Loose Screws (20 page)

Then I hear it. A rustling sound, so faint I almost miss it.

Oh, God. I
so
do not need this right now.

It's finally happened. After twenty-five years of my mother's staunch refusal to install a gate over the fire escape window in the living room, somebody's broken in and is now lurking in the shadows, waiting to bludgeon me to death for having come upon him. Or her. But maybe if I can just…sidle over to the light switch, right…there…

After a few fumbles, my hand finds the switch on the wall behind me. This is totally insane, what I'm about to do. But it's him or me, and maybe my life is worth squat right now, but it's the only one I've got and I can't bear the thought of leaving it in this much of a mess.

I flip the switch and shriek my brains out.

M
y mother comes flying out of her room in a T-shirt and underpants, feet pounding, bosoms bouncing. My grandmother, bless her, sleeps like the dead.

“Ginger! For God's sake, what on earth—”

I turn on my mother, hardly able to get the words past my gritted teeth. “What…the…
hell
…is…
that
doing
here?
”

My arm swings out toward the rooster locked in his wire cage. The bird jerks his head to one side, impaling me with his beady little gaze, before letting out an ugly, offended squawk.

“The Ortizes couldn't keep it where they were,” my mother calmly says. “They remembered I'd said to call me if they needed help, so they called.” She ends her sentence with a shrug, as if that's all the explanation necessary.

All I can do is stare at her. “And somehow that translates to giving sanctuary to a chicken?”

“Only for a few days. Until they find another place, maybe with another relative.”

“And they didn't think to call Animal Control? No, wait,
you
didn't think of calling Animal Control?”

“I couldn't do that! They would have destroyed Rocky.”

“Rocky?”

“
Chicken Run
is their little boy's favorite movie.”

“Nedra. Listen to me. It's against the law to keep livestock in Manhattan. Has been for probably, oh, for a hundred years, give or take.”

“Honestly, Ginger.” She crosses her arms, indignant. “You're acting as though I brought home a cow or something.”

Now
do you see what I've had to put up with all these years?

“Jesus, Nedra—what are the neighbors going to say?”

“They won't know—will they?—unless somebody with a big mouth tells them.”

“The
rooster
will tell them, for God's sake!”

Presumably because my turning on the light has thoroughly disrupted his biorhythms, Rocky picks that precise moment to demonstrate his crowing technique, stretching up
en pointe
and beating his wings against the sides of the cage. A feather flies out, drifts to the carpet. I don't even want to think about the various…things that might live in that feather.

“Look at that,” Nedra says. “You're upsetting him.”

“I'm upsetting
him—?
”

“And for someone who just had sex, you're sure cranky.”

If my mouth hadn't already been open, it would have dropped to my chest. Since I'm a rotten liar, there's little point in denying it, although God knows how she knows. Some kind of latent motherly radar or something, I suppose. In any case, the best I can do is shoot back, “Yeah, well, at least one of us did,” before turning smartly on my bare heel and tromping off to my room.

“Don't be so sure about that,” she says behind me. But by the time I recover enough to turn back around, she's gone.

The rooster, unfortunately, is not.

 

If there'd been any way of avoiding the kitchen the next morning, believe me, I would have. But after less than five
hours' sleep—rudely interrupted by enthusiastic crowing—setting foot outside the apartment without a major caffeine injection would have been foolhardy, if not downright dangerous to the general public. So here I am in the kitchen—feeling reasonably pulled together in a crisp white sleeveless blouse and a long, straight black skirt with a slit up the front—trying to ignore the rooster perched on the back of
my
chair, Nonna chattering in what I can only surmise is Italian baby talk to the rooster perched on the back of
my
chair, and my mother sitting at the table next to the rooster perched on the back of
my
chair, nonchalantly sipping coffee and reading the
Times.

Criminy. The woman is downright
glowing.
Which I might be, too, if I weren't so screwed up.

No.
No.
I am not going to think about me. Nick. Us.

So I'll think about my mother. Which isn't actually making me any more comfortable. To be perfectly honest, the idea of my mother getting it on is almost weirder than having a rooster perched on the back of my chair.

I grab a piece of toast, ignoring Nonna's entreaties to sit down (like I'm going to let this thing peck at my hair) eat a real breakfast, I'm too skinny, and contemplate the fifty-year-old woman sitting in front of me. There she sits, in a shapeless, sleeveless patterned dress, her hair boisterously free around her shoulders, her brows pinched in concentration, and I'm thinking, God, she's beautiful. And it's not as if I'm repulsed by the idea of her having sex, don't get me wrong. More power to her. Frankly, I think she should have been hitting the sheets years ago, if you ask me. It's just…she hasn't. Not once since Dad died that I know of. And of course, part of me wants to grill her: is this an ongoing thing? Do I know the man? Is this serious?

Is she really as happy as she looks?

I sneak another peek at her face through the rooster's tail to check.

Hell, my guess is that she's delirious.

And this is bothering me because…?

My cell rings. I sprint down the hall to my bedroom to discover Nonna has already made my bed. When did she
do that? I pick up the phone before it hits me. Oh, God, what if this is Nick? What am I supposed to say?

What am I, thirteen?

“Hello?” I say cautiously, hoping to distract myself by trying to figure out where the hell Nonna put my black T-straps.

“Ginger? Hi, it's Curtiss James. Geoffrey's new daddy?”

“Oh—” Aha. There they are. In the closet, of all places. “Hi,” I say, relieved and not at the same time. That it's not Nick, I mean. Figure that one out. Anyway, so here I am, trying to hang on to the phone and hook the strap on my right shoe with one hand. “How are you?”

“Well, I'm fine. But…we have a problem. It seem Liam's allergic to dog hair, which we didn't know until I brought Geoff home. I mean, we thought it was something else at first—we really wanted it to be something else, because Liam absolutely
adores
this dog—and then he had to go away for a few days on a shoot, but then when he came back, boom! His eyes are so red, he looks like a child of the devil. Not even antihistamines work, before you ask—”

I wasn't going to.

“—so the long and the short of it is, we can't keep the dog. So we were wondering—hoping, actually—that we could return him to you?”

I momentarily freeze. Then a little shudder of joy ripples right down my spine. After all these weeks of things being taken away from me, you mean I'm actually going to get something
back?

“Of course you can! Oh, God…I mean, I'm really sorry it didn't work out for you, but I'd love to have him! When can you bring him? Oh, wait—I'm not where I was—long story—and I had to move back in with my mother, so let me give you that address.”

“Hold on…Liam, honey? Can you toss me that pen? Thanks, you're a doll.” Then to me, “God. You're back with your
mother?
”

“And you don't even know her.”

“I know mine, and that's bad enough. Okay, shoot.”

I give him the address, he says he'll bring the dog by
around seven, and we hang up. Only then do I realize I didn't even bother asking my mother if it was okay for me to bring back the dog.

Excuse me? There's a rooster strutting down the hall— I can hear it's little chicken toenails scraping the bare floor, yech—and I'm worried about bringing in a
dog?

Oh, crap. What if the dog eats the rooster?

Then again, what if the dog eats the rooster?

Oh, well. Them's the breaks.

 

The kitchen, later that evening. Geoff has wedged himself in backward between the refrigerator and the cabinet, alternately whimpering and snapping at the rooster, who, with much wing-flapping and ballyhoo, is doing the poultry equivalent of break dancing in the middle of the kitchen floor. While my mother and I argue over the best way to catch the stupid bird and get him back in his cage, Nonna, armed with a broom and emitting a constant stream of frantic Italian, is trying to keep the bird from pecking the dog's eyes out.

Now, I'm not a total idiot. I'd told my mother about Geoff, she was cool with it—what else?—so we'd put the rooster in his cage when Curtiss dropped off the dog and all his stuff, including the never-ending bag of dog food (which actually, is finally down to about a third). Anyway, we were in the midst of giving Geoff the grand tour of his new home when, in a blur of feathers and agitated clucking, Rocky burst into the kitchen and attacked the poor dog. Who knew the damn thing knew how to undo the latch to the cage?

“Wait!” I say, blinded by a flash of sudden inspiration. “My laundry basket!”

I dash to my room, dumping my dirty clothes in a trail along the floor as I sprint back to the kitchen. By now, Rocky is strutting back and forth in front of the dog, apparently satisfied just to torment him with his presence. Geoff seems more pissed than anything else, curling back his lip and issuing the occasional growl, although he keeps shooting me “Would you
please
get this damn thing outta here” looks. My grandmother sees the laundry basket,
which I'm now holding upside down in preparation for the Big Pounce, tosses the bird what looks like a crouton. (Seems a waste of a perfectly good crouton to me, but desperate times call for desperate measures.) Anyway, the chicken goes for the crouton, I go for the chicken. The basket neatly dropped down over it, I then yell to anybody who'll listen to get the cage.

The bird now securely ensconced in his cage, which has been removed to my mother's room—“You brought him here, you can keep him with you,” I said, and she didn't argue—the poor dog allows Nonna to entice him from his hidey-hole with scraps of the roast beef we had for dinner.

“Hey. He's only supposed to eat his own food,” I say, pointing to the rolled-up bag lolling against the leg of the kitchen table. Nonna eyes it, hands Geoff another piece of beef. As much as she seemed taken with the rooster, I can tell fur wins over feathers, no contest. Especially as the furred thing has a
brain.

“Why such a big bag? Is too much food for such a small dog, no?”

“Don't ask me, ask Brice.” I wince. “Well, you could have asked Brice if he were, you know, alive.”

Her duty done, Nonna says,
“Basta”
to the dog, then turns and glowers at the bag. “Open bag, is no good. Things will crawl in. You go out, find something with a lid to put it in.”

 

Forty-five minutes later Nedra and I are trooping back up Broadway at eight o'clock on a balmy summer night, lugging home a miniature garbage pail, complete with lid. I have no idea why she decided to come along, but she keeps giving me these looks, as if she wants to talk but doesn't quite know how to go about it. Since we're not prone to having cozy little mother-daughter heart-to-hearts, I can understand why. I'm also not going to make it easier for her.

Never mind that my brain is about to explode with curiosity.

Dusk has purpled most of the sky, save for the brilliant rim of orange along the horizon, just visible at the cross
town streets through the trees along Riverside Drive. The atmosphere is relaxed—for New York, anyway—the scene almost carnival-like. The sidewalks are clogged with people and laughter, strollers and the creaking, wheeled shopping carts unbiquitous to the city. Bodies swarm around the open-air fruit and vegetable stands, filling the air with a dozen languages; dogs tied to parking meters stare fixedly through a thousand passing legs at store entrances, dodging passersbys' attempts to get their attention, only to explode into dance when their owners finally emerge.

Morningside Heights has changed a great deal since I was a kid, as have most Manhattan neighborhoods, I suppose. Many of the family-owned businesses that gave each area of the city its unique flavor have gone the way of the ten-cent pay phone in favor of franchises that threaten to make New York no different from Houston or Des Moines. But New York is all about attitude, I decide as we sidestep a pair of Hispanic teenage girls giggling so hard about something they can barely walk. Attitude, and energy, and survival. And each neighborhood has its own slant on that, something that can't be completely annihilated by the Great Franchise Invasion.

“Oh, look,” Nedra says, nudging me as we pass West Side Market. “They've got cherries on sale.”

We both grab plastic bags, assume our positions on either side of the trio of slanted bins stretching across the front of the store. The can shoved underneath the bleacher-like space formed by the raised bins, I begin plucking the best cherries from my side, along with about a hundred other people. I catch my mother watching me, but she averts her eyes when I look up.

Something pings off my head.

I look across the bins at my mother, who is frowning in concentration at the cherries. I think,
hmm,
and resume picking.

Two seconds later,
thunk,
a cherry bounces off my shoulder and back into the bin. My gaze shoots across to my mother, who looks up. “What?” she says.

But her eyes are sparkling like jet.

I wait for my opportunity, then lob a cherry at her. Only
a little old Spanish lady gets in the way and the missile bounces off her forehead. The poor woman looks around, puzzled, then starts gesticulating to her companion, going on in rapid-fire Spanish about what just happened.

My mother and I don't dare look at each other.

We hold it in until the cherries are paid for—we each get about three pounds, which is way more cherries than we'll be able to eat before they rot—and stowed inside the garbage pail for the six block trek back to her building. Giggling, we each grab a handle and start up the block, exploding into howling laughter before we hit 111th Street. People are looking at us. Some smile. Some frown. I do not care.