Free Shamrock Alley by Ronald Damien Malfi Page B

what’s in there already.”
    “You do not,” she said, pushing her mouth against his ear. “You don’t even know what’s in there. What’s in there?”
    He shrugged, smiled. Spread out on the table before him were the telephone records for Francis Deveneau’s cell phone, going back the past three months. He’d gone over the numbers countless times before, circling and re-circling specific numbers, but he’d been unable to finger another thread, unable to find any other lead.
    “They’re ugly and pitted,” Katie said.
    “What are?” He’d hardly heard her.
    “The fixtures.”
    “They’re not pitted.” Were they? He didn’t know.
    “And a skylight,” Katie continued, whispering in his ear. “A big one, right over the toilet.”
    “We’re on the second floor. You’d be looking at the bathroom in the apartment upstairs.”
    “I know. Wouldn’t that be fun?” She kissed his cheek and examined his face. He felt her eyes on him for what seemed like an eternity, as if she were trying to learn something new about him just by forcing her eyes into his skin. Visual osmosis. He thought of her as the Country Girl just then, as she had been once before, now seemingly so long ago: she the Country Girl from a farm upstate, and he the City Boy who fell hopelessly in love with her. He recalled the first time he’d kissed her and could remember wondering what she thought of him even as their lips were pressed together. Did she like him? Did she
love
him? So long ago, it seemed like someone else’s life.
    Finally, dejectedly, she stood, the swell of her belly nearly at his eye level. “I’m going to bed,” she said, examining her fingernails. “I’ve got class tomorrow.”
    “I’ll be in soon.”
    She whispered something in return, but he couldn’t make out what it was.
    After some time, he pushed himself away from the kitchen table and stared at the walls around him. The place was slowly becoming home. It was rare he found the time to consider things besides his job, but when he did—like now—all the thoughts seemed to rush at him at once, bombarding him until his mind was exhausted by the sheer savagery of the onslaught. He thought of his wife and what it would be like to be a father. Then he thought of his
own
father, and of the cancer that was slowly eating him alive.
    There was a small room with an ugly shag carpet at the other end of the hall, mostly crammed with boxes and other displaced items from the move. A sofa was propped up against one wall. An old television set sat on the floor, its screen dusty, with a VCR—a gift from Katie’s parents—on the floor next to it. He moved around some the boxes, considering how comfortable it felt to be out of their old apartment.
    He examined most of the boxes without opening them, tipping them over to see what was written on their sides. Most of them were filled with Katie’s stuff—junk she’d accumulated over time, and more junk accumulated by her parents and passed on to her as if in tradition.
    In the bedroom, Katie’s breathing was soft and on the surface. He peeled off his clothes and slipped into bed beside her. She muttered something beneath her breath, rolled over, her breathing suddenly deeper.
    “You asleep?” he whispered. She was.
    When he finally fell asleep, his dreams were a patchwork of irrational sounds and images: off-key overtures and badly performed one-act plays comprised of unskilled actors and illogical symbolism. Somewhere in all the confusion, he dreamt of his father.
    When the phone rang later that evening, he awoke slick with sweat, his heart trip-hammering in his chest. Sitting up in the darkness, eyes unfocused, he grabbed his cell phone off the nightstand. Beside him, Katie stirred but did not awake.
    “Yeah, hello?”
    “Is this John?” A woman’s voice.
    “Who is this?”
    “It’s Tressa Walker. John?”
    “It’s me.” It took a moment for the sleep to disperse and for reality to take over. “Tressa,