David Prete - Say That To My Face

“Oh, no?”

“No.”

“Then tell me the truth, Ray. Tell me the God’s honest truth, even if this thing is nothin’, and it’s probably not—”

“It is nothing.”

“Even so, even if that’s so, there’ll still be somethin’ else, won’t there? Won’t there, Ray? You’ll have to leave the country or go to jail—”

“I won’t.”

“You don’t know that. And what will happen to us? Tell me the truth right now. What will happen to us? Will anyone be able to protect us?”

“Whaddaya want me to say? That I’m sure about how the rest of my life is gonna work out? Nobody can say that. Nobody really knows what’ll happen to them. And forgive me for makin’ this example, but didn’t you think you were gonna be married to that guy forever?”

“Go on.”

“Maybe we don’t know nothin’ for sure about what’s gonna happen to us. All I can tell you is that I know how I feel and I know what I wanna do. Don’t you see what I can give you?”

“Raymond, look at me and tell me that if you made a mistake it wouldn’t come down on all of us. Tell me that right now.”

He took a long time to answer. “I can’t.”

“Then neither can I. I can’t do it.”

There was silence. Then the soles of Ray’s shoes moved against the slate stairs and my mother said, “Raymond, don’t.”

A little more silence.

“I love them so much, Ray. I love them so fucking much I can’t stand it sometimes.”

“I know the feeling.”

Last thing Catherine and I heard before we ran up the stairs was Ray’s car door slam.

THE NEXT DAY,Catherine and I were in our room with our mom, packing up clothes to bring to our father’s for the weekend. I just blurted it out: “Mom, are you and Ray gonna get married?”

Catherine looked at me as if I were going to get in trouble for asking that. Our mother sat on my bed and said, “Me and Ray are not getting married.” We were silent. We knew there was more. “Also, I don’t think Ray is gonna be comin’ over to the house anymore.”

Catherine said, “He’s not?”

“No, he’s not, Catherine.”

Then I asked the question that our mother was dreading. “Why?”

She couldn’t explain it to us. She couldn’t explain to us why Ray wasn’t coming back. She couldn’t explain to us why there had been a divorce. She couldn’t explain what brought people together, then led them apart. In that moment—sitting on a bed in her parents’ converted attic, at twenty-five years old, with her two children—she had no idea why. She grabbed my arm. “Oh, sweetie”—her eyes got still, she seemed to be looking inside herself for more words—“I didn’t want him to.” Then her head dropped and her face distorted into extreme sadness. It happened as fast as you could tilt a hologram and see a different picture. Her head landed in her hands. My sister and I had that stunned silence that kids get when they see their parents fall apart. We might as well have just watched a car crash. We stood there not even blinking, in awe of a crying mother. Then we heard the beep of a horn. She took a deep breath, wiped her nose on her forearm and said, “There’s your father. Don’t keep him waiting.” I climbed up on the bed and gave her a kiss goodbye, then Catherine did the same. Our mother picked up our bag and followed Catherine and me down the stairs. From behind the screen door she watched her children get into her ex-husband’s car and drive away.

THAT NIGHT WEslept at our father’s girlfriend’s house. I asked Catherine where she thought Ray was. She didn’t know. We were trying to figure out a few things: why we had come so close and now had nothing to show for it but two television sets, and what was going to happen now. Sometime during the conversation I started to cry. Catherine tried to get me to think of my Big Wheel, but I just cried harder. Our father heard me and came into the room. He was puzzled and looked at my sister.

“What’s the matter with your brother?”

“He can’t sleep.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

Then he asked me, “Joey, what’s the matter?”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

My sister chimed in, “Tell him to think of his Big Wheel.” She was trying to help him help me. She was smart.

“Your Big Wheel? What about your Big Wheel?”

I didn’t answer.

My sister said, “He likes to think about his Big Wheel. It helps him sleep.”

Realizing Catherine knew more about this than he did, our father said, “You wanna think of your Big Wheel?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, how does your Big Wheel go? What does it sound like?”

I said, “It sounds like … I don’t know.”

My father started to make car sounds. Honking horns and everything. My sister rolled her eyes. She knew this wasn’t going very well.

“Come on, Joey, how does a Big Wheel go? Does it go like this: brrruuummm . Or, vruuummm. Or like, beep-beep .”

I just stared at him. How, as a four-year-old, could I say, It sounds like the merciful palm of the Lord, soothing all my unspeakable childhood angst and misery. Can you make that sound, Dad?

“How does it go, Joey?”

“It just goes.”

I was dismissive enough about it that my father knew he had to change gears.

“Hey,” he said. The timbre in his voice changed. He pushed my sister and me closer together. “You guys know Credence Clearwater Revival?”

“No. What’s that?”

“It’s a rock and roll band and they have a song about Big Wheels.”

He had my interest. I said, “They do?”

“Yeah, they do. I’m not kiddin’ you.”

“How does it go?” I asked.

“Here. It goes like this.”

With his head hovering over mine, he started to sing, a soft ballad rendition of “Proud Mary.” He didn’t quite hit all the notes, but he knew every word. He sang about how I shouldn’t lose sleep worrying about how things might turn out. And about how there was a river somewhere with people who knew how to live. They all rode big wheels. If you went there, it didn’t matter if you were poor or sad or alone because these river people were happy to give. And there was a fiery woman there named Proud Mary. The chorus of the song played like a mantra in my head and faded me out to sleep. Big wheels keep on turnin’ … big wheels keep on turnin’ … big wheels keep on turnin’.

THAT SUNDAY AFTERNOON,Catherine and I came back to Verona Avenue with a firm agenda. “Mom,” Catherine said. “We want to sleep at Aunt Marie and Uncle Ernie’s tonight.”

“Listen, I wanted to talk to you kids about that.”

That sentence was death. There was a certain tone our mother used when she was about to spring bad news on us. As soon as we heard it, we tried to cover our ears with our shoulders.

“Catherine is going to be starting kindergarten in a few weeks …”

And there was the other tone. The everything-is-going-to-be-all-right tone that not even our mother believed. This was bad. “… and that means that she has to be in school in the morning. And Uncle Ernie has to go to work and Aunt Marie can’t drive all the way up from the Bronx and take you to school, sweetie. So you kids can’t sleep over there anymore.”

I said, “Can’t they sleep over here?”

“No, they can’t, Joey.”

This was really friggin’ bad. In three days, we lost a potential stepfather, a swimming pool and four immediate family members. Not to mention two houses—the dream home Raymond was going to give us, and the one Aunt Marie and Uncle Ernie already had given us.

That night, before dinner, I took my Big Wheel out for a ride. I spun out a few times along the side of the house, but that wasn’t helping me out of the state I was in. I rode to the front of the house and sat there on my low-rider plastic tricycle. I stared at the street. My eyes defocused on the asphalt. For a moment, my mind became empty, until a green car came down the hill of Verona Avenue and broke my stillness. I watched it the whole time it idled at the intersection. When the light changed, it took a left on Central Park Avenue and I followed it with my eyes until it was out of my sight. I looked up the hill it had come from, looked back at my grandparents’ house, stood up and carried my Big Wheel four house-lengths up the hill.