“This?” she asked. He nodded and took a seat across from her on a fat, sturdy ottoman that went with the sofa. Both were well made, but they barely filled a room that to Zochi seemed to need much more, including—desperately—a woman’s touch. Zochi couldn’t have known it, but Halle had felt the same way.
“That’s it,” he said. “It’s everything I took from my uncle’s apartment in Staten Island. I could have taken a lot more, but it was practical to travel light. I was on my way to college, and I had no idea where I’d even spend the summer.”
Zochi gingerly went through the box, finding things she mostly expected: a high-school graduation cap with a little faux-brass “85” hanging from a tassel and plenty of Kodak-era photographs. There were some magazines and newspapers from historic events, such as Reagan’s assassination attempt and the death of John Paul I.
In the photos, Zochi finally beheld Lois DeSantos in life. Death had left her face sunken and scarred, but otherwise it was the same person. In most of them, she had a cigarette in her hand or mouth. One series was taken on Christmas morning, presumably with Joe and his brother, Robbie, climbing over her to get to a present. A later photo revealed it to be an air hockey table. In the photos, Lois was in a housedress, seated beside a fake tree adorned with colored lights.
She had been attractive, Zochi thought, her hair parted ’70s style down the middle, presenting a pleasant angular face. Her eyebrows were faint. Below them, the eyes were alert and intelligent. She looked gloomy and tired. In most of the photos, the smiles seemed forced, never reaching the eyes.
Zochi flipped through a few photos of Uncle Mike, who looked more or less as she expected. He was thin with sad eyes, a high forehead, and a pencil mustache. In a few of the photos he was with another man, or a small group of men, on a beach or at a table in an outdoor restaurant. There was only one photo of him with both boys, taken in a park in cold weather. On the back, someone had scrawled, “Mike, Joe and Robbie, Feb. ’78.” The rest of the photos were of just Joe and Mike; one or two were taken at a beach, and one was taken somewhere in Manhattan.
“These are nice,” Zochi said. “None of your dad, though?”
“Not a one,” Joe said, and Zochi sensed some feeling behind it. “That bothered me for a while. Lois didn’t keep any, though, and Uncle Mike didn’t have any. My father’s been dead a long time.”
“He died when you were a kid?”
“Yeah, I was nine. Robbie and I were born in Staten Island. That was home for my mother and her family going back two generations at least. My father was from Bayonne, but that’s all I knew. We never met any of his family. Around 1970, he got a job in Danbury, Connecticut, and we moved there. He walked out on us when I was eight, so in ’75. A year later, he was driving drunk with his girlfriend in the passenger seat and wrapped his car around a tree. Killed them both.”
“Eesh, I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s some backstory.”
“It’s okay. Neither Robbie nor I took his death very hard. Mostly, the guy was an asshole. I don’t think my mother felt anything when he died, other than the need to get the hell out of Danbury.”
Further down in the box, Zochi came to a thin and faded amateur-looking magazine. On the mustard-yellow cover was a mimeographed drawing of an ashtray with a cigarette in it. A twirling column of smoke curled up to form the title and year: LIT, 1979.
“Oh, dear God,” Joe said as she lifted it. “I haven’t thought about that in years.”
“It’s like a school thing, right?” she said, looking it over. “Like a little publication.”
“Our literary journal, yes,” Joe said, putting a little flourish around the term. “That was from my sixth-grade year. My uncle must have had twenty copies. He sent them to everyone, like a proud parent. I haven’t seen it since it came out.”
“You made the journal,” Zochi said with an admiring little turndown of the lips. “Very nice.”
“It was just a collection of stuff from the kids, some bad drawings and poems. A poem was my contribution.” She thumbed through and found Joe’s poem on page twelve in simple black type.
“For Lois,” by Joey DeSantos, 6th Grade, Mrs. Benedetto’s class There was no illustration accompanying the poem, just five stanzas, all in the same black typeface with old newspaper serifs. Zochi mused for a moment about what her own thirteen-year-old daughter, Lupe, would say about such an effort. Lupe had a passion for design and was already creating professional-looking layouts with no more than an iPad. There was something Zochi liked about the simplicity of the printed words on the page, though. It came through raw and innocent.