The Blue Helmet Read Free

of visiting Rome and Venice and Florence to feast on paintings and sculptures. I remember the discussions and arguments Mom and Dad had—about the expense, about maybe taking me with them—before they finally packed me up and drove me to my aunt’s, promising they’d come home soon and bring me lots of presents.
    When they returned, she was pale and weak.She had lost weight, but her eyes were bright with excitement, and she began a new painting the same day. Before she was able to finish it, an ambulance carried her off to the hospital. They hooked her up with wires and tubes, and her body under the bed sheet was like the stick-figures I drew at school.
    She never came home. One afternoon my father sat me down in the kitchen and crouched before me, holding my hands, and told me in a voice he could barely control to pretend she was on another trip and that we’d see her again some day. Even at seven, I was too old for that crap. I was confused and terrified, but I knew my mother wasn’t on holiday.
    I hardly saw my father after that. He held two jobs, the auto repair during the day, a department store at nights and on Saturdays. Neither one paid a decent wage. He was gone when I got up in the morning and never home before ten at night, when he’d drag himself into the apartment, eat, have a few beers, and fall asleep in front of the TV . When I was little, baby-sitters looked after me Saturdays and after school. When I got older, I took care of myself.
    For a long time I thought he was burying himself in work because he missed my mom.Then one day I realized it was more than that. He was paying back the thousands he had borrowed so he could take her to Italy. From the age of seven I grew up without parents. One was dead, one was a zombie who hardly spoke to me, who I often felt blamed me in some way for his wife’s deadly illness. Which was funny, because for a long time I blamed him.
    I spent most of my life alone, without much help when my eyes dimmed from the dark rage that took hold of me and scared the hell out of me because I didn’t know what it was or how to deal with it.

FOUR
    “Y OU SMELL LIKE ONIONS.”
    “How’s it going, Your Majesty?” I said to the old woman beside me.
    I poured myself a coffee and replaced the pot on the hot-plate under a sign that said
    HELP YOURSELF
COFFEE $1
WITH MILK &/OR SUGAR, $1.50
    “If people want to ruin good Colombian,” Reena had told me more than a month ago when she showed me around Reena’s Unique Café for the first time, “they’ll have to pay for the privilege.”
    I called the old lady “Your Majesty” because she spent all day circling the block, pushing a grocery cart piled high with her belongings and calling out, “I am the Queen of Sweden!” Rain or shine, she wore a long knitted scarf, striped blue and gold, and a dirty white toque. Where she slept at night, I had no idea—probably in the big park across the road.
    “You smell like onions,” she repeated, dumping another spoonful of sugar into her coffee and stirring as if she was punishing it. “And your eyes are red.”
    “Been slicing in the kitchen. For the soup of the day.”
    “You work here?” she asked.
    “Yeah. Chief busboy and onion chopper-upper.”
    “Do you like it?”
    “Not really, but I don’t have much choice.”
    “Reena never mentioned you,” she said, and shuffled off to a table.
    The Queen and I had had the same conversation half a dozen times. Her memory seemed to come and go, but she remembered to turn up at the café almost every morning.
    A few more street people, their faces pale, their clothes tattered, sat around the tables Reenakept at the back of the small restaurant, drinking coffee and staring into a personal nowhere. Reena let them have the coffee—and cookies, if she had any around—for nothing, as long as they were quiet and didn’t stay too long. She had a soft spot for people who floated on the edge of the stream, which is why she had taken me