Photo by waqar khalid on Unsplash
I live with my grandmother and everyone thinks it’s pretty fucking pathetic but won’t tell it to my face. Not that they need to. I feel it resonating – the word “mooch” - reverberating in every fiber of my sorry self every time I linger in the shower or turn the thermostat up a notch. Plus, my cousin Rosalyn has said as much. Well, she hasn’t quite articulated it, but she has rolled out her family’s recycling bin every Friday morning, glaring across the street as I wrestle with Nana’s wheelless, cracked trashcan.
Not much is expected of me to be honest. And I will be honest because that is why I am here in the first place. My family agreed. Esther couldn’t live alone and I was the only viable option. My uncle had jokingly referred to the arrangement as “reform school.” He didn’t say this to me, but I heard one aunt relaying it to the other the night I moved in. The fact that the kitchen floors are poorly insulated and directly above my bedroom is apparently lost to them. They used to live here too.
In my bed ten feet below them, I tumbled and thrashed, trapped in the sticky web of lies I had woven.
My chief responsibilities, besides taking the barrels out on Fridays, are providing my grandmother, Esther, company and, above all else, as my company is, so I’ve been told, “uneasy, if discomfiting,” peace of mind. Specifically, the reassurance that if her midcentury modern house were to be broken into in the middle of the night, the burglar would have to go through me first. That’s not necessarily true. I live in the lower level, and while it’s possible, I suppose, that a jewel thief could come through the cellar door, it’s much more probable that they would slip in through the first floor – the screen door in the back, or maybe by removing the window air conditioner – and encounter Esther tucked into her queen-sized bed, hair in curlers and night cream smeared on her face, scads of pearls and diamonds tucked into the top drawer of her mahogany armoire.
Rosalyn once insinuated that in the event of a robbery, I would be the prime suspect. Given my unseemly track record of stealing change from laundromats, unsuccessfully hotwiring cars, and tagging abandoned buildings with inconsistent emblems, she might be on to something. But I’ve lived on enough couches and eaten enough Poptarts for dinner to know a good gig when I see one. And that’s exactly what Esther’s five bed, four bath house looks like.
In Cousin Rosalyn’s eyes, I am nothing more than a freeloader dressed in a musty Adidas tracksuit.
She came over every Tuesday night, all five feet of her. I felt that she had chosen Tuesday to be her night as a means of making the phrase “see you next Tuesday” slip out of my mouth carelessly so on her morning phone call with her mother, aka The Boss, or Aunt Anna, Rosalyn could flick her unsettling eyes out the living room window and spit vitriol about me into the receiver. These two adjacent houses - my grandmother’s and Aunt Anna’s - were ostensibly the only houses in the town with landlines.
Believe me, I hate our little neighborly arrangement as much as Rosalyn does. Having lived across the street from our grandmother for twenty-three years, she wasn’t exactly thrilled by my arrival in an Uber with an oversized suitcase, the worn zipper practically dripping off like a Dali painting, sleeves of raggedy t-shirts spilling out.
So on Tuesdays when the grandfather clock struck five, as I obediently delivered a crystal glass of alcohol-free wine to Esther in her corduroy armchair, I looked out the window at Aunt Anna and Uncle Terry’s Irish coffee-colored house and saw the screen door snapping shut behind Rosalyn, clicking across the street in her kitten heels that still caused her ankles to intermittently buckle with uncertainty, a china plate covered with unwrinkled tinfoil in her French-manicured hands.
“What’s for supper?” Esther would ask, and I would point out the window as the gleaming strawberry blonde head disappeared under the overhang of the front door. She would announce her arrival with a courtesy knock, a formality that was more standoffish than polite. When I didn’t answer the unlocked door in twenty seconds, she rang the doorbell.
“Who’s there?” Esther warbled on cue, our meticulously staged play.
Upon entering, Rosalyn would diligently apply a nauseatingly fragranced hand sanitizer labeled with an unnatural scent, like “sparkling sugarplums” or “raspberry buttercream frosted angel food cake,” rubbing her hands together like a haughty prayer. She always brought the same meal, but Esther’s dementia compelled her to ask Rosalyn where she ever learned to cook, before praising her for the meal, basically telling her she was unrivaled even by Julia Child. Cue her demure smile and trifling false modesty.
I dug through her trash can many Fridays ago and found the smoking gun - a plastic Boston Market bag. The jig was up. As I slammed the lid down triumphantly, I spotted Rosalyn standing in the driveway, her hands clasped, that same smug, Grinchy smile on her face.
A thick slice of turkey. A coquettish drizzle of gravy. Steamed green beans lightly buttered, and roasted potatoes. Every week she perched across from Nana like the canary she is and watched her eat every bite of the meal with the intent focus of a gambler watching a horserace. Each time a bean dangled off the end of the fork, Rosalyn inaudibly gasped in anticipation - would the bean stay speared onto the tines or would it drop down onto Nana’s bib?
Rosalyn never ate with our grandmother, just observed her with satisfaction as she polished off the plate. Her weekly excuse was that she had a “late lunch.” Back when we were twelve or so, my mother returned home from one of her hiatuses and made a last-ditch effort to cure me of my blatant irreverence for authority, education, and society by sending me to her alma mater, a hail Mary that the sisters of Our Lady of Mercy could turn me around. As it turned out, there was a bit of a nun shortage, so most of my teachers were laypeople. That year, I ate dollar slices of pizza dripping with grease while across the aisle of the cafeteria, my cousin sat with her fellow members of the knitting club, the unfortunately named “Stitch Sisters,” anxiously nibbling on leaves of bibb lettuce.
She also made sure to never bring a meal for me, thank Christ. As good an excuse as any to give Nana and Rosalyn some “private time” while I laid out the couch in the lower level. The last thing I needed was something else for Cousin Roz to hold over my head. Their dinner conversation was scripted. The main question was “when is Anna coming home?” to which Rosalyn would politely explain that her mother had retired this past year and was now spending half the year in her new condo in Florida, and that she would return in the beginning of May.
After a while, I learned it was best for me to leave the house entirely, to zip up my tracksuit, slip into my muddy white Adidas and hoof it down the hill, do laps around the neighborhood, my hands jammed into my pockets, calculating when it would be safe to return to the house. I had worked it out that the sun vanishing behind the Temple Israel on Chestnut Street was my all-clear.
On the Tuesday in question, Rosalyn took her phony decorum to a new level. I was sitting in the corner of Esther’s bedroom flipping through a Field & Stream catalogue addressed to my uncle who lived here seven years ago when Rosalyn entered carrying the dinner tray.
“Hello, Nana,” she said with her disingenuous smile. I noted the latex gloves on her hands.
“What, have you been exposed to the bubonic plague or something?”
“The bubonic plague doesn’t exist anymore.”
“That’s actually not true.”
I’m interested in pressing the point further. One of Rosalyn’s favorite activities is pointing out how incompetent I am, reminding me how impressive everyone thinks it is that she commutes to college and is studying to be a nurse. Not like me, who she thinks did not graduate high school (I did, but I don’t see the use in correcting her).
She glared at me. “Excuse me. I’m going to serve our grandmother dinner.”
Rosalyn placed the tray on Esther’s lap. “You look so well today, Nana. I love that color on you!”
Esther was wearing a white shirt stained with marinara sauce from lunch. “What’s this?” Rosalyn indicated the orange splotch.
“We had meatball subs for lunch,” I shrugged.
“You fed our grandmother a meatball sub?!” Apparently, this was the equivalent of serving up a bowl of nails sprinkled with arsenic.
“Sure did. Esther, what’d you think of lunch today?”
“Lunch. What did we have? Oh. A tuna sandwich.”
“No, Esth. We had meatball subs. Didn’t you like your meatball sub?”
“Oh. Yes, I liked it very much, thank you.”
I looked back at my cousin and tried to disguise my burgeoning smirk.
Over her shoulder was a tote bag full of pastel balls of yarn. Her self-indulgent hobby of late was knitting hats for kids with cancer because she couldn’t volunteer in the hospital since she would just suck all the life out of the joint. As Esther slowly sawed away at her Boston Market slab of turkey, Rosalyn perched like a ceramic doll and knitted with great exaggeration, as though she was playing the violin. Esther commented just how great it was that Rosalyn could knit, and my cousin seamlessly launched into a monologue about how important philanthropy is to her and how rewarding it is to know these beautiful, blessed angels have warm heads because of her.
I zone out then as I rack my brain trying to figure out what exactly I could do for these poor kids to make up for the fact that they have to wear hats knitted by a sadist. It’s a good thought to mull over, so I head out for my walk. Besides, Esther’s bedroom is so stuffy with narcissism I may very well suffocate.
It was on this stroll that I accidentally got mobbed up. Our neurotic Aunt Marjorie, who lived on the corner, told me the day I moved in that she suspected the family across the street was in the mafia. I pulled back the dusty curtains and surveyed the four Mercedes parked on the curb in front of a bathtub Madonna.
“They never park in the driveway,” Aunt Marjorie hissed in my ear.
Parking aside, I was far more concerned by the beastly rottweiler these neighbors kept tied to a clothesline. His name was King, and whenever so much as a dry leaf rustled by, he erupt in violent barking, snapping his razor-sharp canines, his thick neck straining at the studded collar.
“Their name is Capicola or something like that, and they’re certainly connected.”
This seemed like a time that I should suggest that perhaps I was sensitive to these Italian stereotypes, but I decided it was best not to invoke my widely abhorred father.
I was about a mile and a half from Esther’s house when a Lincoln town car drove past me. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it if it hadn’t stopped six yards ahead, then slowly crept back and inched along beside me. Initially I kept my gaze trained straight ahead, but as the car crawled in step with me, I gave in and looked. Behind the driver’s side window was a man with leathery skin, pleated at the forehead and spotted with moles. He rolled down the window and waved a hairy hand.
I squinted in confusion, and he waved again, gold rings and a matching Rolex gleaming.
“You a friend of Roz?”
I double-blink. “Roz?”
He drummed his ring-laden fingers atop the door. “Yeah. Roz.”
I shrugged. “I wouldn’t exactly say we’re friends. We’re affiliated.”
“Get in, kid.”
“HUH?”
He pressed a button and the door locks shot up like soldiers standing to attention. “In.”
“You know my cousin?”
“Yeah. You could say we’re, uh – affiliated too. You gonna get in or what?”
“I don’t need a ride, thanks.”
The man grazed the pocket of his leather jacket, revealing the edge of what I knew to be a gun. The only other time I’d ever seen one had been in the cupholder of my friend Jack’s Chevy Impala. It was the first time that I glimpsed the graveness of his addiction.
“Did I ask you if you needed a ride?”
I shrugged and climbed into the passenger seat, the gray leather as slick as dolphin skin. The guy shifted into drive and shot down Elm Street.
“So. You’re Roz’s cousin, eh? You the cousin on Gould Street?”
“No, Roz and I live across the street from each other. I live with our grandmother.”
He took his eyes off the road and sized me up. “You second cousins or something?”
A car horn blared in sync with the squealing of tires. Without missing a beat, the guy swerved out of the way while flipping the bird.
“Roz hates my guts,” I blurted out. The blood was still pumping heavily from the near collision.
“Is that a fact?” He stroked his hairless chin. “You’re in good company, kid. Roz hates my guts too.”
I nodded and looked out the window. I was trying to parse together how my duplicitous, doe-eyed cousin could possibly know this heat-packing stranger. When I returned to this affluent suburban town just a few months ago, I was struck by the sameness of it all, the seeming placidity with which it had remained over the past decade. Not like the city, how it would shapeshift every time I left during one of my mother’s spells. I’d leave for a year or so and come back to spin studios, CBD shops, and pho joints where the bodega, the Y, and the Jones’ apartment building used to be. But Esther’s town was all old money, smooth sidewalks, punctual trash collectors.
I still tossed and turned at night, disquieted by the silence, the quivering of naked branches and occasional hoot of an owl suddenly deafening. All I had ever known was honking, and sirens and fireworks, or gunshots.
I glanced again at the driver’s hip. “Roz owes me a favor.”
“Me too, actually,” I said.
“You’re family.”
“That doesn’t mean shit.”
We rolled to a stop and he pushed the shifter into park. “Well. Looks like I’m in an interesting position.”
I cursed myself for bothering to buckle into the seat. Why the hell was I considering safety when a blatant mobster picked me up off the street? If I could just unbuckle, unlock the door, and escape, I could maybe make it six feet before the guy whipped out his 45 and gunned me down.
“So you’re tellin me, Roz hates your guts and owes you a favor.”
“Yep.”
He stroked his chin again and I noticed the laces of my sneakers were coming undone. If I were to make a run for it, I would trip immediately. The mobster would scoop me up by the neck of my tracksuit and dump my body into the trunk.
“What’s the plan?”
“What’d you say your name is?”
I panicked and blurted out my last name.
He nodded approvingly at the vowel at the end. “Whaddaya say we handle this the Sicilian way?”
“What? I’m not Sicilian.”
“Well of course you’re not. I’m sayin...” he pressed his palms together, extended both pointer fingers and thumbs.
“Wait - you want to shoot Roz?”
“Hey ho, hey ho! Pipe down, will ya? We’re not gonna shoot em’, we’re gonna shake’m up a little bit. C’mon. Whaddaya say?”
I said nothing, and that’s how we ended up cruising towards Converse Street, the guy’s eyes pinned, total tunnel vision, on the pavement, nearly t-boning a goddamn Mazda en route. The blonde-bobbed Karen laid on her horn and stuck up her French-tipped middle finger.
At the top of the hill, the guy lifted his foot off the wheel. He pressed down on a button to his left and my window rolled down.
“Ready?” He shifted his hip and pulled out the thing I had hoped it wasn’t.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
Turns out, this is just another instance of life taking me for a ride. We’ve barely rolled to a stop when the front door opens and those kitten heels step down and before I even see the swish of Rosalyn’s blonde hair, the resounding brutality of not one, but three gun shots ring out, reverberating across the neighborhood, down Converse Street, and straight through my soul and my cousin’s thigh, chest, and shoulder.
The empty China plate shatters on the front steps before her body meets it in a heap of pale, wasted flesh and white cotton, blossoming with blood.
He was stuttering, his cool affect shattered by the young girl crumpled before us, and he’s slurring about how it’s not Rosco and must be the wrong house and I’m thinking, Roz, Roz, Cousin Roz, about how could I be anything to anyone, except my family, who know me as a wastrel, wearing my uncle’s hand-me-down tracksuits and running up my grandmother’s electricity bill and getting my cousin whacked and all of it.
But anyways, to answer your question, Rosco doesn’t live across the street.
Jen Susca is a graduate of the University of New Hampshire, where she studied psychology and English with a concentration in creative writing. Her work has appeared in Change Seven Magazine, Grattan Street Press, and Not a Type Magazine, among others. She currently lives and works in Boston. You can follow her on Instagram @sopranosundays.