Chapter Four

Well, we're back from the grocery store. Derrico had to go along and supervise. He always does, the big dumb Dago. You'd think he was Chef Boyardee.

Not that he can't cook. And not that he limits his specialties to Italian food, either. It's not what you'd expect, you know -- a fireman in charge of the kitchen, a Neapolitan Italian, you'd think we'd have Chianti and white tablecloths and huge pots of pasta and all be singing "O Sole Mio". Real "Lady and the Tramp" stuff.

Unh-uh. Derrico's latest thing is Thai food. Last week, the crazy bastard had us driving all up and down St. Clair Avenue looking for -- get this -- lemon grass. Lemon grass, he says. The Thai sine qua non of Derrico's Thai clay-baked chicken. Here we are trolling up and down St. Clair near Hamilton Avenue, in Chinatown, stopping the rig at first one Asian grocery and then the next, people stopping ont he sidewalk to peer into the shop windows.

Which brings me to a point.

Of course, the assholes who have no idea what they are talking about will always have plenty to say.

"Look at those firemen wasting the taxpayers' money," they whine. "Out grocery shopping and using the city's equipment to do it! Tch! Disgraceful! They even leave the engine running! Wasteful! Awful!"

Okay. Excuse me. Hold the goddamn phone here, just for a minute.

If I am in the middle of my shift and it's my turn to shop for the house, and we get a call on the callbox that your house is on fire, would you rather I had taken my little shitbox 1994 Subaru? Would you? Or would you rather I can dump the grocery chore (because yes, it is a chore for me, just like it is for you, and firemen gotta eat, just like you do) -- would you rather I dump the grocery basket, run out in the lot where the guys are keeping the engine running, jump on the truck and speed over to your house? Or would you rather I brought the Subaru?

Yeah. I thought so. Try to remember that next time you see a rig parked outside the Stop-n-Shop, will you?

Anyway, I was on the subject of Grace and women, and maybe that's two subjects.

As Grace and I grew a little older, I started to think maybe we would end up together. We liked each other, got along well enough, and when the crowd got together for parties in people's basements, football games, etc., Grace and I always seemed to wind up paired off. It was very natural. People started saying, "Grace 'n' John," like the names belonged together somehow.

Uncle Eamonn called to me from the front porch of his house as I was going by on my bike one summer Saturday morning.

"Johnny. Johnny Sullivan. Come here," he intoned.

Uncle Eamonn (not really my uncle; in our neighborhood all the parents were Uncle and Aunt) was not someone to whom you said no, you thought you'd come back later. There was only one proper answer to Uncle Eamonn, and that was "Yes, sir."

First of all, Uncle Eamonn was powerfully built, a fast runner, and his temper was legendary. Twenty-five years of work as a pipefitter had kept him in pretty good trim, and he had boxed semi-pro as a young man. He had a pretty bad temper when he drank, which was more or less all the time. You never saw Uncle Eamonn legless, disgracefully drunk, but you never saw him sober, either. The only one I knew who wasn't afraid of his temper was Grace, but then, it can be fairly said Grace probably would have slapped the Devil himself for having a smart mouth, so that was pretty much a given.

Wanting to avoid any sort of confrontation with Uncle Eamonn, and also wanting to please Grace, I parked the bike alongside the brick porch and walked into the kitchen of the house.

"Will you have a drink, Johnny?" asked Uncle Eamonn. "A beer? What'll you have?"

"Oh, I'm too young to drink yet. Sir." I was very nervous. I was no stranger to drinking, in fact had tied one on the night before with my older brother Dan's friends, but I was not about to let on.

Uncle Eamonn walked to the cupboard, took out a glass, and poured a generous dollop of Bushmill's into it. He indicated I should drink it. The very smell under my nose made my eyes water, and I only pretended to sip at it.

"You've been keeping company with my daughter, Johnny," said Uncle Eamonn. It was not a question but a statement.

"Yes, sir."

"Have the two of you been....what is your intention, Johnny? Is my girl...."

I had no idea what he was getting at -- well, no, I had every idea what he was getting at -- and I was scared shitless.

"My Grace," he continued, "my girl is the apple of my eye, my heart's darling, ma bhoirnin, my child...She is INVIOLATE!" he finished with a shout, and pounded his fist on the table. A saucer fell from a shelf and shattered in the sink.

I nearly pissed myself.

"She is inviolate and will remain so, Johnny Sullivan. Or I will break your neck. Never doubt that I would, lad." He said this last very sadly, as with the heavy heart of someone who must break bad news, however difficult.

"I...I....." Not only was the subject terrifying to me, but if Uncle Eamonn only knew that it was the dearest desire of my heart to accomplish exactly that for which he would break my neck, I had no doubt he would do so. Sadly and tenderly and with no other recourse, but, as my Uncle Owen would say, as sure as shit stinks. I have doubted and pondered many mysteries, such as Transubstantiation, Schroedinger's cat and the infield fly rule, but I harbored not one scintilla of doubt that in this case Uncle Eamonn was a man of his word. He would snap my neck like a matchstick if I so much as....

A noise on the stair, and Grace came into the kitchen, cheeks flaming pink, eyes blazing.

"DA! What the hell kind of nonsense is...Johnny Sullivan! Have you been drinking? In the middle of the morning????"

I daresay we looked about as stupid as it is possible to look. It's a good thing there were two of us; I doubt one man could have looked sufficiently stupid when Grace was on her mettle. To make a long and dull story short, she threw me out of the house and made Uncle Eamonn go out and weed the garden before her Ma got back from work. As I have said, there has never been another Grace.

Ah, Grace. We graduated high school, and I went off to Northwestern University and she stayed at home to go to John Carroll. I saw her at Christmastime, and hadn't the sense to realize that young Grace with her slender build and pale skin, her budding breasts and funny, froggy little voice, her impossibly unruly auburn hair and her huge hazel eyes that were so sad and merry by turns, her ten-dollar words and her banshee visions (she always subscribed to some sort of alternate spirituality, which she never would explain to me), was worth ten of any of the cool, Farrah Fawcett-tressed sorority types that I never seemed to get far with. Oh, I got laid, and lots of it, but they kept a well-bred distance, and always there was something about Grace that saw through to your soul.

Maybe I was afraid to be so close to her. She knew what I was, and what I was about. We went our separate ways, and I heard she moved away somewhere down South and married, a real fancy pants type, a physicist or some high-tech type, and the bastard beat her (Uncle Eamonn had long since died, more's the pity since he would have killed anyone who laid a hand on his Grace), and she had a boy, and left the no-good husband and moved back here with the child. I saw her briefly then, right after the divorce, but it wasn't right.

We were sitting watching the Indians game on television after she had got the little one to bed, and we were sharing a beer, and she looked right at me and said, "Go on, Johnny Sullivan; you're bored to pieces, I can see it in your eyes."

"What do you mean?" I asked, genuinely puzzled.

"Go," she said. It wasn't melodramatic, but it was a definite command.

"But why....Grace....I thought...."

"You thought wrong. Oh,there's beer, and baseball, and conversation, and after awhile we'll go up to bed, and then you'll have me, but it will never be enough. You don't want me, you want The Life."

At the time, I was a probie, just got on with the house I work out of today, and we were all a wild bunch, but no worse than the rest, I suppose.

"What do you mean, I want 'The Life'?"

"Oh, you do," she went on, "though you may not even know it yourself yet. Go on, then," she said, and handed me my jacket.

"Grace, what the hell are you...."

But she wouldn't explain, wouldn't say another word, just ushered me to the door as if this was something we had agreed upon, as if it were all for the best and an inarguable fact of life. The Natural Progression of Things.

I was hurt beyond words, but for some reason, deep inside I knew what she said made sense. I was in no way ready to settle down, and I would have only broken her heart, and somehow she knew that. But her behavior was like nothing I have ever encountered in any woman before or since. She seemed to be recklessly breaking a thing for the sake of it being broken. Women don't usually do that. They build things. It's usually us, the men, who break them. But not always.

I didn't know then that it was herself she feared. I think I understand that now. She always made talk about other girls too, as if she were the jealous type, but a fellow who could see beyond that could see that she was really afraid of her own inability to love. I was not a fellow who could see beyond my nose at the time, and I have had plenty of time since to regret that.

I heard a year later that she had got married and was expecting a baby. I was on my third post-Grace girlfriend by then, and just scoffed. I ran into her in the grocery store and she was radiantly, startlingly pregnant, and made conversation with me as warmly and casually as if we had parted just an hour before. I lost track of her after that, though down through the years, I thought of her often. And the night I heard she had a little girl, I went out and bought a Cecile Brunner shrub rose and planted it in my garden and got very, very drunk. But I didn't see her again until....

Last week, a bunch of the guys and I were having lunch down in the Flat Iron Cafe in the Flats. (This is another thing. Firemen eat lunch together in public places, and when they do, they take the firetruck. And why do they take the firetruck? Come on...come on....see? You're catching on!)

Well, we had a window table, and I saw a car pull into one of the spaces under the bridge, and a woman got out -- no, leaped out. She strode through the thin November sun, bright red wool cape swirling around her in the wind, her dark hair glowing burnished auburn, an unmistakable authority in her long stride....

It was Grace. As she walked into the bar, thirty years passed my eyes, and I saw The Girl. She made no overt move of recognition, just flashed us all that dazzling smile she's so good at throwing out when she wants to keep her cover. I saw a bunch of rings on her hands, but it was impossible to tell if one was a wedding ring. Derrico made some smart remark about "Red Riding Hood," and I wanted to deck him, but I didn't want to tell him anything. My heart ached watching her -- she was having lunch with some fellow who must have been her brother or a friend -- it wasn't her husband and if I know Grace, if the husband's still around it wasn't a lover -- Grace always did play it straight.

And God help me, I hope I see her again, because there is a very wicked, ugly side of me that would like to change that....

I think next time I will talk to you about my cousin Kevin - the whole Grace subject seems to provoke an allergic reaction in me....it's hard when you know right from wrong and know that you'd go with wrong in a heartbeat if the opportunity presented. Cognitive dissonance and all that great shit. My whole life is about being one of the Good Guys, and I think I need to remind myself of that right now. So, next time I will tell you about Kevin.