Free Bank Robbers by C. Clark Criscuolo

Brian, had left almost an hour ago, but she was still having a fight with them in her head.
    So they were going to move her down to Florida to Fred, Jr., and his wife, a woman she’d met maybe once.
    Pains in the ass.
    Teresa DeNunzio Newhouse leave East Harlem? Leave New York? The city she’d grown up in? The neighborhood she’d grown up in?
    They had to be kidding.
    They wouldn’t be pulling this crap on her if Fred were still alive. No. Fred would straighten them out, fast.
    Fred. She felt her eyes begin to dribble again. What were they in such a rush for? Fred’s body was barely cold and already they wanted to ship her off down to some hellhole with sand and water—to do what? They knew she didn’t like the beach.
    No. Fred would’ve let them have it.
    She felt a tear spill hot down her cheek, and immediately wiped it off.
    Maybe it didn’t matter anymore. Maybe it didn’t matter where she was anymore. She’d had a good long life with Fred. God, she’d loved him. So what did it matter where she lived? It was over.
    Teresa took another sip of coffee, and frowned at the wall.
    Feeling sorry for herself? Over what? Whenever she started feeling sorry for herself she always thought of one person she knew who was worse off …
    Dottie Weist.
    Teresa at least had good things to look back on, not like crazy Dottie Weist, who had nothing and was now running all over New York like a stunadze looking for a gun. Teresa was grateful she wasn’t Dottie.
    Dottie’s marriage had been bad, her health wasn’t so good … And her boy dying in the army, trying to take over some island somewhere, that had been just tragic.
    She remembered Nathan, Jr. He’d looked just like Nathan, same skinny little thing, running all around Joe’s. And he’d been smart, not Nathan-smart, Dottie-smart, always reading all them books.
    From the time he was seven, Teresa hadn’t been able to understand a thing that kid had said, he’d been so smart.
    She remembered his funeral, when they finally got his body back from Grenada.
    She knew then it was going to end badly for Dottie.
    So, she should be grateful. Grateful to have a good marriage to look back on, grateful her kids were alive and well …
    The hell she was! The little bastards were planning on shipping her down to Florida like some suitcase. Leave New York? Where she’d been with Fred her whole life?
    Naw. That wasn’t right. And she’d be damned if she’d have a mess of kids she’d diapered, and whose noses she’d wiped, order her around. No. This they could not do.
    She felt her heart sink as she thought of the showdown—she didn’t care that they were calling it a meeting, it was a showdown—with all her children next Wednesday.
    Because the truth was that they paid her rent and they paid for the electric and the gas and the phone, and had ever since Fred had gotten sick last year and all their savings had gone to the hospital before Medicaid would pick any of it up. And the fact was that if they decided to move her down to Florida, then that was it.
    She had to think of something, fast. Otherwise she was going to be some permanent guest living in another woman’s house and having no control over her own life.
    The image of Dottie Weist sitting up in her kitchen the previous afternoon came into her head. She gave a wry chuckle into her coffee cup.
    Now that would call off the kids. Holding up a bank, she thought, amused. She could see the look on Tracy’s face at having to go and bail her mother out. Hell, smoking cigarettes would look like a deal if it was either that or bank robbery.
    Teresa gave a little chuckle and felt the corners of her mouth droop.
    Naw, she wasn’t that desperate or lonely.
    â€œMrs. Newhouse?” The nurse behind the desk motioned to Teresa and she got up.
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œThe doctor wants a sonogram of your breast