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Okay, maybe Joe would want cake . . . but it wouldn't be the first thing on his mind, and he wouldn't care if it was half-eaten.
I grated parmesan for my mother, and I sliced some cucumbers and tomatoes.
In the dining room, Valerie and Sally were yelling at each other, competing with the television and the galloping horse.
“Is there any news about Michael Barroni?” I asked.
“Still missing,” Grandma said. “And they haven't found his car, either. I hear he only had it for a day. It was brand-new right out of the showroom.”
“I saw Anthony yesterday. He was driving a Corvette that looked new.”
Grandma got dishes from the cupboard. “Mabel Such says Anthony's spending money like water. She don't know where he's getting it from. She says he doesn't make all that much at the store. She says he was on a salary just like everybody else. Michael Barroni came up the hard way, and he wasn't a man to give money away. Not even to his sons.”
I got silverware and napkins, and Grandma and I set the table around Valerie and Sally and Angie.
“You can stare at that seating chart all you want,” Grandma said to Valerie.
“It's never gonna get perfe
ct. Nobody wants to sit next to Biddie Schmidt. Everybody wants to sit next to Peggy Linehart. And nobody's going to be happy sitting at table number six, next to the restrooms.”
My mother brought the meatballs and sauce to the table and went back for the spaghetti. My father moved from his living room chair to his dining room chair and helped himself to the first meatball. Everyone sat except Mary Alice. Mary Alice was still galloping.
“Horses got to eat,” Grandma said. “You better sit down.”
“There's no hay,” Mary Alice said.
“Sure there is,” Grandma said. “See that big bowl of spaghetti? It's people hay, but horses can eat it, too.”
Mary Alice plunged her face into the spaghetti and snarfed it up.
“That's disgusting,” Grandma said.
“It's the way horses eat,” Mary Alice told her. “They stick their whole face in the feed bag. I saw it on television.”
The front door opened and Albert Kloughn walked in. “Am I late? I'm sorry I'm late. I didn't mean to be late. I had a client.”
Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at Kloughn. Kloughn didn't get a lot of clients. He's a lawyer and his business has been slow to take off. Partly the problem is that he's a sweetie pie guy... and who wants a sweetie pie lawyer? In Jersey you want a lawyer who's a shark, a sonuvabitch, a first-class jerk. And partly the problem is Kloughn's appearance. Kloughn looks like a soft, chubby, not-entirely-with-the-program fourteen-year-old boy.
“What kind of client?” Grandma asked.
Kloughn took his place at the table. “It was a woman from the Laundromat next to my office. She was doing her whites, and she saw my sign and the light on in my office. I went in to do some filing, but I was actually playing poker on my computer. Anyway, she came over for advice.” Kloughn helped himself to spaghetti. “Her husband took off on her, and she didn't know what to do. Sounded like she didn't mind him leaving. She said they'd been having problems. It was that he took their car, and she was stuck with the payments. It was a brand-new car, too.”
I felt the skin prickle at the nape of my neck. “When did this guy disappear?”
“A couple weeks ago.” Kloughn scooped a meatball onto the big serving spoon.
The meatball rolled off the spoon, slid down Kloughn's shirt, and ski jumped off his belly into his lap. “I knew that was going to happen,” Kloughn said.
“This always happens with meatballs. Does it happen with chicken? Does it happen with ham? Okay, sometimes it happens with chicken and ham, but not as much as meatballs. If it was me, I wouldn't make meatballs round. Round things roll, right? Am I right? What if you made meatballs square? Did anybody think of that?”
“That would be meatloaf” Grandma said.
“Did this woman report her missing husband to the police?” I asked Kloughn.
“No. It was just one of those personal things. She said she knew he was going to leave her. I guess he was fooling around on the side and things weren't working out for them.” Kloughn retrieved the meatball and set it on top of his spaghetti. He dabbed at his shirt with his napkin, but the smear of red sauce only got worse. “I felt sorry for her with the car payment and all, but boy, can you imagine being that dumb? Here she is living with this guy and all of a sudden he just up and leaves her. And it turns out she has nothing but bills. They had two mortgages that she didn't even know about. The bank account was empty. What a dope.”
My mother, father, and Grandma and I all sucked in some air and slid our eyes to Valerie. This was exactly what happened to Valerie. This was like calling Valerie a dope.
