Mr. Falso called out as he moved through the kitchen. “Hello? Anybody home? It’s Nick Falso, and I have Ben Lattanzi with me!”
The coat creeped Ben out, and for a moment, he was glad that he was the kid and Mr. Falso was the adult and that he wasn’t alone.
“Ma!” Eddie yelled from the back of the house. He entered the kitchen blinking, in a threadbare Bruins T-shirt and basketball shorts that fell too long, and his hair was mashed up in the back, his hand now expertly bandaged. “Oh, hey, Mr. F. Didn’t know you were coming.”
Mr. Falso moved fast to embrace Eddie, who looked at Ben over Mr. Falso’s shoulder, his eyes blank. “My parents must not have heard the doorbell. TV’s too loud, and the AC makes them deaf.” Canned laughter roared from the back of the house. Eddie’s parents were too young to be holed up watching game shows, Ben thought uneasily. Mr. Falso had a lot of work in store. “You want some, uh, coffee?”
“First things first, my man!” Mr. Falso released his hug and took hold of Eddie’s shoulders. “How are you?”
Ben had eaten many meals at the Villelas’ and never could have imagined the kitchen in the state in which they found it. Someone had given up on the mountain of crusted plates and placed a package of paper plates beside the sink. Tall bags from Johnny’s Foodmaster covered the counter. It looked to Ben like Eddie had been eating directly out of them. Connie’s cat slinked behind him and curled around his leg, her ribs brushing his calf above the sock. On the floor was a double cat bowl with both sides empty.
Eddie’s eyes welled with tears, and he stepped backward, waving his bandaged claw.
“I’m good. Better than you might think, with this mitten on my hand. Now I can get a job as toll collector on the Mass Pike. I’ll fit right in. You ever see one of those guys with all ten fingers? Good money, they say.”
Mr. Falso slapped Eddie on the back—a little hard, Ben thought. “That’s the Eddie I know. Did you say your mom and dad are in the back? Mind if I say hello?”
“Knock yourself out, Mr. F. Remind them it’s time to eat soon, okay?”
Ben felt his stomach drop. He’d known Mrs. Villela had taken Connie’s death hard. But the fact that Eddie’s dad wasn’t doing well pained Ben. Big Jimmy Villela (who was not big, but compact) had coached Ben in three different sports as a kid. He was the dad who shot hoops with the neighborhood kids and gave everybody day jobs in his roofing company, including guys no one else would hire. He was the first guy on the roof well into his fifties, scurrying up ladders like a goat, planting himself on the steepest pitches to show his boys they could do it. Mr. Villela was old-school, kind under his gruff exterior, like Eddie—and like Eddie, devastated when their precious Connie’s throat closed for good.
Connie was diagnosed with her life-threatening exercise-induced allergy at age nine. It shouldn’t have taken that long for the doctors to figure it out, with her periodic fainting spells in gym. For a while, it gave her kind of a Victorian heroine chic, and she lapped it up. At fifteen, she carried around an EpiPen, and seemed to enjoy the status her perceived fragility provided. Put simply, Connie needed an edge with people, and her unusual condition provided one. Where the Cillos were all sex and unknowability, Connie was easy to know, to the point of transparency.
Ben heard Mr. Falso straining to talk with the Villelas above the air conditioner and the Wheel of Fortune ticking on its axis. Eddie leaned heavily against the counter, his bandaged paw resting in the crook of the opposite elbow.
“Aren’t you supposed to be working today?”
“I gave myself the day off,” Ben said. Connie’s cat appeared and licked the tips of Ben’s fingers, which hung at his side. Ben snatched his hand away in disgust, then felt rude. He rushed to say something about the cat still being able to smell his dead dog on him, but he caught himself in time. Today was not a day to mention the dead. The cat meowed defiantly, glaring from its one good eye, the other a milky cataract.
“C’m’ere, cat. I’ll give you some food.” Eddie moved to a lone bag on the kitchen table and reached in, pulling out a can. Ben was impressed that Eddie knew exactly where it was, then realized he was the one doing the shopping. Eddie razored the can using the side of his bandaged forearm to hold it in place.
“You’re good at working around that,” Ben said. “Does it hurt?”
A briny smell permeated the kitchen. The cat screamed. Eddie dumped the can into the bowl on the floor with a liquid plop and shrugged. “It hurts for a while. Then you live with it. Hard part is when it gets knocked around. Hurts fresh all over again, like it just happened.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t swim with it,” Ben ventured, thinking of Eddie diving over and over again like an automaton.
“It’s the only thing that helps.”
Ben leaned against the opposite counter, his butt knocking over a line of plastic prescription bottles labeled for Mrs. Villela and an orange EpiPen. As he tried to right the bottles, they skittered from his hands and bounced off the floor. The ones he managed to place back on the counter fell over and rolled away again. He chased one bottle toward the dining room, past the hanging rack of miniature spoons from places like Las Vegas and Lake George. He looked fast over his shoulder; Eddie’s head was stuck in the fridge, his square butt shining in his basketball shorts. Ben quickly tipped the rack away from the wall and out dropped a white note, folded fat and tight as an origami star.
YES!
Ben stuffed it into his shirt pocket and hustled into the dining room, scooping the runaway pill bottle off the floor. As he rose, he came level with four Easter baskets filled with plastic grass on the dining room table. He hustled back to the kitchen and spied the last bottle on the floor next to the cat food. As Ben reached for it, the cat swiped at his nose, and Ben yelped.
Eddie cocked his head.
Ben rose, rubbing his nose and mumbling about having too much caffeine, maybe. His words trailed off with every passing second of Eddie’s silence until all that was left were the canny strains of Mr. Falso. It felt rude for Ben to comment on the prescription bottles and the Easter baskets; it felt rude to say anything. Mira’s note burned a hole in his pocket. The fact was, Ben hadn’t set foot in Eddie’s house since right after Connie’s funeral, but now that the girls were gone, here he was, presumably checking in, but really looking for secret messages from Eddie’s cousin. That the girls were favored even in mourning was a final insult to Connie that Eddie would not bear.
The unfairness of Ben’s visit flickered between them, hard and bright.
“So why are you here, Benny?” Eddie said with a cold edge.
“Checking in on you. That’s all.”
“I saw you at the quarry.”