Revolver Read Free Page A

what?”
      
    Every time Jim pulls up in front of his house he can’t help but feel disappointed. They bought their row on Unruh Avenue as their starter home in the late seventies when Mayfair was still solid—lots of guys on the force lived in the Northeast—and they had one kid. The loose plan was to stick around for five, six years, then bolt for someplace bigger. Maybe even out in the near burbs.
    But those five years passed in a blink, and in the meantime came their second boy (Cary), and before long it was 1990, and they realized they’d been there a dozen years and now with a new baby girl in the house. Instead of moving they doubled down, building a deck off the back of the house to make up for the lack of a yard. According to conventional wisdom in Northeast Philly, once you put on a deck you were there for life. But who cares. In the warm weather, the deck is pretty much where they live.
    Jim holds the door open for his widowed mom, Rose, whom they picked up after their visit to the shuttered bar. Rose Walczak still lives in the house she bought with her husband almost fifty years ago, but sooner or later she’s going to have to move. Not necessarily to an old-age home—she’s a bit too young for that—but to a small apartment, maybe, in a better neighborhood. This was a decent slice of Frankford for a long while, but lately it’s joined the rest of the city in becoming one sprawling high-crime area. Jim dreads taking the call someday that someone’s attacked her.
    Rose will refuse, of course. This is her world, and all she knows. Part of Jim can’t blame her—and if he’s honest, that same part of him will be gutted to put the house up for sale. The ghost of his father still looms large there.
    “DADDEEEEEEEEEE!”
    Audrey comes thundering across the wooden floor. She’s five years old and crazy and strong as a bull.
    BAM —a wrecking ball right to Jim’s upper thighs. He scoops her up and blows raspberries into the side of her neck, causing her to wail and squirm around in his arms.
    Rose hands Claire her homemade potato salad (which the kids love) and beet salad (which they loathe). She kisses Sta ś on his forehead, then pats his girlfriend, Bethanne, on her cheek. “Such a pretty girl,” she says. Bethanne blushes.
    Cary walks behind Rose, in her wake, and winks at Bethanne, his gaze lingering. He has a public crush on his brother’s girlfriend that sometimes borders on the inappropriate.
    “Fuck off, Care,” Sta ś says.
    Jim wanted to name their firstborn after his father. But Claire didn’t want him going through life saddled with a name like Stanisław, or even the shorter version, Stan. (“Stan’s the guy who fixes your plumbing,” she said.) So they settled on the alternate form Sta ś , pronounced “Stosh.” People mishear it all the time, call him Josh, which drives him nuts.
    Claire wraps her arms around Jim’s burly torso and tucks herself in.
    “Time to get your disgusting Polish meat out of my fridge onto the grill,” she says.
    Jim whispers:
    “I can think of someplace more fun than the grill.”
    She pokes him again, harder this time, laughing despite herself. But she really does hate the smell of the kielbasa. Despite this, she already has the links cut and butterflied so all he has to do is char them a little. Jim buys kielbasa from Czerw’s, a small shop in Port Richmond that’s been grinding and smoking the stuff since the Great Depression. Pop used to shop there.
    Claire doesn’t eat red meat—and even if she did, she wouldn’t eat pork—so this is something she only tolerates on special occasions. To Jim there’s nothing better than the aroma of the smoked stuff wafting out of the fridge whenever you open it. Claire more or less gags every time.
    As Jim turns the links, Audrey is spinning around lip-syncing to her new favorite song, which is pumping from a CD boom box:
    An older version of me, is she perverted like me?
    Jim doesn’t know whether to