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  Our captain likes to break up the edutainment (his word) with a duck joke or two.

  What time does a duck wake up? At the quack of dawn.

  What did the duck say to the pharmacist?’ Give me some chap stick and put it on my bill.”

  Candice and Miles sit beside us, and Candice talks to us the whole ride. “So, Rodebrecht, you’re a theology major. That’s so interesting. Any good religious facts for us?”

  Twelve years of Catholic school and three required religion courses at La Salle means I actually know plenty, but it’s all related to Christianity. The Cohens are almost certainly Jewish. “My concentration is Christianity. One common misconception people have is that Jesus is the Immaculate Conception.”

  Candice nods. “Right. Immaculate Conception. Right.”

  “He isn’t. His mother, Mary, was born without Original Sin to be the proper vessel for Christ’s birth. The Immaculate Conception is one of her titles. Jesus was also born without Original Sin, so I think that is where the confusion lies.” My accent starts to slip and I catch myself.

  Candice touches my bright yellow thigh. “Very interesting. We’re Jewish, but we have a lot of Christian friends. Plenty who probably think Jesus is the Immaculate Conception. What else do you have?”

  What did the duck carry his schoolbooks in? His quackpack.

  I search my brain for something interesting, my eyes tilting to the roof of the Duck. “OK, here’s one: Jesus is going to be crucified by the Romans on a Roman holiday where the tradition is to release one prisoner sentenced to death. The other prisoner sentenced to die at the same time as Jesus is named Barabbas.”

  Candice nods. “Right. Barabbas. Right.”

  “And the magistrate asks the crowd which prisoner to set free, Jesus or Barabbas.”

  “Right. Pontius Pilate. Right.”

  “Yes, Pilate! And the crowd chooses Barabbas. He was a thief who might have been part of a revolutionary group trying to overthrow the Romans. So why did the people choose him over Jesus? Here’s the thing: Barabbas’s first name was Jesus. Jesus Barabbas. Jesus Christ said he came from the Father, God the Father. Jesus called God Abba, which is like daddy, something the Jews of the time found blasphemous. The Jews only referred to God as Lord—”

  “Right. Adonai. Yes.”

  “Exactly! So, the revolutionary was Jesus Barabbas and Christ was Jesus from the Father, which in Hebrew would be Barabbas. Both men had the same name. Many scholars believe the crowd thought they were releasing Christ, that it was a case of mistaken identity.”

  “Very interesting, Rodebrecht. Really neat!”

  Miles speaks for the first time, his voice deep and soft. “The Islamic faith teaches that the Romans made a mistake and crucified Barabbas and let Christ go. Then Jesus got sick a few days later and God took him back to heaven. Christ is just a prophet to the Muslims. They claim God allowed this confusion so people would believe Jesus rose from the dead and believe his teaching.”

  “I did not know this, Miles. Thank you.” I give Miles a thumbs-up.

  “Good job, Miles!” Helena chimes in, then quacks into what had been my good ear.

  What kind of oil does a duck use in his car? Quacker State.

  * * *

  After feigning elation that the Duck Tour now includes spots where scenes of National Treasure were filmed, Helena and I part ways with Miles and Candice. We take a cab to Pat’s and Geno’s.

  Having grown up less than a mile from these cheesesteak rivals, I fear I might run into someone I know and have to break character. Hopefully my old friends and neighbors find the gaudy overlit signs in front of Pat’s and Geno’s a deterrent like I do. I’ve always called these places “The Migraine Twins.”

  I always got my cheesesteaks (minus the cheese) from Jim’s Steaks on 4th and South, if for no other reason than they don’t have a giant glowing sign. Helen(a) is from the suburbs (of Moldavia) and has no opinion either, so we flip a coin and it chooses Geno’s.

  Sitting on the same side of an orange picnic table that’s bolted to the ground, a migraine begins to form behind my eyes. Two steaming, greasy cholesterol torpedoes sit in front of us, and two strangers sit across the table. I watch Helena draw a rectangle on the center of a piece of paper.

  “Rodebrecht, take this pen and write a six-letter word on this paper in this rectangle. Don’t let me see it!” The strangers sharing our table don’t attempt to disguise that they’re staring at our loud tracksuits and weird accents.

  I take the pen, shielding the paper the way I did to keep kids from cheating on me in grade school, and write FARTER on the paper. “Done.”

  “Now fold the paper in half like this.” Helena mimes folding it lengthwise. “Now fold it like this.” She mimes folding it widthwise.

  Once I’ve folded it twice, she takes the paper from me. “Did you write the word in print letters or in cursive letters?”

  “Print.”

  “Craps!” Helena tears the paper to shreds. “That was my fault. I should’ve told you it had to be cursive. OK, we start again. Same word.”

  She draws a rectangle on another piece of paper and hands it to me. She gets more napkins while I write FARTER in cursive in the rectangle and fold it the way she showed me. When she sits down, I hand her the paper.

  “This time, Rodey, you can rip it up.”

  I do as I’m told.

  “Place the pieces in my hand and say the word in your head again and again and I will hear it.” She rubs the torn pieces of paper on the sleeve of her tracksuit. In my head, I say “farter” again and again.

  The strangers across the table watch us like we’re a TV show. One of them says “What the fuck?” when Helena pulls up her sleeve and FARTER is written on her left forearm in black marker.

  “Holy cow! That’s my word! Farter.”

  * * *

  The strangers across the table are gone by the time Helena and I finish our sandwiches. A Coke seems like it was designed to wash down red meat; it never tastes better than when I drink it with a burger or a cheesesteak-sans-cheese. After a long slurp that ends with the hollow crackle of my empty cup, I smack my lips in approval and slam my cup on the table. I avoid caffeine because of migraines, but since I already have one, sometimes the caffeine helps. “So, I had this friend back home.”

  “Back in Moldavia?”

  “Is that not home?” I raise an eyebrow.

  “Of course. Go on.”

  “I had this friend. His name was Rannish.”

  Under the bright-eyed exuberance of Helena, I see Helen tense up ever so slightly.

  “Rannish has passed, God rest his soul.” I make the sign of the cross, ending it by kissing my fingertips. “This friend, he was in love for many long times with a girl. They could not be together because…of the Moldavian caste system.”

  Helen squirms inside Helena.

  I turn my body toward her and inch closer to her on the bench. “Well, Rannish and this girl make plans to move to America, where there is no caste system, so they can be married. He plans and plans for their first night together in the U.S. of the A. At the time, we are rehearsing our acrobatic routine for the summer solstice festival. In between routines, while we stretch, he tells me of all the different scenarios he came up with for their first night in this country. He asks for my opinions and I tell him. All of his ideas—”

  Helen stands. Helena is gone. “Find your own way home.” Her voice comes out in a quivering whisper. She turns on her heel and marches off.

  I scramble after her, trying to get around a crowd crossing the street.

  “Bobby Pinker! No shit!” A hand grabs my sleeve. I turn and see Paul Dobber, a guy I haven’t seen since eighth grade graduation. His face is the same, but he’s impossibly muscular, like he lifts weights for a living. “Dude, what’s up? What’s with your outfit? You look like a Glo Worm.”

  Paul laughs as I edge past him, saying from the corner of my mouth, “Good to see you, can’t talk, outfit�
��s part of a prank I’m doing.”

  “What prank? Hey. Hey!”

  Helen turns a corner. I run to catch up to her, grabbing her by the waist. “You have no idea where you are.”

  She wrenches free before I can finish my thought and speed walks down the street. “I get a cab to 30th Street and then I know the rest.”

  I try to keep pace with her, but she’s in much better shape than I am. I pant, steak and bread blobs churning in my stomach. “You won’t catch a cab around here. It’s not like Center City where they’re all over the place. You’d have to walk fifteen—”

  She turns another corner. I jog to the corner and see that the street she just turned onto is empty. Four side streets branch out from this street, and by the time I’ve had a chance to look down all four, Helen’s had enough time to vanish.

  This is her best trick yet.

  Chapter 15

  Family Pit Stop

  Guilty over what I’d done to Helen, I decide to walk home as penance. I walk, muttering to myself (ironically, our next stop was supposed to be the Mütter Museum), and then I add up the distance from where I am to my apartment. It’s about a hundred blocks. In The Fugitive, Tommy Lee Jones says that the average foot speed in the woods is four miles per hour. I’m on asphalt, which helps, but still have a three-hour walk ahead of me. The sun has gone down, and I’ll have to walk through a few dicey neighborhoods on my sheepish sojourn.

  I call my brother and explain the situation. I ask him to meet me at our parents’ house, a distance I know I can walk in the forty minutes it’ll take him to get there.

  * * *

  My full name is Robert Domenic Pinker. I was born January 8th, 1979 at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I grew up in South Philly with my parents Michael and Liz and my older brother Joe.

  My parents met in Catholic school in 1960. They were both eight. Liz was Italian, Michael was Irish. When they started dating at sixteen, their ethnicity was a huge issue for both families. I have no idea why. Irish people and Italian people are exactly the same. It’s the difference between pasta and potatoes, getting drunk on beer or wine. The Italian flag is green, white, and red. The Irish flag is green, white, and orange. But there’s still some tension between the two families to this day.

  My dad’s smart, my brother’s smart, I’m smart. I had friends who got money for every good grade they got. My straight A’s earned me a pat on the shoulder and an expression on my parents’ faces that said “Doing what you’re capable of isn’t impressive. It’s expected.” My dad and one of his brothers got full academic scholarships to college. So did my brother. I put pressure on myself to live up to that and ended up getting two full rides.

  I was always a mama’s boy, hiding behind her leg when company came over. At five years old, I was a skinny leprechaun of thirty-five pounds, and my mom could scoop me up and sit me on her lap. Even at twenty-seven, she still dreams of me that way. I’m Peter Pan in her mind.

  My Italian grandmother had a blue and red kerchief that she wore on her head. The house I lived in as a child had an entryway with a beveled glass door that was about the size of a phone booth. I used to borrow her kerchief, run into the entryway as Clark Kent, close the door, and return as the Superman of my little row home on Emily St. When I was fourteen we moved into my grandmother’s house after she passed away; it’s less than two miles from that first house. My parents still live there.

  * * *

  By the time I climb the five steps to my parents’ front door, I want to take a nap. I walked less than two miles, but my calves burn and my chest stings from breathing so deeply. I called ahead to let my parents know I was dropping in and that I’d explain when I got there.

  My parents always watch TV in their finished basement. When my mother hears me at the top of the steps saying, “It’s just me,” and I’m all out of breath, she asks what’s wrong in a panic. “Nothing. I’ll be down in a minute. I need a glass of water.”

  I’m not one to drop by randomly. I have dinner with my parents every other Tuesday and see them for birthdays, holidays, births, and deaths. We get along really well and are almost friends at this point, but I usually keep to myself. When I lived at home, I spent most of the day locked in my bedroom. I check in every now and then—and by “I check in,” I mean my mother calls to make sure I’m not dead in my apartment, and I fill her in on my life at the moment. My nephew’s birth provided more reasons for family gatherings; that tiny prince instantly became the centerpiece of our lives.

  I wash my face and head downstairs to lie to my parents. I love my parents very much, so I lie to them on a constant basis. I lie to protect them from the truth about me. Throughout my childhood, they lied to keep me happy and safe, and adulthood is my time to return the favor. I lie to keep them from worrying, especially my mother. If she knew the real me, she would lie awake every night thinking about her loser son with no friends sleeping with his dead friend’s true love, gambling himself into half-a-year’s-salary of debt, playing detective as an escape from playing Bobby Pinker.

  My mother starts to fear that I died in my apartment and no one has smelled me yet if we go more than four days without talking. I suspect my dad is the same way and just keeps that thought to himself. That’s a level of love I never thought myself capable of until I held my nephew for the first time and my brain flooded with the very rational fears of choking, birth defects, crib death, kidnapping, leukemia, and King Herod coming back from the dead and decreeing that all infants under the age of one be slaughtered to snuff out a new messiah.

  I had spent half of my walk creating excuses as to how and why I ended up at my parents’ door. Luckily, my parents want to believe whatever I tell them, so I don’t have to be very convincing in my fabrications.

  I make up some cow chips about going to a concert with a guy from work, and he drove, and he had to leave in the middle of the show because his daughter got sick and he had to pick her up from a slumber party. My mom wants to know if the little girl is hospital sick or just regular sick. I assure her she’s just regular sick.

  My dad tells me to join a gym so I won’t feel like dying after walking a mile and a half. He goes to the gym five days a week at five-thirty in the morning. If I’m awake at that hour, it’s because I haven’t gone to bed yet. If I didn’t know my dad had been an agnostic, sleep-till-noon college kid in the seventies, I’d seriously wonder if my real father was a sloven, apathetic mailman.

  My mom asks about my yellow tracksuit. On the spot, I spit out “The band we went to see always asks their audience to wear specific outfits at their shows as a gag so they can spot their true fans.” Sometimes my own lies impress me.

  She then asks in a hushed tone how I’ve been coping with Ron’s death.

  “I’ve been reading books to keep my mind off of things.”

  “How’s my Nancy?”

  “Good. We’re good.” I really need to get around to telling my parents Nancy dumped me.

  “Tell her I wore some of her jewelry at work and some of the girls want to buy stuff from her.”

  I nod.

  Mom asks if I’ve thought about doing stand-up comedy on my own so I can get back onstage. I explain that stand-up isn’t my thing. She says I can do monologues. I tell her I don’t write my own stuff and refuse to do any of Ron’s stuff without him.

  She asks me about every major aspect of my life, and I answer honestly whenever I can, which isn’t often. I’m much more honest in better times.

  She asks if I’m eating fruit every day. If I own enough underwear and socks. If I eat too much fast food. If I know my neighbors. If I play the guitar after nine on weeknights. Annoying questions, but I can answer all of them honestly. Well, except the guitar question. I stop playing at ten, but I tell her I stop at nine.

  Then I get the report on the family. My mom talks and talks. My dad only talks when she asks him for a detail, usually a date. My dad has a brain full of birthdates and death
dates, marriage dates, the year this happened, the year that show went off the air. My mother fills me in on who has cancer, who’s in remission, who’s on chemo, who had a stroke, who had a recent colonoscopy, who lost their father.

  After family, she moves on to family friends. Some of the information is relevant and/or interesting, but I’ve forgotten most of it by the time Joe shows up to take me home.

  * * *

  Joe and I drive up the steep incline of the Platt Bridge on our way to 95 South. Joe wears an Eagles Jersey and matching cap; he sells airtime for WIP, the local sports radio station. His SUV has heated leather seats and separate climate controls for the driver’s seat and the front passenger seat. “I’m thinking you shouldn’t have said that to her until you got back to your place. Can’t believe she left you there.”

  I shrug. “It’s my fault. I humiliated her in public, even if no one knew it.”

  Joe’s cell phone rings and he taps the blue tooth on his ear. “Yeah…I know…definitely before he falls asleep…no, I—we can talk about this all night if you want, let me talk to my brother now…I will. Bye.

  “Holly says hi. So, I still don’t get why you were Russian tourists.”

  “Because Ron was weird. That was his idea of a fun first date. And Helen’s. It would’ve been fun for me, too, if I hadn’t been thinking about how she was probably pretending I was Ron all night.”

  “You should’ve stuck with Nancy. Gonna be hard to find another girl who treats you that way, that we all like, and is good looking.” This is as preachy as Joe gets with me. He has a paper-perfect life—great job, pretty wife, healthy baby, nice house, two nice cars, no debt—and has plenty of things he could pick on in my quickly-heading-nowhere life. But he never does. He never holds me up to his standards, and neither do my parents. I’m thankful for that. If they treated me like the fuck-up I actually am, I’d have ended up as a Goth kid taking breaks from Dance-Dance-Revolution to cut myself. I get away with murder because I’m different. As the only artistic one in the family, they don’t “get” me, so they accept me on my own terms.