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outside the house? I got my brother Antoine, you remember Antoine? Who, by the way, legally changed his name to Toni a few years back. Anyways, Antoine, Toni, he’s got the Package now . . .”
    “Unh,” Ray softly grunted in sympathy, giving his face to her again.
    “Yeah,” bobbing her head in acknowledgment. “Sometimes he’s in the hospital, sometimes he’s in jail, sometimes he’s on my couch. I’m trying to get him into this Christian Brothers hospice over in Bayonne, but he’s not quite sick enough yet . . .
    “And my brother Butchie, you remember him too, right? He’s in jail. Again. But he’ll be out soon. Again. I tell him he can’t come around anymore, but he will. He likes to break in through the back door in the middle of the night. The way I find out about it is when I go down in the morning, see him dead asleep in the pantry, like to scare me half to death. He’s lucky I haven’t shot his ass . . . And you want to hear something else? I go down to Florida three months ago to see my cousins? And, as a courtesy I go visit my son’s paternal grandfather because I had heard that he was mandated into a state home for the elderly. I go in there, he takes one look at me, sits up in bed, says, ‘Flossie?’ He always thinks I’m his dead daughter Flossie. Anyways, he’s like, ‘Flossie? If you leave me here, I’ll
die
here . . .’ So, what the hell, I go and bring him back up with me to New Jersey, get him checked out by my doctor? Doctor says he’s got creeping dementia, it’s an early warning sign of Alzheimer’s. But Ray”—Nerese touched his arm again to keep him in this—“the man is ninety-seven years old. Ninety, seven. He ain’t got time for early warning signs of
shit.
So, OK. I go and stick him upstairs with my mother and uncle, and it’s like ‘Hell Up in Harlem.’”
    Ray sighed, a deep chest-lifting exhalation that ended in tears. “Tweetie, I’m so fucked,” not looking at her.
    She put her hand in his, and he took it.
    “You want to tell me what’s going on?”
    “No,” he said, “but keep talking.”
    She waited a beat, to see if he’d say anything else, then got back into it. “See, Ray, I think one of the reasons I became a police officer to begin with was to make my family keep its distance. ‘You want to be a criminal, Antoine? Butchie? You too?’ ‘Well, you know you can’t be near me no more. I’m not gonna waste time telling you shit is wrong. You just best stay away ’cause I’m on the Job and that’s that.’
    “But I tell you, Ray, praise to God, I have discovered over the years that I am blessed. I am truly blessed. And so now I’m like the man in the family, carrying everybody. But I don’t know if I’m doing anybody any favors. They could probably learn to make it on their own, you know, most of them, which is good for me, because the truth be known? Yes, I am blessed, but I am also tired. I am as tired as I am blessed, and that’s no lie.
    “Like, OK. You want to hear a typical day off for me? A few weeks ago, that ninety-seven-year-old man I parked upstairs? He don’t . . . He’s crazy with that dementia thing. My mother’s all like, ‘Get that man out of my house!’
Her
house, right? But so, OK . . . I make some calls, cash in some favors, and I get him placed in Beth Abraham, a seniors’ home something like five blocks from the house.
    “So like, last Saturday I get Darren to pack him up, I take him over to the home, sign him in, take him up to his new room, unpack, and I see my son has done his usual expert job. The man’s got no pajamas, no robe, no toothbrush, no . . . So I leave him there, go running to Caldor’s over in Gannon, get him underwear, toothpaste, I don’t even remember if the man’s got
teeth,
underpants, socks, a belt, slippers; store’s a Saturday madhouse, checkout line’s a mile long . . . I run back to Beth Abraham, old man’s sitting up in bed just like in Florida,