The vertical blinds sway in Nonno’s old bedroom. Probably his ghost roaming around again. I stare at the white brick St. Leonard duplex with stone lion statues on both sides of the stairs and try to convince myself that plenty of successful thirty-year-olds move back in with their parents. I told them I just wanted to put some money aside for a house and Mom and Dad, who are still shocked and offended that I had left in the first place, accepted without question. I turn to Dad and tap the hood of the Volkswagen parked in the driveway.
“The bookshelf is the last of it.”
“Is big,” Pa says, pronouncing the i’s like the ee in cheese. He wipes the sweat from his forehead and fans himself with his Myrtle Beach baseball cap from the ‘95 family trip. Overexposure to the sun has transformed his bald head into an orange dome riddled with sunspots. He is wearing the classic summer outfit of an undershirt, leather loafers, and the same pair of turquoise short shorts he has been wearing since before I was born. Each article of clothing represents a different decade since his immigration to Canada. “Back up the car. Is too far.”
I get into the Volkswagen and blow into the Breathalyzer again so I can turn the key in the ignition. Pa, who doesn’t even drink wine with dinner, shakes his head. Picking me up at the station after the DUI was not his proudest moment. The green light flashes and I reverse.
We grab the bookshelf from the trunk and carry it through the garage filled with cobwebbed wine jugs, folding chairs, and the snowblower Nonno steered like a sea captain at the helm of a great ship.
“Watch your backs!” Ma yells from the upstairs.
We place it in the basement hallway, which is permanently filled with boxes stacked like pillars. The combination of my parents’ inability to throw anything out and Nonno’s lifetime of hoarding means there are five of everything: cutlery sets, shrimp cocktail glasses, espresso cups, pizzelle makers, cast iron skillets and boxes of bubble-wrapped bomboniere not nice enough to be put on display.
“Tommy,” Pa says, o as in owe, unable to pronounce the Anglicized version of Nonno’s name, Tomasso, that Ma had insisted on giving me. “Porta i suitcase sopra in Nonno’s room. We do the rest tomorrow, ok? È tardo.”
With my old room full of Ma’s exercise equipment, I have no choice but to take the bedroom haunted by my grandfather’s spirit. Heaving the suitcase full of my office clothes up the staircases covered in 1970s floral carpeting, I stop for a minute and stare out the open back door. I fantasize about running through the backyard and climbing over the fence to place a bet on the Roger’s Cup quarterfinal. But what about Andy Scalia? Son of a bitch. He’s probably waiting to jump out from the bushes and throw me into the back of his Cadillac Escalade.
“After you’re done in there, come here for a minute, ok?” Ma requests, sticking her head out from the office with horn-rimmed reading glasses perched on her roman nose. “I can’t see my emails. It keeps saying I have to call a number to win a million dollars.”
“Yes, Ma.”
I lay the suitcase on the bed. The closet is stocked with Nonna’s fur coats and her all-black wardrobe. He had become a permanent widower after Nonna died of complications of diabetes. He joined her in the following decade. Ma found him squirming on the bathroom floor, clutching his chest. He has been dead for nearly three years now, but his old set-up remains untouched. No wonder he won’t leave the realm of the living. The rocking chair is parked in front of the bulky, dust-covered television set in the corner. A half dozen VHS wrestling tapes are stacked on the VCR. “Lotta,” one tape reads in square letters. It’s the same penmanship as on the label-less spray bottles under the bathroom sink marked Windex or Sapone.
I slip one of the tapes into the VCR and sit on the footrest. Andre the Giant, Nonno’s all-time favourite wrestler, appears on the screen in black spandex, choking Jake the Snake. The image scrambles. The sound slows down like it is being played in reverse. Andre’s ogre face is made double through distorted waves of black and white. Wanting to avoid an electrical fire, I eject the tape.
I find a photo album while placing my folded shirts in the dresser. My grandfather solemnly poses with his sister by a fig tree in the village. Next, he is chopping wood in a field. On the following page, he’s standing in front of an apartment building somewhere on Papineau where he opened his first shoe store. In full-colour, my unsmiling grandparents cut their 50th-anniversary cake. I recognize the mustard rococo couch covered in plastic. We still have it downstairs, but nobody sits there because we aren’t allowed. Was she thinking about his French-Canadian mistress when she sliced into that cake?
“Malocchio,” Nonna had exclaimed years before. She sat in her chair with the Old Testament in her lap and a hot compress over her eyes. That whore had cursed her with her envious, evil eye, she swore. “Maledizione!” It was the source of her migraines and incessant yawning. It was the evil eye that caused her to misplace her wedding band and forget to water the plants. My grandfather’s shameful affair, Nonna whispered to me from her chair, had cursed us to lead lives of misfortune.
I hold my necklace, feeling the missing cornicello, the coral horn amulet she gave me at birth to ward off the malocchio. I was ten years old when she instructed me to get her a pair of scissors. She filled a dish with holy water and made the sign of the cross three times. She placed her pinky in olive oil and then dipped it into the holy water. The drops merged, and the oil spread out, confirming the fear that she had been cursed. “The scissors,” she demanded. I handed them over and she cut the air over the dish of oily water, then made the sign of the cross three more times. “Holy Monday, Holy Tuesday, Holy Wednesday, Holy Thursday, Holy Friday, Holy Saturday and to Easter Sunday, the evil eye dies!” But she never recovered.
What’s this? There’s something else in the drawer: a rusty bullet. Was it from the war? Nonno participated in the North African Campaign. When I asked him what he did in the war, he told me he was a “driver.” “We had to eat potato skins to survive,” he said. “Like hyenas.” Then he pulled my cheek and gave me an Oreo.
Did he fire the other bullets in the chamber? Niccolò Rizzuto grew up down the street in the village. Could Nonno have been involved in some way? At 86, Niccolò sniped through the double-glass patio door of his Cartierville mansion while Nonno planted zucchini here in the garden. If there are another one of his secrets hidden somewhere, we’re all better off leaving it buried.
I hang a pair of work trousers and a dress shirt on the back of the closet door and glance through the window blinds.
“Don’t be paranoid,” I repeat to myself. “Nobody’s waiting in the bushes.”
2:47 AM. Even with my head under the covers, I see the glowing lights of the poker machines. Spades. Jokers. Lemons. I hear the jingle of coins and the jackpot chime. I need a smoke, but hiding the habit from my parents is a Navy Seal Mission. If I manage to sneak one, I’ll want to make myself a drink from the untouched liquor cabinet and before I know it, I’ll end up at Café Paradiso burning a paycheck playing the machines. The one in the corner is going to pay out any day now. I’ve been loosening it up for weeks. The others, Hachem the welder on disability checks and Sylvianne the single mother, don’t know what they’re doing.
Stop. Think about something else. Ten grand short. I can’t afford to show up at the office on Monday with a mouthful of loose teeth. What can I pawn for a few bucks? It must be something around here nobody would notice. No, don’t even think about it. Jesus Christ. Stay in bed. Watch your back. Don’t end up like Carlos De Sousa with his foot cast. They say Andy Scalia whacked his toes with a mallet. The next morning, Carlos borrowed from his parents to pay his debts, but instead of forking it over, he used the cash to bet on college basketball. Whatever happened to him?
I stick my head out from under the covers and look straight at Nonno’s twenty-inch porcelain statue of the Virgin Mary. She stares back at me, a bleeding heart pierced by daggers. To her left, a framed certificate signed by Pope John Paul II sanctifies Nonno and Nonna’s marriage, while to the right, a portrait of Padre Pio shows off his Stigmata. There must be a crucifix in every room of this house.
I see Nonno from the corner of my eye. He’s in his military uniform hunched over on the rocking chair. His service rifle is slung over his shoulder, hair full of dust. Scarfing down potato skins in the palms of his hands, he stops to stare at me. Nonna had always said the place was haunted. She claimed she heard horses galloping on the roof.
“I worked two jobs for thirty years to build this house and you want to piss it away in thirty seconds,” Nonno complains. “Disgraziato!”
As usual, I try to ignore my grandfather’s ghost.
“You’re one to talk,” I want to say, remembering how he used to get loaded on wine and flirt with cashiers at the grocery store. Sometimes he would play cards at the bar for money and accuse the old men of cheating when he lost to play for a final pot.
“Be a man!” he shouts before vanishing into time and space.
Ma says if we keep giving him attention, he’ll never find his way toward the light. He lingers, refusing to let go of his cluttered house while I lie in his queen size bed, guarding my own secrets. More than a name, we share the degenerate gene that steers us clear of respectability.
The phone rings. Startled, I grab the wireless phone from the dock.
“Hello?” Nobody answers. RECHARGE BATTERY. Just like the stockpile of free U-Haul pens that don’t write, Dad refuses to get rid of the broken phones.
The ringing wakes up my parents in the adjacent bedroom.
I hear Ma first. “Who’s calling at this time?”
“Allo?” Pa answers the phone. “Allo? Why nobody speak?”
“Throw out that stupid phone for God’s sake, it doesn’t work.”
I jump out of bed and rush downstairs to the kitchen to grab one of the few functioning phones. “Hello?”
“Who is it?” Ma asks, coming down the stairs in her flannel nightgown. “Tommy, does this person know what time it is?”
“Hello?” I repeat, raising my voice.
The dial tone hums in response.
Sunday morning. My parents are in mass. I dress and look through the blinds. Nobody’s there. Staying home all day to watch The Price is Right is unthinkable. I need to move. Quickly, I put on a cap and a pair of Pa’s sunglasses to avoid being recognized. I rush out the door and spark a cig. I walk in the direction of the park with my hands in my pockets, glancing over my shoulder. One step at a time I pick up the pace, finding myself diverting from the intended path to the park to the front door of Bar Legacy.
The barmaid behind the counter paints her nails while the owner texts without even glancing in my direction. The place is dead with only a few tables and chairs like they’re not expecting or inviting any customers. These are the telltale signs of a mob bar. A buzzing, neon arrow “Loterie Vidéo” sign points to a backroom where the poker machines glow. I pull out a twenty from my pocket to slip into the Poker King, but then, imagining my toes being crushed with a mallet, I turn back and order an espresso instead. It goes down in a single gulp. Where am I gonna get ten k? Get a grip! Bite the bullet and bury it. You can get a second job. Join a meditation group. When the cup hits the saucer with a clink, the owner, still seated on the stool, doesn’t look up from the screen of his phone.
I jog back to the house and run up past the stone lions. When I put the key in the lock and try to turn, the key doesn’t move. With a slight push, the door slides open. Did I forget to lock it?
“Hello? Ma? Pa?”
There doesn’t seem to be anybody home. Mass doesn’t end for another twenty minutes. I look around, finding nothing out of the ordinary until I get to the kitchen. The forty-inch television set is missing from the wall mount. Shit! I grab the kitchen shears from the counter and silently make my way upstairs to the bedrooms where all the drawers are open and our clothes are strewn across the vinyl tiles. Ma’s crystal jewelry box lies open. Pa’s foreign coin collection purse has been emptied. Nonno’s Virgin Mary, broken in two. Maybe the intruder is still here.
In the living room, the computer, DVD player, radio and accordion Nonno forced Ma to play at family gatherings when she was a child, are gone. The pillars of boxes in the basement hallway are turned over on their sides. Even the filing cabinet was raided. In the canteen, a jug of Nonno’s last batch of vinegary wine seeps into the floor drain. The downstairs kitchen window is shattered. This must be where the Andy broke in. He left through the front door like he owned the place. “One way or another, I’m gonna collect,” he told me eight days ago, pointing a screwdriver at my eye. “You’ve got one week.”
I slash at the air and kick the garbage can across the kitchen. “Fuck!” I pick up the phone to dial 911, but there is no dial tone. RECHARGE BATTERY.
“Thirty years!”
I turn around. Nonno is sitting at the table. He shakes his head. “When I arrived in this country, my shoes were full of holes.”
I take a seat across my grandfather’s ghost. My face falls into my hands.
“What was it all worth?” He sobs. “What do I do now?”
“I don’t know,” I reply, watching the tears run down his translucent cheeks.
I hear Dad’s rattling muffler. The jars of tomato sauce shake on the wall shelves. My parents must be parking in the driveway. I stare at the canteen door, which leads to the backyard. I see myself running to Café Paradiso and hitting the jackpot. The machine in the corner finally pays off. “Full house,” I whisper to myself, but don’t budge from the chair and as my grandfather’s ghost gazes at the broken window, I turn to face the misfortune I’ve brought upon the living and the dead.