As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

hurling. For some time they stood there, staring at the hazy and distant line of the horizon. Above them gulls flew, as always, and by their legs a jellyfish floated past, barely noticeable as it swayed with the sea’s mixed currents. Time was a strange thing, Maks muttered to Risel, pulling her close. And by that he meant that it seemed impossible they’d been married forty-four years.
      
     
    Friday morning was a simple enough matter. Howard, who’d been up carousing with Mark Fishbaum the night before, was late taking off to join the morning minyan in Middletown. When he finally pulled the Dodge onto Hillside Avenue to begin his drive to Middletown he thought he was still dreaming, for there was Davy, yawning as he stood roadside at the mailboxes, waiting hours too early for the day’s mail to arrive.
    On his hand he wore his favorite puppet, Samson, the boy in a family of puppets we’d named after our beach. Lenny Bagel. Esther Bagel. Linda Bagel. Samson Bagel. Brilliant, we’d thought, to name them so aptly: the Bagels of Bagel Beach.

Breathing
     
    B y 1948 Sal Luccino had been smoking cigars for the dozen years that he’d been a Good Humor man. A Milford native who’d been trained by his father in the art of plumbing, Sal had split from the family business, Giuseppe Luccino & Sons, in 1936, when he was forty and had socked away enough money for the down payment, seventeen hundred dollars, for his own Good Humor franchise and a truck. The first cigar, smoked the day he signed the papers for the franchise, was a means of celebrating his independence, as was the second, smoked at ten in the evening when he finally parked his truck in front of his home after his first day of making rounds. He’d begun the day promptly at nine that morning. Independence, he discovered right away, came with a price—those daunting hours—but he was determined to make a go of it, and after that first day the cigars were smoked because they made him feel less alone inside his cab, like his father and brothers were right there beside him, just as they were when they fixed the pipes of the buildings in downtown Milford. Quickly, then, the cigars became a habit, and soon enough, for old times’ sake, he even called them “pipes.” “Not fixing the pipes anymore,” he told his wife, Marie, and all five of their children on a Sunday morning in July of 1936, one month after he’d begun his new work. In four weeks he’d cleared eighty-seven dollars, more than he’d ever made before. He held his cigar proudly for them to see. It being Sunday, he’d gone to mass then taken the rest of the morning off. “No, not fixing pipes. Just smoking ’em now,” he’d said. The work of the ice cream franchise ran from late April through mid-September, and in fact he returned to fixing pipes during the other months, when the families remaining off-season in the shoreline boroughs of Milford didn’t want to rush outdoors for something even colder than the weather. But once he’d adjusted to being a Good Humor man—driving and maintaining his truck, meticulously dressing each morning in pressed whites, ringing those luring bells, and chatting it up with his customers, the world’s children—his months as Sal Baby, as he’d come to be called, were by far the better part of the year.
    He’d been the one who’d first offered himself to others as Sal Baby. August of 1937, a second summer of the new franchise almost gone, and a group of six kids—all from the Monroe family of Morningside—had begged him to “whistle it more, please,” as the youngest, a child of four, had put it. At the time Sal hadn’t even realized he was whistling. But that’s how whistling was for him—like breathing, he simply found himself at it. He’d even learned the hard way, through the cries and complaints of his own children to keep it down at night or he’d keep them up. But here in the streets of the Milford shoreline, the ocean gleaming in the