The Blessings (16 page)

“Where am I?” Mother says.

Margie turns. Mother is smiling, but the smile looks faint, disconnected, not so different from Stephen's.

“What do you mean, Mother?” Ann says. “You're at home.”

“Home?”

“You fell.”

She frowns. “I did?”

Margie and Ann exchange a quick, nervous look.

“Mom?” Patrick is still standing, studying her. “Does your left arm hurt?”

“My arm?” She glances down. “It does hurt a little, now that you say it.”

Margie sees now that the arm is slightly crooked, held at an odd angle. She looks again at Ann, a jolt of alarm passing between them, and Margie wonders if it was shock that kept Mother from feeling it before or something else, something worse—a head injury, a stroke.

“Dammit,” Patrick says, already moving to the candy table, picking up the phone.

“Where's Stevie?” Mother is saying, blinking. “Is Stevie here?”

“He's here, Mother,” Margie says quickly. “He's right here.” She looks at her son, who's rocking slightly from foot to foot as Patrick speaks firmly into the phone beside him: “She fell in her apartment. Eyes responsive, pulse normal, but possible head injury and broken bone—”

Ann sits down beside Mother, taking her hand, as Patrick spells out the address. “We're going to take care of you,” Ann is saying as Mother asks again, “Has Stevie had enough to eat?”

But Stephen isn't paying any attention. He's still eating M&M's from the dish next to the phone, tossing them in his mouth like peanuts from a bowl on a bar. In the light of all these lamps, Margie can see a long brown spill down the front of his shirt. He is still swaying. His eyes are only half-open. The stink of him is unavoidable—not the smell of a few cheap beers at the corner bar, but something deeper, heavy, sweaty, as if it's seeping from his pores.

Patrick hangs up the phone, runs a palm over his hair. Then he walks into the kitchen, fills a glass of water at the tap, and wordlessly carries it back to Stephen. Margie watches as Stephen drinks it down, spilling a little on his shirt. He raises his chin—
thanks, man
—as if his uncle is just anyone, some random guy at the bar. It's the moment that breaks her: seeing her son in this light, as they wait for help to arrive.

Stephen is immediately asleep in the backseat. It's five thirty in the morning, dawn seeping into the cold October sky. Ann and Patrick followed the ambulance to Holy Redeemer. Margie will leave Joe and Stephen at home, then join them there. She urges Joe to drive quickly, more quickly. The streets are abandoned, the parking lots empty. In the backseat, Stephen is snoring. Drunk snoring, deep and ragged.

“She might not be able to live there anymore,” Margie says.

Joe says nothing, just breathing, a faint wheeze from the depths of his chest. The world is quiet save for the sounds of her husband breathing, her son sleeping in the backseat.

“If something's broken, she won't be able to live on her own.”

“Where will she go?”

Margie hears the real question underneath:
She won't live with us, will she?

“I don't know,” she says stiffly, looking out the window. “One of those places, probably. A home.”

She watches the familiar streets pass by. The Rite Aid, the Wawa. The high school with the white-lettered sign:
Ninth Grade Dance!
She smells the dank alcohol rising from the backseat. The sound of sleeping rises with it, heavy, cut off from the world.

“Joe,” Margie says. “We need to do something.”

“Just wait and hear what the doctors say.”

“No,” she says. “I mean, about Stephen.”

Joe is staring straight ahead, both hands on the wheel. It's the same way he sat in his father's car almost thirty years before, except now he is a different man, an older man. Flesh dimples the backs of his hands.

“You saw him,” Margie says. “He's not going to get his life together if we—we can't keep taking care of him.” She blinks back tears. “He needs to move out.”

Joe stops for a red light, adjusts the defroster. She wants to slap his hand. “Joe,” she says.

“I heard you.”

“Well?”

He rubs his cheek hard. “I mean, where would he go?”

Margie shakes her head, teeth clenched so hard that her jaw hurts. It would have been too much, she thinks, to expect him to help her. To support her. After all this time.

“That's up to him,” she says. “He has to figure that out on his own. He's an adult. That's what people do. They figure things out—”

Joe chuckles, and Margie thinks—
how dare he.

“What?” she says.

“You can't just expect him to pull it together overnight, Marge.”

“I know that,” she says. “Do you think I don't know that?” She steels herself and says, “We give him thirty days.”

It's what Dr. Phil would say. But her husband is unimpressed. “And then what?”

Margie feels a scream gathering, pressure building in her lungs. “It would help if you believed in him,” she says tightly. “Just a little bit. You never have.”

The light changes and Joe starts driving again, slowly. Past the Color Tile, the Wendy's, the deserted strip mall where the old Pet World used to be. Finally Joe says, “I'm just being realistic. What would he do for money?”

“He'll make money.”

“Where?”

“A job.”

“What job?”

“He'll get a job. Any job. And he'll keep it, because he has to. And he'll make money. That's what people do—”

“Who are these people you keep talking about?”

“People,” she says. “Other people.”

People who live their lives right
, Margie thinks. Who do things the way you're supposed to. Who work hard and don't cheat and steal and cut corners. Winners. People like her father, like her brothers.
Roughed the place up a little
—the line returns to her like a blast of air to her lungs.

“You're the reason he's like this,” Margie says in a whisper. “It should come from you.”

Joe stops for another red light, his soft hands still gripping the wheel. On their right is the rec center—the overgrown baseball diamond, the hill where the boys used to drag their trash can lids to go sledding. Beyond it, the basketball court where Joey played pickup games, the field strewn with cigarettes and beer cans. The trees are nearly bare.

Joe clears his throat. “It isn't that simple, Margie,” he says. When she turns to him, his face looks damp, distorted in the traffic light's glow. A lumpy vein bulges on his brow, like a molehill bursting through the earth. “He's in over his head,” Joe says.

“I know that,” Margie says. “Isn't that what I've been telling you?”

“No,” he says. “Something else.” He pauses, and Margie is stopped by the gravity of the pause, by the look on his face. “He made a few bad bets.”

“What?” she says, as a quiet fear awakens in her gut. “What bets?”

“Through my guy,” Joe says. “But I'm taking care of it. I just have to win the next few.”

Blood pounds thickly in her ears as she tries to absorb what he's saying. “Football, Joe? He's betting on football?”

“Yeah.” Joe wipes one finger across his upper lip, returns his hand to the wheel. “And a few poker games,” he says. “Just a few.”

Margie reaches for her cross. She doesn't want to imagine these poker games, which seem more sinister, dangerous somehow, than betting on football—strangers meeting in dark, seedy rooms. “How much?”

Joe clears his throat again. “It could be worse,” he says.

“Oh, my God, Joe—what?”

“Five.”

“Thousand?”

“It'll be okay,” he says. “I told you. I'm figuring it out.”

Margie pushes the point of her cross into her thumb until it hurts. Was this where Stephen disappeared to at night? Why he'd become even less motivated to find a job?
My guy
—panic spreads through her veins.

“This guy is—what, Joe? A bookie?” She looks at him, hoping he'll find the word amusing, an attempt at tough talk, but Joe just nods. She turns back to the rec center, the barren slope of the hill, her jaw tightening, eyes pooling with tears. “Is he threatening him? Threatening us? Isn't that what these people do?”

“I'm taking care of it,” Joe says again. “This guy…you know. We go back.”

The blood in her ears makes her feel as if she's underwater. Something has crawled out on the seat between them, ugly and stark. That her husband has a bookie, that he let their son get mixed up with him—and all of this went on without her knowing. It could be dangerous for Stephen—for all of them. Their son, in danger. Like the plot of a movie except it's real. Looking at Joe's profile, the vein branching across his brow, his eyes blinking back tears, she feels terrified and angry and also, oddly, heartbroken—her husband trying, in his way, to protect him, too.

Margie glances in the side-view mirror, to make sure Stephen is still sleeping. The snoring has grown quieter. His cheek is pressed to the window, his mouth gapes slightly. When she speaks again, she is surprised by the steadiness of her voice.

“Joe,” she says. “Where is it?”

Joe goes so quiet then, she wonders if he's still breathing. For once, the whistling noise in his chest has stopped.

“Joe?”

“Yeah,” he says, but a whisper. The air feels as if it could splinter into pieces.

“Did you hear what I said?”

He doesn't answer, but his hands are tight on the wheel, his knuckles white. Then he says, “You really want to know?”

Margie's eyes flood with tears—so it's true. After all these years, she didn't dream it. She wasn't crazy. It's been there all along. She feels vindicated and devastated at the same time.

“Do you?” Joe asks, and Margie knows he wants to tell her, to share the burden, but after all this time, she doesn't want to know.

She says only, “You didn't get it?”

Joe looks at her in surprise. “I didn't think you'd want me to.”

The street swims up before her. The pad of her thumb is throbbing.
Hail Mary, full of grace.
Then the light turns, a watery splash of green, but the car doesn't move. Margie thinks of the old, innocent promise made in the car all those years ago. She thinks of her father—
five of them make a nickel
—and a sob escapes her chest.

“Get it,” she says. “Just get it. Can you just please do that, please?”

Joe lets out a sound, like a whimper. Margie presses a hand over her mouth as the tears leak onto her lips.

“Mom?” Stephen says, rousing from his stupor and leaning forward. “What's wrong?” She feels his warm, worried breath on her neck. “Why are we just sitting here?”

At eight thirty, the call comes. Minor head injury, Ann says. Her arm is fractured in two places. Margie nods, taking this in. They talk briefly about what the next steps are. She won't be able to live at St. Mary's any longer. They'll research other places, get her on a list, and until a spot opens she can stay with Lauren, who has an extra bedroom—John's old office—and a bathroom on the first floor.

Margie hangs up and stands there, hand resting on the receiver, letting this new reality sink in. It will be difficult, complicated; it will require a lot from all of them. At the same time, she feels a determined stirring: to be on the cusp of a crisis, to rise to it, as a family. It's almost energizing, the thought of all that will need to be done.

First, she'll stop by St. Mary's to pick up some of Mother's things. Clothes and toiletries. Rosary, three kinds of pills.

For Lauren's, she'll make food. Chicken cacciatore, Mother's potato soup. The macaroni-and-cheese casserole that Max likes.

At nine, she showers and gets dressed.

At nine thirty, she stands outside Stephen's door. She knocks softly, then goes inside. His basement room is so dark that it could be night out, the windows draped with plaid flannel sheets. The old fish tank sits on the floor, empty, ringed with scum. There's a dirty baseball inside it, a magazine. Margie sits on the edge of the bed. “What?” Stephen stirs, his voice thick with sleep. Margie looks at her son's heavy face. “Stephen. I have to tell you something.” And then she says what needs to be said. “By the end of the month,” she tells him. Her voice is calm and steady. Thirty days. He needs to find a place. “Dad and I are going to take care of your problem,” she says, and his face stiffens, eyes fixed on the ceiling. “But after that, you're on your own.” Still he doesn't look at her, his face blank. “I love you,” she says, her voice catching. “You have no idea how much.”

At nine forty-five, Margie picks up her purse, her coat and keys. Joe is sitting on the couch—
I think it would be better coming from you
, he'd said this morning. She passes by him without a word. Outside it is cool and foggy, a skein of gray smog draped over Northeast Philadelphia. She drives to Holy Redeemer, the same hospital where they went to visit John all those terrible days and nights. In the hospital bed, her mother looks tiny, outlined beneath a thin blue sheet. “Margie?” she says. “Margie, when am I going home?” Margie neatens her mother's hair, speaks to the nurse. They're keeping her overnight for observation. Kate appears in a perfumed flurry, juggling Hayley and Tate, and Mother brightens at the baby. Lauren and her children arrive, Max with his swimmer's crew cut and Elena with her dyed black hair. Margie thanks Lauren—“It will be very temporary,” she assures her—but Lauren just says, “It's the least I can do.”

At four o'clock, Margie kisses her mother's forehead, tells her she'll be back in the morning. There are things she needs to do. She stops by St. Mary's and packs up the essentials. Goes to the ShopRite to get the ingredients for the casseroles, the soup. Just after six o'clock, she pulls into the church.