11. Mike
MIKE
Janet is pulling on her jacket when she asks.
"Is Nico dating anyone?"
I look up from my coffee. "Where did that come from?"
"Is he seeing anyone?"
I set the mug down. "Why?"
She smooths her lapel, not looking at me. "Rosemary. Rosemary is curious."
"Rosemary is curious after you told her what?"
"You had a friend named Nico," she says.
"You think Nico is hot?"
"Are you jealous?"
"Should I be?"
"You haven't answered the question."
Janet picks up her bag, checks her phone.
"He's not dating anyone as far as I know," I say. "Anything else you need to ask him?"
She finally looks at me. "Don't make it weird."
"I'm not making it weird. You're making it weird." I pick up my coffee. "It's cute."
"Don't say cute."
"You're cute."
She points at me. "I have to go to court and be tough, not cute."
"Juries like cute."
She kisses me at the door — quick, firm, her hand flat against my chest for a second — and she's gone.
I get in my car and drive to Queens.
The BQE crawls all the way to the Kosciuszko, brake lights bleeding red through the windshield, and I sit in it with the radio off, watching Manhattan shrink in the rearview.
It always looks cleaner from a distance. Glass towers. Gold windows. A city you could almost hold in your hands without it cutting you.
Richmond Hill rises around me one block at a time, and with it, that old feeling in my chest. The one I hate. The one that says I never really left.
Working-class Queens. Two-family houses. Chain-link fences. Cars packed tight along the curb. Men in work boots smoking on stoops. Women carrying groceries like they've been carrying the whole damn world since breakfast.
My mother's house sits on a quiet street, nothing special, nothing tragic. The house I grew up in. The place where people work hard, know it won't be enough, and learn which corners they can cut without getting caught.
Now I'm here again, and the worst part is, some piece of me never got out.
The whole house smells like lasagna. Like my mother.
Garlic softening in oil. Tomato sauce bubbling too long. Sofrito underneath it all, sweet and sharp and green, the ghost of every dinner she ever made in that kitchen.
I walk in without knocking.
My mother never locks the door. She doesn't have to. Nobody on this block is stupid enough to rob this house. Not because there's anything worth taking. There isn't. Not anymore.
Because Ryan Keller grew up here.
That makes it off limits.
She's in the kitchen, moving between the counter and the stove, her hands damp, her hair pinned up crooked, a dish towel twisted in one fist like she might strangle the day with it.
She hears me come in but doesn't turn right away.
That's my mother. Make you cross the room first.
She looks over her shoulder, eyes dragging across me the way only a mother's eyes can. Like she sees the boy I was, the man I became, and every sin in between.
I go to her.
Kiss her cheek.
"How was traffic?" she says.
"Not bad."
She pats my arm twice, the way she always has, goes back to the stove.
The living room is the same. The same plastic on the couch, the same photo of Ryan and me on the wall — Ryan sixteen, me twelve, both of us in Mets jerseys.
The AC unit in the window is making a sound like a playing card in bicycle spokes.
"How long has it been doing that?"
She waves a hand without turning around. "A few weeks."
"Ma."
"I don't even hear it anymore."
"I do."
I go to the window and look at the unit. It's the same one that was here when I left for the Marines. The casing is cracked on one side and the filter hasn't been changed in God knows how long.
"I'll get you a new one."
"You will not."
"It's like six hundred dollars, Ma."
"I don't need it," she sets a plate of lasagne on the table. "Sit."
I sit. She sits across from me, pours two glasses of water from a pitcher, and watches me the way she always does — like she's looking for something she expects to find eventually.
"You look tired," she says.
"I'm fine."
"How's the bar doing?"
"Good. Really good."
"You look like your father when he was tired. Same thing around the eyes."
We eat. The AC rattles.
After a while she says, "How is it going with Janet Graham?"
I keep my eyes on my plate. "It's going."
"Is she sleeping over?"
"Yes."
She nods slowly. She picks up her fork, sets it down. "Ryan called."
"I talked to him."
"He says you're close." She looks at me. "Are you close?"
"I'm close."
"Michael." Her voice drops the way it does when she wants me to stop managing her. "He's been in there five years. Five years because of what that woman did. You understand that?"
"I understand."
Her jaw tightens. "He was not a good boy, I know that. I know what he was doing. But she cheated. She didn't play by the rules and my son lost five years of his life."
I don't say anything.
"This is a good thing you're doing for him." She reaches across and puts her hand over mine. Her fingers are dry, warm, the way they've always been. "I'm proud of you. You got a good head on your shoulders. I always knew you'd be the one to make good."
"I couldn't have done this without you," I say.
She squeezes my hand once. She picks up her fork again.
We eat.
My mother's lasagna is my favorite thing in the world. It always has been. I've eaten in Michelin-star restaurants. None of it comes close.
I'm not sure that's because the lasagna is actually better.
It might just be memory.
It might be that every bite tastes like being a kid again.
Whatever the reason, I clean my plate.
The AC rattles and shudders. When she starts clearing plates, I get up and pull the unit from the window before she can argue, carry it to the kitchen table, and start taking the casing off.
"Michael, leave it."
"I'm cleaning the filter." I find a screwdriver in the junk drawer where it's always been. "Go sit."
She stands in the doorway watching me for a moment. She goes and sits.
I work on the unit for twenty minutes. Clean the filter, check the fan, find a loose wire in the back panel that's causing the rattle and tape it down. It's nothing. I needed something to do with my hands.
I carry it back to the window and plug it in. It hums on, quieter now.
She comes to stand beside me. She looks at the unit.
"You always could fix things," she says.
She means it as a compliment. I know she does.
"You need anything else while I'm here?"
"No."
I measure the AC unit. "Buying you a new one."
We watch two episodes of Family Feud. I think my mother has a crush on Steve Harvey.
I drive back over the bridge with Queens behind me and Manhattan in front of me; the skyline rising out of the dark like a dare.
I merge onto the FDR and drive north, toward Nocturne, toward the life I built when I got out. The river runs black beside me.
Toward Janet.
I think about her getting dressed in the morning.
That's become the part I wait for.
She stands at the foot of my bed with her hair still damp from the shower, wearing one of my shirts while she looks for her clothes.
She slips out of my shirt and reaches for her bra, hooking it behind her back without turning around. The blouse. White. Clean. Too innocent for what we did to it a few hours earlier. She buttons it from the bottom up, hiding herself from me by inches.
The way she steps into her heels and becomes taller, sharper.
The blazer.
The badge.
It's a shame she has to go.