City Boy by Jean Thompson Page A

from his writing desk. Mrs. Palermo was looking around the place in an interested fashion that made him anxious to send her on her way before she began making any more intrusive comments. To distract her he asked, “Did you grow up here, you and your family?”
    “This place? No, we lived over on Waveland Avenue. Mom came here after me and Rocco, that’s my brother, got married and moved out. My dad was already dead. He passed away, what, almost fifty years ago.”
    Jack waited while Mrs. Palermo wrote her phone number in careful,florid digits. “Fifty years,” he repeated. “That’s a long time …” He supposed he meant a long time to be dead, but that would have been crass. “I’m sure that was hard for your mother.”
    “Yeah, they were only married for six years. Six years a wife, fifty years a widow. He drowned. My dad.”
    “Oh, I’m sorry.” Stupid, to offer consolation for something that happened before you were born, but what else were you supposed to say. Mrs. Palermo waved it off.
    “That’s all right. I was just a little kid, I don’t remember that much about it. Or him. Sometimes I think even what I remember’s only what they told me. Dad drowned on Lake Michigan. Him and some friends went out on a boat fishing. It was the one guy’s boat and he was supposed to know what he was doing. October 1953. They hit a squall. You know about storms on lakes? They’re bad because lakes are shallow and the bottom kicks up easier. Anyway. Here comes the sad stuff. The two other guys washed up a week later. Fish ate parts of them. You don’t want to know which parts. They never found the boat. Never found my dad.”
    “Wow,” said Jack, inadequately.
    “Maybe that’s why Mom, you know, lost it. Not ever knowing. She still keeps his shoes in the closet, his clothes on hangers. I think she even still sleeps on the one side of the bed. Like she always expected him to come back. It’s a little nuts. She could have married again, the church lets you, and she was still a young woman. But she just stopped her life where it was. When do you cross the line between love and crazy? I tell my husband, you disappear on me, I’m selling your golf clubs. That’s a joke, after a while you have to turn it all into a big stupid joke. Well I’m off. I need my cigarette, or else I just keep talking till I use up every word in the English language. Then I start in on Italian. That’s a joke too. Very nice to meet you, and thanks for helping me out.”
    Then she was gone, leaving Jack to ponder yet another neighbor and the life lived behind closed doors.
    When Chloe came home that evening, she was tired from her week at work, so they planned on staying in, eating take-out Thai food, andwatching videos. Jack thought of telling her about Mrs. Palermo, offering her up as something interesting in the course of his boring day. But Chloe could be impatient with what she called Jack’s weirdness museum, his accounts of different pathetic or grotesque events. Death by fish was likely to make her shriek in disgust. And besides, it would have shamed him to turn Mrs. Lacagnina’s half century of grief into dinnertime chatter.
    They were finishing up their meal and drinking red wine in the balloon glasses they’d gotten as a wedding present. Chloe said, “This is the good stuff, isn’t it? I’m drinking and drinking but I don’t feel drunk.”
    “You will.”
    “You know what the big power thing is now? No casual Fridays, and everybody tries to dress to the max. It’s supposed to show you’re more cutthroat than the next guy.”
    “Well you are, aren’t you?”
    “Oh you are so amusing, have you ever considered writing comedy? What it means is heels and hose five days a week. You try it sometime. I don’t mean that, you know, literally.”
    “Maybe it’s what I need. A career wardrobe. For motivation.”
    “What?”
    Jack shook his head, sorry he’d allowed himself one of his usual sad-sack comments about