The Other Side of the World by Jay Neugeboren

spoke to her in his usual cold, confident way: “You’re Seana O’Sullivan, aren’t you,” he said.
    â€œThat’s correct.”
    â€œI’m an admirer of your two novels,” he said, and he led us into the living room, which was handsomely appointed in a soothing combination of contemporary furniture—sleek plastics and stainless steel—and antiques: an oak sideboard, a large French country table, rush-covered ladder-back chairs, electrified oil lamps, and, around the room, discretely placed, a dozen or so model ships, some of which, I knew, Mister Falzetti had made: fishing boats, sailboats, steamboats, ocean liners, and fully rigged tall ships like those you see in pirate movies.
    If you’d met him in this setting, or in the home Nick had grown up in, in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, an upper middle class suburb south of Springfield—the house in Maine had been the family’s country home until Mister Falzetti retired and they moved here full-time—you would have thought he’d probably gone to Harvard or Yale, and had been the CEO of an old-line WASP corporation. But it wasn’t so. “What my dad does is to turn shit into gold,” was the way Nick had described his father to me. Mister Falzetti had grown up in the North End of Boston, one of nine kids from a poor Italian immigrant family, and had started out, at fourteen, digging sewer lines for a company in Newton, after which, when he was sixteen, he’d moved to a small, mostly Polish farming town in Western Massachusetts where he set up his own business—mowing lawns, plowing driveways, pumping out septic tanks. Though he never finished high school, he was a fanatic about education—the one thing, he liked to say, the bastards can’t take away from you. And when it came to smarts—Nick loved quoting him on
stuff like this—being a Wop among Polacks was like being the proverbial one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. By the time he was twenty-one, he owned his own company, which pumped out shit and sludge from people’s basements and septic systems, dug up their leach fields, put in their sewer lines, and plowed and repaired their driveways, and he’d also been able to corner lucrative contracts for school bus routes, waste treatment operations, and road work—salting, plowing, repairs—in a half-dozen Western Massachusetts towns.
    â€œSo let’s get to it, Charlie,” he said as soon as he’d poured wine for me and Seana. “Tell us about Nick, since, except perhaps for poor Trish, you knew him better than anyone. Tell us about our boy: was he happy near the end?”
    â€œNot especially,” I said.
    â€œHe drank a lot, didn’t he.”
    â€œHe drank a lot.”
    â€œThe man from the embassy said that his alcohol level at the time of death was off the charts.”
    â€œProbably.”
    â€œThen tell us something else: Are you glad he’s dead?” he asked, and before I could answer, he pointed a finger at me. “The truth now, Charlie. Don’t dissemble with me. Is it a relief ? Were you glad when it happened or, in the immediate aftermath, let’s say, when the actuality—its irreversibility—hit home?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYou’re a liar, but a credible one,” he said. “Nick always admired that quality in you—your ability to fool people into thinking you were just an ordinary, okay guy. ‘My friend’s a regular good-time Charlie,’ he used to joke. You were the only person he knew whose way of being was a refutation of the truism that one cannot both be sincere and seem to be sincere at the same time.”
    â€œI miss Nick more than you can know,” I said.
    â€œI intend no criticism,” Mister Falzetti said. “We’re all upset,
each in our own ways, but I’ll tell you this: you did make a terrific team, you two—like Tom Sawyer and Huck