Matthew Thomas - We Are Not Ourselves

“Here’s to the end of the year,” Ed said, raising his glass and taking the little bit of wine left in it down in a gulp.

“Here’s to finding a house,” she said. Ed held out his empty glass. Connell raised his water and the three of them clinked.

“Here’s to high school,” Connell said. They clinked again.

Ed looked at her. “Good luck,” he said.

“With what?”

“Finding the right house.”

“I told you I found the right one.”

He turned to Connell. “Good luck in high school.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“Good luck to all of us.”

His mother yelled for him to come outside. When he did, he saw her leaning on a shovel in the garden box, where she’d spent a lot of time lately. Anytime he left for a game on the weekend, she was hunched over a plant, flashing a spade in her gloved hand, or spreading enriched soil from a bottomless bag.

“I want you to bury this for me.” She handed him a statue that looked like the ones on the breakfront in Lena’s apartment. It depicted a man in a red gown holding a baby, probably Jesus, dressed in pink. She pointed to a space between rose bushes. “Put the hole here,” she said.

“How far down?”

“Start digging. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

“Why are you burying this?”

“St. Joseph is supposed to help people sell houses,” she said. “You have to bury him upside down, facing the street.”

“Do you believe that?”

“It can’t hurt,” she said.

He felt the shovel strike something hard. He cleared some dirt away and saw a large rock. He trenched around it and pulled at it. It came up slowly, like a recalcitrant root. He took off his shirt, hung it on the railing, and kept digging. He was enjoying his new physique. He had grown about four or five inches that year. He watched his muscles tighten and release as he worked.

“This is the second one I got,” his mother said as he dug. “The first one cost four dollars. It didn’t feel right. It was white plastic. Just Joseph; no Jesus. I brought it in to the girl at the religious store. I told her, ‘I need a good one, not this chintzy one.’ She showed me this. She said it wasn’t intended for burial.”

“How much was it?”

“Forty bucks.”

It seemed like a lot of money to bury in the ground. When he had cleared the space of backsliding dirt, he dropped the statue in headfirst, covered it up, and stomped the mound to make it flat again.

“What if it doesn’t work?” he asked.

“It’ll work,” his mother said.

She gave the listing to Cindy Coakley’s sister Jen, who was with Century 21 in East Meadow. It might have been easier to go with someone local, but she wasn’t about to leave any money in the neighborhood that she didn’t have to.

The next thing she had to do was tell the Orlandos. She went up the back staircase to the second-floor landing and listened without knocking. She could hear them all in there — Gary and Lena too, from the third floor — watching Wheel of Fortune and laughing. Donny was good-naturedly yelling at the set, calling out answers and cursing the contestant.

Selling meant throwing them out on the street, or at least putting more burden on Donny, who wrote the checks for both apartments. Brenda didn’t make much money at Pathmark; Gary’s odd jobs never lasted; and Lena was past the point of being able to work.

She went back downstairs. The next day, after steeling herself, she headed up again. She heard some murmurs of conversation and knocked. Brenda opened the door onto the dining room, where Donny and Sharon were sitting at the table.

“This looks like a bad time.”

“Not at all!” Donny gestured to an empty seat. “You want to join us? We have plenty.”

She felt herself drift into the apartment. Brenda disappeared into the kitchen.

“Did you eat?” Donny asked.

“I don’t want to trouble you.”

“Sit down,” Donny said. “I’ll get you a plate.”

The truth was, she was hungry. Ed and Connell were going to stop at a diner on the way home from Connell’s game; she’d been planning to heat up leftovers. A big pasta bowl sat in the middle of the table with huge, gorgeous meatballs under a blanket of deep-red tomato sauce.

Sharon regarded Eileen with elfin eyes over a glass of soda. Brenda came in with steaming garlic bread wrapped in tin foil.

“Are you joining us?” Brenda asked.

Donny grabbed a big forkful of spaghetti and ladled out a few meatballs and poured a little lake of sauce around them. Before Eileen could answer, he handed her the plate.

“I guess I am,” she said.

Sharon’s plate was taken and the girl smiled silently across the table at Eileen. She had beautiful straight hair and striking features. She was nine years old, shy and gentle, the compensation for all the dead ends and suffering in the family, and remarkably unspoiled, though they all doted on her. Her radiance was like a recessive gene come to life after generations of hibernation in the bloodline.

Brenda said grace, a habit Eileen had abandoned at her own table after trying it out for a while after Connell was born. Her conscience rumbled as Brenda spoke the familiar words and added a makeshift prayer.

“This looks amazing,” Eileen said nervously after everyone had crossed themselves.

“Thank you very much,” Donny said, winking at her broadly. “I try.”

“That’s rich,” Brenda said. “You can’t even boil an egg.”

Donny caught Eileen’s gaze and gestured theatrically with his eyebrows as he spoke to his sister. “What do I need to boil an egg for,” he said, “when I have you to do it?”

“Keep it up,” Brenda said. “You’ll find poison in your coffee one morning.”

Donny smilingly bit his outstretched tongue and shivered in triumph at having provoked her. Sharon giggled through the whole exchange.

“Did you want to talk about something, Eileen?” Brenda asked. “I was trying to get everything on the table; I forgot why you came.”

“Would you let the poor woman eat? Look, she has a mouthful of food, and you’re asking her questions.”

Eileen held a finger up while she chewed. Donny looked at her with placid interest. He had a kind, broad face with exaggeratedly fleshy features, like those of a prizefighter. He had a boxer’s broad back and meaty hands. He could have become a depressive like his brother or a gambler like his father but he had sought to make a life for himself instead. He used to run with a tough crowd, the kind that in retrospect was almost wholesome in comparison to the drug gangs that roved the neighborhood now. She stopped seeing them around the house after Donny’s best friend Greg from up the block wrapped his motorcycle around a streetlamp. Donny got a job as a sanitation worker through his father. He still worked on cars, but now only on his days off and more as a hobby than as a source of income. The Palumbos let him park whatever he was working on in the back of their driveway.

“What I really want to know,” Eileen said, “is how you make this sauce. Mine never tastes this good.”

“The key is to use fresh sausage. Spicy or sweet, whatever you like. Good stuff, nothing cheap. You have to burn it in the saucepan.”

“On purpose?”

“When you have a nice charred coat, you put the tomatoes in. The acid eats the burnt part off the pan. It gets in the gravy. I’ll show you sometime.”

“Don’t listen to her,” Donny said. “Our mother’s is better.”

“For once this idiot is right,” she said. “No one’s is better than my mother’s. I’m okay with that. I have time to perfect it.”

“She’s gotta perfect it,” Donny said. “She needs something to bait the hook.”