Page 10 of On the Ropes
I nodded, handing them to Alice as I gently pried the hose from her papery fingers. “Go sit with Mom. Remember, you’re letting me do shit like this for you now.”
The sun bounced off her white hair. “My, my, such language from such a sweet boy.”
I hid a smile. “Stuff like this,” I corrected. For an Irish woman who’d been strict as hell about the language Rowan and I used growing up, she cursed a goddamn blue streak whenever she felt like it.
A drop of sweat rolled down my back as I worked the hose, squinting up at the sun from under my hand.
“Dean, baby, can you stay for breakfast?” Midge asked.
“Can’t,” I said. I turned off the spigot. Shook water from my hands. “Edna Kozlowski hired me to fix her fridge this morning. I’ve gotta go in a minute.”
“Oh, Edna, off Cantrell?”
I nodded again as I wrapped the hose around my arm. I’d been killing time the past few years as a handyman, doing odd repair jobs for neighbors. It was easy. I was good at it. And if I was lucky, the person would ignore me and let me work quietly in peace. That wasn’t the case with Edna, so I had to conserve my limited conversational energy.
“We know her from church, don’t we, Alice?” Midge said.
“Oh yes, that we do,” she answered. “She used to babysit the Tyler girls when their parents were going through their”—Alice dropped her voice—“terrible divorce.”
“Hush, Alice,” Midge said. “Their father is a sweet, sweet man, and he makes one heck of a pork roll at that diner of his. He didn’t deserve an ounce of what that woman did to him and his daughters.”
I froze as I was bending down to drop the hose. Turned my head. “The Tyler girls? You mean Linda’s nieces?”
“The very same,” Alice said, indifferent to my mother’s mild scolding. “Tabitha was in school with you and Rowan. You remember, right? Was she older than you or younger?”
“Older,” I said, then wished I hadn’t spoken so quickly. “Let me bring the oranges in. I’ll be right back.”
I lifted the carton and stepped inside the house I’d grown up in. The decor hadn’t changed in thirty years. As I walked to the tiny kitchen, I ignored the framed photographs of my boxing matches and magazine covers.
Every conversation in South Philly was some iteration of you remember, right? But Tabitha Tyler wasn’t a person you could easily forget. She’d been two grades above me. And in high school, I had a crush on her that rivaled the size of the fucking sun.
She was a cheerleader. She wrote for the school paper. She was friendly, popular, never without a giant smile. And she was pretty in a way that had tied my tongue every time we talked. Tabitha grew up just three streets away. For two years, until she graduated, we walked to school together every Wednesday and Thursday morning, Tabitha chatting away while I nervously tried not to trip and fall.
But she was nice to everyone. And there wasn’t anything that original about the shy kid having a crush on the beautiful, popular girl.
I pushed open the storm door and shook off the memory. I hadn’t seen her since she graduated. Tabitha had gotten out of this neighborhood in a way most people didn’t, going to college in LA. I assumed she spent her days driving a convertible down a street lined with palm trees, now even more out of my league.
“Have you seen Eddie?” I asked everyone. “I got oranges for him too.”
“Speak of the devil,” Midge said, pointing over her shoulder with her gardening gloves. “He must have seen me over here with my plants and decided to show me up.”
I flashed her a warning look. She shrugged. “What? You don’t think it’s true? Natalia told me he buys organic soil and sneaks it into his pots when he thinks we’re not looking. Organic, can you believe it? Like he’s so fancy over there?”
I rolled my eyes as I crossed the street. My parents, Alice, and Eddie were the old-timers on this block. Had lived here for most—or all of—their lives. Midge and Eddie’s flower wars were competitive but lacked any real heat. If he ever saw my parents facing any kind of insults or discrimination, he was always the first to step in and protect them if they needed it.
Eddie stepped onto his Astroturf-lined porch and lit a cigarette, still in his bathrobe. He was Italian American, like my parents, and a decade older. He spent most of his days spying on people and trading intel with Alice.
“Hey, how ya doin’, Dean,” he grumbled, then brightened when he saw the fruit. “Did you bring those for me?”
“Yeah, I did.” I handed him a handful of oranges. “You’ve got tomatoes coming your way from Natalia’s garden too.”
He ducked his head vigorously but avoided looking at me. “Yeah, yeah. That sounds real good. Nice to have a little extra if I need it, you know?”
I raked my hand through my hair as he took the food inside. When he came back out, I said, “We all need a little extra. It’s no big deal.”
“Sure, yeah.” He patted my arm, cigarette dangling from his mouth. I frowned, unsure of what else to say. Like a lot of folks in this area, he’d worked at the same oil refinery outside the city his entire life. Eddie had also been the neighborhood handyman for as long as I could remember. Until I needed a way to stay busy after retirement. And then he’d been nice enough to show me the ropes.
He never asked for help. And now that his pension couldn’t pay all his bills, he definitely didn’t ask. But Midge couldn’t cook a dinner only for two to save her life, so her leftovers came his way. And the rest of us dropped off a few groceries on his stoop when we could.
