Free Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen Page B

and jabbed. You’d take me out to that restaurant on City Island and you’d talk to me, not about anything important, just like you thought I was your friend. You’d tell me about the lady you met who’d been standing naked, all 320 pounds of her, in her kitchen on a hot, hot New York City afternoon when some young guy with burglary tools tried to climb in her window. When you told her to cover up she said, “Well, I figured I shouldn’t be touching nothing at the scene of the crime.” And we’d laugh until the tears ran down our cheeks into our shrimp fra diavolo. Or you’d tell me how you shoved some punk up against the wall, a kid who’d grabbed a television set from the old Jewish man who’d said he’d never move his appliance store from the old neighborhood, and how you’d discovered the punk had enough warrants to really put him away, not like the other times,the times when you finished your paperwork and then cruised by the projects and saw the guy you’d busted just sitting out by the hydrant with a big smile on his face. And I’d look at you, with your dark skin and eyes and heavy brows and big bottom lip, the inside the color of a red grape, and think what I’d thought when Tommy Dolan introduced us at that bar down by the water my first year in nursing school, when I was nineteen, when Tommy said, “You got to meet Frannie Flynn. Everybody likes her.” I’d think that you were the best-looking man I’d ever seen.
    And, maybe seeing that thought in my eyes, seeing yourself in my eyes, so big and strong and sure of himself, that Bobby Benedetto, always a crowd around him at the bar, listening to his stories, buying him drinks—seeing yourself like that in my eyes, you’d take my hand across the table. And you’d even listen to a few of my stories, too. Although that stopped after a while; you gradually stopped listening and I stopped talking the last couple of years, when you were so angry all the time instead of just occasionally. When you’d been passed over for a couple of promotions and there hadn’t been another baby, when you’d wrecked one car and talked your way out of a DWI, given a free ride by the two young cops at the scene after they saw your badge. A thousand small disappointments, a half dozen big ones, and you’d stopped talking about the people trying to keep their sons out of trouble in the projects, the teenage girls taking good care of their babies, and started talking all the time about the spics and the jigs, the people you busted and I patched up. They live like animals, you’d say, and you’d look around our house, with the flowered couches and the flowered drapes and the flowered canisters lined up onthe kitchen counter, flour, sugar, coffee, tea. You always liked things to be so neat, just like at your mother’s. “The baby’s got fingerprints all over this coffee table,” you yelled upstairs one Sunday morning before your friends were coming over for football and lasagna. “You know where to find the Windex,” I yelled back.
    What possessed me? What possessed me, after the guys were gone, to say, “When Jackie Ferrin chews, you can hear him in the next room.”
    “Jackie’s a good man,” you said.
    “He still eats like a pig.”
    “Yeah, God forbid anyone should offend your ears, huh, Fran? Plus he scratches himself sometimes, right? That’s it, let’s take him off the guest list. Jackie Ferrin’s got God knows how many goddamn decorations for bravery, but he scratches his balls and chews with his mouth open.”
    “I’m going to bed,” I’d said. “I’ll do the dishes in the morning.”
    “We’ll have roaches all over the goddamn kitchen. And with the new carpeting we got no money left over for an exterminator.”
    And on, and on, and on, about nothing, until finally he shoved me into the kitchen table so hard I fell and cracked my collarbone. “Jesus Christ, Fran, I was just a little lit,” he said the next day, but it was past the time