Kiss of the Wolf by Jim Shepard

her.
    She dabbed at the top of her forehead with a napkin. She watched people come and go. She asked how we could play so hard in the heat, and made us come out of the tomatoes and sit in the shade. She said we were pazza. With her dialect it sounded like pots. She said even the animals knew better.
    The grapes were in, and we ate them off the vine while we sat there. You had to be careful in the big clusters for spiders.
    My sister squeezed the skins so that the centers would pop out. Then she ate just the skins.
    What I never told anyone was that the week my father died I dreamt he was asking me to go get medicine for him—he couldn’t get out of bed—and I wouldn’t. And he looked at my face like he knew that I would’ve gone for my mother.
    That was my secret while I sat and ate the grapes.
    Poor Lucia. Perry she was proud of, but Tommy—you know. Tommy was the first.
    How do we get used to this? That’s the secret. How do we do it?
    My mother thought here in America the big problems were always just about to get worked out. Polio, TB, influenza, bad roads, prejudice. Someone was off somewhere making new medicines, working out the answers. Our job was to sit tight and hope it happened in time. God protected babies, drunks, and the United States.
    In bad times, like when my younger sister got sick with the influenza that killed my baby brother in Italy, my mother would sit in her chair in the kitchen and close her eyes and name the villages surrounding Strangolagalli. Bovile, Ciprano, Monte San Giovanni, she would describe them to herself. We’d tiptoe around the house while she talked about orchards, terraces, and fountains.
    When my father died, we waited for her to do that, and she didn’t.
    She was spotty about Mass afterwards. When the priest would finally see us, he’d take us aside to see if we were okay. What were we going to say?
    I was there when he finally cornered her. She’d managed to avoid him for a little while. He told her something about God’s will, and she quoted back to him an old Calabrian saying: that God was in charge of everything, but the devil was in charge of the timing.

B RUNO
    I was raised mostly by my aunt and uncle. They’re dead, too. My mother, when she went out, it was to pick up something for dinner. My father had a little den and used it.
    He was apparently a massive pain in the ass even before they crushed his legs. He got a little money out of that, but how much was compensation then? He hung around the house and listened to the radio and complained. He covered his legs with a blanket even in the summer, and I had to tuck it back in when it slipped off. He drank Old Sunnybrook, this rye that took the print off coasters. The label said, “Takes the wrinkles out of your face and makes your asshole smile.” No lie. Look it up.
    My aunt told me when he died, “Your father just was never happy, you know? He just never figured out how to be happy.” We’re standing there at the grave site, and she tells me that.
    I was fifteen years old. I felt like telling her, If we knew how to fix that, we’d all be in clover.
    My aunt, the one that died, she was best friends with Lucia.
    Tommy I knew from when he was a little little kid. He ran a paper-route scam from the time he was about eleven. He’d come by and collect twice for the same week, once from the father, once from the mother. He’d wait until one or the other was out.
    My aunt had him figured out early, starting writing down his visits on a pad near the phone. The first time she caught him, she said, “I don’t think so, Tommy,” and he knew enough not to push it. The second time she took him by the hair and brought him inside and showed him the list. She said that at that point he said—his head all twisted around, she’s still got him by the hair, eleven years old—that it was his feeling, in a case like this, that the customer