The Mayor, glad to see breakfast coming to such an abrupt halt—there would be that much more leftovers for the picking—jumped into Stan’s chair to oversee what Mary might unthinkingly discard. There was no sense in being wasteful. He whimpered at the sight of Carmela’s three quarters of a piece of buttered toast heading for the bin.
“What, you want that, too?” Mary looked at him skeptically. “I don’t know how you can enjoy it in all this heat. All right. Take it.” She finished up most of the dishes (Mary had a dishwasher but was rarely known to use it), left the coffee on for Claire, took her apron off irritably, and went out into the yard with Michaelaen. He’d help her water the strawberries. He was the only one who could do it without wetting the leaves.
Mary was annoyed at Stan for bringing up Michael. She knew she shouldn’t be, but she was. She didn’t want them upsetting Claire so soon after she’d come home and she might very well have been listening. That was the type she was. Michael had been the talker and she the listener. Gravy and bread. Claire had all but died herself when Michael was killed, and Mary knew inside herself what kind of suffocating pain Claire felt when she bumped into some old thing of Michael’s that they still had lying about. A picture. Or Michael’s old copies of Motor Trend that no one had seen fit to throw away. What if Claire took off again? What then? A nervous breeze unsettled the trees. Mary looked up and narrowed her eyes. The white sky glared. With any luck they’d have a thunder storm.
“Gram?” Michaelaen wrapped his hand around her thumb.
“Mmm?”
“What’s a kicker?”
Claire, in her father’s knee-length undershirt, bleary-eyed and mouth still parted from her dreams, came into the kitchen, tripped quietly over the vacuum cleaner, and dunked her whole face under the faucet. Was the cloth she dried off with the same as one she remembered from years ago? It smelled the same. Ivory Snow and Cheerios.
“We have bathrooms here in America for that sort of thing,” Zinnie said.
Claire turned and looked at Zinnie, all grown up and sharp as a tack. When Claire had left New York, Zinnie had still been wearing braces. Now here she was: married, a mother, divorced. There and back and no scars on the outside to show for it. But then Zinnie had been the kind of kid who would take a tumble off her bike and laugh out loud. Hard. Zinnie used to tag along with Claire and Michael all the time back then. She’d been their favorite. Claire suddenly felt too old for so early in the morning. She poured a cereal bowl half up with coffee and the other half with milk. Then she lit a cigarette.
Zinnie watched the cool blue smoke surround Claire’s tousled head. “Whadda ya takin’ pictures in the woods for?”
“Oh. It’s the people.”
“What people?”
“The old people who promenade up there. Half the survivors of Dachau and Auschwitz seem to be living right up here in the apartments at the end of Park Lane South.”
“And you like that, eh?”
“I like them,” Claire admitted, enjoying her coffee. No one who’d lived in India could ever take a luxurious cup of well-brewed coffee for granted. “They fascinate me because they survived what was impossible. They’re very sad and matter of fact and somehow not bitter at all. Numbers tattooed on their arms as though they were cattle. They have faces that shrug.”
“So you photograph them.”
“Well, I’m starting to. They’re opening up a little more now that they think I understand Yiddish.”
“Now you speak Yiddish. My sister the Jew.”
“I don’t understand it, really. But it’s not too different from Schweitze-Deutsch—Swiss-German. Between High German and Swiss, you can pretty much understand.”
“High German, Low German—it’s all Greek to me.”
“Anyway, they have extraordinary faces for black and white.”
Zinnie rolled her eyes. “If you think they’re good, I oughta take you with me on my four to midnights. You want characters, I’ll give you characters.”
Claire looked stung. “I couldn’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“I’m having a hard enough time getting used to the idea of you being a cop … let alone drive around with you in uniform … and you deliberately conjuring up all sorts of dangerous possibilities just to make my day … even though I would give anything to photograph the authentic types you must meet up with.”
“I don’t get it. I mean, how can you get so excited about these normal creeps when you’ve been all over the world? You’ve seen just about everything, and you act all hepped-up and goggly-eyed to photograph the local riffraff.”
“You’d be enthused, too, if you’d been gone for ten years.”
“I doubt it.”
“Ah, but you would, Zinnie. You’d come back with new eyes. You only can’t see what you’re so used to you can’t see it.”
“I dunno. You’re the artist in the family. I’ll let you ‘capture’ the neighborhood while I go capture the mutts.”
“The who?”