Household Saints Read Free Page A

and cheese, sausage fried with onions and peppers, the good hot food they hadn’t had the appetite for all summer—everyone eating, talking, laughing while the rain pattered softly outside. Even the ones who would eventually go home to a dinner table in hell, meals soured by rancor and arguments, imagined as they hurried through the rain that they were rushing to buy food for an ideal family, a cozy dinnertime paradise.
    By the time the women reached Santangelo’s, they were giddier than their children. Breathless from running and laughing, they shook their heads, streaming droplets onto the sawdust.
    “Sweetheart!” Joseph greeted each one. “Lover, where have you been?”
    The women blushed, as if he were really their lover, and perhaps that was why they felt so unself-conscious, though their wet dresses clung to them, revealing intimate details. All they could think of was how much they’d missed him. Crowding into the shop, each was reminded of some long-ago wedding when she’d danced past midnight like Cinderella, one night when the rules which governed the rest of her life were suspended. Now, in that same way, the women dispensed with the rules of normal butcher shop behavior, and giggled and gossiped without the usual itchy awareness of whose turn was next. Even the thriftiest forgot to watch Joseph’s thumb, but it didn’t matter; that day, in celebration of the heat wave’s end, Joseph refrained from sneaking it onto the scale.
    Ordinarily, Joseph was a master of dishonesty. Like his father before him, Joseph knew exactly when and how to tip the scales, knew which housewives would notice the short weight and which were so oblivious, they could cook and carve a roast with the meat hook still inside it.
    And yet, like countless generations of Santangelos, Joseph never thought of himself as a dishonest butcher but rather as a leveler, an instrument of primitive justice like the legendary outlaws of the old country. In this tradition, he sold to widows at cost and sent rich matrons home with a pound of pancetta that was half a pound of paper. Like all great bandits, Santangelo men delighted in playing cat-and-mouse with the law, and indeed the housewives’ strategies equalled those of the cagiest detectives. Fed up, the women ordered Joseph to write his computations on the brown paper bags, and they reweighed their purchases on the scales in other shops. Always the sums totalled, the weights checked out, and still the women knew that they hadn’t received what they’d paid for.
    Of course there were other butchers in Little Italy, and nothing prevented Joseph’s customers from taking their business elsewhere. But their families would have missed his special sausage, made by old Mrs. Santangelo from a secret family recipe which they could never quite duplicate. And they themselves would have missed Joseph.
    In part it was the cheating itself which won their loyalty. They enjoyed the perpetual challenge of trying to catch him and couldn’t help admiring a man who could lie to their faces and get away with it. But why didn’t they feel the same thrill when other merchants shortchanged them? Why had they wasted no love on Joseph’s father Zio, a sour-faced man who never took his cigar out of his mouth long enough to talk?
    The answer was that Joseph liked women, and they knew it. As he strutted behind the counter—slicing, grinning, saluting them with his knives—his customers felt such warmth in their hearts that his petty dishonesties flattered them like secret signs of attention, and the energy he put into cheating them made them feel as lovely and desirable as brides.
    On that rainy September afternoon, Joseph’s dashes to the meat locker made the women think of a lover running for that special bottle of chilled champagne awaiting his mistress’s return. Like women reunited with their lovers, they felt that there was nowhere else they would rather be, no way they would rather celebrate this God-sent