Brush Back

The women on either side of her were laughing and encouraging her. “You tell him, Betty! Frankie, listen to your ma, get us a hit!”

Betty Pokorny? I gaped at her. She’d put on thirty or forty pounds since high school, but it was her face that had changed. When I’d known her, she’d had soft round cheeks framed by light brown curls. Somewhere along the way she’d started bleaching her hair until now it hung in pale ropes to her shoulders. She had deep grooves along her mouth and in her forehead. Too much worry, too many cigarettes, maybe a few too many beers, too.

Frankie popped up while I was staring at her. One of her neighbors nudged her and pointed at me.

“What are you looking at?” she called. “You think your boy can outhit my boy?”

I shook my head, held up my hands, universal sign of peace, I don’t want any trouble, but the two women next to her were egging her on. Don’t let a St. Jerome’s mother dis your boy, and so on.

Betty started to her feet, fists clenched.

I went over to her. “Betty: it’s V. I. Warshawski. I stopped to watch Frankie—he’s an amazing—”

She slapped me before I could finish the sentence. “You?” she screeched. “I knew it, knew you’d never forgive me for stealing Big Frank from you. You’ve been up there on the North Side all these years, plotting—”

“No!” I roared.

She stopped shouting, but stood clenching and unclenching her fingers. Her two friends eyed her uneasily. They liked a shouting match but not a fight.

Other parents began yelling at us to shut up: “We didn’t come to watch two old broads fight.” “We’re here to watch our boys.” “Shut up!” “Get out of the way.”

I took Betty’s arm and hustled her away from the stands, to the back where Father Cardenal was dealing with the remnants of the fight he’d been summoned to break up.

BRUSH BACK

“You never did forgive me for stealing Frank,” Betty repeated, but uncertainly, as if she didn’t really believe it.

“You two broke my heart,” I agreed, “but it mended. I only stopped here today to see your son play. Frank told me he thought he might go all the way and—”

“So you have been sneaking around with Frank behind my back!”

It was the tiredness in her face that kept me from losing my temper, the heavy lines that I’d seen on the faces of my classmates’ mothers when I was growing up. She wouldn’t have wanted my pity, but poverty is an unrelenting taskmaster.

“Didn’t Frank tell you? He hired me to try to help Stella with her exoneration claim. Which only led to her slandering Boom-Boom, and then slapping me with a restraining order. We have been having fun without you, I suppose.”

“He hired you without talking to me? And me, trying to pay the bills and raise the kids on what he brings home from Bagby? Where’s that money supposed to come from? Stella’s right—you and your mother, you live to ruin our lives.”

“I hadn’t thought about you in years, Betty, not until Frank came to me two weeks ago. Sounds as though you and Stella are pretty close, though. I’m surprised—I didn’t think you wanted her moving in with you when she came home from prison.”

“I’m looking after enough people with my dad, the kids, Frank, I don’t need Stella. But that doesn’t mean I don’t respect her for standing up for her beliefs.”

“What beliefs?” I asked. “She has some moral code I don’t know about?”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Betty said scornfully. “You’re the one who encouraged A

“Carried on how?”

“She was like you: she’d go after anything in pants. Maybe Stella reacted too hard, but if either of my girls goes on the Pill and I learn about it, I’ll be just as mad as Stella was.”

“You’ll kill your kids? It’s an interesting riff on safe sex. You think Stella was right to murder A

Betty reddened. “You’re twisting my words! Of course not. I’m just saying A

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Father Cardenal looking at us. I was afraid he might interrupt, but the mother of one of the kids he’d been dealing with started shouting at him and he turned back to the other fight.

“How did you know A

“Goddam right she did. Frank and me, we were married, Lucy was two and I was pregnant with Kelly—Frank Junior, he was my third before the two youngest girls. Anyway, A

Betty picked up a twig and dangled it between her thumb and forefinger. “I wanted to smack her, she was so smug and smirky. ‘Don’t you know it’s a mortal sin to take those pills?’ I said. I tried to grab them from her but she laughed, stuck them in her purse.

“‘I’m going to Philadelphia to college,’ she says. ‘No one’s going to tie me down with a baby and a husband. Mortal sins and coal dust, they’re both about as useful as Daddy’s pension.’ Mateo Guzzo’s pension disappeared along with everyone else’s when the steel company went bankrupt,” Betty added.

“Did A

“I asked who the lucky boy was and she got this look on her face, you know, like she’s Cosmo’s sex adviser. ‘No boys for me. They’re too young, they don’t know how to treat women.’ That’s how I knew it was Boom-Boom, because he was the only older man she was close to.”

I opened and shut my mouth without speaking. A

Betty was still ranting. “Of course I told Frank about it and we agreed Stella should know. I mean, A

The field and stands seemed to shimmer behind me. Frank, coming to me, not telling me about that conversation? What a total fuckup, him, Stella, the whole situation.

“You told Stella. Is that why she had her final big blowup with A

Betty’s chin jutted out in a major-league scowl. “You can’t say things like that! It’s not my fault if Stella went off the deep end. I thought she had a right to know, a right as a mother. She went through A

“I hope neither of you is imagining Boom-Boom paid A

Betty bunched up her lips. “Stella took the money. When Mr. Guzzo’s pension disappeared it was hard for her to keep up the mortgage payments, and for A

I couldn’t tell which the real grievance was—sex or education. Maybe both. “Did A

“Stella demanded, she had a right to know, and A