What would Rose say? Would she be furious? Furious enough to throw him out? Awful to contemplate, because, no matter how it looked to others, Louie deeply loved his wife.
Viewed through different eyes, their marriage might have seemed like one more joyless habit, one more self-imposed diminishment, but to Louie it was something else, a remembered exaltation that he cherished all the more because nothing but his cherishing was keeping it alive. There was a time when they were young and Rose was beautiful, more beautiful, with her full lips and arching eyebrows and terrific shape, than any woman he ever thought would be attracted to his bumbling manner and clownish cheeks and uncontoured arms and shoulders. He loved being out with her, could hardly believe the way she clung to his arm, laughed at his ill-told jokes. Even then he realized in some part of himself that she was drawn to him because she knew his brothers were big shots and imagined he would be a big shot too. It didn't turn out that way, and Rose had made him pay every day for thirty-two years.
But Louie didn't blame her; in fact, he blamed himself. He knew he wouldn't end up like his brothers, he'd known it all along; he should have set her straight. But he didn't. By omission, he'd made himself a fraud for the pleasure of her company, a fake for the flash of her eyes. Even now he didn't want to lose her, because he knew there was nothing to replace the pride he used to feel in being her man, a pride that, on his side, had ripened into stubborn love.
Then there was the store. The plumbing store. An embarrassing secret: Louie kind of liked the place. Other people hated it on his behalf, but he was fond of it—the cool fluorescent lights that buzzed, the perforated metal shelves, the joints and valves in their dusty cardboard boxes stamped with codes and sizes. It was peaceful, and it was the only place he was the boss. He got a kick out of the Dominican kid who worked for him. His name was Eduardo, but he was an American now, you could only call him Eddie. Eddie's eyes looked off in different directions, he wasn't very mechanical, but he was honest and willing, sweet-natured. He leaned on the counter and worked on his English by reading newspaper horoscopes and doing those puzzles where you find words hidden up, down, backward, and diagonal. Louie liked when Eddie asked him what auspicious meant.
Truth was, he liked the whole crumbling East Harlem neighborhood, where what seemed decline to some, was the next poor bastard's promised land. He liked seeing the domino games on the stoops; he liked hearing the women shout down from windows, exactly like old-time Italian mommas back when Italians were the immigrants, the underdogs, the losers waiting for their turn at being winners. His brothers wanted to forget all about that, they couldn't grasp Louie's affection for the marginal. A marginal neighborhood, a marginal store, its remaining clientele a few stooped and white-haired plumbers with arthritis, a smattering of Puerto Rican supers with the enterprise to turn a wrench.
Then there was . . . what? What else did Louie have to lose? He looked up at the slow mesmeric turning of the ceiling fan, sniffed the ripe and complicated air, and concluded there was nothing else. His life's entire wealth consisted of a very so-so marriage and a crummy business on its last legs anyway. Maybe it wasn't much to wager; what mattered, though, was not the size of the bet, but its completeness.
And now that Louie was back in Florida, now that he'd taken the unprecedented and irrevocable veer away from custom and reliability, the thing that he was betting on—that his niece Angelina was in Key West—suddenly seemed a ridiculous long shot, the baseless hunch of a lunatic. Out of all the places she might be? Out of all the things that might have happened to her?
Louie exhaled, let his soft and stumpy body settle deeper into the motel bed. He felt heavy, daunted, slightly suspicious of his sanity. But then he almost giggled. He'd been keeping a secret from himself, and now, between one breath and the next, the secret stood revealed: He had no idea if his niece was here. He hoped she was but he had no idea. He'd come to find her, but finding her fell into that vast gray zone between reason and excuse. Lying there, smelling tropic air, feeling his pores grow lush with the beginnings of candid sweat, he realized that his hunch hadn't been about Angelina. It had been about himself.
He'd been waiting a long time to take that first calamitous or saving veer, to let the steering wheel turn itself for once and put him on a different path, one with a whiff of recklessness.
* * *
Paul Amaro had never learned the tender art of looking to his wife for comfort, and now that he needed her he was clumsy and ungracious, his questions soured into accusations, and the kindness he was asking for was smothered before it could speak.
It was early evening and they were standing in their cold white kitchen. Dinner stood uncooked on the counter. A cadaverous steak; broccoli still pinched in its wire tie. Paul drank bourbon from a big glass, Maria absently sipped at coffee that had long been cold.