Household Saints Read Free Page B

break in the weather.
    Yet this celebration, like so many others, included one determined holdout, one teenage girl leaning into a corner with the folded arms and put-upon expression of someone who’s not enjoying herself and doesn’t care who knows, someone so unable to get into the swing of things that she forgets completely where she is and winds up being the last one to leave.
    And so the shop was empty again when Catherine Falconetti remembered what she was doing there, stepped up to the counter and said, “Two pounds of sausage.”
    “Hot or sweet?” Joseph’s sly grin suggested a choice between two delicious and obscene alternatives.
    “Mixed.” Catherine didn’t smile back.
    “Half and half it is.” Reaching into the display case, Joseph bent till his eyes were level with Catherine’s chest, then straightened up and said, “Two pounds of sausage for a shrimp like you?”
    Catherine looked as if she were eyeing a silverfish in the bathtub.
    “Not just for me.”
    “Too bad. If you don’t mind my saying so, you could use the extra meat.”
    “Spare me the beauty advice and let’s have the sausage so I can get home and start cooking. Lino’s hungover from your card game last night and he’s hungry.”
    “Right,” murmured Joseph. “Two pounds of special sausage for my good friend Lino Falconetti.”
    Unlike Lino, Joseph was blessed with a memory which no amount of alcohol could impair. He awoke in the morning with perfect recall and no intention of holding his drinking companions to the stupid things they did and said the night before. A spiteful man could have used such a memory to ruin half the businesses and marriages on Mulberry Street. But Joseph kept his neighbor’s confidences to himself, for his own amusement—just as it amused him now to think that little Catherine Falconetti belonged to him. He would never collect on the bet, no more than Frank Manzone would dream of claiming poor Nicky’s reconditioned Stromberg-Carlson. For one thing, Lino wouldn’t remember staking his daughter. For another, Joseph didn’t want her.
    Idly, he took another look at his prize—built like a ten-year-old boy and about as attractive as she stood there, chewing gum like a kid who imagines that toughness is a matter of how sullenly you can chew. Rain dripped from her spiky dark hair and shone in the pebbles of her black, old lady’s cardigan. Like his other customers, Catherine was soaked, but she was the only one with hunched shoulders, arms folded in on herself—as if, thought Joseph, she had something to hide.
    What would he do with her if he had her? No father, no matter how drunk, would gamble away his daughter’s honor—and that automatically left marriage. But Joseph wasn’t ready to marry; and if he were, Catherine wasn’t the wife he would choose.
    Still, she was a female. In honor of that fact, and for the sake of form, Joseph tossed the coiled sausage up into the air and caught it on his knife blade in such a way that it fell to the counter with six links neatly separated from the rest. The elegance of this gesture was wasted on Catherine, who was gazing over his head at the poster of a cow divided into cuts of meat.
    No longer amused, Joseph slammed the sausage onto the scale and was suddenly overcome by the disappointment which so often follows near-disasters, catastrophes survived. The heat wave was over, people were buying sausage again. Just yesterday, he’d wondered how his life would change in some slow, hot, vegetarian end of the world—but now he knew that it would never change at all. And what did that leave him? Forty, maybe fifty years of cheating housewives out of their precious pennies, of drinking his way through dull pinochle games and winning uncollectible bets from the Falconettis. At this, Joseph’s melancholy changed to anger—directed, for want of a better object, at Lino Falconetti. The old man owed him something—if not a daughter, then something to redeem a