Butterfly Tattoo Read Online Free PDF Page A

haunted by Alex’s last trip to New York City. A random memory, really, but I think about him calling me from there last March. It was lunchtime back east, and I was starting my workday at the studio when my cell phone rang. I flipped it open, and Al greeted me with his warm, booming voice. “Can you hear them?”
    “Hear what, baby?” I asked softly, turning away so the other guys wouldn’t eavesdrop.
    “Listen, okay?” He laughed, and there was the sound of blaring horns and traffic through the receiver. I could practically smell the exhaust fumes and late winter snow he’d described in an e-mail earlier that morning. But irritation rankled through my system, too, because he’d plowed right into my workday, not even bothering with a decent greeting.
    Then I heard them. Chiming bells that rang out in a lovely, melancholy voice. Despite myself, I smiled for a moment. It was such an Alex thing to do, to call me for something like that. Everywhere he went in life he discovered an adventure, found something beautiful to appreciate in the midst of stress and chaos.
    But the thing was, I didn’t hear those church bells. Not really. I was too self-conscious that the guys might be listening in, and frustrated with Alex for not asking if I was busy, if I could even talk in the first place. When he came back on the line, a little breathless, he said, “They’re the bells of St. Patrick’s. I’m sitting here on the steps, and I wanted you to hear them, too.”
    “Cool,” I mumbled, cautiously watching my boss, a craggy old-school union guy, walk closer. I’d never come out to him about Alex, and I wasn’t about to start right then.
    “Tomorrow’s Ash Wednesday,” Alex said. “I think I’m going to try to make a service.”
    For a moment, I pictured his freckled forehead, a sooty cross marking the center of it like a bull’s eye. Something about that somber image made me shiver despite the morning heat.
    “You sure you want to do that?” I asked, feeling spooked for reasons I couldn’t possibly verbalize, but he only laughed at me, so I rushed to add, “I mean, aren’t they already lining up today like it’s a Stones concert or something?”
    “Now, Michael, don’t forget I’m a good Catholic boy,” he teased, knowing that I never darkened a church door. Well, except for our commitment service, which was the one time he ever got me to attend an ecclesiastical ceremony. No wonder we could never agree on getting Andrea baptized.
    “Yeah, Father Roberto would be proud of you,” I mumbled, rubbing my palm over my heart. I couldn’t shake the eerie shadow that had fallen over me, the vague sense of dread. “You out of the conference?” I asked, trying to turn the subject in a sunnier direction.
    “I’m taking a walk during the lunch break,” he said. Suddenly a passing siren blared loudly through the phone, drowning out his words, until I caught the end of some amputated sentence: “…and that I wish you and Andie were here with me.”
    “Yeah, me, too,” I half-whispered into the phone, eyeing my boss, but he was busy at his desk now.
    “I bought you a present yesterday.” I could practically hear the smile in his voice; nobody loved a surprise like my Alex. A terrible pang of guilt nagged at my heart for having been irritable, even if he hadn’t known it. He’d been gone for days and I’d begun to miss him a whole damn lot.
    “Let’s bring Andrea here for her birthday in the fall,” he continued. “Wouldn’t that be great? To really do the city together, all three of us?”
    “Definitely.”
    “We could take her ice skating at Rockefeller Center.” I had a momentary vision of holding Andie’s small hand in mine, leading her in an awkward circle around the rink while Alex videoed us together. But then my boss stood from his desk, clipboard in hand, making a beeline right for me.
    “Let’s talk about it when you get back.” I wanted to hurry Al off the phone before my boss