She poached herself in the tub and thought about food. Her struggle with the earth had left her ravenous and helped her appreciate the hunger that Sal used to have back when they first got married. He was working as a stonemason then, and came home at night ferocious for the pastas and cheeses and spicy meats his mama had stuffed him with his whole life till then. Josephine, a girl from a tuna-casserole family, prepared meals that Sal didn't even consider food. And so, nineteen years ago, Camilla had come over to teach Italian cooking to her son's twenty-year-old bride.
The phone rang out in the kitchen. Josephine slid her ears into the water to make it go away. She had old Camilla to thank for a lot of thingsâher career as a chef, her changing realestate luck, even her dinner tonight, which she'd brought home from Cantami yesterday because she knew she wouldn't want to cook today. Lying back in the tub like a dragoness, bourbon fumes escaping her nostrils, she relished the food awaiting herâlinguini with calamari sauce, one of her favorite things in the world. Camilla had taught her to make it. In honor of Camilla, Josephine was going to find someplace great to cook in Florida, some incredibly classy restaurant where she'd knock their eyes out and get articles written about herself in the paper. She'd send those articles to Camilla, and Camilla would come to visit her. They'd wade together in the blue Atlantic Ocean.
She appeared in her kitchen in her terry-cloth robe, feeling immensely better. The phone machine wasn't blinkingâher caller hadn't left a message. That meant Camilla had called; she wouldn't talk to “jukeboxes,” her word for telephone-answering machines. Dinner resided in two takeout containers in the fridge: from one she plopped cold linguini onto a plate; from the other she poured the nice-looking red sauce with its rings and tentacles of squid. She covered it all with plastic wrap and put it on the microwave carousel. She'd been against zappers at first, but they were surprisingly all right for pasta dishes. Her carpenter had built the microwave into a cabinet on the wall for her, or it wouldn't have been here at all.
She opened a bottle of Chianti and poured herself a glass, flipped on the back-yard floodlight and stood at the sink window with her wine, fantasizing about the realestate calls that might come in as early as tomorrow. It was night now and frigidly cold, even to the eye; snowdrifts stood frozen in strange attitudes, like waves about to break. She thanked the Lord for alcohol. Sharp gusts of wind blew powdery snow into the air, where it sifted like silver-blue glitter through the plastic rigging of her revolving clothesline. Saint Joseph, earthly father of the Christmas manger, was out there under the ground, irradiating her property with saintliness.
She got the cordless phone and pushed Camilla's speed button. The microwave started beeping the instant the number rang. The bells in Josephine's life always went off all at once. She popped the oven door and lifted a corner of the plastic wrap, averting her face from the steam.
“Hi, Ma,” she said when Camilla answered. “It'sa me.”
“It'sa you, bad girl,” Camilla said.
“I'ma no bad girl,” said Josephine. They always played this game. She clamped the phone between ear and shoulder so she could grab her wine, and walked herself and her comforts into the dining room. “Hey, Ma, you calla me?”
“I no calla you.”
The food was too hot to eat, but she shoved in a forkful anyway. “Oh. O.K.,” Josephine mumbled around the pasta, huffing puffs of steam to save her mouth. “Guess what?”
“No eat when you talk!” Camilla said.
“Sorry. I'm starving.”
“What you eat over there?”
Josephine was burning her tongue with a hot calamari tentacle, and it took her a few seconds to get the answer out.
“You get fresh squid?” Camilla asked.
“Nice and fresh, Ma. From the restaurant.”
“Why you so hungry? You no hava lunch?”
“I'm hungry from burying Saint Joseph. The ground is like a rock.”
“You get nice saint?”
“Got a nice big one. About a foot long. Real nice.”
“Hold Baby Jesus?”
“Of course, Ma. That's how you know it's Joseph. âCause he has Jesus.”
“You bury like I tella you?”
“What do you mean, like you tella me? I buried him. He's in the ground. I put him in a plastic bag so he wouldn't get dirty.”
“I tella you, head going down.”
“No, Ma. You did not tella me that. What? Straight down?”
“Straight down!”
“Ma, I buried him good, in a nice plastic bag in the back yard.”
“Back yard! No back yard! Front yard!”
“You did not tell me front yard!”
“I tella you!”
“Ma, I live on a busy street. People will see me.”
“How you gonna sella you house?”
Josephine tossed her fork onto her plate and stood up from the table. “Are you really telling me this isn't gonna work?”
“I tella you, Josephine!”
“You did not tella me, Ma!”
“I tella you!”
She burst out the back door of the house in her jeans and boots and goose-down parka, cursing Chianti vapors at the arctic darkness beyond the range of her floodlight. She had her spade in one hand, her wineglass in the other. The wind had blown the snow into drifts across the yard, and now she couldn't find the spot where she'd buried the saint. She stamped around, kicking at the snow. Chianti sloshed out of the glass, staining her sleeve. She drank some more, and then ran the shovel around like a locomotive's cowcatcher till she found the soft spot she'd made before. She forced herself to go gingerly from there, so as not to disembowel the saint with her spade.
It was too much to ask that she be left alone. Mr. Crocus, her neighbor on the side with only a naked privet hedge, came out into his own postage stamp of a back yard to walk his hateful yippy dog, Felicia. Josephine very much doubted that Felicia had to go. She almost never saw Mr. Crocus walk the dog in winter; she was sure he let the little rodent relieve itself in the basement until spring and saved its business in mayonnaise jars. No, her nosy neighbor had seen her outside with a shovel, cursing and stomping, and he had to know what she was doing. Josephine pretended not to see him, and went on with the exhumation.
“Josephine!” he called out over the hedge. “What are you digging there?”
She looked up and feigned surprise. “Oh, Mr. Crocus!” she said. “What am I digging? A begonia. An exotic begonia tuber I bought mail order. I decided it belonged in the front yard after all, and I couldn't sleep till I moved it.” With unmistakable finality, she added, “Good night, Mr. Crocus.”
“You don't plant begonias this time of year,” he said.
“These you do,” she replied, scraping the soil. “They're perennials.”
Saint Joe's plastic shroud glistened in the dirt. Josephine grabbed it and extirpated him like a root. This brought Felicia past the point of self-containment. She howled ghoulishly and tried to tear through the bare hedge while Mr. Crocus yelled and slapped her with her leash's leather handle.
“But you have it in a plastic bag,” he protested.
“That's how you do this kind of root. You trick it into thinking it's winter.”
“But it is winter.”
“Yes, Mr. Crocus.
Here
. But not where the root comes from.”
She put the saint in her cargo pocket, fetched her glass from the snow, and raised it in a toast. “To your health, Mr. Crocus! To Felicia!” She tossed off a swig and wiggled her fingers goodbye.
“Can I see this root, Josephine?” he called out. “I'd like to see this root.”
“Gotta get it in the ground,” she called back, hurrying up the narrow driveway on the opposite side of the house. Her fury at her neighbor made the digging easier this timeâor maybe the front yard got more sun and didn't freeze so hard. She was working beyond the small well of light from her front-porch fixture, and couldn't see into the hole, but when it felt deep enough, she pulled Saint Joseph from her parka pocket and stuck him in, head downâno, she was still several inches shy. She could have bought the forty-nine-cent Joseph and buried him with a teaspoon, but she had to be grandiose. Did the spirits care about the size of your saint? She tossed him on the snow, and chopped like a madwoman at the base of the hole. Even in fleece-lined gloves, her hands were going numb.
Felicia began barking on the second floor next door. Josephine looked up to see the dog's master peeping through the window curtains.
Croak off, Mister Crocus!
she barked at him in her mind. Given her exhaustion, the cold, and the Chianti, she couldn't be sure she hadn't yelled it out loud. She must have, because suddenly her neighbor's window went dark. Or actually, no, the whole side of his white house lit up. Josephine thought she must have burst a vessel in her brain, or for some other reason was hallucinating. Then she saw that her arms were lit up, too, and throwing shadows across the blue-white lawn; the lawn itself was lit up, the shovel, Saint Joseph in his Ziploc bag on the snow. She twisted around to look. Her mental curse at Mr. Crocus had blocked the sound of a truck pulling into her drive and stopping halfway, as though about to turn around. She was kneeling before a hole in her lawn at eight o'clock on a frigid night, caught like an animal in someone's lights. She thought of the rifle racks she'd seen at the shrine.
She waited for the truck to back out and go away. Instead, its lights snapped off, though its rear end was still technically out in the street. It wasn't a truck. It was the smashed-up van of Ricky's jackass of a friend Alfie, whom she could see, in the glare of the streetlight, sitting behind the wheel. Her son was in the passenger seat. They stared at her through the windshield in the relative dark. Then they pushed open the creaking doors and stumbled out of the van.
Had it been summer, you could have seen their tattoos. As it was, they wore scuffed black leather and deformed ski caps. The spectacle of Josephine digging a hole in the lawn seemed to focus their wobbling attention, straighten them out momentarily, though they were clearly on goofballs of some kind. They moved in slo-mo, like androids whose joint grease was thickened by the cold. Josephine plunged Saint Joseph in the ground head-first and pulled dirt over him with her gloves. Then she stood and shoveled in the rest, and tramped it down with her boots. The representatives of drugged youth arrived as she finished. Ricky just stood looking at the dirty place in the snow. Alfie was the first to speak.
“Hi, Missus Vitale,” he said, looking her up and down without even pretending he wasn't. “Whatcha doin'?”
“I'm not
Missus Vitale
. There's no such person. You can call me Miz Sessions.
Miz
Sessions.”
“Excuse me,
Miz Sessions,”
the sarcastic bastard said.
“Whatcha doin', Mom?” Ricky said.
She answered, “You're not supposed to come here when I'm not around.”
This point seemed to dumbfound Josephine's son. He licked his lips and blinked his eyes. “But you are around.”
“I know I'm around. You're supposed to call first.”
“I did call.”
“Oh, that was you. Well, you didn't get any answer, right? That means I'm not around.” She gestured at the van. “You got my TV?”
Ricky looked at the van himself. “I forgot it. What are you buryin'?”
“None of your business.”
“That's not very nice,” Alfie said. “My mom doesn't talk to me that way.”
“You don't even know where your mom is, schmuck,” Ricky said. “Shut up.” He turned to Josephine with a smile. “You buryin' the money and jewels?”
“Yeah, right, Ricky.”
Josephine felt someone looking and glanced up at the window next door. When she did, Ricky grabbed the shovel from her hand. With one swipe of its blade he unearthed the plastic freezer bag. He pulled on its edge and plucked Saint Joseph from the ground.
“Hey, it's a religious thing,” Alfie said.
“Give him a medal,” said Josephine.
Ricky held the saint up in the yellow light from the front porch. He peered into its hollow bottom and shook it, but nothing came out. He poked at the hole in the ground with the spade.
“There's nothing else,” said Josephine. “Just Saint Joseph.”
“Is that who this is?”
“Can't you see he's holding the Baby Jesus?”
“Oh, yeah. So what are you buryin' him for?”
“It's an old good-luck tradition. You bury a Saint Joseph for Christmas. I'm doing Christmas traditions this year.”
“You bury him and he brings you good luck?”
“That's right.”
“Huh,” Alfie said.
“You gettin' religious?” Ricky asked.
“I've always been religious,” Josephine said. “But now I'm born again.”
“You
are? Born again?”
“That's right. So give me my saint and take off, O.K.?”
“I need to talk to you about something.”
“I don't have anything, Ricky. It's gone. You took it all.”
“He might, like, have some news to tell you,” Alfie said.
“Will you stay the hell out of my life?” Josephine said to Alfie. She turned to her son. “You wanna talk, you can talk. Inside. Alone.”
“Go wait in the van,” Ricky said to his friend.
“Hey, it's, like, really fuckin' cold out here,” Alfie said.
“Don't you know you're not supposed to talk that way in front of me?” said Josephine. “Go turn on the heat in your stupid van.”
“The heat doesn't work.”
“Then freeze.”
Josephine picked up her wineglass, pulled Saint Joseph from Ricky's hand, and climbed the front-porch steps. Ricky followed her.
“Hey, I might not be here when you come out, Rick,” Alfie said.
“Then he'll stay here tonight,” said Josephine.