LITMIR.BIZ

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shook her head. “Not enough money.”

      “You want money?”

      “Oh, yeah. Tons of it.”

      “How’re you gonna get it?”

      “I plan on marrying it.”

      “Whoa. Guess I’d better succeed at something, huh?”

      “I would if I were you.”

      “How much money do you want?”

      She thought about it. “Enough to fill a wheelbarrow.”

      “Singles?”

      “No. Hundreds, minimum. A wheelbarrow full of hundreds’d do me.”

      I pulled a five-dollar bill from my pocket. “This is all I’ve got.”

      “All right, then.” She took my hand, laced fingers and pulled me to her side. “What the hell, it’d be annoying, pushing that wheelbarrow everywhere. Take me to the movies, big shot.”

      Kissing and groping was as far as it ever went between Michael Anthony DeFalco and Lynn Ann Mahoney. We’d come close once to going all the way, but something happened to interrupt us….

      I didn’t despair, though. I always felt there was an inevitability to our being together, someday, somehow. It was a rock, this inevitability, a rock that wasn’t about to be washed away in a roaring rush of hormones.

      We had time for everything, is what I’m trying to say, except that time ran out on us very suddenly one August day at Jones Beach.

      I really must have loved her, because to make bucks in the summertime I was pushing a lawn mower all week long in the broiling sun, and the last thing I needed on the weekend was a day at the beach. But Lynn was cooped up all week punching that supermarket cash register, and she was starved for the sun.

      So we went. We’d take the bus to the beach and spend the whole day swimming, lying around, and eating hot dogs.

      It was always a good time, until the last time we did it. She was edgy and cranky. I wondered if she might be getting her period. I wondered if she might have met another guy. I didn’t dare ask about either thing.

      “We’ve got to even out that tan of yours, Mickey!”

      “What do you mean?”

      “Look at you! Brown from the elbows out, white from the neck down! It’s a workingman’s tan!”

      I shrugged. “I’m a workingman. What am I supposed to do about it?”

      “I don’t know.”

      I knew her as well as I knew myself, maybe better. She wasn’t upset about my tan. Something else was bothering her.

      “Hey, baby, what’s wrong?”

      She shook her head, poked my upper lip with her finger. It was something she did a lot. I have a chubby upper lip that sticks out, even now. It’s strictly a structural thing, but it makes me look as if I’m always walking around with an attitude. Lynn was always trying to push it back, so it would look like a “normal” lip.

      “I keep telling you,” I said, “I was born with it this way. It won’t stay in place.”

      “I don’t want it to stay in place. I just like to watch it spring back.”

      “Push it all you want, then.”

      “There’s nothing wrong with me, is there, Mickey?”

      I didn’t see that coming. I was shocked. I’d always thought of Lynn as the most confident, self-assured person I’d ever known, the last person I’d ever expect to ask such a question.

      “You’re great, Lynn.”

      She pressed my upper lip again, let it go. “You don’t think I’m strange, or peculiar?”

      “You’re…unique. But that’s a good thing.”

      “How am I unique?”

      “I don’t know…. You’re the only girl I could ever talk to. You’re the only person I could ever talk to.”

      I was learning it as I was saying it. What I said was true. Lynn looked as if she were about to cry, but she managed a strange smile, the smile of a happy person who’s just bitten into a lemon.

      “Know something, Mick? Your father is a nice man.”

      This came out of nowhere. Why the hell was she talking about my father?

      “Eddie’s a nice guy? Eddie’s a frustrated, unhappy ballbreaker, Lynn!”

      “Yeah, sometimes, but deep down, he’s all right.”

      “Lynn, what is all this? What’s the matter?”

      She blinked back tears. “I guess I was just wishing I had a father like yours, instead of the one I got.”

      “Well, if we get married some day, you’ll have Steady Eddie for a father-in-law. That’d be good, wouldn’t it?”

      I was shocked by my own words. I’d never spoken with Lynn about marriage. I couldn’t imagine life without her, but I’d never even thought about marrying her. Marriage, as far as I could tell, was a total fucking mess.

      She stared at me wide-eyed, picked up a clamshell, threw it into the water.

      “Wow. Mickey DeFalco speaks the M-word!”

      “I didn’t mean it, Lynn. What I mean is, I didn’t mean to upset you with it.”

      “I’m not upset about that.”

      “Think you’d want to get married some time?”

      “I’d rather go to Italy with you first.”

      We stood at the water’s edge, watching ravenous seagulls tear into whatever left-behind food scraps they could find.

      “If only we had a sailboat, and we knew how to sail, we could do it from here,” I said.

      Lynn was puzzled. “Do what?”

      I pointed toward the horizon. “Sail to Italy.”

      She looked at me, and I thought for a moment she was going to burst into tears. “That’s a sweet idea, Mickey.”

      I let my imagination go, the way you do when you’re with someone you trust to the bone.

      “It could be done, right? It’s a straight shot across the Atlantic. If we had a big enough boat, with lots of supplies, and if we didn’t hit any big storms in the middle of the ocean…”

      I’d run out of “ifs.”

      “Well, anyway, I don’t see why we couldn’t make it,” I continued. “We’d have to make sure we had enough food, stuff that wouldn’t spoil, like canned goods, because it’d probably take a couple of weeks, and we might have to drink rainwater….”

      She embraced me, harder and longer than she’d ever held me before. I wasn’t through.

      “We’d sail to Genoa, or Naples,” I continued over her shoulder. “I think those are the main seaports in Italy. They’d have to take us in, even if we didn’t have passports…. Hey, how do you get a passport, anyway?”

      There I was, seventeen years old, not yet able to drive a car, talking about guiding a sailboat across the Atlantic to start a life in Italy with Lynn Mahoney.

      The sun was setting. Ever really watched a sunset? It’s a sudden thing, not gradual in the least, and on this evening the sun seemed to slip into the waves as if it were drowning, never to rise again. On the other side of the sky the moon grew brighter and larger, as if it were winning a battle against the sinking sun. It was like a sad wedding of fire and water, and at the moment the last bit of orange was

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