Mistaken Identity Read Online Free PDF Page B

and scrutinized her mother. The old woman’s eyes didn’t move toward the picture or even appear to see the pilot, so Bennie moved the picture into what she figured was her mother’s line of vision. Still her mother’s eyes didn’t focus on the photo at all.
    “Ma, they’re tellin’ me this is Exhibit A. Is this my old man?” Bennie hooked a finger around the side of the photo. “This one, with the eyes that look like someone you know?” Her mother’s eyelids were sinking again, and Bennie’s hopes with them. “Ma? Are you signaling or sleeping?”
    Her mother’s head dropped onto her chest and she slid under the blue blanket, which engulfed her like a riptide. Bennie’s breath lodged in her throat, then she let her hand and the photo fall to her lap. Why wake her mother up or show her the other photos? There was no point.
    Bennie returned the photo to the envelope and slipped it back into her briefcase, but didn’t move to go. She stayed still, keeping her mother company, watching her slack chest moving up and down, her breathing too shallow to lend any reassurance. Bennie had no answers and she barely had her mother, but she remained. It felt good just to be around her, in her flesh-and-blood presence. Bennie didn’t dwell on how many such times they would have left. In that moment it was the same as it had always been: Bennie and her mother, the two of them, still breathing against all odds.
    And now was there another? A third? Bennie couldn’t imagine it. The Rosatos weren’t the ideal nuclear family, but it was
her
family and she took its structure for granted, like stars fixed in the firmament. A constellation couldn’t be changed; there was a Big Dipper and a Little Dipper, and that was it. There couldn’t be another Little Dipper, could there?
    Bennie’s gaze strayed through the arched windows to the sky, where the earliest stars were peeking through a transparent canopy of dusk. She remembered that stars weren’t forever, but died from instability within, spewing glowing heat, light, and color into deep space. She’d seen the photos in the newspaper: stellar deaths like pinwheels, cat’s eyes, and whorls of light. From their showy deaths came life and new stars were formed, yet to be discovered, named, and recorded. To be sure, they existed before Bennie knew of their existence. Maybe Connolly was like that, an unnamed star.
    Bennie reflected on it, her eyes bright. She had to concede it was at least theoretically possible. Her mother, dozing in her wheelchair so soundly, could have borne twins. She was tough as a young woman, defiant of convention, and tight-lipped enough to keep a secret of that magnitude. Maybe the secret had contributed to her illness. Maybe it had even caused it. If new stars could be formed and old ones die, didn’t it follow that constellations could be reconfigured? A Big Dipper and
two
Little Dippers? The thought made Bennie shiver with an admixture of doubt and wonderment, and she sat by the window until night shone with an almost unbearable brilliance.
     
     
    On the other side of town, a white police cruiser idled at a gum-spattered curb. Its headlights were on but its radio crackled to an empty car. Joe Citrone was on the pay phone at the intersection. It was dark and this was a rugged section of the city, but he had nothing to fear here. He had grown up only a block over, in the house near the corner. There used to be a luncheonette on the corner, Ray’s and Johnny’s, and Angelo’s Market, the grocery store right across the street. Joe used to like Ray’s, it made the whole corner smell like the steak sandwiches that sizzled on the flat grill. Now the corner stank like shit.
    “He in?” Joe said into the phone. The receiver was all black and greasy. He hated that. Everything dirty, from the crackheads. He couldn’t use his home phone. He didn’t want it in his phone records, in case some mamaluke got ahold of it.
    Joe never took chances. It wasn’t