Free The Greeks of Beaubien Street by Suzanne Jenkins

No one else was injured. The officer at the scene recognized the name and called Nick. Nick came over to tell us. As much as my parents never warmed up to Chris, they were devastated. I remember thinking that I had to keep it together because of Jill, but then I would look at my mother and see that the news had aged her ten years. Pop, too. I couldn’t fall apart because they needed me.”
    “I remember the funeral,” Jill said. Gus looked surprised.
    “You do?” he asked. “I was in a fog.”
    “Gigi kept saying she didn’t know who was going to go to Plymouth now. I said, ‘You can go, Gigi!’ Talk about out of the mouths of babes.” Jill said.
    “She did, too,” Gus said. “Although not every day, she made my father take her every Wednesday. We went every Sunday for years, Jillian and me. We’d take Chris to lunch at Bill Knapp’s.” Gus was afraid to say anymore. The obvious discrepancy in Christopher’s life when compared to the rest of the family was glaring. Why didn’t he just bring his son home as soon as his parents died? As if reading his mind, Jill answered him.
    “Papa, Chris is happy in his group home. He has lived with that same group of men for over twenty years. If you were to have taken him out, he wouldn’t have had the friends here that he has. He’d be alone. It would have been miserable for him. He probably should have been brought home as a baby and then he would have had a life here. Would people really have said so much?” She wondered if IQs were lower back in those days . The thought crossed her mind that her mother might still be alive if the baby Christopher hadn’t been institutionalized. That’s what people did back then when they had a special needs child; at the advice of their physicians, they put them away, Jill thought .
    “My family went every week, still does. At least my dad does,” Andy said. “I know Uncle Nick goes a couple of times a week.”
    Lucky for Chris, when the state home closed he was old enough to live in a group home. He wanted to go with his friends from Plymouth State. Whenever Gus asked him if he would like to come to Detroit for a visit, he always refused. He had never stepped out of the town of Plymouth.
    ~ ~ ~
    Andy left to go home after ten. He knew Dana would be furious with him. He was staying away from home for longer and longer periods, but he couldn’t help himself. It was self-preservation. She was always so angry with him. She had wanted to get pregnant so badly, and was the first to admit afterward that having kids was no bed of roses. Her parents had lived two blocks away and that was why Dana and Andy bought where they did. Then they found land on which to build a house that was more than an hour from Novi, and her support system left town.
    Four of her girlfriends were over on Sunday with their children, playing in the pool he put in because she needed it to survive the boring summer months while he worked. He overheard Dana telling them that she was embarrassed that her husband worked in a Greektown grocery store. He was stunned; he knew she hated the idea of him working far from her, but embarrassed? When he graduated from college, he realized after six months that he hated his job as a CPA. Dana had agreed that if what he wanted to do was to work at the family grocery store in hopes of someday taking it over, it was what he should do. But what she assumed was that he would move it out of the city, or open a branch, or sell it. Not that he would drive into Detroit every, single day of the week and leave her at home with two kids.
    Andy loved the boys. From their birth he got up in the middle of the night for feedings, did the grocery shopping, got someone in to clean, and tried to do everything he could to be helpful to his wife and ease her burden. But it wasn’t enough.
    Gus let him come in at ten so he would miss rush hour and be able to see his family in the morning. So Dana could sleep in, Andy got up with the boys