When I let myself into the apartment and closed the door and engaged both deadbolts, I’d been gone no more than ten minutes. Mrs. Lorenzo still sat at the kitchen table with my mother, and she still wept, though the wrenching sobs had passed for now. Neither of them knew that I’d gone out.
At one of the living-room windows, I peered down at the swarming street as light bloomed in the frosted glass of the lamps, and they seemed to float like aligned and miniature moons in the early dark. Every pedestrian interested me, every driver of every vehicle, and though none of them proved to be my father, I didn’t grow bored with sentry duty. If he had come back once, he would come back again, as though a bad-juju penny rattled within the hollow space inside him, a penny with two heads and both of them my face, by its every clink and spin reminding him of me and of how my mother would be devastated if she lost me.
After a while, my mom came to me and put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Are you all right, Jonah?”
That didn’t seem to be the best time to tell her about Tilton. Mrs. Lorenzo needed her.
“Yeah, I’m okay. It’s awful, though. How’s Mrs. Lorenzo?”
“Not good. Tony was an immigrant. He has no family in America. Donata’s father died when she was young, and she has no brothers or sisters, and I gather her mother’s … well, difficult. There’s nowhere she can go but back to their apartment, and she can’t face that right now. Maybe tomorrow. I’ve asked her to stay the night with us. She can have your bed, and you can sleep in mine.”
I looked out at the street and then at the sofa, to which I pointed. “Can I sleep there?”
“The bed would be more comfortable.”
“Well, sleeping with your parents, a parent, whatever, it’s for scared little kids, it’s little-kid stuff.”
“When did it become little-kid stuff?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. A while ago, weeks ago maybe. I mean, I’m nine.”
Sometimes it seemed that she could look right into my head and read my thoughts, as if my forehead were glass and my brain a neatly printed scroll. “Are you sure you’re all right, sweetie?”
She never lied to me, but I didn’t always measure up to her when it came to truth-telling, although this wasn’t lying, not really. I intended just to withhold the truth from her for a few hours, until Mrs. Lorenzo gathered the courage to go downstairs to her apartment in the morning.
“See, the sofa is … cool. Not kid stuff.” I sounded so lame, and I could feel the blush burning in my cheeks, but one of the benefits of dark skin is that a blush can’t give you away even to your perhaps psychically gifted mother. “The sofa is like an adventure. You know? The sofa is righteous.”
“All right, Mr. Jonah Kirk. You may sleep on the sofa, and I’ll lie awake all night worrying about how soon you’ll want to drive a car and date grown women and go away to war.”
I hugged her. “I’m never going away anywhere.”
“You go strip your bed and put on clean sheets for Donata. I’ve got to dash downstairs and get her pajamas and some other things she needs. She just falls to pieces at the thought of going back there even if I’m with her.”
Here at the front of the building, they hadn’t heard the ruckus in the alleyway, Tilton kicking the Dumpster and cursing.
“You shouldn’t go there alone.” When she gave me an odd look, I said, “I mean, not this late.”
“Late? It’s twenty past nine and it’s just downstairs. If this was a work night, sweetie, I’d be coming home alone hours later, just me with a pretend gun in my purse.”
“Well, but Mr. Lorenzo died down there.”
Although we were speaking softly, she glanced toward the kitchen and lowered her voice further. “He didn’t die of disease or anything, Jonah. And in this family, we believe there’s only one ghost this side of Heaven, and it’s the holy one.”
Having committed myself to withholding the news of my father’s return until Mrs. Lorenzo was able to go home, I felt that the manly thing would be to stay the course and not complicate the situation by dumping my fears onto my mom when she still had to help Mrs. Lorenzo get through the shock of being widowed. It made sense at the time. A great many things make sense when you’re nine years old that appear senseless years later. As justification, I can only say that during the eventful summer of 1966, I became concerned for the first time about behaving in a manly fashion, no doubt out of fear that if I didn’t discipline myself, I might wind up like my father, a perpetual adolescent.