Chapter 10: Sunday Gravy

I picked up the receipt and read it three times.

Then I read the date out loud, because I needed to hear it.

"June ninth."

My father took it out of my hand.

He held it under the lamp. He didn't need his glasses for this one.

"That little bastard bought it at a mall," he said.

"He bought it at a mall with his own credit card," Sam said. "And then he did Darth Vader for the cashier."

My father put the receipt down and laughed.

It came out of him in a bark, and then he couldn't stop.

He laughed until he was wiping his eyes, and then I was laughing too.

On Sunday Sam took me to dinner at his grandmother's.

"It's not a date," he said in the car.

"I didn't say it was."

"She'll say it is. She'll say it to your face. I want you prepared."

His grandmother lives on a narrow street in Port Richmond, three blocks from the church, in the same rowhouse she was married in.

There was a blue Blessed Mother in a half-buried bathtub out front.

His grandmother was in the doorway before we were out of the car.

She was eighty-four and about as tall as my shoulder, with white hair set in curls and reading glasses on a beaded chain.

"So you're the one," she said.

"The one what?"

"The one he talks about when he thinks he's not talking about anybody."

"Gram," Sam said.

"Inside. The gravy's been on since nine."

The living room had a plastic runner on the carpet and forty years of school photos on the wall.

Sam at six, missing teeth. Sam at twelve, all ears.

Sam at twenty-one in his police uniform.

She sat me on the couch and sat directly across from me in a recliner, close enough that our knees almost touched.

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