Page 1 of The Vow

One

When pop finally came home from heaven, we threw him a party. Ma cried, while our fat neighbor Bob shoved a hot dog in my father’s one hand, and a beer in the other. They worshipped him, and as I sat on the couch with the ugly floral print, my feet dangling off the cushion, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I wanted to be idolized like my old man.

A year later, pop never came home and my mother had a breakdown in front of our tiny black and white television. The newscaster was an ordinary guy relaying the news of an extraordinary event, and from that day forward, I could envision an exploding capsule in the pupils of my mother’s eyes. Once again, we threw my father a party. I remember standing in front of the casket and feeling guilty instead of sad. It was empty, for Christ’s sakes. Pop wasn’t even close by. He was playing among the stars, laughing at all of us and especially his sister, Marie, my favorite aunt, who wore so much white powder beneath her black veil, she looked like the corpse that belonged in the wooden box.

Soon after the funeral, life returned to normal. Ma said we had no choice. We were second-generation Italians blending into a 1960s backdrop. My paternal grandfather was a cobbler, while my grandmother babysat the neighborhood kids, feeding them pastina for breakfast, and every year at Christmastime, she would knit each child a sweater that resembled the Italian flag. My maternal grandparents had passed away before I had a chance to meet them, but ma made sure to tell me stories about them every night before bed and their memory lived on. I learned about my namesake too. My uncle Pip had been a casualty of war. Not by gunfire. He shot himself on friendly ground, unable to deal with the psychological trauma that was brought on by the horrors he had witnessed. Ma told me that my grandmother had found him crumpled in a heap with peace plastered on his face, and with a squeeze of her hand, my mother encouraged me to honor a man I’d never met.

Our family was all about honor. I’d heard about family crests. Our crest was tattooed on our hearts, and while others chased impressive degrees, and prestigious positions on the corporate ladder, we were intent to leave a legacy behind, even if it meant dying for the cause. When pop told his father he wanted to be an astronaut, my nonno scoffed, retreated to his back workshop, and didn’t emerge for a full week. On day eight, he sent my father a letter: “Vai con Dio.” Go with God. The following Sunday the entire neighborhood gathered to salute the celebrity in their midst. Pop was a celebrity in their eyes, and we feasted on lasagna, lamb that was slow-roasted on a spit, and cannoli the size of my six-year-old head. When fate intervened and banished the celebrity to the sky, someone put up a makeshift street sign with pop’s name on it at the intersection that divided our version of Little Italy and the others.

As soon as I became a teenager, I involuntarily became the “man of the house” which did nothing to help me secure dates on weekends. While my buddies were at the roller rink, or the bowling alley, I did the grocery shopping, washed our beat-up Chevy, and cooked dinner so that ma could put her feet up after her shift at the dry cleaners to prepare for her shift at Hardball, a seedy bar that catered to the town’s most notorious mafiosi. I loathed that she had to work at that place, but she used to reassure me with a kiss on the cheek and a promise that she’d see me for breakfast. One morning, I found a ten-dollar bill underneath my plate of bacon and eggs. “What? I made good tips last night. I really don’t know what I’d do without all your help around here, bello. Just don’t spend it all in one place.”

I think it was her stint at the bar that made me want to become a crime reporter so that I could be worshipped, like pop. I wanted to become a hero, not to the grieving mothers and distraught fathers, but to the victims themselves; so that I could immortalize their names, and so that I could bury guys like Vinnie Marconi, who regularly left a hickey on ma’s neck before tipping her generously. I never made it that far. It was too late for higher education, not that we could afford it. By the time I turned twenty, words were no longer necessary.

“Hey, Pippo! Another beer, or are you going to write love poems all afternoon?”

“Shut the fuck up and pour.”

The city shut down Hardball ten years ago after a bar brawl left two guys dead. Nicky’s became the new watering hole in town, named after my childhood friend – the hoodlum behind the bar whose heart is bigger than his bark.

“Writing your last will and testament then? I’ll never understand why you wear a suit in this dump. It’s fucking summer. Trying to fool the ladies?”

“What ladies?”

My version of a little black book is filled with incoherent ramblings. I carry it with me everywhere I go so that if I show up dead one day, there’ll be a record of my life. Ma will share baby photos of me with her blue-haired friends, but baby pictures say nothing about a man except that at one point in his sorry existence, he was truly innocent. Sometimes I do write love poems, but most of them are scribbled over because someone who has failed miserably in the love department has no business writing about love.

“Well, shit. Here comes one now.”

“One what?”

“Shut it. Play cool.”

The woman who sat down next to me reminds me of Anjela with a “j”. Anjela was the only girl I ever wanted to be with until she slept with her math tutor and told me about it, boasting as if she had won first place at the Science Fair. Anjela ruined me. Whenever I’m in the ring, I picture her face when throwing a punch. I box, weaving my way through life by using my fists, and everything unspoken ends up in my little black book.

“What’ll it be?”

“Beer.”

“Which kind?”

“The cold kind.”

Nick’s brows did a little dance, but he poured a cold one, set down a coaster, and then a pint of beer. This is the part where I make a fool of myself, like the time I was grocery shopping and a short, blonde woman asked me to help her reach the top shelf. Security escorted me out when my hands encircled her waist, ready to lift her. It was humiliating, and I spent the rest of the day in the ring shadow boxing.

“My neighbors play their music all night long.”

“And?”

“And I can’t sleep,” I said, twisting in my bar stool to face her. I was distracted by the highest cheekbones I’ve ever seen and fell silent.

“Fascinating. Then what happened?”

“Well,” I said, clearing my throat, “I banged on my ceiling with my baseball bat, swore a bit in Italian, and then covered my ears with my pillow, but it was no use.”

“That’s terrible,” she said, gulping from her mug until it was empty.

“Yeah. Except then I got up for a glass of water and realized I’d left my Panasonic on all night.”

Nick was at the beer taps pretending not to listen, but he shook his head ever so slightly. Even though he hates to admit it, he’s happily married and has three young kids, and he once told me that I should consider joining the priesthood. Anjela’s doppelganger stared at me stoically, tapped her mug to indicate she was thirsty, and lit a cigarette.