Apple of her mother's eye

Mary Anne and her older brother Paul grew up in one of those steel towns with brick streets, where all the shops are within a block of the bar, and you can see the mill, the river, and mountains up the hill behind the bar, all from the front stoop of the bar. Their father, who had been hurt in an accident in the mill, some say deliberately, spent his evenings at that bar, drinking and gambling with off-duty mill-workers; Mary Anne was more angry with her mother, though, for tolerating it, while at the same time trying to instill virtue in her as a young Catholic girl. She started out very close to her mother, helping her at the dress shop she ran, and that they lived on top of, but by the time she started kindergarten, her father was already down at the bar most afternoons, and it seemed like good times were already over. She and Paul got in trouble practically from the start, stealing and drinking communion wine together, breaking into the bar in the middle of the night together, and later stealing an enormous statue from the school and dumping it in the river, and getting caught, eventually.

Both got in serious trouble in high school; Paul stole a car and had to be bailed out by Mary Anne; Mary Anne actually dropped out of high school and started living with a drug dealer named Joseph, who had a trailer out on the edge of town. Joseph's father was the pharmacist; his business was on the same street as the bar, a few doors down from the dress shop, but he was a drunk too, and mean to boot, so Joseph had no intention of staying by his side, or going to school, long enough to learn the family business. Times are changing, Mary Anne's mother would say. This shop won't stay open forever; neither will his father's. Neither will the mill, for that matter, you know how things are going. Mary Anne, Paul and Joseph were all in that generation where it didn't seem clear where a person could fit in, if they didn't want to work in the mill. People would look at Mary Anne when she was little, and remind her- she was the baby of the family, the apple of her mother's eye. But she'd got hardened, tough, and angry, especially at her mother. And to the question of why a woman would stick with a man, if he cussed and drank and gambled, and spent what little money she had, her mother would only say, in my generation we didn't toss out husbands like shoes that didn't fit just right anymore.

Mary Anne stayed out at that trailer for a few months, but her being there actually attracted unwanted attention to Joseph, and endangered his business. Joseph was serious about making some money and getting out of this town, going somewhere where there was a future, but he was serious about Mary Anne too. At one point there was a bad drug deal with her brother Paul; Paul claimed that Joseph had overcharged him; Joseph told Paul to get lost, and made it clear he never wanted to lay eyes on him again. Even then he had some thugs that were working with him, guys like Rico Soto, guys from mill families who were born with huge muscles and metal things stuffed in their waists, guys you didn't want to mess with. But Paul couldn't get lost; he had nowhere to go.

Joseph was passionately in love with Mary Anne, but he could see, right then, that in some ways she would always be closer to her brother, and in fact took her brother's side in the argument. It didn't matter to her the details, the fact that Paul had been lying and stealing for years now, that he would do anything for Mary Anne's attention, that he was blindly jealous of Joseph. To Joseph it all seemed like Paul was the problem; he'd been in the way from the beginning. But Joseph was determined in many ways. He moved further out into the country and set up his dealing business so that he could expand it, keep it secret, and hide out for a while. He made less of a paper trail out to his farm, so fewer and fewer people even knew where he was or what he was doing; at the same time, he expanded his contacts in the cities, where the money was. And he kept his eye on Mary Anne and her family.

Paul was in and out of jail, mostly for little stuff, but finally he got into big trouble. Mac Cobb, a cement man and a friend of their father's, had befriended Paul as a kid and offered him work pouring cement at frequent jobs around the county. Paul was completely unreliable in those days, as he was always being arrested for drinking and disorderly-type crimes, and drugs, while he was still getting along with Joseph. But one evening Rico Soto came after old Mac Cobb as he was closing his place, and demanded payment on a gambling debt. He knocked out Mac Cobb with a single punch, when Paul came upon him, rustling through the papers in the back office. Paul told him to get out of there; he didn't. They started a fight that very well could have ended in Paul's death, but, just by chance, Mary Anne arrived at the old cement yard just then, to pick up Paul in their old Pontiac. Mary Anne picked up an old shovel and gave Rico Soto a whack in the head, right as they were fighting on the floor. This was enough to give Paul a minute to get out from under Soto's grip, enough to give him time to get to his feet, grab the shovel, and give Soto another whack. This time, Soto, was killed; Mary Anne was breathless, horrified at the sight.

Paul feared for his life, sure that Soto's friends, and Joseph, would come after him and kill him. Impulsively, Mary Anne said that she'd done it, and they stuck with their story. It seemed like the only thing they could do to save Paul's life; Mary Anne felt she had nothing to lose. It was a big deal in that town, a murder, however justified or not, and it tended to shine the light on their father, the drunken gambler, and the rough life Mary Anne and her brothers and sisters had suffered. Her mother, of course, suspected the truth, and was furious with both of them, but Mary Anne was angry too, angry at her mother for putting her in this world, with no choices, a world with gambling and alcohol and drugs, and ugly thugs like Rico Soto menacing everyone. To the judge she played an innocent, drawn into a murder scene, striking out in self-defense, and got off with a stern probation. She was living at home at the time, but deeply unhappy, fighting with her mother every day. She was aware that Joseph, with his dirty drug money, was watching her, from out in the country, probably waiting for opportunity. Finally she got the chance to move to Ireland, through a woman her mother knew from church, and she took it. She'd wanted out of this mill town, this brick-street, hard-drinking coke-furnace jerkwater town, from the beginning, and now she got her chance, and moved.

In Ireland she got married almost immediately, to a guy named Sean, a raffish character, easygoing and handsome like her father, but who always had lots of drugs, and many friends, but almost no prospects. Sean went away for weeks at a time, and when he came back to Dublin he had plenty of cash, much like her father when he'd win a big pot at the local bar, and treat everyone to big steak dinners. She loved it both when they were together, on a roll, living the high life in Dublin, and then again when she was alone, and she'd be quieter, and sometimes remember the hard life she'd left behind in Pennsylvania. She missed her mother, whose greatest fear was that she'd have a baby and they'd be unable to meet; this, however, wouldn't happen, and more often she'd make short calls home and just tell her mother that she was ok. She heard reports: that Paul had gone to jail for a short time again, this time for his part in a drunken brawl, but also probably for suspicion of guilt in the Rico Soto case; that her older brother died in a mill accident; that an older sister had married a mill worker who had beat her and put her in the hospital. The dress shop was selling wedding stuff now but was slowly but surely going out of business; so was the pharmacy down the street. Only the bar was still doing a lively business, and the mill was hanging on, against most predictions.

One day she got a telegram from Sean, who was in jail on the Moldova-Romania border for smuggling drugs, and needed her help getting him out of jail. In a panic she grabbed some clothes and went to the train station. But at the train station, who should she see but Joseph, from Pennsylvania, blocking her path and not letting her get to the ticket booth.

"You need to forget this guy," Joseph said. "He's trouble. He's too stupid to stay out of jail". She was appalled that he even knew who Sean was.

"What, and go back to the states with you?" she asked bitterly. Somehow she figured she would have the same fate with him someday; didn't all drug dealers end up in jail? Or dead?

"Listen, I have money now, I don't need to keep doing that. I can take care of you, keep you in the lifestyle you want, wherever you want to live. Here, Pennsylvania, wherever you want. You don't have to chase this worthless guy to the end of the earth"

"I don't want to live with you," she said. "I tried that, remember? Go home, Joseph, and leave me alone!" She shook him off, left him there outside the train station, bought her ticket, and settled in for a long ride to eastern Europe, where, after some months of haggling, finding Sean's parents, and translating with local authorities, she got her husband out of jail, brought him back to Ireland, and told him never to do that again.

But things were not as happy or carefree as they had been. For one thing, she got the impression that Joseph was still tailing her. She felt her apartment had been broken into in her absence, and had an uncanny feeling that Joseph knew everything about her, how she'd keep a key under a garbage can, when she'd come and go, where she went when Sean was gone. She even thought she'd seen Joseph a few times, disappearing around corners, after watching her perhaps, in various parts of Dublin as she went around, getting her groceries or whatever. It was an unsettling feeling, and worst of all, she couldn't shake off what he'd said.

Her marriage with Sean also wasn't going well; he didn't amount to much, and she couldn't really change him. He continued to love her and adore her, and bring her money and good times whenever he had it, but it always seemed like less money, and hollow good times, much like her father's steaks, enjoyed on the back of some loser's pain. She wanted to leave him; she wanted out, but she thought of her mother's remark about shoes, and that stopped her; also, it was Joseph she was really worried about.

For many months, she thought about that strange encounter at the train station with Joseph. Strange, that as far as the law was concerned, she had killed his right-hand man, and got away with it, yet he either didn't believe it, or it meant little to him, since he didn't even mention it, and continued to want her with a passion she knew was only getting stronger. He seemed out of control; he would stop at nothing.

When her father died, she packed her bags quickly to fly back to Pennsylvania for the funeral. Sean even then looked at her, suspecting it was over, doing nothing. She threw a few extra things into the suitcase; still he did nothing. There was a moment, when an entire marriage came to that point; he could have gone along to Pennsylvania, but didn't; he could have changed his ways, but maybe couldn't have; he was what he was.

In Pennsylvania, the family, as it was, was together again; Paul had now gotten out of jail, and was taking over Cobb's cement business. He seemed upright now, quiet, steady, determined to make it in spite of his own bad reputation and all that had happened. Their mother was falling apart, though; the last few years had been rough, with no money, and their father in bad health, the other brothers and sisters gone, or unable to help much in any case.

Late at night, Mary Anne found herself talking again to Paul, at the kitchen table in the old apartment above the dress shop, telling him about Joseph giving her the chills at the Dublin train station, and again with the various signs of his tailing her.

"He won't be bothering you again," said Paul.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, he's been around here, too. Dad got into some gambling debts before he died. Joseph came around and offered to pay them off, but I wouldn't let him. Mom almost took it though, she thought he was a gentleman, and a nice rich one at that. I knew what he was after, though, and I told him, if he ever came hanging around here again, I'd kill him.

"Then, it turns out, Dad lost the shop and the apartment, too; he'd used it as collateral for a loan, and lost that. And it turns out that it all was about to be bought up by some shadow company called "Consolidated", and Mom had made a deal to make payments with them somehow. I looked into this company, and it was completely hidden, the trail died, and I got in the way of that too. I knew Joseph was behind it. And I knew he didn't like me snooping around. It was just like high school, when I almost got him busted, because he was doing his sneaky business.

"He came out to find me, and threaten me, to get the deed to the place, with his money and his lease and his slimy Consolidated whatever it was. But I was out at the new Wal-Mart site; they've been pouring and building 24 hours, they're in a hurry, and half the time I'm out there, in the middle of the night, whenever it's convenient for them. I'm making plenty of money, and I'm pouring plenty of concrete, and I work at my own pace, I work around the electricians and plumbers and all.

"Well, he brought his gun, but he left his thugs behind, because of the personal nature of what he was doing, and that was his mistake. Let's just say, those thugs will never find him. He's not coming back to the surface.

"You…?" She was dumbfounded.

"He has no trail. He has no name; he disappeared from the face of the earth. His people are not going to go to the police looking for him. They came looking for me, but I was at the bar; I made sure that those big guys were standing right behind me, when I told them, I don't know anything about it, and if you know what's good for you, you'll get lost. They took his car, and they're out of here; I think maybe they were glad to see him go. And he had no legitimate business around here, none. His dad and the pharmacy are long gone, they don't have little pharmacies like that anymore, maybe the old man went to Florida or something. Joseph, if he'd a kept running drugs up and down the east coast, I'd a' had no problem with him. Listen, sis…"

He didn't want to say any more; he didn't have to. "My lips are sealed," she said. The only man that had ever really loved her, the only guy she'd be true to, her brother, and he was a murderer, not once, but twice. This time, he'd done it for her, and for their mother.

"I got a job waiting for you at the cement place; I need someone to take calls and manage the bills."

"It would help if someone stayed in the house, took care of mom, helped her keep stuff in order," he said. "The store is finished, I guess, though I got the building back, with a promise of some money; I'd never let go of the deed, and Consolidated basically disappeared. It's more mom I'm worried about; I don't want her going making deals with guys like that again."

"Consider it done," she said, looking around at the familiar mess. In fact it was a couple of days before she'd settled on the idea, but then, it was days before she could have a rational conversation with her mother, too. And by then, she'd got word from Europe that Sean was in some other jail, far from home, needing to be bailed out. One's past is never far behind, she thought, as she was walking with Paul one night, but, as they passed by the church, they came to a little cement patch of the walkway, where they'd each put their hand print, as children. They stopped for a moment, trying to remember the priest who had made that possible, but he too was long gone, like so much else; they couldn't even remember his name.

With Dad not around, it would probably be simpler. It would be different, anyway, a new chapter, a new start. The sun was rising behind the rusty smoke of the mills; the first of the cars clattered along the bricks by the church, on their way to work. Paul picked up a piece of slag, a small rocky remains of the steelmaking process, and pinged it against the window of the church, not breaking it this time. Mary Anne needed some sleep, and turned back toward the apartment, and then to her old room, in the back corner of it. The old apartment building, the downtown alley out the window, and the old wooden floors, settled around and beneath her, not ready yet for the new day.

10-07