John Connolly - The Lovers

“So,” she said. “How have you been?”

“I’ve been okay.”

“You still working at the Bear?”

“Yeah. It’s not so bad.”

She did a good imitation of her mother’s pained smile. “I’m glad to hear that.”

There was silence for a time, then, “We need to formalize these visits, that’s all. It’s a long way to come on a whim.”

“I try to come as often as I can, Rach, and I do my best to call. Besides, this isn’t quite a whim.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I know.”

More silence.

“Mom said you had a favor to ask.”

“I want you to keep Walter.”

For the first time she showed some emotion other than frustration and barely restrained anger.

“What? You love that dog.”

“Yes, but I’m not around enough for him, and he loves you and Sam at least as much as he loves me. He’s cooped up in the house when I’m working, and I keep having to ask Bob and Shirley to look after him when I leave town. It’s not fair to him, and I know your mom and dad like dogs.”

Rachel’s parents had kept dogs until very recently, when their two old collies had both died within months of each other. Since then, they’d talked about getting another dog, but they hadn’t quite been able to bring themselves to do it. They were still hurting from the earlier deaths.

Rachel’s face softened. “I’ll have to ask Mom,” she said, “but I think it’ll be fine. Are you sure, though?”

“No,” I said, “but it’s the right thing to do.”

She walked over to me and, after a moment’s hesitation, hugged me.

“Thank you,” she said.

I’d put Walter’s basket and toys in the trunk, and I handed them over to Joan once it was clear that she was content to take him. Her husband, Frank, was away on business, but she knew that he wouldn’t object, especially if it made Sam and Rachel happy. Walter keáappy. Wal seemed to know what was happening. He went where his basket went, and when he saw it being placed in the kitchen he understood that he was staying. He licked my hand as I was leaving, then sat himself down beside Sam in recognition of the fact that his role as her guardian had been restored to him.

Rachel walked me to the car.

“I’m just curious,” she said. “How come you’re away so much if your job is at the Bear?”

“I’m looking into something,” I replied.

“Where?”

“ New York.”

“You’re not supposed to be working. It could prevent you from getting your license back.”

“It’s not business,” I said. “It’s personal.”

“It’s always personal with you.”

“Hardly worth doing if it isn’t.”

“Well, just be careful, that’s all.”

“I will.” I opened the car door. “I have to tell you something. I was in town earlier. I saw you.”

Her face froze.

“Who is he?”

“His name is Martin,” she said after a moment.

“How long have you been seeing him?”

“Not long. A month, maybe.” She paused. “I don’t know how serious it is yet. I was going to tell you. I just hadn’t figured out how.”

I nodded. “I’ll call next time,” I said, then got into the car and drove away.

I learned something that day: there may be worse things than arriving somewhere with your dog and leaving without him, but there aren’t many.

It was a long, quiet ride home.

A false friend is more dangerous than an open enemy. -FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626), “A LETTER OF

ADVICE…TO THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM”

N EARLY A WEEK WENTby before I could make another trip to New York. Not that it mattered so much: the Bear was short-staffed again, and I ended up working extra days to take some of the load, so there was no way that I could have gone down there even if I had wanted to.

I had been trying to contact Jimmy Gallagher for almost a month, leaving messages on the machine at his home, but there had been no reply until that week. I received a letter from him, not a phon

I booked the cheapest flight that I could find, and got into JFK shortly before 9:00 A.M., then took a cab to Bensonhurst. Ever since I was a boy, I had struggled to associate Jimmy Gallagher with Bensonhurst. Of all the places that an Irish cop, and a closeted homosexual to boot, might have called home, Bensonhurst initially seemed about as likely a choice as Salt Lake City, or Kingston, Jamaica. True, there were now Koreans, and Poles, and Arabs, and Russians in the neighborhood, and even African-Americans, but it was the Italians who had always owned Bensonhurst, figuratively if not literally. When Jimmy was growing up, each nationality had its own section, and if you wandered into the wrong one, you were likely to get a beating, but the Italians gave out more beatings than most. Now even their age was passing. Bay Ridge Parkway was still pretty solidly Italian, and there was one mass said each day in Italian at St. Dominic’s at Twentieth Avenue, but the Russians, Chinese, and Arabs were slowly encroaching, taking over the side streets like ants advancing on a millipede. The Jews and the Irish, meanwhile, had been decimated, and the blacks, whose roots in the area dated back to the Underground Railroad, had been reduced to a four-block enclave off Bath Avenue.

I was still two hours early for my meeting with Jimmy. I knew that he went to church every Sunday, but even if he was home he would resent it if I arrived early. That was another thing about Jimmy. He believed in punctuality, and he didn’t care for people who erred on the side of early or late, so while I waited I took a walk along Eighteenth Avenue to get breakfast at Stella’s Diner on Sixty-third, where my father and I had eaten with Jimmy on a couple of occasions because, even though it was nearly twenty blocks from where he lived, Jimmy was close to the owners, and they always made sure that he was taken care of.

While Eighteenth still bore the title of Cristoforo Colombo Boulevard, the Chinese had made their mark, and their restaurants, hair salons, lighting stores, and even aquarium suppliers now stood alongside Italian law firms, Gino’s Focacceria, Queen Ann’s Gourmet Pasta, and the Arcobaleno Italiano music and DVD store, where old men sat on benches with their backs to the avenue, as though signaling their dissatisfaction with the changes that had occurred there. The old Cotillion Terrace was boarded up, twin pink cocktails on either side of the main marquee still bubbling sadly.

When I got to Stella’s, it too was no mo B aoo was nore. The name remained, and I could see some of the stools were still in place in front of the counter, but otherwise the diner had been stripped bare. We had always sat at Stella’s counter when we ate there, Jimmy to the left, my father in the middle, and I at the end. For me, it was as close as I could get to sitting at a bar, and I would watch as the waitresses poured coffee and the plates moved back and forth between the kitchen and the diners, listening to snatches of conversation from all around while my father and Jimmy talked quietly of adult things. I tapped once upon the glass in farewell, then took my New York Times down to the corner of Sixty-fourth and ate a slice at J & V’s pizzeria, which had been in existence for longer than I had. When my watch showed 11:45 A.M., I made my way to Jimmy’s house.

Jimmy lived on Seventy-first, between Sixteenth and Seventeenth, a block that consisted mostly of narrow row houses, in a small, one-family semidetached stucco house with a wrought-iron fence surrounding the garden and a fig tree in the backyard, not far from the area still known as New Utrecht. This had been one of the six original towns of Brooklyn, but then it was annexed to the city in the 1890s and lost its identity. It had been mostly farmland until 1885, when the coming of the Brooklyn, Bath and West End Railroad opened it up to developers, one of whom, James Lynch, built a suburb, Bensonhurst-by-the-Sea, for a thousand families. With the railroad came Jimmy Gallagher’s grandfather, who had been a supervising engineer on the project, and his family. Eventually, after some shuffling around, the Gallaghers returned to Bensonhurst and settled in the house that Jimmy still occupied, not too far from the landmark New Utrecht Reformed Church at Eighteenth and Eighty-third.