Lisa Miscione - Twice

A lifetime ago, his children, Katie and Jim-or James, as he liked to be called now-and their golden retriever, Max, would have raced each other to the door in a messy, happy tumble to greet him. He could hear the echo of Max’s deep barking, the kids’ yelling. His wife would be standing in the archway between the living room and the dining room, the look on her face telling him if he was in trouble or not for however he’d fucked up that day. The smell of whatever she was cooking reaching him as he embraced her. But tonight the house was quiet. Max was long gone, put down nearly five years ago now. Katie, a kindergarten teacher, lived with her husband and two kids in Houston. Jimmy was a Wall Street broker living in Battery Park City “working like a slave and partying like it’s 1999,” as he liked to say; Ford saw even less of him than he did Katie, though he was only a few subway stops away.

His wife, Rose, hard to believe she was gone more than a year now. All the difficult times they’d faced together, all the hell he’d put her through, all the fights and late nights she spent worrying about him, all the canceled dates and missed anniversaries because he’d “made a big collar.” After thirty years together, she’d finally had enough.

“I have good years left, Ford,” she told him one night, when he’d come home to find her sitting at the kitchen table, her coat on and an overnight bag by her feet. “I don’t want to live them like this. Our children are grown and happy. I did my job, taking care of my family.”

She’d put some money away, wanted to travel.

Turns out no one ever told him that all the things that make you a great cop make you a shitty father and husband. He missed her every night when he came home to the quiet, cold Brooklyn house where he’d lived for twenty-five years, twenty-four of them with her. But when he thought of her, he realized he didn’t know certain things about her that a man should know about his wife, like her favorite color, the perfume she wore, what made her laugh. He’d paid attention to every detail of every case he’d ever investigated, had a catalog of professional memories, remembered things about cases twenty years ago like it was yesterday. But when it came to Rose, he was ashamed to admit, he didn’t even know her dress size.

Ford flipped on the light in the hallway and hung his coat in the closet. He looked at himself in the mirror that hung behind the door, the mirror where Rose had always combed her curly black hair and applied lipstick to her full, soft mouth before leaving the house. He looked old, with blue smudges of fatigue under his eyes, a five o’clock shadow on his jaw. His salt-and-pepper hair was in serious need of a trim. He was fat and pale. Shit, he didn’t even get on the scale anymore. He didn’t want to know.

He turned out the light and walked over the red shag carpet of the living room and onto the speckled Formica of the dining room and into the kitchen.

When Rose left, he realized he didn’t know how to run the dishwasher. That he couldn’t remember the last time he’d washed a stitch of clothing or been inside a grocery store. He was virtually helpless. Thank god for Chinese takeout and Laundromats. If it weren’t for the Asians, he’d be dirty and hungry all the time.

The aroma of sesame chicken wafted from the bag as he dropped it on the counter by the sink. He washed his hands and pulled a plate from the cupboard. It was funny, not in a ha-ha way but in a pathetic and miserable way, that he’d spent his whole life trying to be different from his father and his life was turning out just exactly the same way-alone, a heart attack looming in the not-too-distant future. He turned on the television that sat on the stand by the table to the eleven o’clock news, brought the bag and the plate over to the table, and sat down.

Ford’s father, a first-generation Irish American, had been a mean bastard of a drunk who’d never held down a job for more than a month. Living off welfare and the meager salary Ford’s mother earned as a clerk at Macy’s, his father had systematically terrorized and tried to ruin the lives of his wife and each of his children. He’d beaten Ford and his older brother Tommy, nearly killed his mother before she got the strength to leave him and move them all away. His father died alone in a room at the YMCA, a heart attack at the age of fifty-six, with no one to mourn him.

In his life, Ford had worked to be exactly the opposite of the man his father was. He’d learned the value of discipline and hard work from his mother and promised himself that no children of his would want for things the way he and his brother had. He’d worked long hours of overtime to make sure his family had everything they needed and more. He’d never had more than a beer or two in a sitting. Even with all of that effort, always sure he was doing the right thing just because it was the opposite of the way his father had done it, now he was alone.

Ford had never touched his children in anger; in that way at least he had not lived his father’s legacy. Nonetheless, Katie and James were distant, polite strangers who made the obligatory calls on Sunday night and visited every few months. He couldn’t blame them… he hadn’t been the best father. He hadn’t really been a father at all. But they were good kids because of Rose.

He reached over to turn up the volume on the set when he saw himself on the screen. He looked even worse than he thought. He stood beneath the maroon awning of the Park Avenue building where Richard Stratton had been killed, with the reporter he’d agreed to answer some questions for when he’d been ready to make his statement to the press.

“At this time,” he was saying to the pretty blond reporter, “no charges have been brought against Julian Ross.”

He cringed to hear himself talk. Just a month ago, his partner Frank Benvenuto would have talked to the press. A good-looking guy, charismatic, funny, Frank had always handled the press with ease, knew how to use his relationships with reporters to the department’s advantage. But Ford had no such expertise. Now, with Frank retired and no new partner assigned to him, Ford had to deal with the vultures himself. He tried not to think about the fact that his chief had hinted at a reluctance to assign Ford a new partner, the assumption being that Ford, too, must be considering retirement.

“Does this murder make you doubt the jury’s decision to acquit Julian Ross ten years ago?” the television reporter asked, her smile and perky voice seeming inappropriate to him.

“There’s nothing at this time to connect the two events,” he said, curt and non-committal. Why did I keep running my fingers through my hair like that , Ford thought, hating the way his voice sounded.

But Ford wasn’t thinking about retirement. He had no idea what he would even do with himself. It was fine for Frankie, now sailing around the Caribbean in a fifty-foot sloop with his wife, Helen… his dream for as long as Ford had known him. Ford kept getting postcards from exotic locales: “The emerald water is calling you, my friend! Come meet us in St. Bart!” Yeah, right. And do what? Sit on my ass and sip cocktails?

“Where is Julian Ross now?” asked the reporter.

“She’s under psychiatric care at an undisclosed location,” he answered.

“Are there any other suspects?” the reporter pressed.

“There are no suspects at this time,” he said, moving away from the reporter and toward the unmarked Caprice that he drove while he was on duty. “That’s it. I have no further comments right now.”

As he watched himself get into his car, the camera still following him, Ford noticed that he had a huge bald spot on the back of his head. He sighed and served himself some of the sesame chicken, started eating with a plastic fork. The fact of it was that, without a partner, he’d been lucky to catch this case at all. If he hadn’t worked the first Julian Ross case, he’d be doing peripheral work for people like Piselli and Malone, a couple of junior guys assigned to work the case with him.