Despite all this, it didn’t mean the homeowner would be happy. People never were when the cost of a job increased. The wife on this particular job told us to stop work and called her husband, who we assumed called Todd. William and I sat outside in the shade of a large eucalyptus tree waiting for the papal blessing to continue. As per usual, I sat on one of our five-gallon plastic buckets, and William squatted on his haunches, smoking a cigarette.
“Whatever happened to that cute Italian girl in the house next door?” William asked. It was the first time he’d brought up Amy DeLuca in weeks.
“She went home to New York,” I said again.
“Anything happen between the two of you? You looked like you were getting along at pizza that night.”
A part of me wanted to tell William about that night, that Amy and I had returned to the house and the pool, but I knew Amy had just needed to get her mind off her ex-boyfriend, and I’d been a convenient distraction, nothing more. I also didn’t get the sense William was all that interested. He was just making conversation and had something else on his mind.
“Nah,” I said. “She was leaving that Sunday, and she has a boyfriend in Manhattan. She was just looking for something to do because her cousin’s boyfriend was complaining they didn’t get to spend any time alone.”
“Too bad, Vincent. Nice Catholic Italian girl would have made Mama Bianco happy.”
“How do you know she was Catholic?”
“Her family’s Italian and she’s from Queens. She’s Catholic.”
I smiled. “She was too old for me anyway.”
“That’s the best kind. They can teach you.”
I laughed. “I’ll bet.”
William flicked his cigarette ashes.
I decided to ask William a question I had asked earlier that summer. “How come you don’t wear your cross anymore?” I asked. “The one you said your mother gave you.”
William sucked his cigarette. He’d previously said he lost the cross, but I didn’t believe he had. This time, though, he said, “I gave it to a guy who had a use for it. I no longer did.”
“Oh.”
William took a moment, as if debating whether he wanted to say more, and in that moment I realized asking again had been a mistake, that William had lied for a reason. A part of me hoped he wouldn’t tell me what happened, but then he said, “I told you Bean usually walked point?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Except some nights Cruz made Bean take a break and we’d switch off taking the point.”
“Okay.”
“We went out one night and it was my turn to take point, but Tommy, this guy from Minnesota, he asked me to switch because the next day was his birthday and he didn’t want to walk point on his birthday. He said it was bad luck. So I said, ‘Sure.’ What do I care, right?”
“Right.”
“We called Tommy ‘Forecheck’ because he was a big hockey guy. Played in college and the semipros, and he was talking about playing when he got home, said he had a tryout with the Minnesota North Stars. Big mistake.”
“What?”
“Talking about home.”
“Victor Cruz warned you about talking about home,” I said.
William nodded. “Said that was bad luck. Forecheck had this freaky weird accent. He elongated his o’s. Minn-eh-soooota.” William smiled, remembering. He took a drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke into the sky. I could smell the tobacco on the breeze blowing through the eucalyptus leaves. “We used to make fun of him, give him a hard time. He just laughed with us. Said we were the ones with the accents.” William’s eyes seemed to lose focus and he said softly, “Good guy.”
He looked back up at me as if he had forgotten I was there. I was hoping he wouldn’t continue, and I was trying desperately to think of another topic.
“This night that Forecheck asked to switch point, we were humping the same patrol as the night before, and we’d all come back without a scratch. So I was thinking no big deal. I switched with him and I was walking at the back with Victor Cruz. It was so dark I could barely see Cruz, and he was only three meters in front of me.”
William took another deep drag on his cigarette. His hand shook and the shake found its way into his voice. “I heard a sound, a click. We all heard it. Everyone froze because we knew that sound. We knew what was to follow. Cruz and I both dropped where we stood.”
“Was it a mortar?”
“No. An incoming mortar whistles. This was a Bouncing Betty. You know what that is?”