CHAPTER ONE
“Isn’t this perfect?” my best friend, Rose Galigani, said. Her newly applied auburn highlights caught the light from the faux Tiffany lamp as she swung her head from me to her daughter, and back.
Girls’ Night Out at Tomasso’s Restaurant and Coffee Annex on Squire Road in North Revere. A fall evening, a few months after I’d moved out of my apartment in the Galigani Mortuary building and into the house owned by police detective Matt Gennaro, my second boyfriend since the Kennedy Administration.
Rose smiled broadly. “First you come back from California, Gloria, and then MC comes home from Texas. Our own little city is like Capistrano. The sparrows always come back to it.”
“Swallows, Mom. It’s the swallows that come back to Capistrano.” MC orchestrated the melody with her hands. “When the swallows come back to Capistrano, da da da da da dee,” she sang. Softly, but still, Rose or I would never have done such a thing in a public place, even at MC’s age. Generation Thirty-Something-Years-Old was a more self-confident lot.
My godchild Mary Catherine Galigani, MC to her friends, had returned to the nest after several years in Houston, first as a field chemical engineer for an oil company, and then making a career change to their carbon research facility. I went from huge hydrocarbons of petroleum to tiny diamondoids, she’d said in a letter to me. Imagine roasting petroleum at almost a thousand degrees and getting miniature diamonds for your trouble. I was eager to have MC to myself to hear more of the research—and why she’d left it to come back home.
She, her mother, and I sat in a red vinyl booth that smelled of oregano from meals past, sharing our thoughts and our innermost secrets. The one I wanted both of them to reveal was how the mother (size six) and the daughter (size four) managed to eat pizza regularly and still look the way they did. They even each had a beer, while I (size undisclosed) nursed a calorie-free espresso.
“I meant swallows,” Rose said. “And how many times do I have to tell you about the Mom part?”
MC laughed. Her short, dark hair fell artfully in front of her face. “Oh, right. Maaaaaa.”
Rose gave her daughter a playful nudge. “Don’t make fun of your old ma.”
MC was a much quicker little swallow than I was. It had taken me thirty years to return to my hometown. I’d fled across the country to Berkeley, California, after my fiancé died in a car crash a few months before our wedding. Not until three decades later had I been ready to move on with my life. Or, to come back and face it, was Rose’s diagnosis.
Her playful demeanor aside, MC seemed distracted this evening, as if there were more on her mind than our light conversation. While Rose and I covered topics that took in her whole family, MC’s gaze wandered to Tomasso’s old, cracked, wooden door, then to the tiny dark-glass windows, then to the long weathered bar along the side wall as if she were expecting another guest. I wondered if she missed Texas. Or maybe a particular Texan.
Rose didn’t seem to notice MC’s preoccupation, and engaged me in a long agenda—how her husband, Frank, would respond to the new mortuary chain that was moving into the North Shore, threatening to buy up all the independents (in unprintable language, Rose predicted); whether MC’s older brother John, a journalist, would ever settle down (maybe not until his fifties, like me, I suggested); whether the Galiganis’ only grandchild should go to Revere High School or to the new Catholic school (RHS had been good enough for us, Rose and I agreed).
My issues were slight, having to do with redecorating Matt Gennaro’s house, and keeping up with my volunteer work in science education. I was on a deadline to come up with a hot technology topic for the second half of the term for the Revere High Science Club. Call Daniel Endicott, the new science teacher, I reminded myself silently.
“Did you say redecorate?” I heard Rose ask with great enthusiasm when I tuned back in to her. This was her field. She knew I preferred computer stores to any other, the latest software to a new couch or lamp. “You know I’ll be happy to go furniture shopping with you.”
“How about choosing the furniture instead of me?”
MC picked at her pizza crust, nibbling at a burnt piece. Rose played with her slice, pushing mushrooms around with her fork—the Tomasso waitresses all knew that they should bring Rose a full set of silverware, even if she ordered finger-food. Maybe I was witnessing the Galigani women’s secret. Small bites, with long waits in between. I was more inclined to immediately bite off a sector with a two-inch radius.
“Any plans yet, MC?” I asked.
She shook her head, seeming to return from some distant land, perhaps the Southwest. “I’m just glad to be out of Houston. I got tired of the weather, and … other things.”