Carney met her parents. They’d had their ideas about young men from broken homes. “What did your father do?” Leland asked, knowing the answer but wanting to hear how he’d put it. Which was, “Odd jobs.” He had to allow that in retrospect, maybe they had a point. After all, he had mobsters chasing him these days.
“Who’s going to finish that up?” Alma asked. The ham, of course, would last for days, that’s what ham was for, but they’d almost taken care of everything else. A few bites of candied sweet potatoes remained.
“I know you like sweet potatoes,” Leland said to Carney. “Right?”
Carney took the bowl and thanked him.
“Didn’t you have a story about them, Carney?” his father-in-law asked. He snuck a look at Alma.
“Sorry?”
“It was a Christmas one. With your father on Christmas morning?”
Carney had, over the years, shared anecdotes about his upbringing. About his mother’s death when he was nine, his father’s disappearances, and how his aunt Millie took him in for a few years. How his father returned, and various hard-knock occasions. Getting bit by rats, deloused by the school nurse, the winters without heat, the time he woke up in Harlem Hospital with pneumonia and had no idea how he got there. He told the stories without self-consciousness; why should he be ashamed to have lived for so long on his own?
It had been hard. Others had it worse.
Over the years, on nights like this around this very table, Carney told them about those times because they were true and a part of him, and now these people were family. Only too late did he realize he was exposing too much of himself, soft places where someone might stick in a piece of steel. His stories were his in-laws’ entertainment, a vaudeville act. Yes, there was the story of the time he woke up one Christmas and he and his father had one mealy sweet potato to share between them, they cut it in half and put it on two plates, and he saw his white breath before him because the heat was out again that frigid morning, and his father took off at noon and didn’t return for a week. Well, maybe the tale possessed a colorful majesty in retrospect, but maybe also he didn’t need to be so free with that part of his life anymore. Mr. and Mrs. Jones smiled slightly and sometimes laughed when he told those stories, and why not, they were funny in a miserable way. Perhaps there was something amusing in his delivery, or so he told himself. It was long ago. These days, what he got out of telling that kind of story—a sense of pride in having survived it—and the delight Leland and Alma received from hearing him tell it were small compared to what he had in his life now. He had Elizabeth and May, and if he got a hankering to enumerate his troubles, he had more pressing ones than a sad Christmas morning years ago.
He declined the invitation. The jester called in sick. He told Leland he didn’t know what he was talking about and said he’d seen a lot of posters for Porgy and Bess on the subway, which sent his in-laws relating, as he knew it would, how one of Leland’s clients got them opening-night tickets for the Broadway revival some years back.
“I’m tired,” Elizabeth said. The home treatment had worked, the patient had revived, but it was getting late. “It’s time we got May in bed.”
For once, the Joneses forwent a comment on his pickup truck. He’d had it painted recently, midnight blue. Leland and Alma waved from the front steps, muttered something to each other that Carney couldn’t catch, and returned to their cool bubble.
It was a quick drive but long enough for him to decide. Two phone calls. The first to one of Chink Montague’s spots to give them Arthur’s name. The second to Arthur to tell him the gangsters were coming. The safecracker would have to leave town—he was sensible. Arthur had time to get the stash from wherever he was hiding it, or not—it didn’t matter to Carney. He didn’t care if Arthur split the take with the crew later on or whatever arrangement they decided; it was not his concern. Dropping a dime would insulate him, and he figured it was his best chance to keep Freddie’s name out of things. He was like Elizabeth—plotting a safe route of travel for his cousin. As he had in the old days, keeping Freddie away from an Aunt Millie hairbrush spanking. He’d sleep on it, work out the kinks, but he suspected that morning would find him resolute.
Freddie was pacing across the street from Carney’s apartment when he pulled up. They were surprised to see him—Carney alarmed, Elizabeth delighted.
“Freddie,” Elizabeth said. “It’s been a while.”