The Carbon Murder(2)

MC told this to us, and, inadvertently, to our waitress, who wore a Tomasso’s uniform shirt the color of old marinara sauce. She smiled down on MC, her blond/black beehive hairdo at a precarious angle. Her look said one of two things: You’re home now and we’ll take care of you, or If I could get out of Revere, I’d never come back. I couldn’t decide which. Either way, she deserved a big tip.

Tomasso’s had not adopted the practice, so common in California, of supplying name tags for employees, so I named our waitress myself. In my mind I called her Josephine, my mother’s name. Josephine Lamerino had never left Revere, either.

Tomasso’s was one of Revere’s tourist attractions. Visitors who came for the beach and the famous Revere Beach Boulevard also heard about Billy Tomasso the Fourth, who made the best pizza outside of Boston’s North End. Old-timers could remember when the restaurant was even better—years ago, when half the facility was devoted to baking Italian bread. Few could pass without succumbing to the fresh yeasty smell and picking up a crusty loaf for supper.

Now half of the building had been turned into a trendy coffee bar—Tomasso’s Coffee Annex—serving breakfast pastries in the morning, and Italian desserts the rest of the day. Tiramisu, cannoli, pasticciotti, pignoli, rum cake. I would gladly call any of the selections dinner.

On this Tuesday evening, a group of four middle-aged women in various Hawaiian prints posed with a waitress in front of Tomasso’s famous coffee vat while a busboy took their photograph. On weekend nights patrons lined up for this shot. The vat, at the far end of the coffee bar, was enormous. A large gold eagle perched at the top of the center section. Highly polished, coppery gold, in three sections, it looked at once like a medieval religious triptych and a futuristic rocket launcher.

Billy kept a bulletin board behind the vat and posted photos, some of famous visitors, like former Boston mayors Curley and Tobin and even a Kennedy or two. Mixed in were postcards from patrons who sent messages to Billy when they returned to their homes in Indiana or Kansas.

Although the vat hadn’t been used in my lifetime, I could imagine rich, dark liquid dripping from its elaborate valves.

“An oil refinery,” Rose said, as if she’d had the same image as me, except with oil instead of coffee pouring out of the shiny spouts. She wrinkled her nose, and I realized she was still trying to come to terms with an unlikely combination—her lovely, only daughter working as a chemical engineer, surrounded by hard hats and enormous drilling rigs.

A few years ago Rose had toured an oil refinery, humoring MC in her daughter’s attempt to share her work world. In her more recent research career MC had been involved in very clean laboratory work, experimenting with the newly discovered diamond fragments that lurked inside crude oil, and she’d also taught a chemistry class at Houston Poly. But Rose hadn’t made the adjustment. Besides, to Rose, one science or engineering field was the same as another.

“You should have seen those steel pipes,” Rose had said to me. “Miles of them.”

“I have seen them,” I said.

“Oh, yes. I forgot it’s your fault MC is a scientist in the first place.” Rose’s happy grin always took the edge off comments like that.

I liked to think Rose was right, that MC had been influenced by me, her godmother, now-retired physicist Gloria Lamerino, who’d made MC a tiny white lab coat when she was four years old.

“How did you manage, Aunt G?” MC asked, bringing me to the present, where MC was no longer a toddler. “Working in that huge organization for so many years—there were eight thousand people at the Berkeley lab, right?”

“I only worked with six of them.”

Rose and MC laughed, but I knew what MC meant. I had to admit that I’d liked getting lost in an army of coworkers, the better to keep my private thoughts and feelings to myself. I thought of other advantages also, however, ones I could share with Rose and MC, and I recited them. “There’s a lot to be said for a big organization. You can move around, work on different projects, and still have the same employer, with all your benefits and a permanent office and phone number. And in my day, scientists at the big labs didn’t have to worry about bringing in their own funding. We all wrote grant proposals, of course, but even if nothing came through, you knew you could keep working.”

“Our tax dollars at work,” Rose said.

MC nodded. “Good points. But I think I’m headed for ‘small’ next time.”

Rose finally scooped a forkful of mushrooms from the top of her pizza and ate it. “MC thinks she might want to teach full-time, but those scientists at the Charger Street lab are after her already.”