You Don’t Know What’s Good

They had been good girls. They stood by him when he shot and killed a man and went to jail. And the money, god, the money, the long-distance collect calls, the law firm he ended up firing anyway, the beautiful books they had sent: The Collected Works of Chagall; Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra; Aviation: From Our Earliest Attempts at Flight to Tomorrow’s Advanced Designs. He wanted to tell them to come alone. Just the three girls. No grandchildren. Sure, they were his, so of course he loved the grandkids. Well, maybe not all of them. Or at least not equally. One set struck him as precocious. Or maybe it was elitist. He resented the way they talked about SAT scores, museums, cities he had never visited. One set, well, they were just untrained savages. The less said about that group the better. And the set he liked best: they were the ones who had been in his company the most, primarily because their mother was the most pliable, the most accommodating, the most well-married, with the lush bank account to show for it.

Frank, standing at the ironing board, thought about these people, these daughters and their children. Every day, like this one, he ironed his clothes, his thoughts wandering backward and forward. Unless he was doing heavy chores or yard work. He didn’t iron the kind of clothes you wore for cleaning. He wasn’t nuts. Not like Bobby Pusateri, who came back from the war only to shower every day, trim and clean his fingernails, shave, get dressed and then refuse to leave his mother’s fenced-in yard on First Avenue. It was an impeccable yard with a little goldfish pond and a row of mulberry bushes, but still. You’d walk by and say, “Hey, Bobby,” and he’d get up out of the lawn chair and come stand against the gate and talk to you like any other guy, about the neighborhood, about who was going to jail or who was getting married. Mostly though he talked about the Cubs. Bobby loved the Cubs. They all loved the Cubs. Bobby listened to the games on a transistor radio right there, sitting on a lawn chair in his beautiful clothes, in his mother’s front yard. But if you said, “Bobby, you wanna go for a sandwich?” he would back away and say, “Nah, not today. I got stuff to do.”