States of Grace, Mandy Miller [uplifting novels .txt] 📗

Ts sounding like Ds and the look on his face proof that we’ve been through this routine one too many times. “That last one, whatever that bi—” Vinnie pauses. “Whatever that old gal was called, she ripped off half my roof tiles. Place looked like a kid with a bad haircut.”

It is amusing to watch the hurricane media circus on TV—supermarkets running out of bottled water and batteries; videos of chichi types, for whom canned food is usually an anathema, piling shopping carts full of the stuff; and my favorite, the “cone of opportunity,” the megaphone-shaped impact zone with a mind of its own. But the truth is, storms—all loud noises for that matter—still petrify me, transport me straight back to that day in Fallujah, as if I never made it out of the Humvee.

“Ophelia’s the name,” he says.

“What?”

“The storm. They’re calling it Tropical Storm Ophelia.” He shakes his head hard from side to side. “Have you heard a word I said?”

I head for the recycle bins outside the office, anxious to distract myself, to do something with my hands, my head a riot of the incoming storm and questions about what I might have done to walk a guilty man.

I did everything I could to defend him, sure. But it’s my role in the play. Right?

I just thought the jurors would do their part and see through his lies.

“Let’s get these sorted,” I say, slamming cans and bottles into bins. “They can call the storm whatever they want, just wake me when it’s over. Who makes up these names anyway? Didn’t Ophelia drown?”

Vinnie takes a step back. “What’s got you all bent out of shape?”

“Nothing.”

He rolls his eyes. “Right. Nothin’. That’s what my second ex-wife used to say right before she smacked me upside the head.” He kneels beside me. “What happened today, kid?”

“I won a case.”

He claps me on the back. “Congratulations. Winning’s supposed to be good, ain’t it?”

“So I’ve been told. But winning’s not always right, remember?”

His eyes harden and we revert to sorting in silence.

Three wasted years are a lot to a man like Vinnie, on the back nine of his life, and I share his anger at the injustice, not to mention the guilt I carry for my part in it. In another lifetime, I prosecuted Vinnie for knifing a man to death in The Hell Hole, a biker bar on Second Street, back when Vinnie had enemies. The jury convicted him and sentenced him to death. A year later, as part of a police corruption probe, I discovered a trio of crooked cops had conspired to bury an eyewitness who would have testified Vinnie had been thirty miles away betting on the greyhounds at the Biscayne dog track when the hit went down. It took me two years to make things right, but I did. Fought all the way to the Florida Supreme Court and convinced the Court Vinnie had been railroaded. As a result, I became Enemy Number One of the local cops. The battle cost me my job, not to mention my freedom, for a time.

When Vinnie got off death row, he thought he owed me. Not long after, when I was unemployed, broke, and living out of a rust-bucket car parked in a different lot every night, he set about repaying me by giving me a place to stay. He’d bought The Hurricane with the settlement money he got from a lawsuit I brought against the Fort Lauderdale Police Department. Vinnie may be old school mob all the way—cops are crooked, rats deserve whacking, and only family can be trusted—but I appreciate his counting me as family, as well as his company. I keep telling him he better start taking my money for rent or I’ll move out, but he won’t hear of it. “Family don’t pay.”

The rhythm of working side by side frees my mind. Watching Vinnie sort each item into the proper bin, I am struck by how many lives one person can live, how many faces we have to show to the world. While Vinnie might wear his hard life on the streets and two long bits in prison in the tight set of his jaw and steely stare, his jailhouse tattoos have faded along with too many scars to count, and he’s become a good man. He keeps the safety on his gun and the beat cops’ cell phone numbers on speed dial. He goes to City Commission meetings and pays his taxes early. Like me, Vinnie doesn’t want any more trouble, but he can still smell it a mile away.

Task complete, he extends a hand to help me stand, Oscar, my prosthetic leg, not being the most flexible of limbs. “How’s about we have some chow, kid?”

“Thanks, but I’m tired.”

“You sure?” he asks, as we haul the last of the recycle bins to the curb. He worries I don’t eat enough. He’s constantly plying me with his home-made manicotti or corned beef and cabbage, legacies from a Sicilian father and an Irish mother.

“I’ll grab a snack upstairs.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

“Your loss, kid. But thanks _for the help, even if I said I didn’t need it.”

“Thanks for the company,” I say, heading for the stairs.

I don’t look back, but he’ll watch over me until I’m safely inside.

***

Efficiency #7 is just that—an efficient use of very little space. One room for all purposes. Bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, closet, all in one. A waist-high wall hides the commode, an arrangement that would have appalled me only a year ago. The bedroom lacks an actual bed. Instead, I sleep on a futon which, by day, doubles as my desk. The shower stall is a tiny, rusty metal box adjacent to an equally rusted out metal basin which doubles as the kitchen sink. A microwave and coffee maker sit atop a mini-fridge, the type I had in my freshman dorm room at Yale—all three appliances beat up and scratched like the rest of the furniture I bought at the Salvation Army store with a