Julie and Romeo Get Lucky (7 page)

“I want them to think I take good care of you.” It was my intention to say a very short hello, then slip back down to the kitchen, telling myself I was being thoughtful by letting the family have a little time alone together. Maybe Nancy would want to come downstairs with me and drink coffee. I could ask her whether or not she thought Sarah needed a math tutor.

“Okay,” Joe said. “Up you go.”

“Why is he upstairs?” a shrill voice demanded. “Who put him upstairs?”

I looked at Romeo, who had gained enough mobility by this point to turn his head and look at me. I mouthed the word, “Who?” and he mouthed back to me, “My mother.” He was pale, or perhaps he was just reflecting my own paleness back at me.

Thump, thump
came the heavy footsteps, the slow and deliberate encroaching of doom. It was like a horror film. I was trapped in the bedroom, and something truly wicked was coming up the stairs. I opened the door a tiny crack and peered out with one eye. There they were, huffing and puffing up to the second floor in a pose that was not entirely unfamiliar to me: the scariest son carting the scariest mother up and up in his arms. Joe was much bigger than Romeo, and the old witch Cacciamani was, I am sorry to say, much smaller than me, and still I could see him struggling. His receding hairline was crowned in stars of sweat, and I thought I heard some wheezing.

What if he went down, too? What if I had to lay another Cacciamani in my bed and nurse them both back to health, while the old woman harped me to death? I felt a cold chill and shut the door.

Thump, thump.
They came closer. There wasn't time to ask the logical questions:
What could Joe possibly be thinking of bringing her over here without calling first?
Or,
Do you think she knows where she is?
There was only time for one question, the big question, and I whispered, “What are we going to do?”

“Hide,” he said.

Without giving it a single thought, I stepped into my closet.

This was not a walk-in closet: This was a good, honest closet built for the good, honest sensibilities of the 1920s, when every man had three suits and every woman had four dresses and they could all be hung together without actually touching in a very small space. Whenever I opened my closet, I was confronted by the massive amount of superfluous junk that was crammed into it. My closet was a no-man's-land, a collection of things I had once needed and loved and had completely forgotten, horrible muumuus and corduroy jeans crammed in beside a couple of lovely cashmere sweaters. I stepped into a pool of my own shoes, bent down and shoved my shoulder into the densely packed wall of fabric, and pulled the door shut behind me. Had I stopped to give the whole situation two seconds of consideration, I would have been too late.

From inside my closet I heard the bedroom door swing open, somehow missing the knock that
surely
must have preceded an adult man bringing his grandmother over to see his father in his father's girlfriend's bedroom.

“Surprise!” Joe said in a weary voice.

“Put me down!”

“Hi, Ma,” Romeo said.

“This is some hospital. Look at the junk that's lying around here.”

“It isn't a hospital, Ma.”

“I should say not. The nurses don't do anything for you. The one who let us in wouldn't even tell us your room number.”

That's because she's eight years old, you idiot.

“Grammy, Dad's not in the hospital.”

It was very snug inside my closet and very dark except for the small strip of light that came in from beneath the door. I was crouching on a pair of winter boots that were not altogether comfortable, but I was not unhappy in there. I realized I had probably never taken absolutely everything out of my closet and cleaned it, and as a result there was a certain amount of dust to contend with, but what did that matter? It was my stuff after all, and the smells were my smells, my perfume and my cedar blocks and the faint green odor of the flower shop that permeated my life.

And while many a woman might have been offended to have been asked to hide at the age of sixty-three in her own house, I was not. I felt saved from an impossible situation. Old woman Cacciamani might not be able to tell a bedroom from an intensive care unit, but I have no doubt she would have recognized me, and she would have wanted to know what in the hell Julie Roseman was doing in Romeo's hospital room.

“Why are you lying in bed?” she snapped. “I've already had lunch.”

“I hurt my back,” Romeo said patiently.

“Don't you remember, I told you about Dad's back. You've been asking where he was, so I brought you over here to see him.” Joe's voice sounded huge and gruff, even when it was clear he was trying to speak gently to his grandmother. “See him? He's right there.”

“Of course I see him. Do you think I'm blind? There's a cat on the floor. Even in Italy they didn't let cats into the hospital. It's not clean.”

“Here, kitty-kitty-kitty,” Joe said sweetly.

Oompah-Loompah meowed. “He went under the bed,” the old woman said. “Disgusting.”

“Everybody knows you've got good eyes, Ma,” Romeo said, valiantly trying to change the subject. “Now tell me, are you being nice to Theresa?”

The saint, I thought at the very mention of her name. The one who stays home taking care of her children and her dog and her vicious ninety-three-year-old grandmother-in-law. I never understood the concept of Catholic sainthood until I met Theresa.

“That girl steals.”

“Theresa doesn't steal, Ma.”

“She takes my things. She takes my shoes.”

“She picks things up,” Romeo said. “She cleans up your room. If you want to know where something is, just ask her. She'll tell you.”

I shifted my hips a quarter inch to the left, hoping to relieve the growing numbness in my legs, and in doing so must have stirred up some dust. And so I did what I always do in the face of dust: I sneezed. There wasn't any time to stifle it. It was an ambush sneeze.

“What was that?” the old woman said. A mind like a sieve but ears as sharp as a five-year-old's.

“Yeah, what was that?” Joe said curiously.

“Another patient,” Romeo said calmly. “He's in the next room. Sneezes all day long.”

“I want you out of here,” Mother Cacciamani said. “The place is a pigsty. Look at this, leaving piles of laundry right here on your bed. How do you know if it's even clean? The germs in this place will kill you, and cats can smother you in your sleep. Whatever you've got now, it can't be as bad as what you could catch here.”

“I'll come home as soon as I can,” Romeo said.

“You can tell Joe to take you home with us.” I imagined she pointed up to the big man, thinking he could carry her to the car in one arm and take Romeo down in the other.

“No,” Romeo said. “I should probably stay here just a little bit longer, at least until the doctor tells me to go home.”

“Doctors don't know anything,” his mother said. I thought I heard some sadness in her voice.

“Never as much as mothers.”

“This place makes me tired,” she said.

“Joe, why don't you take your grandmother home?”

“All right,” Joe said with a heavy sigh.

“You could have at least stayed in a hospital that had an elevator. That wouldn't have been too fancy.”

“You carried her up all those stairs?” Romeo said.

“And it looks like I'll be carrying her back down.”

Romeo whistled, long and low. “You should watch your back, son.”

R
OMEO AND
I
MIGHT NOT HAVE BEEN LEGALLY
married, but we were joined in the eyes of the law as business partners. We each owned half of the other's flower shop, both of which were now called “Julie and Romeo's.” Still, it didn't exactly stick. Our customers never accepted the new names and flatly refused to use them.

Even when we talked about the stores, which we did incessantly, we always called his store Romeo's and we called mine Roseman's. We always said your store and my store. We didn't mean anything by it except as a means of differentiating: your store is low on birthday cards; I want to get some of those orchids over at my store. On the books we were profoundly conjoined, and because of that we got better prices on everything from long-stem reds on Valentine's Day to our accountant's fees.

There was also a great fluidity among our staff, because all of our staff now consisted of our children. If Big Tony was running deliveries for Roseman's, he'd call his brother Alan to see if there wasn't something that needed to go out at Romeo's. If Romeo's got backed up with arrangement orders, Raymond would call Sandy at Roseman's, and she would go over and lend a hand.

It was all a delicate balance, making sure that everybody got along and one store wasn't favored over the other, and Romeo and I sat at the helm of this great ship and charted the course. Calculating the profit margins in walk-ins and deliveries, the small gift items that could be real moneymakers, keeping on top of the distributors to make sure we were getting the very freshest product, the careful business of ordering just the right amount so that no one wound up with a store full of rotting tulips, was what we did. It worked because we made it work.

But then we stopped going to work, and instead of the world grinding to a halt the way we knew it would, everything moved forward with suspicious ease. Raymond, who had the most seniority and was the only one in his generation who looked at the shops as his career instead of his default source of employment, took over the managerial duties. When Romeo tried to grill him on the phone, Raymond gently blew him off. I stretched out next to Romeo in the bed, and he held the phone between our ears. After all, the stores did belong to both of us.

“Everything's fine, Dad. All you need to worry about is getting better.”

“I AM getting better, and I'm coming back to work soon. I just want to know about the hydrangeas.”

This wasn't exactly true. After a little more than two weeks Romeo could sit up and stand, but only for a few minutes. The rest of the time he was still flat on his back, eating Percocet.

“What's there to know?” Raymond said. “They're here, they're blue, they're beautiful.”

“But who's doing the arrangements? You and Sandy can't be handling everything yourselves.”

“We're okay.”

“You aren't letting Tony do the flowers, are you?”

“You know I wouldn't do that.”

A look of real horror passed over Romeo's face. “Not Alan!”

“Now you're just being silly,” Raymond said calmly. He was quiet for a minute, but Romeo didn't say anything either. Then Raymond sighed, breaking the stand-off. “If you have to know, I'm bringing in a designer from New York, someone very chic. She's only going to work for a week or so, just until you're back.”

I panicked. I started to say that we could never afford that, and then Romeo said it for me. “We don't have that kind of money.”

“Dad, it's Plummy,” Raymond said.

“Plummy's coming home?”

“She wanted to surprise you, so act surprised. She's taking some time off to come and see you, so I told her she might as well roll up her sleeves and help out.”

“Do you really think she can spare the time?” Romeo's voice seemed small. “She's so busy now.”

“Everyone else in the family works in these shops. I don't see why she can't.”

“But it's Plummy,” Romeo said.

“Can't you just pretend like you're on vacation? Pretend you're taking a cruise. Pretend that every phone call is ship-to-shore and is costing sixteen dollars a minute.”

Romeo hung up the phone and turned his head to face me, a new trick he was really getting quite good at. “He doesn't need me.”

“He needs you,” I said.

“I can't believe Plummy's coming in to do our flowers.”

“I know,” I said, leaning my head gently against the side of his shoulder. “That really does defy imagination.”

Having Plummy Cacciamani do the flowers in your neighborhood flower shop was a little bit like bringing in Meryl Streep to star in the community theater production of
Carousel,
or hiring Lance Armstrong to teach your kid how to ride a bike. It was overkill.

At twenty-four, she was the youngest Cacciamani by many years and bore an eerie resemblance to Audrey Hepburn, with her enormous brown eyes and a neck like a willow branch. She had taken her degree in fine arts to New York City and within a year established herself as a floral artist. Not a florist, mind you. A Floral Artist. None of this calling up and ordering flowers nonsense.

People scheduled appointments with Plummy six months in advance. They booked their weddings and banquets and rooftop soirees around her packed calendar. They rushed her to the Hamptons and flew her to L.A. to consult about blossoms and twigs.

Her work, she said in one interview, was always informed by the space. She'd cover entire walls with thousands of forsythia branches flown up from Mississippi in March, bringing in teams of men to bind them down to her exact specifications, then she'd turn around and float a handful of cherry blossoms in a flat bowl of water. Her style transferred seamlessly from Japanese minimalist to full-throttle baroque depending on how she was moved.

And she was not above making sixteen-foot arrangements loaded with roses and peonies, of the type one would see in the middle of the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, except hers always seemed like a parody somehow, an improvisation on a classic theme. The only thing consistent about her vision was its perfection.

As far as anyone could tell, no one had ever assembled plant life like Romeo's daughter, and her talent, coupled with her unnerving beauty and easy manner, made her a superstar in a field that had never had one before. Her name was linked to movie stars in the gossip column of the
Post.
She was the subject of a front-page profile in the Style section of the
Times.
And then, last spring, she was on the cover of
New York Magazine
holding a single daffodil over one eye. She was dubbed the It Girl of the season.

“Why can't Plummy help me with my Halloween costume?” Sarah complained, as I spread an ancient cake of blue eye shadow over her face. I had found it in the darkest corner of the bathroom linen closet, a cowering refugee from the early seventies.

“Because Halloween is in half an hour, and she's not coming until tomorrow.”

“Maybe she could get here earlier.”

“It's not going to happen,” Sandy said, and brushed Sarah's hair hard until she got it all gathered up into a high ponytail. Sandy had done a truly ingenious job on the costume, sewing a blue bed sheet onto a hula hoop so that Sarah was transformed, awkwardly, into a giant blueberry, just like that nasty little girl Violet in
Willie Wonka
who was punished for chewing too much gum. She wore blue tights, a blue turtleneck, blue mittens. She smacked blue gum.

“I don't think that Plummy could have come up with anything better than this anyway,” I said, pulling a green stocking cap covered in large felt leaves down on her head. “There. You're a vision. Go show Romeo.”

Sarah trudged through the hallway, her girth seeming sadly deflated. She lacked a certain puffiness, and I wondered for a minute if we should stuff her full of pillows. It would keep her warm, but it also might render her completely immobile. If only she had her own little team of Oompah-Loompah's to roll her from house to house.

“My bluebell!” Romeo said, lifting his head up off the pillow. “My star sapphire! My little robin's egg!”

“I'm a blueberry,” Sarah corrected.

“I was getting to that one.”

I felt sorry for Little Tony, who was suddenly too tall for costumes and candy. He seemed unfairly banished to adulthood, when I knew that all he really wanted was to tie a bandana on his head and put a paper patch over one eye and wear Sarah's old stuffed parrot on his shoulder. It was decided that he would take his little sister trick-or-treating, the logic being that most people would take pity on a too-tall boy and give him a couple of pieces of candy just for being a good sport.

“You'd think somebody would give out lottery tickets,” Sarah said. “Even scratch tickets. It's always candy, candy, candy.”

Sandy put a hand on either of Sarah's shoulders and looked her daughter in the face. “Sarah, you've got to snap out of this. We're going to have to start sending you to Gamblers Anonymous.”

“I hear it's a great place to meet other third graders,” I said.

“There's a drawing tonight,” she said, as if she had ever given us the chance to forget. Then she tilted her head to one side, and gave a very knowing sort of nod. There was something about her blue skin that made her look less like a blueberry and more like a very wise alien. “I'm feeling very lucky.”

“I don't know how you'd be feeling lucky, when I've told everyone to stop buying you tickets,” Sandy said, tying a blue scarf around Sarah's neck. “Now go out into the night and beg strangers for candy.”

Sarah waddled down the stairs and out the door into the cold wind, carrying an ambitiously oversized plastic bag from CVS. Little Tony trailed sullenly behind her, wearing jeans and a parka, his hands stuffed into his pockets. Big Tony followed them both at a discreet distance with a flashlight. They passed two ghosts and a blond toddler dressed as My Little Pony coming up the sidewalk. I gave out packages of M&Ms.

The plan was that Nora and Alex were coming over to help us hand out candy. They had never had a single child show up at their Back Bay condo, and while this had always been considered a plus in years past, now that Nora was pregnant she thought it was a tragedy. “I want to see what everybody's wearing,” she had said. They were supposed to come before Sarah left so they could take pictures, but now it was well past dark, and they were still no-shows.

“She probably got busy at work,” Sandy said. “She probably had to sell some mogul a house. Nora doesn't know a thing about making a promise to a child and keeping it.”

The doorbell rang, and we doled out candy to a fireman and a kangaroo. I thought of Tony and slipped a little packet of candy to a young father who was lingering at the bottom of the stairs.

Sandy had stayed on the bitter side ever since receiving the news of her sister's pregnancy. It was as if Sandy had been the one who was pregnant, and Nora had somehow stolen it away from her.

“It could just be that she's late, you know,” I told her.

“You can't be late when you have children,” Sandy said.

I looked at her with deep incredulity, wanting to tick off every time she'd been late in the past week alone. “Sure you can.”

Sandy stuck her hands deep into her curls and turned her head from side to side as if she was trying to screw it off her shoulders. It was a funny little thing she did when she got frustrated with herself. Even as a little girl, she would manually work her head back and forth when she did something stupid.

The doorbell rang again.

“Go upstairs with Romeo. I'll answer it,” she said.

I felt like I should be able to be some sort of comfort to Sandy, but on the other hand I wanted to comfort Romeo, too. What I needed was some as-yet-uninvented product: a pressurized canister with which I could spray foamy comfort from room to room. Trying to comfort an entire house full of people manually was getting to be too much of a job. Sandy looked at me and pointed up the stairs. “Go,” she said.

Romeo was sitting on the edge of the bed with his feet on the floor. He smiled at me.

“Look at you!” I said.

“It's progress. I'm almost ready to get out of here.”

I sat down beside him and took his hand. “It's not as bad as all that.”

He smiled. “Oh, Julie, if I were going to be held prisoner in anybody's bedroom, I'd want it to be yours.” He did a small movement that was at once a turn and a lean forward. He was moving in to kiss me, but when his mouth came within two inches of mine, he screamed.

“What!”

Every muscle in his face tightened up. “Back down,” he gasped. “Back down.”

And so I helped him lie back and picked up his feet and very carefully stretched them out in front of him. I got him a pain pill and a glass of water with the bendy-neck straw. Someday, when he was ready, Romeo would go, but it wasn't going to be anytime soon.

When Dr. Dominic and Father Al showed up in a stream of cowboys and swamis and fifties girls in poodle skirts, I just pointed them up. They came back down five minutes later shaking their heads.