The Phone Call
Chapter 1
HOW COULD MARY Grace ignore the call without breaking her promise to
her father? “You always take care of family,” her father said many times, and
there was the way he grasped her hand in the hospital. “She’s your mother.”
She had somehow hoped not to ever have to return to 2224 St. James
Place but how else could she respond to Aunt Maggie’s call?
Back then Mary Grace had tried to talk to her dad about what was
happening to him the last time he insisted that she promise to take care of her
mother. He held her hand tight and said, “It is all I want of you. Make sure
she is okay.”
“Dad, don’t worry. I will.” Mary Grace had actually said the
words, not ready to believe that hospital stay would be his last. She figured
there were ways to do this. She could hire people to clean her mother’s
apartment, or go to the store. She would figure it out.
Why was this call from Aunt Maggie different?
Aunt Maggie, her father’s sister, had always been an alarmist,
more reactive than the rest of the Maschere family, but she had never before
sounded so worried about her sister-in-law, Teresa Giordano Maschere. Mary
Grace and Aunt Maggie had a similar distain for Mary Grace’s mother. Aunt
Maggie had always been Mary Grace’s comfort,
knowing just when to call up stairs and invite Mary Grace down to her own
apartment, and get Mary Grace out of the fray between her parents.
This had been a Maschere household for over sixty years since Papa
Maschere purchased the house for his wife, Momma Rosa, Mary Grace’s grandmother,
and their three children. They had converted the house from a one-family to a
two-family when Luigi got married to the mysterious, dark-haired Teresa, a
wispy girl from the north of Italy, and unlike the full-bodied, sun-soaked
Maschere brothers who had come from the south along the Amalfi coast.
After Momma Rosa died it was a relief for Papa Maschere, what with
the wayward ways of Uncle Paul, and Aunt Maggie never marrying, to know his
middle son, Luigi, would be in the house when he was gone. Luigi would watch
over the house and over Maggie.
For Luigi, the idea was always that he would move out of this
house, out of the converted three bedrooms into some place of their own for
him, his wife Teresa, and their sweet-faced bambina , Mary Grace. Early
on he saw how unhappy Teresa was, how she
always re marked, “It is like a midget’s house, this tight space of
kitchen, living room, and bedroom, in a stuffy upstairs, and to top it off, I
have to go down the hall to use the bathroom. How is this a home?”
He wanted to move, he talked about it, usually
after a
few drinks. But they never moved. There was always some reason to stay, Luigi’s
job, Teresa’s health, leaving Aunt Maggie alone after Uncle Paul died. So, they
wound up staying in the too small, too tight space.
Could it be that Aunt Maggie was getting irrational and
overreacting? Mary Grace replayed the voice mail a few times, and something
about Aunt Maggie’s voice made her feel uneasy. “Mary Grace it’s not good, not
good, oh, you must come.” Aunt Maggie’s jittery high pitch was shaky and
desperate.
“She no answer me, she don’t tell me to go
back downstairs.
She’s not right. I had to call for an ambulance,” is how Aunt Maggie described
finding her mother slumped across the couch and unresponsive, when Mary Grace
called her aunt back.
Mary Grace let out a sigh. Could she look at this situation differently, separate from the past? All
that oc curred long ago, the inability for her and her mother to ever see
eye to eye, the cryptic conversations that Mary
Grace knew existed, but never what they con tained, weren’t they all in
the past now?
Mary Grace had always lived at the edges of
fam ily
interactions, always lingering in doorways watching, listening, sandwiched
between Aunt Maggie living downstairs, and Uncle Paul living upstairs above her
in the attic. Both her
Similar Books
