Free Eggplant Alley (9781593731410) by D. Cataneo

You’ll give yourself a heart attack. Salvatore?”
    â€œDon’t get upset? You just said I shouldn’t get upset. Is that what you said? So this is just a nightmare, right? I wanna wake up.”
    Dad rocked from foot to foot. He whispered, begging, “Come on! Wake me up then!”
    Mom slowly reached for Dad’s shoulder. She put her hand on him carefully, as if he might shatter. She called to him, as if talking to a person on a bad phone connection. “SALVATORE? Sal? Sal? Can you hear me? Take it easy. I’m sad Checkers is dead, buthe was an old dog. Count your blessings. Thank God it wasn’t me or the kids. Can you hear me in there? Did you take too much cough syrup again? Pull yourself together.”
    Dad stared blankly at Mom.
    â€œCheckers?”
    Mom made a motion with her head, indicating behind the door. Dad and Nicky looked at the remains of Checkers, stiff on the tile. Nicky gasped. He had never seen a dead creature bigger than a rat. Checkers lay on his side. Checkers was like a rock. Nicky had never seen anything so completely still. The dog’s black nose was tucked under the door. The last movement of his life was one final sniff of hallway air, to see if Roy was coming home.
    Dad said, bewildered, “Not Roy?”
    Mom exploded, “Roy? Whaddya mean, Roy? Bite your tongue. What’s the matter with you? Who said anything about Roy? How could you say that?”
    â€œMalena,” Dad said, suddenly calm. “Take it easy. I need to sit down.”
    Mom and Dad sorted out the mess. They put it all together at the kitchen table. How on this particular afternoon, once again, one thing had led to another.
    Mom had found Checkers dead by the door long after Dad and Nicky left. After a hearty cry in the living room, she faced a dilemma: Checkers’s body blocked the door. There was no way she could bring herself to move him. She didn’t know what kind of horrible things might ensue when you moved a dead dog, and she didn’t want to find out.
    As the hot morning dragged on, Mom grew nervous about the heat. Checkers might start to smell. Then what? She was trapped. Mom considered climbing down the fire escape, but in the end she was more terrified of heights than of bad smells. She considered packing Checkers with ice cubes, but there were only two ice trays in the freezer.
    She called Uncle Dominic at the butcher shop, but he would not close his business to move a dead dog.
    Mom said, “Then who? The superintendent? He took three days to fix a faucet. The cops? They don’t come if you’re getting strangled. The fire department?” Mom kept the fire department in reserve.
    She got the idea to call J&M Variety in Yonkers. She knew Dad’s route. Mom tried J&M and got old lady Ottaviano on the line and filled her in about Checkers. Mom asked her to tell Salvatore Martini, the Yum-E-Cakes guy, to swing by the apartment as soon as possible.
    Old lady Ottaviano needed to leave J&M Variety for a doctor’s appointment. She wrote on a paper bag, “Wife called. Come home right away. Dog is dead.” She ordered the girl who worked the register part-time to pass along the message on the bag.
    â€œYou give this to the Yum-E-Cakes delivery man. You make sure,” she said.
    Dad arrived at J&M Variety, stocked the shelves with Yum-E-Cakes, and wheeled his dolly toward the door. The register girl said, “Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. You’re the Yum-E-Cakes guy, right? I got a message for you.” She handed Dad the paper bag.
    Old lady Ottaviano’s handwriting was poor, and her mastery ofEnglish was shaky. Her pencil was dull. Dad’s worried imagination was sharp. And the word
dog
could easily be scribbled poorly, the letters not closed properly.
Dog
could be scribbled to read very much like the word
Roy
. That was the case here, at least. Dad thought the pencil writing on the brown bag broke the news: “Roy is