Sacred Time Read Online Free Page A

the Rosenbergs, my mother said. She felt sorry for the Rosenbergs’ little boys, who were orphans now. “I’m not that sure the Rosenbergs really were Russian spies,” she’d say. “The one thing I am sure of is that McCarthy is a liar, a bully. Even President Eisenhower is scared of him.”

    â€œMalcolm considers the world his very own fringe benefit,” my father said.
    I couldn’t imagine the world with a fringe. My second-grade teacher, Sister Lucille, had a map of the world above the boys’ coat rack, and my hook was beneath Africa, with the most crosses for missions. During one of our air-raid drills, Maria Donez had cried, and Sister Lucille had told us Maria was sad because her family was going home to Guatemala. I forgot the name of her country, and when I told my mother that Maria was going back to Palmolive, she said Palmolive was soap, not a country. The following morning I’d asked Sister and she’d shown me Guatemala on her map.
    â€œWhat’s fringe benefit?” I asked my parents.
    â€œRemember now, Anthony—” my father said, “—whatever the Amedeo family talks about in the car, stays in the car. And whatever the Amedeo family talks about in the house, stays in the house.”
    I mouthed the words along with him. I certainly heard them often enough.
    â€œFringe benefits,” my mother explained, “is what people get in addition to their pay when they work. Like vacations. Or paid holidays.”
    â€œOr stamps?”
    â€œNever stamps. Never office equipment. Never tires or—”
    â€œAnd never shingles?”
    She started coughing, but it sounded fake.
    â€œYou’re fake-coughing,” I said. “You’re really laughing.”
    She winked at me.
    â€œDidn’t I tell you the boy hears too much?” my father asked.
    My mother leaned toward him to whisper into his ear, her lips as red as her hat.
    Last summer Uncle Malcolm had been in trouble—“deep-shit trouble,” my mother had called it—for selling a shipment of asbestos shingles he’d stolen from Quality Roofing, where he worked. The two brothers who owned Quality had waited for him one evening after dark in an alley off Webster Avenue, near Papa John’s Diner. Both arms and hands in casts, Uncle Malcolm did much of his healing on the striped couch, opening his mouth for the pasta e fagioli and linguine that Aunt Floria fed him fork by fork, hunkering over him like a black-feathered mother bird.
    One Sunday, while we visited, he made the twins stand in front of the couch and hold his bulky accordion between them. It glittered like the mother-of-pearl crucifix that Kevin’s father had tied to the rearview mirror of his cab. Kevin’s father used to drive a bus until he was blacklisted.
    â€œThose Quality crooks stole the music away from your dear papa,” Uncle Malcolm said. “Forever. Now the accordion is your legacy, girls.” Usually he talked like the rest of us, but when he got dramatic, his British accent expanded, though he’d left England when he was sixteen and got fired from his apprenticeship with a roofing company.
    The accordion was too heavy for the twins, too stiff without the motion of my uncle’s body curving into it, without his fingers leaping across the keys.
    â€œIf you set it on the side,” I suggested, “it’ll be like a piano. Then one of you can press the black and white keys, and the other can push the buttons.”
    â€œThat accordion is all your papa may ever be able to give you.” Uncle Malcolm’s fingers were wiggling, trying to fly out of the casts, to circle and dip as they usually did when he talked.
    All he had taught the twins were two beginnings, not even the full songs—“I’m Chiquita Banana” and “Flight of the Bumble-bee”—and they’d play those over and over, singing along. To this day I