“No. I better get home.”
“Spend the night,” she said.
I smiled and gave away still more. “I can’t.”
“You’re sure?”
“I wish I could.” I turned for the sliding glass doors, then stopped and turned back to her. “I’m going to collect on that bet.”
Now she smiled, pensive. “Never,” she said.
I grabbed my jacket off the chair and stepped inside the sliding glass doors. When I turned around, Amy wasn’t chasing after me, like in the movies. She remained at the pool’s edge with a look of regret and both arms wrapped around the bathrobe.
From the speakers came the gentle keys and guitar strings of Springsteen’s “New York City Serenade,” as well as his admonition. Sometimes it’s better if you just walk on. Leave the past behind.
He was right. I wasn’t about to stay to hear the end of that song.
Or see Amy ever again.
So I thought.
As the years passed, I realized what it felt like to be dumped by someone you thought you loved, and I understood better what had happened with Amy that night. Amy’s longtime boyfriend had dumped her, and she was in pain. Her trip to California was no doubt intended as a trip to get away, to have a little fun with her cousin, as she had said. And I’d certainly led her to believe I could provide that fun, for an evening at least.
I didn’t see Amy DeLuca Monday morning when I returned to work, and I didn’t tell William or Todd about what had happened in the pool. When William asked me, I said Jennifer and her parents had been home when I dropped Amy off, and now she was back in New York, going to work.
He didn’t ask any more questions, like whether I’d gotten her phone number. Maybe he knew better. Maybe he knew it was just one night in a lifetime.
Ironically, I did see Amy again. Even more ironic, I was in my third year of law school at the time. I was dating a woman from New York, and we’d gone back east to ski. We went into Manhattan to a comedy show at Catch a Rising Star on First Avenue between East Seventy-Eighth and Seventy-Seventh Streets. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the original club where many famous comedians started their careers. On my first visit to New York, I was in awe of the entire spectacle, the snow falling between the tall buildings, all the cabs, and all the people. The evening had been great, incredible food at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, and comedians who kept me laughing all night. One, Ronnie Shakes, made me laugh so hard he stopped his routine, bought me a drink, and asked me where I would be laughing next. I looked him up thirty years later hoping to take Elizabeth to see this comedian whose bits I could still recite. Turned out Shakes died less than a year after that show. He had a heart attack while jogging. He was just forty years old.
When the comedy show ended, I stood and looked to my right. Sitting at the table were a woman and a man. The woman stared at me with a look of recognition. She was older, early thirties. Her hairstyle had changed, but she had those same electric-blue eyes. Her look was so certain, I was sure she had noticed me much earlier in the evening, maybe when Ronnie Shakes called me out, and perhaps she had been racking her brain until she figured out how she knew me. Maybe she’d remembered that evening also.
When her husband—she had a diamond on her left hand—turned for the door, she hesitated, as if she wanted to say hello, then likely wondered how she would explain me to her husband. She looked uncertain, then lowered her gaze.
“Excuse me,” I said.
She glanced toward the door, to where her husband had been swallowed by the crowd. Then she turned back.
“I’ll make you an offer you can’t resist,” I said.
She smiled, closemouthed but genuine. Her electric-blue eyes sparkled. “Refuse,” she said. “As an Italian, you should know the line is ‘I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse.’”
“I should,” I said.
We both smiled. Then Amy DeLuca stepped into the crowd, glancing back one final time before the mass of people also swallowed her.
“Do you know her?” my girlfriend asked.
“No,” I said. “She was just correcting . . .” I was going to say “a mistake,” but that would have been wrong. “She was just reciting a line from The Godfather.”
PART III
WHEN YOU COMING HOME, SON?
May 1, 1968
Dying is hardest on the living.
Chapter 10
February 17, 2016
Eventually Beau got over their loss on the football field, though he seemed to have some lingering resentment about how their season ended. Serra had lost to a team in the Northern California playoffs, a team they had drubbed earlier in the year. This time, however, they played without Chris. Art Carpenter’s fear had been a premonition. Chris tore his ACL in the second-to-last game of the year when an offensive lineman fell on the side of his leg. Chris had had surgery, and while successful, it had been involved. Doctors were optimistic Chris would be able to rehabilitate to the point of playing again, but that didn’t help Serra.