“Thought I’d drop by.”
“Angie’s asleep.”
“That’s cool. I just…sitting alone, waiting for this guy to try something, it’s driving me nuts.”
“Come on by, Phil.”
While we slept, the temperature had dropped fifteen degrees and the sky turned to granite. Wind roared down from Canada and poured across the neighborhood, rattled windows and bucked the bodies of cars parked along the avenue.
The hail unleashed itself shortly afterward. When I went into Angie’s bathroom for a shower, it spit against the windows like sand carried by sweeps of water off the ocean. By the time I was drying off, it spewed against windows and walls as if the wind were ejecting nails and lug nuts.
Phil brewed coffee while I changed into fresh clothes in the bedroom, then come back into the kitchen.
“She still asleep?” he said.
I nodded.
“Goes out like Spinks fighting Tyson, don’t she? One minute she’s all bright-eyed energy, the next she’s crashed like she ain’t slept in a month.” He poured some coffee into a mug. “Always been that way, that girl.”
I got myself a Coke, sat at the table. “She’ll be okay, Phil. No one’s going to get to her. Or you either.”
“Mmm.” He brought his coffee to the table. “You sleeping with her yet?”
I leaned back in my chair, cocked my head, and raised an eyebrow at him. “You’re way out of line, Phil.”
He shrugged. “She loves you, Patrick.”
“Not that way. You never understood that.”
He smiled. “I understood a lot, Patrick.” He cupped the mug in both hands. “I know she loved me. I’m not arguing that. But she’s always been half in love with you, too.”
I shook my head. “All those years you beat her, Phil, guess what? She never, not once, fooled around on you.”
“I know that.”
“Really?” I leaned forward a bit, lowered my voice. “Didn’t keep you from calling her a whore on a regular basis. Didn’t stop you from pummeling the shit out of her when you felt in the mood. Did it?”
“Patrick,” he said softly, “I know what I was. What I…am.” He frowned and stared into his coffee cup. “I’m a wife beater. And a drunk. And that’s that. There you go.” He smiled bitterly at the cup. “I beat that woman.” He looked over his shoulder toward her bedroom. “I beat her and I earned her hate, and she’ll never trust me again.
Ever. We’ll never be…friends. Not on any level near what we used to be.”
“Probably not.”
“Yeah. So, however I became what I became, I did become that thing. And I’ve lost her and I deserved to because she’s better off without me in her life in the long run.”
“I don’t think she’s planning to ever boot you out of her life, Phil.”
He gave me that bitter smile. “That’s classic Ange, though. Let’s face it, Patrick. Angie, for all her fuck-you, I-don’t-need-anyone attitude, can’t say good-bye. To anything. That’s her weakness. Why do you think she still lives in her mother’s house? With most of the furniture that was here when she was a kid?”
I looked around, saw her mother’s ancient black pots in the pantry, her doilies on the couch in the den, realized Phil and I were sitting in chairs her parents had purchased from the Marshall Field’s in Uphams Corner that had burned down sometime in the late sixties. Something can sit in front of you your whole life, waiting to be noticed for what it is, and often you’re sitting too close to really see it.
“You got a point,” I admitted.
“Why do you think she never left Dorchester? A girl as smart and beautiful as her, the only time she’s been out of state was on our honeymoon. Why do you think it took her twelve years to leave me? Anyone else would have been gone in six. But Angie can’t walk away. It’s her flaw. Probably has something to do with her sister being the opposite.”
I’m not sure what kind of look I gave him, but he held up a hand in apology.
“Touchy subject,” he said. “I forgot.”
“What’s your point here, Phil?”
He shrugged. “Angie can’t say good-bye, so she’ll work hard to keep me in her life.”
“And?”
“And I won’t let her. I’m an albatross around her neck. Right now, I need us to—I dunno—heal a bit more. Get some closure. So she knows completely that I was the bad guy. It was all, all, all me. Not her.”
“And when that’s done?”
“I’m gone. A guy like me, I can get work anywhere. Rich people are always remodeling their homes. So soon, I’m hitting the road. I think you two deserve your shot.”
“Phil—”
“Please, Pat. Please,” he said. “This is me. We been friends since forever. I know you. And I know Angela. You might have something real nice with Grace now and I think that’s terrific. I do. But know yourself.” He bumped his elbow into mine and looked hard in my eyes. “Okay? For once in your life, buddy, face yourself. You’ve been in love with Angie since kindergarten. And she’s been in love with you.”
“She married you, Phil.” I bumped his elbow back.
“Because she was pissed at you—”
“That’s not the only reason.”
“I know. She loved me, too. For a while, maybe, she even loved me more. I don’t doubt it. But we can love more than one thing simultaneously. We’re human, so we’re messy.”
I smiled, realized it was the first time I’d smiled naturally in Phil’s presence in a decade. “We are that.”
We looked at each other and I could feel the old blood rippling within us—the blood of sacred bonds and shared boyhoods. Neither Phil nor I ever felt accepted in our homes. His father was an alcoholic and an unregenerate womanizer, a guy who slept with every woman in the neighborhood and made sure his wife knew it. By the time Phil was seven or eight, his household was a DMZ of flying plates and accusations. Anytime Carmine and Laura Dimassi were in the same room, it was about as safe as Beirut, and in one of the great perverse misinterpretations of their Catholic faith, they refused to divorce or live apart. They liked the daily skirmishes and nightly makeup sessions of passionate lovemaking that had them thumping against the wall separating their bedroom from their son’s.