Cast Me Gently by Caren J. Werlinger Page B

people than bread. She tore the loaves in half, handing them out. “Take it or leave it,” she said to one man who was balefully eyeing the half-loaf she offered. He snatched it from her and grumbled under his breath as he stumped away.
    “Are you all right?” she asked Mrs. Schiavo, who was trembling. “Come on. Let’s get you back inside.” She steered Mrs. Schiavo into the bakery and made her sit down at a table while she poured a cup of coffee. “Here, drink this.”
    Teresa sat with her. She saw that one of Mrs. Schiavo’s hands was scraped and bleeding. “Wait here.” She went back to the drug store and got some antiseptic ointment and gauze. She locked the door behind her and returned to the bakery. Dampening a paper towel, she bathed the scrape to gently clean away the blood before smearing the scrape with ointment and wrapping Mrs. Schiavo’s hand in gauze.
    “I guess they were hungry today, huh?”
    Mrs. Schiavo laughed shakily. “ Grazie , Teresa. Grazie .”
    “It’s nothing, Mrs. Schiavo,” Teresa said gently. “But I think it would be a good idea for me to come over and help you in the mornings from now on.”
    “You’re what?” Sylvia asked angrily a while later when she got to the store and heard what had happened.
    “She needs help in the mornings,” Teresa said, bracing herself.
    “If she wouldn’t feed them bums, she wouldn’t need help! I’ve told her again and again…”
    Teresa turned away and went behind the pharmacy counter. From long experience, she knew better than to interrupt her mother in the middle of a tirade. Once Sylvia got started, she needed to finish, “like a storm blowing itself out,” Lou had said to a young Teresa many times when she would try arguing with her mother. “You can’t win, so just let her have her say.”
    Over the years, Teresa had come to appreciate the wisdom of her father’s advice and understood that it was probably the only thing that kept their marriage bearable. “It’s not like divorce is an option for them,” Bernie used to point out. “They gotta find some way of making it work.”
    Sylvia was still muttering loudly enough for Teresa to hear when Lou got to the store. Teresa went into the office where he was counting up the deposit from the day before.
    “I can take that to the bank today,” she said casually. “I need to do a couple things while I’m out anyhow.”
    He glanced up briefly as he punched numbers into the adding machine, its paper scroll of weeks’ worth of numbers curling off the desk into a tangled heap on the floor. “Thanks.”
    Teresa briefly considered telling him about the man with the dog but decided against it. She knew her parents would call the police and insist they patrol the alley to chase the man and dog off. They’re not hurting anything, she reasoned. They just want a place to sleep.
    Her father called her when the deposit was ready.
    “Just leave it. I’ll take it later this morning,” she said from where she was re-stocking the toothpaste.
    “Fine,” he said.
    Lou left mid-morning to spend a few hours at the Oakland store. Teresa waited a while and then said to her mother, “I’m going to the bank, and I have a couple of errands I need to run. Gianni’s over at Morningside today, but if any prescriptions get dropped off, I’ll take care of them when I get back.”
    Sylvia maintained an icy silence. Teresa sighed and went to the office to get the moneybag along with her purse and car keys.
    Backing out into the alley, she saw no sign of the guy with the dog. There were a few people rifling through the dumpsters and empty boxes behind the stores, but not like the numbers there were at night. Where do they all go during the day?
    It was nearing eleven by the time she got to the bank. Upon entering the lobby, she saw that Ellie had another customer at her window. She went to the lobby counter where she pretended to be filling out a deposit slip, stalling, waiting for the customer to