico asked like someone might say, ‘Is there a doctor in the house,’ just a moment before an emergency tracheotomy.

I studied a poster board full of photos of Miriam as a child in Passaic and Miriam as a teenager in Passaic and then Miriam as an adult after she’d gotten herself waylaid in Salt Lake City.

The photos on the poster board I liked best, twenty or so, captured a gnawed-away time when she was young, in New Jersey, just after WWII, when everything was sepia dew and sepia roses.

One of those sepia photos on that pasteboard was of this building I stood in now, which Giada’s family used to own. For six years they’d owned it, I think. 

First the building contained a hat store that also sold shoes. Then it was a shoe store that had some hats. Then they sold no hats. Briefly after the family lost the building, imitation diamonds were sold here. After that, it became a pawn shop. Then there was white flight and nearly it was demolished. Yet here we all were, knee-deep in bruschetta, faux bouquets, and Dean Martin—the place now called Friar Anthony’s.

Two of the other twenty photos were especially striking, bloomed with life, belonged on a gallery wall.

One of these special photos was labeled “1964 M” She was twenty-four and wearing a white dress, stood in front of a plaster wall painted evergreen. She was wearing a halo. Either it was Halloween or Noel. 

In the other photo, everything had an orange tint and she was getting a haircut from a much older man with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. The collar on his flannel shirt popped. She had on a tight sweater, navy blue, with gold zigzags.

“That’s me,” Miriam said over my shoulder. I turned and introduced myself. Said ‘Happy Birthday’ again. She reached for my hand. I gave her a shake against my better judgement and nearly cried. She’d come all the way from the other side of America—Utah—to be exact, as if on a farewell tour. 

“These two photos are really good.”  

She didn’t get me. “A swell camera.”

“Who is the man?”

“My father, Little Nico. He used to hide money all over the house. When he died, my brother Nico—Big Nico—got the house. When he finally sold, well you know, they tore down that house.” 

“No I didn’t know.” I was upset to hear this but not surprised. I’d loved that house.

“They tear down everything. They’ve got to keep the bulldozers busy. But with all that junk Nico had put in there, I can understand. We had to clean it out in a hurry just so they could level it.”

“That was some good junk though.” 

“Sure it was. We’d be giving away an old dresser and hoping it didn’t have money hidden in it.”

“I lived in that house for a month.” 

“When was this?”

“Ten years ago.”

“I loved that house. You lived there? I’d say a hundred people lived there. Open door policy. At one point the mailman lived there.” 

“I’m Giada’s husband,” I said. I pointed to one of the photos of the house, trashed to the max. “Is that 2012?” 

“Maybe I met you. You were thinner?”

“For sure.” 

“What a lightning rod for garbage. And we’d have to worry there is money hidden in everything. That’s how our dad was. There were all these pill bottles. The other day I opened a bottle of nickels.” 

“When did he die?”

“1992. No. 1993.”

I glanced down at Miriam’s feet. She had on neon running shoes under, maybe, her fanciest dress.

“1994. June the ninth. Dad played the lottery every day. When he died we filled up the coffin with empty cigarette packs and losing lottery tickets. Everyone saw that and smiled. Buried him with two Marlboros, a red, and a lite, one in each corner of his mouth.” 

I gave Giada a wave she didn’t see. 

The servers in their purple vests and purple shoes, handsome parts in slicked hair, wheeled out dessert. The sun was at the perfect angle to blind us all.

Some hero shut the curtain. The room dimmed into comfortable shadow. There wasn’t a single light on. I leaned in closer to the poster board, looking again at those two, specifically striking photos. I realized all my pain had gone poof.

I pointed to the angel and the haircut. 

“Who snapped these?”

“Oh, that would have had to be our older brother. Luca.” She pointed out the man my wife wanted me to strangle. The man Giada was still talking to, still being civil to.  

“He carried that Nikon everywhere.” 

“I really love those two photos of you,” I said. 

Miriam hugged me and gave my neck a little peck.

I went back to my table and sat down with espresso and tiramisu. Giada had floated over to her mother and father and now, to the baby’s delight, her father sang a novelty folk song urging Christopher Columbus to turn the boat around.

The Marine across from me consumed candy crush. His red-headed daughter poked him in the gut, spoke more about a carnival soon happening on the cliffs. The seat where the mother had been was vacant.

I looked back at Luca sat all alone. I thought again about his photos. He looked so lonely. Where was his camera now? I didn’t want to kill him anymore.  

If his sister was 80 and he was the older brother, that would have made him at least 82. I’d met him fifteen years earlier. At a  different reunion barbecue. 

He was always saying evil things at barbecues. At one legendary bicentennial barbecue, he may have told Giada’s mother she needed plastic surgery.

The barbecue I’d been to, he said something nasty to Giada even, but what?

Oh I couldn’t recall even that. 

Can you be irrationally mad at something not worth remembering? Let’s see. I picked up my plate and cup and sat down at the table across from Luca. 

“Hello,” he said. 

“Luca, you don’t know me.” 

He was barely looking. “I know all about you.”

“I just wanted to tell you—”

“Save your breath. I used to believe in radical honesty at your age. It’s a waste.” 

He ate some of his cake. I ate some of mine.

“What should I apologize for?” he asked.  

I looked across the restaurant, Giada was talking to a woman in a skyblue gown. The missing mother? 

“You’re right, forget it. I heard you took those two photos that I like over there. So I forgive you, as an artist.” 

He smiled. “Good. You’ve seen the light. And so have I. Isn’t that photo of Miriam and my father so funny? Who ever saw a father cut his daughter’s hair? But that’s the kind of man he was. He would take apart the TV set just to see how it worked and he would put it back together. No formal training. No education. But he’d wear a tie, hovering over the open hood of a car, changing spark plugs, pulling on wires. He’d guess and he’d be right. Me, and you, we’d be hopeless.” 

“Your father had innate talent.” 

“When the priest would drop by he would be lying on the couch reading the paper and Miriam would let him in the house but Dad wouldn’t even get up. He didn’t make a big deal of ceremony and he thought a lot of people were terrible kissasses. Anyway, I was a nerd. I had a camera. That priest gave it to me. I took lots of photos.” 

The restaurant was louder now. The drunks had had their rocket fuel. Voices swelled. Faces grew younger. And there was Miriam sat under her throne of balloons, shoulder-to-shoulder with Nico. He was red-faced and blockheaded, and whispering something that doubled Miriam over in laughter. I guessed, at this pace, she’d live another eighty years. 

One thing I remembered about Nico was that he put newspaper down and let his three-year-old-totally-healthy dog, shit in his house. Never once did I see or hear him yell at that dog. Though there was a doggie door, the dog preferred to shit in the house. And in the mornings before work, I’d step out of that dog-shit-reeking house, to my car and see Nico had hundreds of pounds of bulk garbage tied with twine to the roof of his Ford Taurus, which he’d gathered in the dark. So I’d untie it all and put it there amongst all his other nightly winnings. Every year he used to have a yard sale in the summer and sell the town back its trash. 

But as you already know, the house is gone, and so is the dog, not to mention, nearly everything else. 

I heard a balloon pop under the table. 

I bent down in terrible agony.

The baby was crying but nobody else noticed. He’d curled up in a little ball, his mouth full of silver mylar. 

I reached out my good arm but the baby scurried away. Now was sucking his thumb amid all this clatter and chatter. He pulled his thumb out and the string of the popped balloon was wrapped around his thumb. 

The baby drooled loose the rest of the choking hazard and smiled.

“Whose kid is this under the table?”

Up above, Luca was summarizing an important commencement speech he’d heard given every Spring for the entirety of his adult life. 

I called for help again. 

Nobody seemed to hear. 

I held out my plate. The baby crawled over and began to scoop handfuls of cake into his brand new mouth. 

Bud Smith is the author of the novel, Teenager, among others. He lives in Jersey City.