Beautiful Dreamers by Minrose Gwin

Author:Minrose Gwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9798885740418
Publisher: Hub City Press
Published: 2024-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

WHEN I GOT TO Mac’s, I didn’t knock, just went right in as if I still lived there. He was in the kitchen stirring a pot of red sauce and singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” at the top of his lungs. When he came to the part about trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored, he stamped his foot for emphasis.

“Oh hell,” he said. “I forgot to bring your bag by. I closed early and ran home to get this sauce ready. It’s Tony’s favorite. He says it reminds him of his mother. The trick’s in the anchovies.”

“Mac,” I began, then began to cough. My childhood asthma had been acting up lately, a giant thumb that sometimes appeared out of nowhere and pressed down on my throat.

“Come over here,” he said and put his spoon down. “Put your head over the pot and breathe.”

I leaned over the pot. Tomatoes, garlic, oregano, basil. Mac had taught me how to make what he called authentic red sauce. Tony, he said, had taught him. The same Tony who was sitting at my kitchen table like he owned the place. The same Tony who was feeding my mother ice cream, then scraping her sweet lips clean. Was the Tony of the authentic red sauce the same Tony who shot the squirrel, who made me shoot the second squirrel, who clutched me to him as I killed an innocent animal? The same Tony who just wanted to please, his hand on Mac’s knee?

Even then, when I was just a girl, I saw Tony not as a man but as a multiplication of men cut out like the paper angels my mother and I made that one Christmas we spent at the El Camino, all visually identical in shape but, in Tony’s case, each different from the other in subtle but invisible ways. A cutout figure, a facade. A function of some impulse we all shared.

“Let’s go down to the water,” I said to Mac.

I had suggested a walk along the shore because it was an activity, something Mac and I could do together while my silence gathered itself. I couldn’t say to him what I thought I should, which was that Tony, and perhaps my mother too, might deceive him, were perhaps already deceiving him and that their game, if it were that, was a sinister thing that would break his heart, not so much through Tony’s betrayal as through my mother’s. She and she alone had been Mac’s home in this world of J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn, clucking Baptists, midnight phone calls, hoods with headache sticks, vigilantes in black sedans. Long before I was born, she had been his respite, his home, the one place where he could breathe easy. How could she betray him?

My thoughts in the moment were actually not that precise, more a sense of inexpressible doom, sensation rather than analysis. I still wasn’t sure what I’d seen in that gesture, the wiping of my mother’s mouth.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.