“Get out of here.”
He descended the ramp, stopped on the sidewalk, and turned to me. “Man, I’m glad you’re back.”
“I’m not back yet,” I said, “but I will be.”
I sat on the porch by myself for a while. On the hour, a paneled van turned the corner at the west end of the block and parked behind the tan Ford in front of the Jaruzelski place. The two vehicles were identical. After a minute or two, the first van left. Shift change.
88
Maybe there’s a law of nature that your life can only go down so far before there’s a rebound. I could make a case that when I didn’t die in the bomb blast, when I only lost the use of my legs, that was my personal-best down, and that things started turning around for me—and for my family—when I learned that I would still be able to pee in the same fashion that I had peed all my life, except always from a sitting position henceforth. That Friday, we began to catch some good breaks.
Mom got a call from a booking agent who hadn’t wanted to handle her but now offered her an audition at a place called Diamond Dust, at 4:30 the next afternoon. It was the swankiest nightclub in the city, and she assumed they might want her for two low-traffic nights, maybe Mondays and Tuesdays. The agent said, no, this was for lead singer, five nights a week, working with a fourteen-piece band. The club had changed hands, and they were looking for an even classier image than what they already had.
The agent said, “The way they want to run it is kind of unusual, but I’m sure you can cope. They want to hear ‘Embraceable You,’ ‘A Tisket, A Tasket,’ and ‘Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy.’ ”
That evening at the dinner table, a grim possibility occurred to Mom. She put down her fork and said, “Oh, no. What if this is because of Tilton?”
Grandpa looked up from the delicious chicken lasagna that Mrs. Lorenzo had brought with her in the move. “How could it have anything to do with Tilton?”
Shaking her head, frowning, Mrs. Lorenzo said, “That man.”
“The bombing was a nationwide story,” my mother said. “He’s a fugitive. Maybe I’m worth the job only because I’m the fugitive’s ex-wife. Maybe they expect I’ll bring in a lot of curious idiots who think I’m Bonnie to his Clyde.”
“I hate that movie,” Mrs. Lorenzo said, “except Gene Hackman. He’s going to be somebody.”
“Diamond Dust,” Grandpa said firmly, “isn’t a place that pulls publicity stunts. They’re serious about their music. Anyway, if that was it, then they’d want you only for the low-traffic nights.”
“I guess maybe,” she said, but she sounded doubtful. “How would a place like that even know about me?”
Grandpa threw up his hands as if in exasperation. “They saw you at Slinky’s or somewhere else and realized you far out-classed the venue. Don’t second-guess your guardian angel, girl.”
Saturday she went to the audition, expecting a piano player, but they gave her the entire band, which had come in early. The manager, Johnson Oliver, obviously hands-on in the right way, presented her with arrangements for the three songs they wanted her to sing and gave her plenty of time to look them over in a quiet corner. “Just get the sense of how we approach the music. The boys will adjust to the way you sing.”
She sang, and they adjusted, and she thought she had never been better. By the time she got to “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy,” at least a dozen guys on the kitchen staff came out to listen, and they cheered her when she wound it up, and even the members of the band applauded.
The agent hadn’t mentioned that he would be there, but he was, and after he conferred with Johnson Oliver, he astonished my mother by bringing her an offer, right then, more than she’d ever imagined they would pay.
Her only remaining concern was that the owner might have ideas like those of others whom she’d had to fend off. She asked when she might meet the big boss, and Johnson Oliver, with whom she felt comfortable, said, “Young lady, I’m the new owner and manager—and with you on board, this place is going to be a great investment.”
Saturday night at dinner, Mom regaled us with the story, and I swear we could have put out the four candles on the table and just dined by her glow.
With so many rotten things recently behind us, I was happy for her, happier than I can put into words. If when I went to bed that Saturday night you had told me that I’d be walking in the morning, I might have believed you.
89
Sunday night, twenty-four hours after returning to the city, Fiona Cassidy sat on the edge of her motel bed, picked up the phone on the nightstand, and placed an out-of-state call.
With her long hair cut short and styled funky and dyed blond, with her peaches-and-cream complexion now bronze from hours under a sun lamp and then under the sun itself, she was confident that no one would recognize her as the bomb-maker in the photo that the police had released to the media. Using one of the three sets of false ID that Lucas had given her a month earlier, she’d rented a car and taken a room in a nondescript motel.
When Lucas picked up his phone three hundred miles away, she said, “They’re watching, sure enough.”
“How’s it work?”
She told him about the Ford vans.
90
Monday morning, Grandpa Teddy drove my mother to Woolworth’s to turn in her uniforms. She didn’t need that job anymore.