You Can Say You Knew Me When Read Online Free PDF Page B

unscathed. My head ricocheted with response lines—everything from I’m sorry to Back off, bitch —but I held my tongue and withstood Aunt Katie’s hex, my face flushed but, I hoped, inscrutable. Finally, Deirdre, bless her, took command, helping Katie out of her coat and passing it to me. “Jamie, give this to the guy in the hall. Not you, AJ. It’s too big for you.”
    Walking away, hauling fifteen pounds of raccoon fur, I averted my eyes from the crowd. Who in the room had seen what just happened?
    I turned around and found Tommy behind me, passing a pile of coats to the attendant. Tommy Ficchino stood out in this room, a swarthy half-Italian in the midst of a lot of pasty Irish stock. As a kid, his hair had been light brown, like wood varnish, but it was almost black now, with little flecks of gray. He wasn’t quite as handsome as his father, Uncle Angelo, had been, but Tommy’s face had the same big, expressive features: a wide nose, dark eyes, a rosy mouth surrounded by the perpetual shadow of a beard. Angelo had died of a heart attack about six years ago. I’d come back for that funeral, too—a southern Italian affair, lavish in its grief. A wailing Nonna Ficchino had to be carried out of the church, her tight black shoes fumbling along the carpet as her grandsons bore her weight.
    The Ficchinos and the Garners had been neighbors in Hell’s Kitchen. Angelo and Katie were high school sweethearts, a few years older than my father, whose nickname in those days was Rusty. I’d grown up listening to their stories of taking Rusty on dates with them, then telling him to beat it so they could have their privacy. There was the time a cop caught them necking in the back of Angelo’s car. The time Rusty got lost in Central Park for an afternoon. The time they crossed paths with Joe DiMaggio and he shook my father’s hand. The stories were so recycled, even I, who hadn’t heard them for years, could recite them in detail.
    Tommy’s hands were rising in front of him, palms up. I knew this gesture, which all the men in his family shared: He was preparing to speak without quite knowing what to say. I scrambled to fill the silence. “I guess this must be tough for you, Tommy. You’ve already been through this, with your father.”
    With a shrug of his shoulders, he replied, “Aw, whaddaya gonna do?”
    I had to bite my lip to hold back a smile.
    “Any time you got a death’s lousy,” he went on. “My dad died too young, but I got no regrets there. You and your dad—that’s another story. You being, you know, the black sheep.”
    I nodded cautiously. “We had our difficulties.”
    “Jesus, he was pretty tough on you, right? Pretty tough, period. Gotta be a lot of mixed emotions here.” He patted his belly.
    I felt my eyes dampen—not from grief but from gratitude, like a patient receiving a diagnosis after previously being told it was all in his head. “One day at a time,” I said.
    “Right. Today, tomorrow. Little here, little there, that’s how it goes. Whaddaya gonna do?”
    “Hell if I know,” I said, letting the smile break through this time. He nodded with finality, and we stood together for a moment, silently perusing the crowd.
    “So how’s it out there, you know, in San Fran?”
    “Crazy times, lots going on. The Internet. The dot-coms.” Tommy’s accent was contagious. I heard myself saying dot-calms.
    “We gonna hear you on NPR again?” he asked.
    “Sure, sure. Someday.”
    “You got anything coming up?”
    “Not right now. Things have been a little quiet.”
    In fact, my career in radio had been very quiet. About six months earlier I’d lost a regular producing job for San Francisco’s public radio station, and since then I’d worked freelance. Barely. The show I’d produced, City Snapshot, a daily report on offbeat cultural events in San Francisco, was one I helped create, and I took its cancellation—its re-branding, as the station manager dubbed it—personally. Before