SERIES: Vignettes
SEQUEL TO: Cheshyre's Couplets
AUTHOR: Missy
EMAIL: lasfic@yahoo.com
PART: 1 of 1
RATING: NC-17 (Adult thematic material, M/F sex, language,
mild drug content)
PAIRING(s): L/L; S/C; SQ/OC; HK/OC
DISTRIBUTION: To LW, Myself so far; any other archives are welcome
to ask, but disclaimers must be included, my email left intact. send a URL, and provide full disclaimers as well as credit
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CATEGORY: Romance, Drama
FEEDBACK: PLEASE?!
SETTING IN TIMELINE:
Spoilers For: Cheshyre's
"Couplets"
SPOILLER/SUMMARY: After every earthquake, there is an
aftershock.
NOTES: Please read Cheshyre's Couplets
first, or this won't make sense.
***
"Len?"
He winces when she touches his goosebump-covered
right arm. The eyes stay closed, and
every muscle in his body seems to strain up for the whip crack of the rejection
he knows will come.
Her heart beats frantically against her ribcage, loss
nibbling at her heels.
"Lenny," she whispers, as if saying his name for the very
first time. "I love you," she
confesses, before pressing her mouth against his.
When she breaks their second kiss - their second real kiss,
she thinks - his eyes are open and hazed with confusion.
***
"Summer wedding?"
She clings to her boyfriend of two years, to his strong neck
as he swings her up against his body.
It's mid-May, the Fifth Annual Shotz Picnic, and she can feel every inch
of his form sweating against her own as they canoodle under the near-privacy of
a tree in Pfister Park. "Len," she giggles - he has a way
of making her giggle - "it's summer now!
We got to go through pre-cana and look for
dresses, and..."
"I don't need none of that,
Laverne," he says. Looking into her eyes as he puts her feet on the ground, his hands
holding her tightly to his front.
"I'll marry you anywhere, any way you want to. I just need you."
His words make her melt as the real world begins to
intrude. She sees from the corner of her
eyes Shirley and Squiggy and Carmine, sitting on a blanket further up the
field, excitedly interpreting Lenny's jumping and yelling and their twirling
and giggling between the three of them.
She looks up into Lenny's eyes and he gives her a pleading grimace. She smiles and nods.
"Hey Squig!" he
bellows. "She said yes!"
***
She watches in stupefied amazement from the top of the
counter as Eleanor Steffeneck and Shirley wrestle on
the floor of the Pizza Bowl for her bouquet of tea roses. They're tearing it into shreds, and she
doesn't know if she should interfere or watch the action when Shirley's arm
comes up from the fray, holding the majority of the tattered roses in her right
fist. The left holds a handful of
Eloise's red hair. Carmine comes between
the women and cheerfully, brashly, instructs everyone to say goodbye to the new
Mister and Missus Leonard Kosnowski.
Goosebumps crawl down the back of her neck as she hears her
married name for the millionth time in one day - she doesn't think she'll ever
get used to the way it sounds. She
refrains from further bruising her inner thigh.
This is real, she reminds
herself. Possessively comes the thought, He's all mine.
Her father parts the crowd, handsome in his outmoded
suit. His walrus mustache tickles her
cheek and she can feel the wet of rubbed away tears. "Be happy, Muffin," he instructs
her. "Take care of each other - but
don't let him hurt you. If he hurts you,
I break his neck. Got it?"
Laverne smiles at Frank's gruffness. "Uh-huh, Pop."
He holds her hands in both of his. "Here he comes," Frank mutters,
still not quite ready to cede her to another man.
She smiles automatically at the sight of Lenny - handsome in
the plaid tuxedo he'd picked out for the occasion, which Shirley had tried to
talk him out of wearing but he had insisted was perfect for the mid-autumn
day. Over his shoulder, Squiggy watches
with a grave expression on his dark face - he still isn't quite over
"losing" Lenny to Laverne.
They've tried over and over to explain it is no loss - they'd only be
upstairs, in a slightly bigger unit at the very top floor of the
The world seems to fall away when he pries her hand from her
father's grip. She melts into the arms
reaching up for her and says,
"Ready to come home, Laverne
Kosnowski?"
***
He's still inside of her.
Laverne marvels at this for a moment as she tries to catch
her breath. He mind, perfectly blank
less than a second before, is filled with a million questions at once. Is it always like that? Did she yell too loudly in his ear when
she...?
She opens her eyes to see nothing but a pale chest covered
with invisible blond hair, his raspberry-jam colored nipples too far for her
mouth to reach. If she has questions,
Lenny seems to have none. He breathes
harshly against the top of her head, panting her name softly there - in this
position, she can hear his heartbeat slowing back to its normal rhythm and
feels momentarily lulled. She cuddles
him in gratitude, and he cradles her against his body with both arms as an
answer. She can't resist kissing his
chest, lapping away the sweat collected at the hollow of his breastbone. He moans ardently and tries to roll off, but
her thighs - unsteady they may be - hold him fast to her.
"Uh - uh," she whispers.
He shifts against her slightly - lining up their faces. His soft mouth brushes hers before he manages
to ask her, "did I hurt you a lot?"
He knows he hurt her, then - she recalls some small bit of
pain at his entrance, how, she isn't certain, because he had treated her with
such loving gentleness, gentleness that was characteristic and yet
uncharacteristic of him.. She analyzes
the sensations emanating from between her legs - there is a very slight
rawness, but not enough to make her want him out. "Not at the end," she giggles,
squeezing him with her arms, legs and inner muscles. His blue eyes flare before he closes
them.
"You're gonna kill me before the night's up," he
groans. "I'm gonna die in the
saddle at twenty-seven!"
"It's not a bad way to go," she says reasonably,
stroking his back
He grins down at her, eyes watching every move with
intensity. "Yeah, but you don't
wanna be the Widow Kosnowski at twenty-eight."
She feels blood drain from her face at the very idea - she
knows how easy it is to lose - and suddenly his eyes turn serious. "Hey," he whispers, "I ain't
going anywhere."
"Good," she sighs, feeling his lips kiss her nose,
eyelids, cheeks, and chin. His head
comes to rest against her shoulder, and they lie in the silence of their
wedding bed.
Laverne takes a good look around herself - at the bedroom of
their apartment. She and Lenny had
insisted that they didn't need a honeymoon that it would be a waste of money -
even a room at the Hotel Pfister seemed like an
extravagance that they nor his or her father or their friends could
afford. When she and Shirley had been
laid off the line in August, Laverne felt very sure that their marriage might
never happen at all. Thank God Lenny had
passed that dispatcher's test in September....
Shirley had been bitterly disappointed that there was no trousseau
to prepare, no honeymoon to book. To
make up for it, she, Squiggy, Carmine, Edna and the Debs had moved everything
Laverne and Lenny owned into their new apartment after the rehearsal dinner,
setting up their bedroom with fresh new sheets, sprinkling it with carnation petals
and flickering candles. The posters of
the second-hand bed had been draped with lace left over from her wedding gown -
she recognizes it now, as she stares up beyond Lenny's slim shoulders to the
cracked plaster of the ceiling. It all
looks beautiful. Even
the dingy green of the walls.
Her eyes rest on the dresser, where Shirley had framed
several old pictures and propped them against her vanity mirror. One of the white tallow candles had melted
down to the root in
its holder during the course of the evening and was dripping on
the polished surface, but Laverne won't move for anything less than a natural
disaster.
This is home, she
thinks to herself, squeezing him again.
She grins like an idiot and feels him stirring inside of her. One blue eye opens and gives her a comforting
smile - with a little leer to it.
Promise and goosebumps spread
within her skin. "Len?" she
murmurs.
"Mmm?" he asks.
"When can we do it again?"
***
Laverne looks down at the little red-faced bundle the nurse
has just placed in her arms and can't figure out what to say to it. Wrapped up like a bread loaf, a tiny blue paper
cap on the crown of its soft head, it wails at her, face bunched and angry and
bee-swollen - a wiggling, crying present.
It was nothing like the rag babies she nursed as a little kid, so alive
and moving and light as to be insubstantial in her arms.
When she presses it to her milk-swollen chest, the little
face unscrews, suddenly stops crying and looks up at her. Her goose is cooked. Her stomach and heart flop over simultaneously
as the little left fist curls around her right index finger and the baby
mews. She had been so knocked out from
the ether that she doesn't even remember what its sex is until she looks at the
little bracelet looped around its tiny wrist.
Baby Boy Kosnowski. Lenny was right all along.
She looks up the foot of the bed, where he now stands,
alternating between taking pictures of her holding the baby and glaring at the
head nurse. He had fought his way into
the delivery ward, and when they tried to throw him out he had just snarled at
them. Until he started
crying. Between the sobbing and
the yelling, the doctor in charge had decided this maniac could be a danger to
his laboring wife, but Laverne had clung to Lenny when they tried to call security. She was so adamant that he ended up staying
the entire time.
Good thing, too. She
needed him, wanted him nearby. It had
somehow made the pain easier to bear.
When the nurse finally leaves them, drawing a curtain around
their bed and secreting them to privacy in the public hospital ward, he puts
the camera down and looks at them, only looks, his hand tentatively caressing
her foot through the sheets.
"C'mere," she urges
softly, but he hangs back. At last, he
speaks.
"If I touch the baby, will I wake up?"
Laverne snickers, a low, soft sound. He seems relieved to hear her laugh. "Len, this is real. Very, very real," she grimaces, feeling
the lingering, fiery effects of childbirth within her body.
"You need something?" he panics. "More medicine or
water or something?"
"Len, sit," she orders, and he complies automatically
and straddles a bedside chair.
"They gave me some stuff to help the pain go away, so
no." He relaxes visibly, and she
reaches out with her free hand to touch his cheek, and he nuzzles her. His face is still damp when she strokes
him. "Wanna hold him?"
His eyes light up - apparently, he hadn't heard the doctor's
announcement, either. "A boy?"
she nods. He giggles,
an expression of the disbelief in the air.
She held out the bundle and he carefully takes the baby into his
arms.
He makes a soft cooing noise, looking up into Lenny's face
drowsily. Laverne simply lies back and
watches; exhausted, filled with love.
"My boys," she murmurs out loud, and Lenny looks up, a joyous
smile on his face, before looking back down at what he'd helped to create
"Hey, little Lenny," her husband murmurs to the
bundle.
"Len," Laverne whines, "I said 'no' to that
name..."
He frowns at her.
"What's wrong with Lenny Junior?"
"If I say 'Lenny'..."
"What?" he answered.
"Get what I mean?
Two Lennys in one house is too much."
He makes a face.
"You think of a better one?"
She closes her eyes.
After a moment of thought, it comes to her clearly. "Tony," she says out loud.
"After your cousin Anthony?"
She nods her head, resting her hand against his thigh. Lenny's thumb cautiously stokes the
butter-soft cheek of their firstborn while he watches the face of his
wife. "Anthony Kosnowksi."
He weighs the name on his tongue.
"You're right, Vernie. It's nice."
She opened her eyes again.
Lenny's cuddling the baby like it's a precious doll, Anthony making tiny
cooing noises at Lenny's own, instinctive, monkeylike response sounds.
"Where's Shirl?" she
wonders finally.
"Last time I saw her, outside crying." Lenny
shakes his head. "She's almost
ready to pop, Vernie.
I think we scared her."
Laverne shook her head.
She'd gone into labor at the final Shotz softball game of the year - the
championship, too. Laverne had insisted
on participating, much to Lenny's worry.
The whole game had gone well for her, and she'd managed her catcher's position
with only the slightest sense of ungainliness. They'd designated Lenny as her
substitute for base running, but she'd been allowed to bat for herself. He'd been sliding into third when she felt a
pop, and ended up counting contractions all through the fifth inning. By the sixth, when they were ten minutes
apart, she decided it was time for the hospital. Shirley, big as a house herself and only a
few months away from delivering Carmine Ragusa's
first child, had been frantic at Laverne's pain as Lenny ran red lights from
"Hey, did we win?" Laverne asks Lenny
suddenly. She can tell from his alarmed
expression that he could care less.
"Shir'll be fine," she says. Shirley and Carmine had barely been married
for a month before Shirley announced her pregnancy. So much for waiting 'til the wedding night,
she thought with a smirk. "I wanna
see her," she adds.
"I'll go find her," Lenny says, handing his son
back to his wife, parting with a kiss to each smooth forehead. "See you, Tony. When I take you home, I'll show you where you
was made..."
"LEN!"
"What? We gotta take him home in the truck!"
"We don't know for sure that that's where it
happened," Laverne complains, recalling their lunch break idylls in
Squiggy’s truck. Maybe they had been
trying a little too hard to get pregnant, she thinks with some
self-recrimination.
Lenny cocks his head smartly. "Laverne - don't ruin a good
story," he tisks.
"Len?"
"Mmm?"
"I love you. I
just want you to know that."
"I know," he smiles, and parts the curtain,
letting the
***
He pulls each candle from the frosting with ginger ability,
leaving only the tiniest pockmarks in the bright white surface. The last pink waxen stick he sets aside,
licking away the creamy white frosting with a catlike and private smile in his
face. Her back prickles with Goosebumps,
and she smiles a promise.
Birthdays aren't Laverne's favorite "holidays" -
not anymore, not after eighteen years of endless planning and drunken clowns
and puking six-year-olds and tantrums.
Not now that she's officially an old lady - officially forty.
"Mom! I need to borrow the car and Johnny won't
give me the keys!"
Laverne swivels around in her seat to confront the sight of
her pint-sized sixteen year old daughter, Rita, trying to grab the keys of their
Dodge from the fingers of her gangly eighteen-year-old brother, Johnny. It's Johnny's last month home before shipping
out to college - off to a culinary arts
school, scholarships had made Laverne's mind muddier than usual this past year
- and he's taking advantage of his position as defacto
head of their kid set, now that Tony was off serving a hitch in Alaska with the
army.
"Where are you going?" Laverne accuses.
Rita sighs, pulling down her faded Led Zeppelin tee shirt
over her nearly-revealed stomach and trying to take Johnny by surprise. Nothing doing - he tosses them underhanded to
the next-oldest child, nine-year-old Melinda, who's far more enthusiastic about
the cake her father's slicing.
"Keep away!"
yells Johnny, but his little sister rolls her eyes and
ducks the flying keys - which miss their target and bounce off of the middle of
her Aunt Shirley's forehead.
Before Shirley can whine, Laverne grabs the keys to the
Dodge and is on her feet.
"Okay. What's up?" she asks Rita.
"Nothing," Rita says, peeling her left sandal off
with the right and wriggling her pink painted toenails.
"She's gonna go see Mikey,"
Johnny announces, as Rita's eyes bug out.
"You a-hole!" she bellows.
"Language," Lenny scolds mildly without looking
up. Laverne gives him a little glare -
Rita is his undeclared favorite, though she knows he loves all of the children.
"Jonny, sit," Laverne
orders, and her second-oldest grumbles, his long hair swaying in the breeze as
he straddles the chair backwards and rests his chin against the slat of his
usual chair - exactly his father's reaction when chastised.
"Mikey?" Shirley
wonders, still rubbing her forehead, "Mikey - my
- son?"
Rita blushes and murmurs something inaudible, playing with
the hem of her tee-shirt. "Yes,
ma'am," she finally manages, an extra note of politeness in her voice.
Lenny looks up from his task and regards his daughter with
an up-and-down glance. "You ain't
in that outfit."
"Daddy!"
"Len..."
"Laverne!" he gives his wife a pleading look.
"We're just going to sit in Aunt Shirley and Uncle
Carmine's basement with Loma and Christine and groove on some tunes. He's got the new Zeppelin single!"
Laverne winced. Loma
and Christine were Squiggy's wild, sophisticated twin daughters - they had
conveniently absented themselves from the party because Squiggy was in LA
scouting auditions for their kid sister Ruby with his wife Marjene,
leaving them to watch baby Eva just as Mikey was left to baby-sit
his sick kid sister Mara.
"Tell him I better not smell lemon Pledge and incense
down there when I get home," Carmine says, some chagrin in his voice. Shirley shakes her head and gives Carmine a
bit of a look while Lenny's face goes pale and he starts to say something out
of horror. Before any further statements
can be made, Rita pecks his wife on the cheek.
"You're the best, Mommy. Happy birthday!" she cries, grabbing the
keys from her hand and disappearing out the back door. Laverne is left watching her daughter's
retreat in disbelief.
"I gotta go after her,"
Lenny mutters, rising from his seat at the end of the table. Laverne's hand on his wrist stops him.
"Let her go."
"Laverne!"
"Let her go.
She's sixteen now, Len. It's
different for her than it was for us."
Lenny bites his lower lip and looks down the table at
her. She sees the worry, the fear, and
can only give him a comforting smile.
She's learned to let go through Tony, and it's something Lenny still
can't manage.
She watches his eyes go from face to face - Melinda,
shoveling in her cake - Her shyer brother, six-year-old Nicky, eating the
frosting off of his cake and nothing else - the baby, their final child Rose, daintily
eating her piece with all of the dignity a four-year-old can muster - Carmine,
doing the same - Shirley, picking at her mini-rose and glancing over at her
best friend, probably wondering if Laverne thought she was a bad mother for the
whole pot thing - their six-year-old daughter, Emily, swinging her feet in the
air as she pokes at Johnny's shoulder with her fork. Finally to his wife, his
love.
"I want the big rose," Johnny says impetuously.
"You know tradition, kid," Lenny says, as he chops
off the slice containing the biggest rose and slaps it onto a plate, oozing
lemon filling over the top with the spatula as he hands it over to
Laverne. She smiles seductively as she
splits the rose in half with her fork.
The world slips away. He smirks
and pretends to pay attention to Carmine's latest complaints about Marjorie Wards.
Hours later, she watches Nicky and Rose sleep in their
shared room, stuffed to the brim with sugar and yet dozing in the mid-evening
darkness. Johnny and Tony had shared
this room until Tony shipped out, while Rita and Melinda shared the third of
their three bedrooms. What she and Lenny
slept in, Laverne knew with a little grimace, was a made -over attic - reminiscent
of the boys' apartment in years before.
It was their private sanctuary, which was why it was home to Laverne,
even more of a home than their first apartment.
In a show of independence, Johnny had tried to move himself into the top
floor of the garage, which lasted until his first encounter with a field
mouse. His understandable cowardice
forced him to share space with Melinda for his senior year, his parents having
already promised Rita the room he had vacated.
Laverne was antsy at first about an eighteen-and-nine year old of separate
sexes sharing a room, but Melinda and Johnny got along exceedingly well, and
Johnny had been protective of his asthmatic kid sister from her birth on. Soon, Laverne would shuffle Rita into
Melinda's room, leaving the babies together and finally giving Tony and Johnny
somewhere to bunk together, should they ever visit. Three bedrooms, six kids, twenty years and
endless hours of wining, Laverne thinks.
When Lenny's arms wrapped themselves around her middle, she
relaxed back into his embrace, her eyes drifting closed. "Is she back?"
Lenny shakes his head.
"Not yet."
An irritated sigh. "I'll kill her. She knows her curfew is eleven."
"Shirl and Carmine are
keeping an eye on them," he kisses her earlobe while his fingers part the
front of her robe. "They didn't
know Mikey was smoking, Laverne. Carmine nearly beat Mikey's
butt off when he found out..."
"Len," she moans softly. "Wouldya stop
letting Rita get away with murder?"
"I don't," Lenny says softly, brushing the back of
her neck with his lips to hear her gasp.
"She's just
better at lying than the rest of the kids."
She smirks. "Yeah. A chip off of the DeFazio block." She knows that's why Lenny admires their
daughter a lot - sometimes she's an exact copy of her mother, which is exactly
why she butts heads with her progenitor.
Lenny's lips go lower, and she carefully closes the kids' door. "We can't until Rita's here."
He freezes and groans.
"That sounds so wrong."
"Lenny," she turns and fixes him with her sternest
glare and he backs off.
She feels the weight of his heavy chin against her shoulder
as he peers around her at the kid's bedroom.
He opens the door just a crack and peers into the darkness. "They're so cute when they're
asleep."
"Too bad it doesn't carry over to when they're
awake."
"I dunno. Nicky's cute when he's not trying to shoot
Mara with his finger."
"Is that why she told Shirley that she hates Nicky Poo Poo Head?"
Lenny snickers.
"I think I remember you calling me something like that when we were
that age..."
Laverne rests her chin against his chest. "How the time flies..."
"How it flews..."
She brushes his lips, feeling the fine lines there, the
fleshy impertinence of them. He'll be
forty next year, but he doesn't look it yet.
His mouth tastes like cake and licorice as he laps at her tongue and
pushes the door closed at the same time.
Her hands play with the collar of his robe as they step toward their
bedroom...
"Mom? Dad?"
Rita stands in the hallway, tentative, a sheepish expression
on her face, clearly embarrassed to have interrupted them. Laverne adjusts her robe as she moves toward
her firstborn daughter.
Rita's arms slip around her mother, and the two women simply
hold on for an infinite amount of time.
"I'm sorry I left," she admits. "Mikey told me
at lunch that he felt left out 'cause Shirley and Carmine wanted him to watch
Mara. He's having a hard time being by
himself, now that Shawn's in art school in
"So this isn't about the Zep?"
Lenny asks innocently.
Rita looks at her father's bold expression and sighs. "Daddy! Mikey and I are
just friends. That's all - JUST
friends."
Lenny and Laverne share a look that speaks volumes - a look
that's nothing but Greek to their daughter. "Did you save me some
cake?" she asks.
Laverne smiles. "The piece with the
rose on it."
She leans against her mother's shoulder as they head to the
kitchen. "I don't deserve you
guys. I'm sorry for wrecking the
party."
"Nah - you didn't wreck it. Four hours of hearing about Carmine's gall
bladder surgery wrecked it," Lenny intones, ducking down and opening the
refrigerator door, pulling out a carton of milk.
Laverne snorts.
"You loved it."
"I did, and you didn't," he hands her three small
plates of cake carefully hidden behind some leftover fish. "It wasn't the worst birthday
ever."
She laughs.
"Yeah, you weren't throwing up this time."
Rita winces.
"Throwing up?"
"The worst birthday your mom ever had, your brothers
and us was all sick with the stomach flu.
We spent the whole day holding each other up over the toilet..."
"Eww!"
Rita winces - but, being her father's daughter, keeps eating the cake.
"But I promised God that if I lived through it,"
Laverne explains, "I'd never let getting old get me down again." She realizes she's broken her vow and decides
to be a little bit lighter. "What's
worse, anyway? Being old or being
dead?"
She catches sight of her husband's thoughtful face over the
table. Her hand finds his knee beneath
the metal surface and she gives it a squeeze.
He grins, finds her hand and squeezes back, his touch saying what he
cannot in front of their daughter.
Rita shakes her shaggy blonde head. "Being old," she decides, and takes
a long draught of milk.
***
"Do You Have Any
Reservations?"
"Not a one."
He's never had them, but she does. Sock skating on Jell-O? Reservations. Driving cross-country in a rented bus for a
summer vacation? Reservations. Spend their retirement money on a Winnebago
so they can go see the kids whenever? Reservations.
She had held reservations about this house - the soft gray
split-level clapboard ranch built on a once brand-new subdivision in suburban
He had just been incarnated a dispatcher for years then, and
she had just been fired permanently from the Shotz line. Carmine gave her a job as an instructor at
Carmine's Marjorie Wards - something she excelled at. Between their two jobs, they managed to sock
away enough money to pay for a house six years into their marriage. They needed the room by them - their tiny
newlywed's nest had been overrun by then by Tony and Johnny, their two walking
toddler tornados, and Laverne was pregnant with Rita. The neighborhood had been sad to release
them, but Laverne remembered only excitement at knowing that this would be her
final home - that she was really and truly home to stay.
Shirley eventually bought a house across the lane, settling
in with her new husband while trying to hide her a-little-too-ripe-for four
months along belly. Inevitably, Squiggy
arrived last, setting up bachelor quarters with Hector Kestenbaum at the foot
of the block, becoming an instant concern to responsible parents everywhere
when he started a fake ID making side business while waiting for the permit for
his knife sharpening shop to come through.
Eventually, they picked up two leggy showgirls and started families of
their own - without moving out of their communal house.
Lenny had been jealous, but tried not to show it.
The fall chill penetrates her bones more easily these days,
if she decides to leave the house.
Lenny's begun hinting to her that maybe it's time for them to retire, to
head to warmer ground, but his pleas fall on deaf ears. She still runs her suburban branch of Laverne's
Marjorie Wards, and can retire whenever she sees fit - unlike Lenny, who's a
year away from getting the gold watch treatment from Pabst - nee- Shotz. Despite this, he doesn't look any more like
an old man to her than she does an old lady, and she doesn't want to move to
She sneaks up behind him and wraps her arms around his plump
belly, causing him to yelp and start against her until he realizes who she
is.
"Hello," she purrs.
"Hello," he sighs back. She plays with the sparse hair at the crown
of his head with her right hand and he frowns - the answer to her oft-spoken
riddle of "When did you know we were forever?" has lately become
"you didn't leave me when my hair started falling out."
"Ick," three voices
chorus from the swingset.
"Mind your own business," Laverne sing-songs,
scampering over to give Dakota Ragusa - Rita's first baby with Mikey - a firmer push as her swing starts to slow
down. Lavonda
Janis and DeShawn Ayden Kosnowki
- Johnny's babies with Christine Squiggman - occupy the plastic wading pool
that serves as the grandchildren's sandbox.
It was hard for Laverne not to make fun of the children's
names within her mind. Johnny knew how
to spell - she had taught him how to do so - so the mysterious origin of her
granddaughter ans grandson's name had caused some
confusion. But then, at least they were
original names - at Dakota's sixth birthday party, four of the ten other girls
at Chuck E. Cheese's were named Dakota, too.
What can she do? They
weren't her kids. She feels nervous
enough just giving parenting advice to Rita, who's lived on edge after Mikey decided to enlist in the Army in the aftermath of
9/11. He had been deployed to
Laverne knew they had a right to be worried.
Tony had come home ten years before from the Gulf missing
his right leg and with an honorable discharge.
The loss had made him reclusive, despite what his family tried to do to
give him comfort, and
inevitably, he decided that it would be best to get out of
That she can't approve surprises Laverne even now. She thinks of herself as open and none-judgmental,
and counts people of all stripe and orientation her
friend - she was the first person to open her arms to Christine and Squiggy's
interracial marriage - yet hasn't blessed one of Tony's girlfriends since the
war. Then again, she only wants the best
for her children - children who took Tony's leaving as a sign that the nest was
ripe for abandoning and began moving from
She feels the arms of the man who acts as her true magnetic
north encircling her, and gives a small sigh of relief.
"What's wrong?" he asks.
His warmth makes the earth slow its spin. "Nothing now," she responds, and
means it with her whole heart.
***
Rita Ragusa folds her mother's thin arms over her chest, her
stiffening fingers carefully arranged into a praying position. She pauses a moment before turning around and
switching off the heart monitor burring behind her, then sits bonelessly down beside the corpse of the woman who had
raised her.
She can't believe that she's an orphan now. Fifty-nine, and she still felt like an
abandoned child as she stares into her mother's calm face. She would look there forever for some sign of
peace, but the hysterical moaning of Melinda draws her back to the present.
"She can't be gone!" her middle sister cries
out. "She just can't be!"
"It's a blessing, honey," says Nicky. Rita glares at her baby brother, the
Christian rock star whose conversion post-rehab for a meth
addiction had both relieved and amused their parents. "Mom's with dad and Jesus
now."
Melinda's expression melted into a more pleading one - the
blue eyes she had inherited from their father flashing darkly. "Jesus doesn't need mommy - we do."
"But daddy does," Rose pointed out, as always the
calm within the storm. "When I get
to heaven, I'll be shocked if he hasn't accidentally broken a few halos already."
Rita smiles through her tears - her daddy could fix a car
with one hand tied behind his back, but he had been frighteningly uncoordinated
and had tended to fall off of roofs with regularity.
It was five years ago that Leonard Alexi
Kosnowski had died - peacefully, without a struggle, and unexpectedly in his
sleep of what the coroner pronounced a massive heart attack. Her mother awoke to his cold body and a
frozen smile on lips that would never move again. It was what would have been his
seventy-eighth birthday.
Laverne had been consumed with guilt and grief. For six months after her husband had died,
she slept in Rita and Mikey's guest room, unable to
see her home without thinking of her lost husband and breaking down. She spent hours crying in Aunt Shirley's
arms, wailing and moaning her frustrations and pains.
"I should have treated him better, Shirl,"
Rita heard her mother saying as she passed by one day, and didn't know what she
meant.
Rita would find out soon enough, as she spent many sleepless
nights between shifts listening to Laverne pour her heart out. The words haunted Rita, as she listened to
her mother castigate herself for her cruel treatment of her husband before
their marriage, then accused herself of not taking
care of him, of allowing him to die through integument. "I should've married him when he asked
me the first time," she would say quietly, looking out the window and into
the deserted streets outside the cul-de-sac.
"I wasted six years. I could
have had six more years with him."
Rita doubted it was time truly wasted, but the real Laverne was lost
amid the pain of self-flagellation.
The family knew that there was nothing that even she could
do to stop her father from soothing his sweet tooth - he was a sneak when he
really wanted something, and his consumption of chocolate and lard and sugar
and sweets and beer had been a long-term love affair, predating even his desire
for his wife. To force him to live on
salad, even for his own good, would have made Lenny miserable.
Time passed away slowly, but eventually Laverne's heart
began to heal. She moved back into their
house six months after Lenny's death, with one small change - Rita had to
dispose of her antique bed, the one she had kept for as long as her daughter
could remember. It broke Rita's heart to
think of someone outside of the family sleeping in the bed where she had been
coddled as a child, the bed that they cheerfully refused to place as it sagged
lower and lower to the floor while the years paraded by, so she stored it in
the guest room.
Laverne filled up her time with classes at senior centers,
trying to learn new skills and cheerfully failing to retain information much as
she had in her youth. She spoiled her
great-grandchildren - eventually her great-great grandchildren - with attention
and love. Frequently, her Uncle Squiggy
would stop by, banging into the living room with his cheerful "hello"
and making the world palpably livelier.
Though his pride would never let him admit it, Squiggy clung to her
mother and her family, seeing in them the last remnants of Lenny - his last
anchor in a world that was stripping their friends away, person by person. Her house had been filled with visitors at
the end; her Aunt Shirley and Uncle Carmine and their family, mostly.
There was one brief, shocking exception. While spending time at her mother's house one
afternoon with a pregnant Dakota, Rita had been stunned by the appearance of a
dapper, gray-haired gentleman in a leather jacket at her mother's doorstep one
afternoon - and even more stunned by the giggly, girlish reaction her mother
gave to the man. While Rita pretended to
dust and straighten the living room, she listened as her mother traded pictures
and stories with the most famous Senator Milwaukee had ever birthed - Arthur Fonzarelli. They
parted hours later on a kiss and a hug, and Rita watched with some amusement as
Laverne leaned out the window to watch him race away on his motorcycle.
"I didn't know you were a Democrat," Rita teased.
She smirked, closing the window and keeping out the stifling
late-afternoon heat. "I gave to the
party a long time ago." Rita
realized her expression must have shown horror, because her mother sighed
impatiently, tossing her dyed-red head.
"Your father was the love of my life, but I wasn't dead before I
was with him, and I ain't dead now!"
Rita bites back a wave of sorrow at those spirited but
long-ago uttered words. She thought she
was used to the battle between life and death - her position as a general
practitioner at the new San Angeles Hospital forced her to confront the world's
polar opposites every day. She felt
Johnny's eyes upon her, heavy and sharp - he was pissed off because she wasn't
crying, and Rita knew she couldn't force out any tears when she had finished
shedding them a year ago. She had cried when
the hospital's best oncologist had proclaimed her mother's throat cancer terminal, shed a million more on the shoulders of her Aunt
Shirley and a million more against Mikey's chest in
their shared bed. Now,
staring at the birdy, fragile frame that had once
held the spirit of her lively mother, she felt only an oceanic numbness, like
an injection of botulism toxin had pierced her heart.
Pain brings her back to life, with the realization that she
would have to tell her Aunt Shirley, who had been put to bed by Carmine early
in the afternoon after forty-eight hours of round-the-clock vigil over her
lifelong best friend's bed. They hadn't
said goodbye - they had tried during the agonizing months of Laverne's final illness
and found it impossible.
Rita stands and moves away from the coldness of her
brother's stare. "I have to go call
Uncle Carmine..."
"Don't. We need
you here..." Johnny says.
"Someone needs to be practical," Rita
mumbles. When she opens the door, she
bumps literally into her missing, prodigal brother.
She looks up into Tony's face - so like her father's - as he
takes in the sight of their dead mother.
"Oh God," he whispers, color draining from his pale face. "Is she..."
"I'm sorry, Tony," Rita says, wrapping her arms
around the solid weight of her brother's chest.
He trembles against her skin in a convulsive expression of sorrow.
"You're late.
But we expected nothing less from you," snaps Johnny.
"Don't start in on me," Tony barks. "My plane was delayed. There's this big fuckall
thunderstorm rolling in over the Dells..."
"Don't give me any more of your bullshit excuses!"
Johnny responds. "Mom asked for you
three times before she went. You knew
she was dying..."
"Tony, come on - I need someone to help me finish
making arrangements," Rita soothes, taking her favorite brother by the
hand and leading him out of her mother's room.
They find privacy in their large backyard, where the two
siblings idle in silent tumult. Laverne
had two final wishes when she understood her illness to be terminal - she
wanted to die at home, and she wanted to keep her hair. Both had been granted.
Rita watches Tony grope through his hunting jacket, trying
to find a match to light his cigarette.
He balances so well on his prosthetic leg that she barely notices it's a
new one - ornately painted over with ivy and cherubs, work done by Rose during
her last trip to Vegas. Rita watches
the red-black flame of Tony's cigarette flicker in the night; she's been on the
nicotine bandwagon since her mother's diagnosis, but the scent of burning
tobacco nearly sends her to her knees with want. She's as weak as her father was, and she
glories in it - anything to distract her from the reality of her new orphan
hood.
Rita looks over the overgrown garden and let out a long,
shuddering sigh. Her parents had brown
thumbs, but tending their patch of land was a post-church springtime ritual for
the both of them. She bites back a smile
at the memory of her father's huge white-rimmed sunglasses and loud Hawaiian shirts,
his skin turning red under the sunlight as he fertilized while her mother
pulled weeds in a tank top. Rita
understands that their activities were less for the fruitfulness of the land
than for the privacy they shared in those hours. She kicks at the weeds and wonders what will
happen to the place now that the love is gone.
She realizes that Tony's been looking at her expectantly for
awhile and turns to face him in the light.
"I'm sorry..."
"I just asked if she suffered at the end." He turns away from her, as if he doesn't want
to know.
Rita smiles and shakes her head. "She looked happy to go. Her whole face lit up before she took her
last breath." Rita lowers her voice to a conspiratorial level. "Promise me you won't tell anyone
this..."
"When have I ever told on you?" Tony smiles - bitter
sweetly, he knows there's no one to tattle to now.
"She grabbed onto me, and she grabbed onto Melinda, and
she looked at all of us - we had our hands on her, and we were saying it was
all right, that she could go, we'd take care of each other...her eyes got
really glassy and they got this far-away look in them." she looks
searchingly to Tony, daring him to prove what she said to be fact. "She looked out past all of us, and I
swear, Tony, I swear on the name of Saint Anne, before her heart stopped she
said dad's name."
Tony's face turns pale as he rocks back on his heels at the
impact of her words. Laverne's voice
box had been riddled with cancerous tumors - it had been removed to halt the
spread of the disease which consumed her mercilessly in the end. She hadn't been able to physically speak a
word for months and had communicated through pieces of paper. For a woman whose piercing whine was
legendary, it had been a crippling blow to Laverne.
"I'm not making it up, Tony - she said 'Lenny', smiled
and died." Rita closes her eyes
against the darkening sky.
"Guess all those novenas I prayed on the plane didn't
got to waste after all," Tony lowers his head. "I fucked up one last time for her -
Johnny's right. I don't disappoint."
"They loved you, Tony," she says softly. "We all love you."
"I broke their hearts."
"That's what kids do - they break their parent's
hearts."
"Not funny."
"Life's not meant to be funny. We all did our best to make them happy, and
sometimes they were, sometimes they weren't.
But they never stopped loving us, or each other," she loops her arm
around his shoulder. "Tone? If you need to cry - don't be afraid to. There's no one here to see but me."
"Mom and dad wouldn't want me to cry," he says
quietly.
She knew they wouldn't, and she didn't falter either. And as darkness began to fall around them,
dimming the blue-gray glow of the falling night sky, Rita swore that she saw
two stars winking right over their heads, so close as to nearly be touching -
one flashy as a roman candle, the other dim but pulsing with an energy that was
not of this earth.