The Leap Year Boy by Marc Simon Read Free Book Online

in East Liberty at the movies, so unlike the boys her mother had wished upon her, the proper Catholic prep school boys with their neatly combed hair and clean shirts and ties. Abe was all angles and guff and trouble, and she was looking for trouble. He had courted her with daffodils and whiskey, and one mild night, as they walked along Highland Avenue toward the park, he told her his story.
    Abe’s father, Jacob, had come to America in 1880, when he was 18, from a village in the hills of western Austria-Hungary. He had $22.13 in his pocket, an unpronounceable last name and his Uncle Morris’s address on a scrap of paper. Morris, who had changed his own unpronounceable last name to Miller, changed Jacob’s, too. He put him to work in his pushcart business, selling soup, sandwiches, coffee, plug tobacco, cigarettes, candy, headache powders and such to the men coming off or going on shifts at National Tube Works in McKeesport, twenty miles south down the Monongahela from Pittsburgh. Uncle Morris also found Jacob a nice Jewish girl to marry, his 16-year-old niece Helen Rottenstein, who died from excessive bleeding 10 days after Abe was born.
    Before long, Jacob realized he despised McKeesport in general and the pushcart business in particular. His passion was sketching, and he fancied himself an artist, and so he decided to follow his dream; after all, there was nothing to keep him in McKeesport except a miserable job and a bawling baby boy, and besides, wasn’t America the land of opportunity? Wasn’t the pursuit of happiness a fundamental part of the American credo? He took off for New York two months after Helen died, leaving Abe to his Uncle Morris. After several months, he found work as a window dresser at Macy’s Department Store. He died from consumption 13 years later. With no money in the bank and no relatives to claim his body, he was buried alongside other indigents at Potter’s Field Cemetery on Hart Island.
    When Uncle Morris, a confirmed bachelor, died 20 years later, Abe inherited his house and fleet of pushcarts. He sold the lot and moved to Pittsburgh. Following Morris’s advice that real estate was the best investment in America you could ever make, they called it real estate because it was real , he bought the house on Mellon Street.
    Irene was head over heels for Abe, but her mother hated him right off, which made Irene like him all the more. He had a steady, good-paying job and owned his own house—not a fancy house, but decent, with six rooms and a yard that she could pretty up. She was determined to show her mother that she wasn’t the only woman that knew how to manage a household and raise a family, and as for his religion, she didn’t give a hoot about her own Catholicism that seemed so damn important to her mother, so what did it matter whether he were a Jew or a Hindu?
    Abe said, “Irene, you remember the dances at Renziehausen Park when we’d sneak away from the bandstand? That perfume you wore, I wanted to haul your dress off right there.”
    “Oh shush.” She pulled his hand to her breast and stroked each finger against her nipple. She thought about how he used to be fun, how they used to be fun before two boys and a miscarriage and now this little one sitting between them.
    Alex pointed a tiny finger at Abe and said, “Delia.”
    Abe turned crimson.
    “What’s he saying, Abe? What’s that, sweetheart?”
    “Delia and Daddy.”
    “What’s he saying, Abe?”
    “Christ, I don’t know. It’s just baby talk.”
    “You know damn well what he said.” She pushed Abe’s hand away. “Delia. It’s that whore Delia Novak, you’re seeing her again, aren’t you?”
    “By God, I swear I haven’t seen the woman, she isn’t even in town.”
    “Isn’t in town? How the hell do you know where she is or where she isn’t?”
    Alex said, “Davy said Delia.”
    “Shush, boy.”
    “Don’t you yell at him, don’t you ever raise your voice to him.”
    “I’m not