Virgin Heat by Laurence Shames Read Free Book Online

cleanse him of the rage and filth of the day and remind him what he was living for.
    Now the entryway was dim and silent. Paulie hung his hat on a peg, draped his topcoat over the rack, walked slowly toward the living room. No TV was on, no stereo. The quiet might have been serene but that wasn't how it felt. It felt sepulchral and chilling, it made Paulie want a bourbon and some noise—clattering dishes, distant sirens, anything.
    But before he could get his drink, his wife approached him. She stood in the semidarkness of the living room; behind her, the doorway to the kitchen was jarringly bright with a flat and cold white glow. She had a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. She looked old and tired—was he that old and tired?— and she didn't kiss him. She said, "Angelina didn't go to work today. She hasn't come home."
    Paulie said nothing. This was an old habit, an old technique. First you listened, then you thought, and only then you answered.
    "I called," continued Angelina's mother. "I called, she wasn't there. She hadn't told them, they didn't know she wasn't coming in."
    You listened so you would learn; you thought so that your answer would not return to humiliate or harm you, because, in Paulie's world, once something was said it could not be called back or explained away.
    "She's not like this," his wife went on. "If she's going to be late, she calls. She always calls."
    Paulie thought, choked back the clammy taste that was the beginning of fear, said evenly, "She's a grown woman, Maria."
    The comment, the unearned certainty with which it was said, made Maria angry. Her hands went to her hips. The kitchen light behind her made her outline look ferocious. "Who knows that better than me? Who was here with her, seeing it happen? I know her, Paul. She's considerate, she calls."
    He sighed without a sound, walked right past his wife, moved through the dimness toward the dining-room sideboard with its stash of liquor. Maria followed, harrying him like a sparrow chasing off a crow.
    "Animals!" she said. "People are animals. The people you deal with, Paul. Your friends. Your enemies. They'll do anything. You think your family's safe? You think your daughter's safe?"
    With the bourbon bottle in his hand, he said, "No one would dare to touch my daughter." He said it faster than he wanted to, without a pause for thought. But some things, you could no more hold back an answer than stop a nerve from twitching at a shock. "She's out," he said, more softly. "She's at the movies, she's having dinner. She'll be home right away."
    "Animals," Angelina's mother said again, and Paulie understood that the insult was meant to hit him first, before it went spattering outward to soil others.
    He drank deep of the whisky, shut out his wife's voice but heard instead the voice of Funzie Gallo. The world had changed. The rules had changed, and people broke them now without shame or fear. Was it conceivable that someone had done something to Angelina? Why? Who were his enemies now? What would they want of him? He swallowed bourbon, thought as best he could, and in his silent, bitter way, he prayed.
    *
    When Angelina had told him the story, had revealed, in her tipsy loneliness, far more than she'd intended to, Michael said, "Jesus. And I thought I stuck it to my father."
    "Whaddya mean?" she asked.
    They were sitting at a beachside restaurant on flimsy plastic chairs. Lingering nighttime heat pulled salt vapor out of the surfless ocean, smells of garlic and parsley wafted up from plates of seafood. Michael sipped beer, studied her a moment for some sign of the coy or the facetious. Finding none, he said, "What do I mean? I mean, all I did, ten, twelve years ago, was come out at Thanksgiving dinner. My old man, military, Air Force, he about choked on chestnut stuffing. But loving the guy that sent your father to the slammer—"
    Angelina interrupted with a slight impatience, as though what she was explaining should be obvious. "Yeah," she said,