Page 54 of The Dead Come to Stay
This was not an obituary, but a series of police reports. “No surviving kin,” they read. Because they didn’t know. Thomas, it seemed, was troubled. Violent outbursts that sometimes landed him in prison—sometimes in psychiatric hospital—and sometimes putotherpeople in hospital. Like his first wife, who was not, MacAdams now realized, Jo’s mother.
“Oh.”
“He wasn’t okay,” Jo said.
“No,” MacAdams agreed. “Did—did the artist tell you all of this?”
“Sort of.” Jo rubbed at her nose. “Arthur told me some. Arthur gave me letters that were my uncle’s. And I realized Icouldhave met him. And that hurts like fuck.”
MacAdams didn’t say anything. And Jo didn’t say more. So they sat in the hallway in silence for another ten minutes.
“It’s really an awful design,” MacAdams said at length.
“The stripes don’t even line up,” Jo said. “I’ve been counting them.”
“All of them?”
“Just the pink ones. There are 341.” She paused. “I do that. Counting. Especially when I have an emotion hangover.”
MacAdams nodded, hid head bobbing against the paneled wall. He wasn’t very good at comforting people; his job usually benefited from the opposite treatment. You wouldn’t call him a shoulder to cry on, certainly. But there were a few things he understood pretty well.
“Is it even remotely close to the way one feels after signing divorce papers?” he asked. Jo turned her head to look at him for the first time.
“Yeah, kind of.”
“Then I might know a good place for a cure,” he said, returning the glance. “At least, it’s where I went after signingmine. Italian. Greasy pizza and cheap beer.”
“True Italian pizza isn’t actually greasy,” Jo said, wiping her nose. “It originates in Naples and was just an easy way to eat tomatoes and cheese on flatbread.”
“Is that a no, then?” MacAdams asked.
“It’s a yes,” she said.
***
Jo had changed back into jeans and T-shirt, washed her face and was feeling a bit more like herself by the time they returned to the hotel car park. The restaurant, MacAdams explained, was a little out of the way, on the outskirts where York looked less York-like. This meant the buildings weren’t a thousand years old and pitching in every direction like plate tectonics, somethingJo enjoyed for obvious charm, but which also made her just the tiniest bit anxious.
“The proprietor’s name is Allen. But he’ll insist you call him Giuseppe,” MacAdams said.
“He’s Italian?”
“He is not.”
He wasn’t American, either, but upon entry, Jo had the uncanny feeling of placement slip. Exposed-brick walls, multicolored lamp shades, the smell of deep dish and—ironically—black-and-white photographs of New York. Tables sported red-and-white-checked plastic tablecloths, shakers of dry parm and red pepper flakes, and she could almost imagine they were somewhere in south Brooklyn.
“James!” shouted Giuseppe-not-Allen. “Haven’t seen you in ages! Light or dark?”
“He means the beer,” MacAdams explained.
“Dark?” Jo suggested, and a pitcher followed them to their table.
MacAdams rolled his sleeves and poured them each a glass.
“I never lived in York myself,” he said. “Found this by mistake while searching for a pub. Came back weekly for a while, despite the distance. Treating the—the emotion hangover, I suppose. Getting used to being single.”
“I never had a chance, really,” Jo admitted, sipping through beer foam. After her own divorce, Jo had moved to Chicago middivorce to help her ailing mother. “Or at least, taking care of the dying is not the best way to do it.”
MacAdams leaned his elbows on the table and gave her a thoughtful look. “I have seen a lot of death. But never the dying. My mother’s still with us; my dad had a killing heart attack while I was in training.”
