The Side of the Angels Read Free

brownies to my side of the table. My favorite. I began to gobble, though I knew Louise had provided this delicacy specifically to soften me up for the pitch she was about to make: namely, that it was time I availed myself of her services, as it seemed that every other desperate single person in the Washington metropolitan area was doing. Her company, Custom Hitches, sole proprietor Louise Geary, stood ready to cure my solitary state. This pitch, which had never had much of a chance, was doomed to failure the moment I heard Tony Boltanski’s name for the first time in five years.
    Damn Ron. Leave it to him to put together the perfect combina-tion: working with an old lover from whom I’d parted bitterly, for Weingould, the compulsive looker-over-the-shoulder, on a strike that already sounded more like a siege than a winnable campaign, upnorth, as winter started. Faced with this cheerful prospect, I was in no mood for Louise’s canned lecture about how the Universe held a mate for each of us if we would just make room for love in our lives.
    My name is Nicky Malone. Nicky is short for Dominica, the middle name of my mother’s Neapolitan mother, but no one ever called me that except my mother in her more dire moods. My full name is Dominica Magdalen Regina (confirmation name) Malone. I like the short version. It sounds like the name of the hero in one of those forties detective stories. “Nicky Malone here,” I could see myself barking into the phone, my hand caressing the fifth of scotch in my drawer, my eyes lingering on a hunk in a fedora and a pinstriped suit who, at any minute, would attempt to seduce me to throw me off the trail.
    I have two brothers, and would have had more if something hadn’t gone wrong with my mother’s insides during her last labor and deprived her and my father of the six kids they’d have liked to bring into the world. My older brother, Michael, is gay, to the eternal lamenting of my mother, who refers to Michael’s gayness as if it were a disease (“I should have
seen
it coming on. If only I’d made him stay in Little League”).
    Michael is dark and slim with coal-black hair. With his heavy-lidded black eyes and long straight nose, he resembles one of those beautiful, melancholy youths in Etruscan portraits. No trace of Irish blood in him. If it wasn’t for our eyes, you would not know we were brother and sister, to look at us. He’s an investments counselor—he shows people who have a certain amount of money how to make even more money by carefully, carefully playing the stock and other markets (or, as Michael would say, “developing a well-balanced portfolio that will yield sustained and steady long-term growth”).
    My younger brother, Joey, whose snub nose and mischievous grin mark him as a mick from twenty paces away, is married and has a new baby, a baby new enough that it still scares me to hold him. Since my father’s death from a heart attack four years ago, Joey has managed River Road Auto, the car repair shop that was the reason my dad brought us all down from Boston when I was five. The shop is a fancyplace now: foreign cars, computer diagnostics, twelve bays with hoists, ten employees where there used to be four.
    Our cousin Johnny Campbell, who came to live with us when he was thirteen, is Joey’s head mechanic. The best mechanic I’ve ever known, and my father was pretty damn good at his job. My dad had talent and an attention to detail, but Johnny has intuition and at times pure genius. There is nothing on wheels that Johnny can’t fix. When he flexes his long fingers over the hood of a fractious automobile, it quiets itself like a horse being gentled
    Johnny is loping and kind, with long, deep-set blue eyes. His Irish half is tempered by his father’s blood, a mix of Lowland Scots and French Canadian. He’s steadier, more equable than Joey—but of the two, you’d rather cross Joey,