Carney had considered giving Munson something more to sweeten the deal, but what did he have? Second-story men. Half-assed crooks. What would his father have thought, him feeding shit to the cops? Working on being a full-time rat.
Even if he could explain the delay to Miss Laura, she was not the sympathetic sort. “A ‘hold up’？” she said. She mashed her cigarette into an L in the ashtray beside her. Lit another. “Then what good are you?”
Bottom line, they had a deal and Carney hadn’t delivered. If the windows had been open, the smell of the flowers and her cigarettes would have been less cloying. It’s a telegram, he said to himself. A saying of his mother’s, about nights like this. She only got telegrams when it was bad news, and so his mother called that chilly night at the end of August a telegram, to warn you summer was over. Rip it up and throw it in the trash but you got the message.
Miss Laura pulled her robe tight around her neck.
“You asked me if my aunt is still in town?” she said. “She left our place one day, two months behind on the rent. Didn’t say a word. I didn’t have two nickels to rub together. She didn’t take me to Mam Lacey herself, but she made it so I had no choice but to go to Mam Lacey. That was the start of it. Now we’re here.”
She was working up to an ultimatum. Making moves in this midnight time of the watch, like Carney. He imagined that she’d had her first sleep, too, and was getting her accounts done before she lay down for her second. All over the city there were people like them, a whole mean army of schemers and nocturnal masterminds working their rackets. Thousands and thousands toiling and plotting in their apartments and SROs and twenty-four-hour greasy spoons, waiting for the day when they will bring their plans into the daylight.
Miss Laura rose to show him out. “Time goes by,” she said, “and a girl’s got to wonder if a man like Willie’d like to know that someone’s dogging him. He’s a fucking miser, but surely that’d be worth something. Right? To know that someone is out to get you.”
She called down to him when he put his hand on the door to the street.
“Get it done, Carney. You get it done.”
SIX
Marie gave Carney the message that his aunt expected him at four o’clock. Also told him that she and Aunt Millie had ended up talking and now his aunt was visiting the store next week for a sandwich lunch. “When she said she hadn’t seen the store since you did all this work, I made her promise.” Carney, in turn, hadn’t been to his aunt’s house in a long time. Most of their interaction these days centered around her panicked calls over Freddie. Where is he? Have you seen him? Now she wanted Carney to leave work early, in the middle of preparations for the Labor Day Weekend Savings Bash. What kind of mess was his cousin in now? The last time he’d seen Freddie was in the Big Apple Diner, back in June.
Aunt Millie had lived on 129th since before Carney was born. It was two blocks from where he’d grown up. Back then, the Irving sisters had dinner with the boys most Sundays—their husbands usually who knows where—and usually at Millie’s. Big Mike was unpredictable and rarely happy to come home and find people in his kitchen, family or no.
Carney avoided the block he grew up on. He only found himself there if he was preoccupied with the store, or money, and his homing mechanism misfired. Safer to direct nostalgia for those days toward his cousin’s place on 129th Street. He knew 129th between their house and Lenox Ave by heart and still considered it his kingdom, even if no one paid him tribute. New neighbors were identified by the different curtains and lamps and Jesus paintings visible through the windows, the emergence of an intrepid plant on a sill, a Puerto Rican flag limping on a fire escape. The landlord of number 134 had finally sprung for some new trash cans. He and Freddie had busted up the old ones with firecrackers July 4, 1941. The cousins had never run so fast and never would.
“Look at you,” Aunt Millie said, taking stock in the apartment hallway. She pulled him in and kissed him. “Those little kids rubbing off on you—you look great.” She was one to talk. He did the math—if his mother, Nancy, was born in 1907, and her sister was two years older, Aunt Millie was fifty-six. It clicked when he smelled that cake. This wasn’t about Freddie. It was his mother’s birthday.
“You know the way,” she said, meaning the kitchen. Of course he did. For two years, this had been his home. When his mother died, his father tore off on one of his jaunts, only he didn’t come back after a day or a week. He dropped Carney off here and didn’t resurface for two months. Now that Carney thought about it, he might have been doing some jail time. When he returned, Aunt Millie suggested that Carney stay with them. He didn’t protest.