Free The Bumblebee Flies Anyway by Robert Cormier Page B

you totaled Papa’s Porsche the day after he bought it? Lucky you weren’t killed. And when you came home that day, you brought home some kid you’d met in the emergency room at the hospital. Your buffer. Like your friend here.”
    Mazzo closed his eyes. “God, how I loved to drive,” he said wistfully. “Nothing better, Cassie, than sitting behind the wheel, top down, the motor throbbing, the wind whistling by. The road before me and the car eating it up. The Porsche and the TR6 …”
    “You wrecked the TR6, too,” she said, mock-scolding him.
    They had forgotten Barney now, caught up in each other, and Barney felt out of place, like a spy eavesdropping, listening to secrets.
    “I shouldn’t be dying in bed, Cassie,” Mazzo said. “I should have died before all this happened to me, bombing down the Mass. Pike, ninety miles an hour. And then boom. In a blaze of glory. Not like this.”
    And now he was the Mazzo that Barney knew. Bitter and resentful. But why not? “This rotten place with its stink and crap. And I’m part of the stink and the crap.”
    “Take it easy, Alberto,” she said. “Take it easy.” Moving to his bedside, removing her jacket at the same time. Her movements were thrillingly sexual to Barney, the way sheraised her arms, the fullness of her breasts, the lips wet and slightly parted. He had not been aroused, had not felt a longing for a girl, for such a long time that he couldn’t remember when. Sex was absent from the Complex; no place here for love or lust or desire. Cassie Mazzofono brought it all back, however. The old stirring again, but the stirring mixed with an aching, because a girl had never loved him. He had a dim memory of kissing a girl at a party, but he’d never really held a girl in his arms, never caressed a breast or darted his tongue between parted lips to meet another tongue. In his bed at night, yes. Vivid images conjured up. Playboy centerfolds recalled. But never in reality. Looking at Cassie now, he felt the old aching, along with a new sadness. And wasn’t sure why. But did know, really, although he hated to acknowledge it. The
why
: knowing he could never attract a girl like Cassie Mazzofono. Not a girl like that. He meant nothing to her: why should he? He was only a buffer, a stooge. She’d barely glanced at him. Probably wouldn’t recognize him if she met him in the hallway tomorrow.
    “I suppose Mother sent you here,” Mazzo was saying. “What is it, a plot of some kind?”
    “We’re not in a conspiracy, if that’s what you mean. She told me to tell you that she loves you. But you already know that.”
    “Do I?”
    “Yes. You should. She doesn’t want to interfere in your life. What you’ve got left of your life. She finds it hard to let you go. She finds it hard to accept what’s happening to you. But if you keep giving her the cold shoulder, she’ll find it impossible, Alberto.”
    Alberto. To Barney he’d always been Mazzo, alwayswould be. As if nobody in the world but Cassie had the right to call him Alberto.
    “Don’t try to con me, Cassie. Don’t try to soften me up,” Mazzo said. “It won’t work.”
    Red blotches had appeared on his face, angry blotches, as if the anger in his words was being expressed by his body, the way pictures in a book illustrate the text.
    “Where was she when we needed her?” Mazzo said. “Caught up in her own little world of the country club. What she did to Papa, who wouldn’t hurt a soul on earth. She killed him, Cassie.”
    “He died of a heart attack,” Cassie said.
    “Screw the idea of a heart attack. He died because he was stabbed in the heart. By what she did. Divorcing him like that.”
    Cassie blew air out of the corner of her mouth, patient, as if she were saying words she’d said a thousand times.
    “We can’t be the judges, Alberto,” she said. “We don’t know what it was like for them. Somehow the marriage fell apart. And then Papa died. Nobody can prove there was a connection.