Gravesend E-Book

William Boyle

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 362

Beschreibung

Shortlisted for CWA John Creasey Debut Dagger 2018 Ray Boy Calabrese is back in Gravesend: some people worship him, some want him dead. . . but none more so than the ex-con himself. Ray Boy Calabrese is released from prison 16 years after his actions led to the death of a young man. The victim's brother, Conway D'Innocenzio, is a 29-year-old Brooklynite wasting away at a local Rite Aid, stuck in the past and still howling for Ray Boy's blood. When the chips are down and the gun is drawn, Conway finds that he doesn't have murder in him. Thus begins a spiral of self-loathing and soul-searching into which he is joined by Alessandra, a failed actress caring for her widowed father, and Eugene, Ray Boy's hellbound nephew.

Leseprobe

GRAVESEND

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Praise for WILLIAM BOYLE and GRAVESEND

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Copyright

GRAVESEND

Ray Boy Calabrese is released from prison 16 years after his actions led to the death of a young man. The victim’s brother, Conway D’Innocenzio, is a 29-year-old Brooklynite wasting away at a local Rite Aid, stuck in the past and still howling for Ray Boy’s blood. When the chips are down and the gun is drawn, Conway finds that he doesn’t have murder in him. Thus begins a spiral of self-loathing and soul-searching into which he is joined by Alessandra, a failed actress caring for her widowed father, and Eugene, Ray Boy’s hellbound nephew. Ray Boy Calabrese is back in Gravesend: some people worship him, some want him dead… but none more so than the ex-con himself.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

William Boyle is from Brooklyn, New York. This, his debut novelGravesend, was published as #1,000 in the Rivages/Noir collection in France, where it was shortlisted for the Prix Polar SNCF 2017 and nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière. Boyle is also the author of a book of short stories,Death Don’t Have No Mercy, and a second novel,Tout est Brisé, released in France by Gallmeister in September 2017. He currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

Books

Gravesend(Broken River Books, US, 2013; Rivages/Noir, France, 2016; Polar Verlag, Germany, 2017; forthcoming from No Exit Press in the UK and Polis in Greece)

Death Don’t Have No Mercy(Broken River Books, 2015; forthcoming from Gallmeister in France)

Tout est Brisé(Gallmeister, France, 2017)

His writing has appeared inMississippi Noir(Akashic Books),The Rumpus,LA Review of Books,Salon,Hobart,Needle: A Magazine of Noir, and other magazines and journals.

Praise for WILLIAM BOYLE andGRAVESEND

‘Gravesendis a taut exploration of the ways we hurt and save (or try to save) one another. With unforgettable characters, a fist for a plot and a deeply evocative setting, Boyle navigates alleys and streets with the best of them, Lehane, Price, and Pelecanos’ –Tom Franklin, author ofPoachers,Hell at the Breech,Smonk,The Tilted WorldandCrooked Letter, Crooked Letter

‘Gravesendis a book that hits you in the guts the same way David Goodis or Charles Willeford’s books do. Boyle’s mining that dark edge of America where no one is safe, not even from themselves. A dark ride but a seriously great ride’ –Willy Vlautin, author ofThe Motel Life,Northline,Lean on Pete,andThe Free

‘Gravesendkicks ass! An irresistible combo of an insider’s tour of Brooklyn and true and authentic 21st Century Noir. Boyle is one to watch’ –Ace Atkins,New York Timesbestselling author ofThe Fallen, The Innocents,andRobert B. Parker’s Kickback

‘William Boyle has written a terrific novel for the new millennium of Noir. A beautiful actress returns to her Brooklyn neighborhood where she finds the dark world she left has gotten worse. Peopled by ex-cons and ex-cops, teenage gangsters and Russian mobsters,Gravesendcreates a claustrophobic intimacy as it moves swiftly to its shocking end. I finished the book grateful for release from its relentless grip, and admiring the guts it took to write such a brutal story’ –Chris Offutt, author ofMy Father, the Pornographer, No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home, Out of the Woods,andThe Good Brother

‘William Boyle’sGravesendis a bruiser and a heartbreaker of a debut. With echoes of Lehane and Pelecanos but with a rhythm and poignancy all its own, it’s a gripping tale of family, revenge, the strains of the past and the losses that never leave us’ –Megan Abbott, author ofYou Will Know Me, The Fever, Dare Me, The End of Everything,andBury Me Deep

‘Boyle understands blood in all its meanings. He’s a dark poet who knows how to draw you close so he can slip the knife into your heart.Gravesendis deeply felt, brutal, tragic, personal and beautiful. You won’t forget it’ –Jack Pendarvis,author ofCigarette Lighter, Movie Stars, Awesome,andYour Body is Changing

‘Gravesendplops you down in the midst of a tragedy waiting to happen, and as the story rumbles toward its shattering conclusion, you’ll find yourself digging in your heels against the terrible inevitability of it all. William Boyle lays bare a seedy corner of Brooklyn and the tortured souls who inhabit it in his debut, and in so doing stakes out his own turf among up-and-coming two-fisted writers’ –Richard Lange,author ofThe Smack, Sweet Nothing, Angel Baby,andThis Wicked World

‘There’s a natural, forthright style here that seems born of this writer’s sense of duty to his characters, these denizens of non-hipster Brooklyn living out the dooms they were born to, nurturing their vices, the hours of their lives plaited masterfully together, their lusts and regrets interlaced. The novel unspools without hurry but also without an extra line, giving neither the desire nor opportunity to look up from it. There’s an exhilaration that accompanies seeing a place and its folks this clearly and fairly, feeling at once that the writer is nowhere to be found and also working tirelessly to show you the right things. Boyle arrives in thorough possession of his seedy yet venerable world, this low-roofed urban hinterland. I can’t remember being more convinced by the people in a novel. Boyle’s characters, each in his or her own way, are accepting the likely future – with violence, with sex, with resignation, with rebellion, by being upbeat. You’ll be grateful, and it won’t take long, to be in this writer’s hands’– John Brandon, author ofFurther Joy, A Million Heavens,andCitrus Country

This book wouldn’t exist without the help, support, and encouragement of the following people: my wife, Katie Farrell Boyle, and our son, Eamon; my mother, Geraldine Chiappetta; J. David Osborne; Alex Shakespeare; and Jimmy Cajoleas.

For my grandparents, Joseph and Rosemary Giannini

When a man knows another man

Is looking for him

He doesn’t hide

– Frank Stanford, ‘Everybody Who is Dead’

You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:

there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.

Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,

you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

– C P Cavafy, ‘The City’

One

It was the middle ofSeptember, and Conway had let McKenna take him out to a firing range in Bay Ridge to show him how to shoot. McKenna had been a cop for six years until he shot someone in the line of duty and they put him out with three-quarters pension.

‘Can’t believe Ray Boy’s out,’ Conway said. ‘Free. Just walking around.’ He held up the gun and fired at the paper target, missing wide.

‘Dude,’ McKenna said, taking out his earplugs, ‘you really should put these on.’ He offered a set of headphones.

‘I’m gonna go what, deaf?’ Conway did feel a light ringing in his ears, but it was like a far-off music.

McKenna said, ‘When you shoot, you gotta have confidence. You got no confidence now. The way you’re letting the gun pull you around, you’re gonna always miss outside.’

‘Ain’t gonna miss I got the gun right in the guy’s gut,’ Conway said.

‘That’s a situation you’re probably not gonna find yourself in.’

The firing range was in a warehouse next to an abandoned textile company and right across from a Russian supper club. From the outside it looked like the kind of place where snuff movies got made. But gun nuts, cops and otherwise, knew about it and came in and fired down brown-lit rows at cardboard cutouts and paper targets. On some targets there were snaps of ballplayers, Mets gone bad, slumping Yanks. Conway had an old newspaper clipping of Ray Boy, and he’d tacked it onto his target. Thing was he hadn’t even hit it yet and it was big, a fold-out page from theDaily News. Ray Boy, all those years ago, freshly collared, on his way into the Sixty-Second Precinct. Wearing sunglasses, the fuck.

McKenna stood next to Conway now and showed him how to grip the gun. ‘You got fish hands, Con. Close up your fingers.’

Conway tightened up his hold and pulled the trigger again. Wide right. ‘Maybe it’s this type of gun.’

‘You don’t know shit about guns. Trust me. Twenty-two’s good for you.’

‘I need a sawed-off shotgun.’

‘That’s for the movies. This is what I got you.’

Conway fired a few more times, hitting the outer rim of the target once but still missing the picture of Ray Boy, and McKenna seemed to be growing frustrated.

‘Maybe I’ll just come with you,’ McKenna said.

‘I’m not taking you away from Marylou,’ Conway said. ‘Things go wrong, I don’t want you near me.’

‘And what about Pop? What happens to him?’

‘Let me worry about that.’

‘Bunker is supposed to call you when?’

‘This afternoon.’

Bunker was a private investigator out of Monticello who McKenna had hooked him up with via some retired cop who’d settled in Forestburgh. McKenna had used another connection, a State Trooper who knew a guy who knew a prison guard at Sing Sing, to find out that Ray Boy had settled somewhere in the general vicinity of Monticello after getting out. Where exactly, they couldn’t pin down, but Bunker claimed to be on it.

McKenna said, ‘You’re going too quick. I understand why. But you’re gonna do this, you should wait. Few days. Few months. A year. Don’t go in underprepared.’

‘Every day he’s out I’ve waited too long,’ Conway said. The truth was that he didn’t want to be prepared. He wanted to be primitive about it.

‘You better keep shooting.’ McKenna turned away. Conway held the gun out and tried to see Ray Boy running away from him. It wouldn’t happen like that, Ray Boy backing down in his crosshairs, but it was what he needed to see if he was going to show McKenna he could place a shot. He fired again. Barely clipped the outer edge of the target. It was a start.

Bunker called at three. Conway was on the bus home to Gravesend, the gun wrapped in towels in a gym bag at his feet.

‘This Ray Boy’s doing well,’ Bunker said. ‘Know you’re not wanting to hear that.’

Conway moved in his seat. Tried to picture Ray Boy living the high life. ‘You mean, what? He’s got money? A girlfriend already?’

‘He’s got this house in Hawk’s Nest. Been in his family for years. Does a shit ton of push-ups. Gets checks from his mother.’

‘Hawk’s Nest?’

‘About twenty minutes from Monticello.’

‘You can take me there?’ Conway said.

Bunker said, ‘Whenever you want. You come up here, I’ll meet you at the racetrack and show you the way.’

‘How long’s the drive from the city?’

‘Three hours, maybe. Little less.’

Conway flipped the phone shut and looked around at the other people on the bus. An old lady with shopping bags. A couple of Our Lady of the Narrows kids clutching bulky knapsacks in their laps and listening to iPods. This guy, Hyun – Conway knew of him but didn’t really know him – who ran numbers for Mr Natale and was sweaty and nervous, holding onto the overhead strap with one hand and gripping a thin stack of papers with the other. And there was the peg-leg homeless lady who rode the B1 and the B64 all day, her wheelchair ornamented with shopping bags. None of them knew he had a gun. None of them knew he was going to get in his car, drive upstate, and kill Ray Boy Calabrese. Probably none of them knew Ray Boy. Or they’d forgotten his face from the papers. The kids weren’t even alive then. A lot got washed away in sixteen years. Conway thought of Duncan’s grave: all those paper poppies from his once-a-week visits. He’d knelt there and made a promise that none of the people on the bus knew about.

Walking back home, Conway watched pigeons on the sidewalk out in front of Johnny Tomasullo’s barber shop. He looked up at a pair of boots hanging from the telephone wires. People didn’t do that much anymore. He remembered throwing his school shoes up there after he was done with junior high. Then he leaned against a parking meter and thought about how he was going to deal with Pop. Kid gloves. Lies.

Pop was at the door to greet him when he came in the front gate. ‘You’ve been where?’ Pop said.

‘Bay Ridge with McKenna. At the gym.’

‘I need you to pick up my prescription.’

‘Not now.’

‘When?’

‘Maybe later. We’ll see. Otherwise I’ll get Stephanie to run it over.’

‘No, no, no. That’s too much trouble. I’ll go get it myself. To put Stephanie out, ridiculous.’

‘Don’t walk up there with your leg, Pop. Stephanie doesn’t mind. She’s my friend. It’s four blocks. She doesn’t mind.’

‘Ridiculous.’

Conway went inside and got his car keys off the hook in the kitchen and a roll of duct tape out of the tool closet. He put the duct tape in the gym bag. Pop followed close behind. ‘I’m busy, Pop,’ Conway said.

‘But you’ll go get it?’ Pop said.

‘Maybe.’

‘I’ll go.’

Conway said, ‘Okay. I’ll go up and get it.’

But he had no intention of going. He left the house and went down the block and found his Civic parked by P.S. 101. He opened his phone and called Stephanie. Asked her to deliver the prescription to his old man. Told her just call first so she didn’t scare him. Ring the bell a few times, he said. Sometimes Pop couldn’t hear it. Stephanie was happy to do it, thrilled to get out from behind the counter. At least that was taken care of. And Pop would have company to distract him, even if only for a few minutes at the door. Stephanie was goofy, she had this frizzy hair like in cartoon strips and an accent nasty with the neighborhood, but she was kind, especially with old timers.

Driving away up Benson Avenue, headed for the Belt, Conway tried not to picture Pop in their sad living room with the dusty cross on the wall and the Sacred Heart Auto League calendars everywhere and the lampshade that was stressed to flimsy. But the picture came anyway: Pop in a ragged recliner, pillows everywhere, reaching out for the channel changer and trying to hear what they were saying on TV. Pop clawing his fingers into a go-to jar of Vicks VapoRub and massaging his neck, the Vicks blobbing up in his neck hair like a wispy chrysalis in a tree. Just waiting for Conway to get home with the scrip.

Now, beginning this very moment, Pop had nothing, had no one. Conway knew he wasn’t coming back. He was at the end of something. Maybe Aunt Nunzia would come around to check on Pop, but she had her own problems. A construction worker son who gambled away her social security. Squirrels in the wall. Her husband’s loans she was still paying off. Pop had squat. The house and his prescriptions. The windows he stared out. The kids around the corner he liked to call the police on. With Conway gone, he might try to stop living. Not off himself. Just give in quietly. Stop breathing with the TV on.

Plumb Beach wasn’t on the way, but Conway backtracked on the Belt. You could only get there by a short lane exit off the eastbound side after Knapp Street.

A parking lot was split in half on either side of the gated entrance. Conway pulled in and parked next to a small Dumpster. It was the same spot they’d found Duncan’s car parked. Conway kept a tally of his visits on the Dumpster. He used a rock or whatever sharp was around to scratch a line. He’d come at least two or three times a week for sixteen years. A whole long section was covered in his deep-etched lines. He leaned over and added one now with a snapped-off bicycle handle he found near his front tire.

He stood and went through his routine. He walked past a huddle of Rent-a-Throne port-a-potties where old Russians came to shit and then curved around the abandoned pavilion, squat and shadowy, stickered with regulations and peeling-off fish decals and a sign that said HORSESHOE CRAB HARVESTING IS NOT PERMITTED. A pair of children’s sneakers hung from the broken-down beach fence in front of him. Seagulls pecked the dirty sand. Empty Corona bottles and Newport packages and condom wrappers rimmed the seaweed-skirted shoreline. He went down to the water and looked out at the Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge in one direction and Kingsborough Community College in the other. Fort Tilden and Jacob Riis were across the bay.

Ray Boy, who had tormented Duncan for being swishy since grade school, called Duncan one afternoon pretending to be a kid he met in the city, saying he wanted to meet out at Plumb Beach and hook up, and Duncan just goddamn went. He’d gotten his license a couple of months before, and he drove to Plumb Beach, parked next to the Dumpster with the lights off, and went down to the shoreline. The scene unspooled on repeat in Conway’s mind: Ray Boy and his crew, Teemo and Andy Tighe, charging Duncan from out of nowhere, pounding and kicking him, Duncan getting up, making a break, realizing he’d dropped his keys somewhere, running past his car, jumping over a guardrail and onto the Belt, dodging lights and cars, knowing that someone would stop to help.

Next Conway walked from the shoreline back to the guardrail beyond his car. He stood up on the rail, balancing himself with his arms out, watching the cars rip by on the Belt. The car that didn’t have the time to get out of Duncan’s way had been doing seventy.

The court called it a hate crime. They also called it manslaughter. Pressure came down from the LGBT Alliance, and Ray Boy, Teemo, and Andy Tighe got sent away for as long as the judge could get away with. Conway called it cold-blooded murder, and he knew that Ray Boy had been the ringleader. Conway was twenty-nine now, working at a goddamn Rite Aid on Eighty-Sixth Street, living with his old man who had never recovered from Duncan’s death and wondering what had happened to his mother who was long gone to alcohol. He wanted Ray Boy’s blood. The fucker deserved to wind up dead in a trunk, buried out in some shithole spot with no fanfare, no marker, just skin and bones rotting back into the earth. He tried not to imagine his brother dead on the Belt all those years ago, a picture that always came back to him. He got down from the guardrail and went to the car.

* * *

The drive up was quick, no traffic, and Conway kept the pedal to the floor. He’d only been outside the city a few times. Long Island for his brother’s grave. Jersey for a cousin’s confirmation. Baltimore for a shitty wedding. Mostly, Staten Island and the Bronx were the ends of the earth. He marveled at the world on the other side of the George Washington Bridge. The Palisades Parkway. Bear Mountain. A traffic circle where he followed signs to Central Valley. Trees everywhere. Leaves turning colors. Cars with their tops down. Then he got on 17. Factory outlets. Strip malls. Exits into towns with names that sounded like what you’d call your dog. Monroe. Chester.

Conway hooked up with Bunker at a Shell across from the Monticello Raceway. He pulled up behind Bunker’s Citation.

Bunker got out, lit a guinea stinker, and came over to Conway’s window. He looked more like a washed-up substitute teacher than a private eye. ‘Conway?’ he said. ‘You want to get a coffee?’

‘Not really,’ Conway said.

‘Ray Boy’s is about fifteen, twenty miles up the road. When we pass the place, it’s on a road called Parsonage, big white house on the left, I’ll put my blinker on one-two-three and then keep driving.’

‘That’s fine.’

‘If you get down to the train tracks and the river, you’ve gone too far. I’m not turning around there. I’m taking a different way back. But at the river, if you get down there by accident, you pull a U and go back up Parsonage.’

‘How much I owe you?’

‘Your buddy took care of it.’

Conway nodded and said nothing.

Bunker headed back to his car and drove away, kicking up gravel on the side of the road. Conway followed him up Route 17B. His phone buzzed in his pocket. He took it out and flipped it open.

‘Where you at?’ McKenna said on the other end.

Conway said, ‘Heading there now.’

‘I should’ve come with.’

‘No.’

‘Listen, dude, I got bad news.The Village Voice, I just found out they did a spread on Ray Boy getting out. Had a thing remembering Duncan. Said the case didn’t get enough attention back in the day.’

‘So?’

‘That’s a lot of eyes on Ray Boy is what I’m saying. I’m gonna reemphasize I think you should wait.’

‘Can’t wait.’

‘They’ll send you up anyway.’

‘I’m not going to jail,’ Conway said.

McKenna said, ‘I’ll have Marylou put out her Mary statue.’

Conway closed the phone. He had this thing with McKenna where he just stopped talking. He’d always liked it, but now it was permanent, like he’d said the last thing he was ever going to say to him.

Could be he killed Ray Boy, got caught, went to jail at Sullivan Correctional. Or he got away with it, made a break for Canada. He had always wanted to see Nova Scotia. But maybe Ray Boy got him, strong-as-shit Ray Boy who could probably crush the gun out of his hand in a second flat, laughing at him for being puny while he did it. Cool-as-shit Ray Boy, grinning like he did on the way into the courtroom the first time Conway saw him after Duncan died, just grinning so no one could see, that grin saying,I killed your fag brother, kid.

The last stretch to Ray Boy’s place was down a broken road with no shoulder. Small houses on the side of the road looked left for dead. Sawhorses blocked driveways. Shattered windows were stapled shut with plastic. Roofs were buckled and crumbling. Conway shut the heat and the radio and focused on Bunker’s left blinker, waiting for the signal.

They made a quick left turn onto Parsonage. Bunker slowed down and flashed his blinker and then kept driving toward the river and the train tracks.

Conway stopped the car and looked up: a white frame house at the end of a long uphill driveway. A dump pile and a burn bin and a couple of abandoned trucks dotted the yard. The mustard-colored shades on all the windows were pulled. The white paint was ribbed with dirt. The front steps sagged. Wet wood was stacked on the porch. Other houses were scattered on the road, but they were not close.

Conway opened the gym bag and took out the duct tape and the .22. He turned the gun over in his lap and looked up at the house again. He tried to see through the walls. Imagined Ray Boy doing pull-ups on a bar tucked into a doorway. Imagined Ray Boy drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup, legs up, watching the news. Imagined Ray Boy’s new prison fierceness, a thousand times harder than before.

Paralyzed wasn’t the word for how he felt, but he couldn’t move. Just like when he was a kid next in line for confession. Those days he’d choke and cough, get pushed into the confessional by Sister Erin or Sister Loretta, and he’d lie to the priest: ‘I had bad thoughts about Alessandra Biagini. I stole a comic from Augie’s. I told my mother I did my homework even though I didn’t so I could watch cartoons.’ Now there was no nun to push him out of the car, but he wished there was.

The front door of the house opened. Ray Boy came out on the porch and turned on a swampy floodlight overhead and lit a cigarette. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. Just boxers.

He was muscled up and had homemade-looking tats on his chest and forearms.

Conway crossed himself and said a prayer. He knew it was wrong to pray about this kind of thing, and maybe he didn’t even believe that prayer did anything. Probably he didn’t. But he’d never stopped going to church, never stopped praying, even if it was only as good as rubbing some bullshit lamp and making wishes. In church, when he was a kid, he’d stare at Duncan, who had these polished brown rosary beads and was always praying decades like a fiend, and he’d be amazed that his brother even believed.

The image of Duncan praying kicked Conway in the heart, and he got out of the car. He charged up the driveway, the gun in front of him and the duct tape in his jacket pocket.

Ray Boy, his eyes all squinty, seemed to notice him, and Conway was surprised that he didn’t bolt or charge, that he just leaned back against the porch rail, blowing smoke.

‘Get down,’ Conway said, approaching the porch behind the gun.

Ray Boy went to his knees. ‘Hey,’ he said.

‘You know who I am, right?’

‘I’ve been hoping you’d show.’ Ray Boy tossed his cigarette over the porch rail and got all the way down, hands locked behind his head.

‘Been thinking about you, too,’ Conway said.

Conway squatted over Ray Boy and jacked him in the back of the head with the butt of the gun to knock him out like they did in movies. It didn’t work. Ray Boy didn’t really even seem fazed by it. Conway told him to stay still and taped his feet and hands and mouth. Ray Boy didn’t move.

Conway pressed the gun against Ray Boy’s back. He still wasn’t struggling. Conway wanted him begging the way that Duncan was no doubt begging that night out at Plumb Beach. That was always what Conway had hated to think about most, Duncan down on all fours like a dog, Ray Boy and his buddies spitting and saying fag-this and fag-that.

Conway peeled the tape away from Ray Boy’s mouth a little and said, ‘Say, “Don’t.” Say, “Please don’t.”’

But Ray Boy said nothing. His lips were against the rotted, peeling porch floor.

Conway noticed one of the tats on Ray Boy’s arm. Duncan’s full name spelled out in shaky green print. Below that, Duncan’s death date.

‘Fuck’s this for?’ Conway said.

Still nothing.

‘What’d my brother say to you that night? He begged you?’ Conway jabbed the gun deeper. ‘Answer me. Fuck did he say?’

Ray Boy said, ‘He went, “Remember third grade. We were friends. Please don’t do this.”’ And started crying.

Two

The whole house smelled likedirty sponges. Alessandra was sitting in the living room with her suitcase at her feet. She had come in on a red-eye from Los Angeles and taken a taxi straight home from the airport. She looked up at her mother’s china cabinet. It hadn’t been dusted in years. A puzzle she’d done with her mother when she was ten or eleven was on a TV tray next to the cabinet. Dust bunnies poked from between the wilting pieces like weeds. Her father came over and sat next to her. He smelled like a dirty sponge, too. ‘I’m happy you’re home,’ he said.

Alessandra put her face in her hands. ‘I’ve been a terrible daughter.’

‘You were a joy to us.’

‘The funeral went okay?’

‘A lot of family. We celebrated her life.’

‘I’m so sorry I wasn’t here.’

‘You’re here now. You want something to drink? Black coffee?’

Alessandra nodded. ‘With Sambuca and a little lemon,’ she said.

Her father went into the kitchen and got the espresso started. Everything he did made him look like he’d been defeated. His clothes were rumpled. He needed a haircut. His glasses were scratched and taped between the lenses. He’d cut himself shaving in five or six different places. It wasn’t working for him, not having his wife around.

Alessandra had gone out to Los Angeles when she was eighteen. She’d wanted to get far away from Brooklyn and she wanted to be an actress, so LA seemed like the place to go. Her parents, especially her mother, didn’t understand. Why leave the neighborhood? Manhattan was right across the bridge, be an actress there. But something about the neighborhood made Alessandra anxious to get away. She was accepted into USC and her parents even fronted her the tuition, but she dropped out at the end of her first semester and tried to get by on commercials. She got work here and there, mostly stuff on the Home Shopping Network, but she started singing in a wedding band to pay the bills. She didn’t have much of a voice, but the guys in the band liked her looks so they let her on board. It’d been almost a decade of scraping by out west and when her mother got sick she thought she’d just finally give up and go home. But she waited, kept doing what she was doing, and her mother got sicker and her father called her five times a day and she just couldn’t face it. Now, almost two months after the cancer had spread to her bones and her mother had died, nothing the doctors at Sloan-Kettering or Columbia could do, Alessandra was back home in Gravesend and things were sadder than she could’ve imagined.

Her father came back out with two espresso cups on saucers. He’d rubbed the rim of hers with lemon the way she liked and left the wedge next to the spoon. She thanked him and then said she’d like to go visit her mother’s grave.

‘We’ll go to Holy Garden whenever you want,’ he said.

‘I’ll just get unpacked and take a quick shower.’ Alessandra sucked on the lemon and then took a sip of espresso. She started thinking about all she needed to do now that she was back. She had shipped most of her stuff and it was supposed to arrive the next day or the day after that. ‘I’m gonna need to find work,’ she said.

‘One thing at a time,’ her father said.

‘And a place.’

‘You’ll stay here. Plenty of room.’

Alessandra got up with her espresso and walked around the room. She looked out the front window. Her father had decided to have the big oak that hung over the driveway cut down and now there was just so much space that she could see in the windows of the house next door. She stared at Jimmy’s Deli on the corner across the avenue, the place where she’d bought quarter waters and ice pops as a kid, and thought of her mother walking her over there and then coming back to work on her tomato plants. ‘We should’ve buried Mom out there in the yard,’ Alessandra said. ‘Where she gardened.’

Her father seemed shocked by what she’d said. ‘This cemetery, it’s a nice place, a proper place,’ he said.

‘We should bury people in places they love. Or scatter their ashes there. Mom loved the yard, she had to. She was out there all the time. With her plants. Or just sitting, listening to the Yankees.’

‘Your mother liked Holy Garden,’ her father said, getting fed up. ‘We chose it together. Rosie DeLuca and Jimmy Licardi are buried there.’ He paused. ‘We don’t bury people in yards here.’

‘I just thought it might’ve been nice.’

After unpacking in her old room, putting her clothes in a closet and drawers that were still full of high school prom dresses and cutoffs and New Kids on the Block T-shirts, Alessandra took a shower. The tub was small and her father had plastered vinyl curtains on all four sides, even around the shower nozzle, to fight against mildew in the grout. It was a very dark and confining space. She remembered taking showers in the morning before school and having to close her eyes because it felt like she was alone in a submerged tank. The darkening of the stall was – and always had been – the project of a man who had failed too often in life and wouldn’t be defeated by mildew to boot.

Alessandra changed into a black dress, something appropriate for the cemetery, and she brushed her hair and put on makeup at her vanity table. Her room was spacious and girly, girlier than she’d remembered it, and it was very unlike the places she’d stayed in Los Angeles. Studios where the bed and refrigerator were side-by-side. Houses that she shared with other actresses and actors, all of whom were astounded by how simply she could live. And she didn’t need much. Some nice clothes and shoes, good makeup in her purse, a trip to a spa every now and then, time on the beach. She’d especially miss the LA beaches. Here, she had Coney and Manhattan Beach not too far away, but it wasn’t the same. New York beaches were too gritty for her. Coney especially. But maybe they’d changed, been cleaned up.

They drove to the cemetery with the oldies station on, Alessandra’s father asking her questions every few minutes. She gave short answers. He wanted to know about her boyfriend, the one that surfed. She said that ended a long time ago. He wanted to know about the weather out there and the traffic. She said warm, everyone drove. He wanted to know about the one big picture she had worked on. She said she’d only been an extra, it wasn’t anything, you couldn’t even see her in the final version. He wanted to know why she hadn’t auditioned for that singing show with the judges. She said she had, four times, and hadn’t made the cut. Weddings were all she was good for.

After that, things got quiet. Alessandra fiddled around in her purse, wished she had a pack of American Spirits. Her father had quit years ago, she knew, but she figured he had a pack stashed somewhere in the car. Everyone who quit had a car stash. ‘You have any cigarettes?’ she said.

He said, ‘You smoke?’

‘Just sometimes.’

‘No good.’

‘I know. So?’

‘Glove compartment.’

She popped open the glove compartment and there was a package of Top rolling tobacco on a stack of old Esso maps and no-good-anymore insurance and registration cards. ‘I can’t roll,’ she said.

‘I rolled a few already. They’re in the bag.’

She opened the package and found a few rolled cigarettes with homemade cardboard filters. A tobacco-flecked matchbook from Benny’s Fish & Beer was also in there. She lit a cigarette and opened the window.

‘You want one?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not now. Your mother wouldn’t approve.’

Alessandra laughed. ‘Serious?’

‘It’s a disrespect.’

‘Ma smoked.’

‘Years ago, when you were just a kid.’

Alessandra blew smoke out the window. She looked beyond passing cars at a squatting strip mall built on what a sign said used to be a landfill. Where were they anyway? She thought they were on the Belt, but it no longer looked familiar. Traffic was heavy in the middle of the day. Cars rocketed around them. Her father was a cautious, slow driver. He was doing the speed limit but it felt like they were going fifteen. All this to stand at a grave and weep. What did it even mean to cry over bones? She wasn’t there when it mattered, when her mother was alive and asking for her, but she’d go through the motions, act like a grieving daughter who had been too busy to make it home for her mother’s last days or even for the funeral.

The cemetery was worse than Alessandra had imagined. Her mother, she knew, wanted to be buried at St John’s in Queens – that’s where her whole family was – but her father had no doubt talked her into going cheap. As far as cemeteries went, St John’s was beautiful. This place, Holy Garden, was a catastrophe of bleakness. Gray prison walls surrounded plots that looked like they’d been hammered out of the earth. Headstones were tacky. Only paper flowers were allowed.

‘Nice place, no?’ her father said. ‘Peaceful.’

‘Jesus, Daddy. Why didn’t you guys just get plots at St John’s?’

‘What?’

‘It’s awful,’ Alessandra said. She went back to the car, got another cigarette out of the glove compartment, lit it, came back to her mother’s grave, and kneeled over it. She picked some pebbles from the dirt and arranged them in a circle on top of her mother’s tombstone.

‘That’s supposed to be what?’ her father said.

‘An offering.’

‘Jesus, Mary, and Saint Joseph.’ He paused. ‘Your mother liked it here. She did.’

‘Her whole family’s at St John’s.’

‘Yeah, well, St John’s costs an arm and a leg. There’s only one spot left in the family plot and her sister Jenny had seniority. So we came out here. Mikey the Goose’s mother and father are buried out here. Rosie and Jimmy. Frankie’s kid, got killed.’

‘Frankie D’Innocenzio’s kid’s here? Duncan?’

‘Poor kid. I don’t remember you knew him.’

‘Of course I did.’ Alessandra stubbed out her cigarette and put the butt in her pocket. ‘I want to visit his grave. You know where it is?’

‘Say goodbye to your mother.’

Alessandra touched the headstone and pretended like she was praying over it. Her father turned his back. ‘We should’ve got flowers,’ he said.

‘Those paper flowers?’

‘They sell them up in the main office.’

Alessandra ignored him. ‘Where’s Duncan?’ she said.

He showed her the way, down a broken brick bath, to a stretch of flat in-the-ground headstones under a collapsing sycamore with roots that were pulling the dirt up around Duncan’s grave. Paper flowers littered the patches of dead grass around the headstone, the kind old VFW guys sold outside of supermarkets on Saturday mornings. The stone said Duncan’s name and the date he died. Below that: BELOVED SON, BELOVED BROTHER. ‘Sixteen years,’ Alessandra said. ‘Christ.’

‘Shame,’ her father said. ‘I mean, I don’t understand the gay thing, but he didn’t deserve this.’

‘That’s a stupid thing to say, Daddy.’

He turned his back again and started to walk back the way they’d come.

Alessandra stared at Duncan’s grave. She remembered not believing it when she heard that he’d died. How it happened was the worst. It’d been a year since she’d been in school with his brother Conway at Most Precious Blood and she just remembered feeling sorry for him. Conway always sat behind her in homeroom because his name came after hers. And she knew Ray Boy, too. He was four years older, and she used to see him around the neighborhood. He had these glassy blue eyes and wore a gray mechanic’s jacket with red stitching and she crushed out on him like the kid she was. Those eyes. She knew he’d picked on Duncan for a long time, a lot of guys did, but he was the worst and back then it didn’t bother her. You were a fruit, you got picked on, that was just the way of it. Now she knew somebody should’ve stepped in. Poor Duncan, always having to avoid guys, making it to senior year and thinking he was in the clear. But Ray Boy wasn’t grown up enough to let it be. He had to get Duncan one last time. She bet Ray Boy grew up pretty fast in jail.

She walked away from the grave and back to the car. Her father was sitting behind the wheel, smoking a cigarette. He had the radio on WABC and was listening to the news. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘You don’t need to be sorry,’ she said.

‘I am,’ he said.

‘Don’t worry, Daddy,’ she said, and she bummed one last cigarette.

Back at the house now, Alessandra and her father ate dinner. Pasta with gravy he’d defrosted that afternoon andbraciolefrom her Aunt Cecilia. She’d forgotten how good it was to eat like this. In LA it had been all hummus and avocados and smoothies, quick and healthy stuff on the run and she didn’t miss it. This gravy tasted silky and sweet with a garlicky bite and the parmesan from Pastosa was unlike anything she could get out west. They shared a bottle of red wine, something dark and bitter and unlabeled from a neighbor’s basement, and she could barely drink it, the taste was so off, but she forced herself because she wanted to be drunk.

After dinner, her father sat down in his recliner and watched the Yankees. She went upstairs and changed clothes and redid her makeup and decided she was going to go out and see who was still around. She thought about Bay Ridge but didn’t want to deal with car service. There weren’t many bars in the neighborhood, not that she could remember. A dive called The Wrong Number with graffiti on the sign. And Ralphie’s, a clammy sports bar full of fat cops and smooth Italian boys stinking of cologne. Those were the options back when. She went downstairs, dolled to the nines, and asked her father if any new places had opened up. He understood her needing a drink out and he said yeah those places were still there and there were a couple of new joints too, a Russian supper club and another sports bar called Murphy’s Irish. Alessandra thought that Russian supper clubs must have been all sweat and vodka and getting hoisted up on men’s shoulders, and she wanted to steer clear of sports bars, so she decided to slum it at The Wrong Number. She wished she had girlfriends from the neighborhood she was still in contact with, someone she could call and coax into hanging out, but part of what had been appealing about going to LA was leaving behind the kids she had grown up with. Anyhow, she was never that close with any of them. She’d had some laughs with the two Melissas, out in Bay Ridge or Canarsie, and she spent a lot of time with Joanne Galbo and Mary DiMaggio in the Kearney days, but that was it. Stephanie Dirello, who used to live right up the block with her family and maybe still did, was the one girl she’d gone to school with for twelve years, at Most Precious Blood and at Kearney, and she used to see her in church every Saturday night, and sometimes they’d do homework together after school on the bus, but they’d never really been close friends, just two girls who lived a few houses apart. But she was nice, Stephanie. Always wore a too-big Mark Messier jersey. Maybe she’d go knock on Stephanie’s door, see if she was still in the neighborhood.