The Roy Stories by Barry Gifford Page A

mother was so often either getting married or divorced around that time. When she threw her third husband, Dion Braz, a sailboat salesman, out of the house for the last time on Christmas Eve, he said to Roy, “Christmas is a trick on kids.”
    Finally she turned and faced Roy and said, “Remember when you were little and I would play the piano and you’d sing? You had such a sweet voice. Why don’t we do it now, Roy, while your sister is sleeping and before Eddie gets here? I always loved it when you sang ‘Count Your Blessings.’ Do you remember that song?”
    Roy looked as his mother’s face. She was not yet forty years old and she was still very beautiful. Before he could answer her, the doorbell rang.
    â€œThat must be Eddie,” she said, taking off her apron. “He’s early.”

 
    Memories from a Sinking Ship

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    Memories from a Sinking Ship
    W hen Roy was five years old his mother took him to Chicago to stay with his grandmother while she went to Acapulco with her new boyfriend, Rafaelito Faz. Roy had been told that hell was boiling but when he and his mother flew up from Miami and arrived in Chicago during the dead of winter he decided this was a lie. Hell was cold, not hot, and he was horrified that his mother had delivered him to such a place. My mother must hate me, Roy thought, to have brought me here. I must have done something terribly wrong. The fact that his grandmother was there already was proof to Roy that she, too, had committed an unforgivable sin.
    Roy’s mother stayed in hell only long enough to hand him over. Rafaelito Faz would meet her in Mexico. “He’s very rich,” Roy’s grandmother informed him. “The Faz family owns a chain of department stores in Venezuela.” Rich people, Roy concluded, did not have to go to hell. His mother had shown him a picture of Rafaelito Faz clipped from the Miami Herald . His hair was parted down the middle and he had a wispy mustache that looked as if it might blow off in the Chicago wind. Underneath the photograph was the caption, “Faz heir visits city.”
    When Roy’s mother returned from her holiday, she was wearing a white coat and her skin was as brown as Chico Carrasquel’s, the shortstop for the Chicago White Sox. Roy did not tell his mother that he was angry at her for dropping him off in hell while she went to a fabulous beach in another country because he was afraid that if he did she would do it again. Roy asked her if Rafaelito Faz had come to Chicago with her. “Forget that one, Roy,” she said. “I don’t ever want to see the rat again.”
    The next time Roy went to Chicago to visit his grandmother, he was almost seven and it was during the summer. His mother disappeared after two or three days. Roy’s grandmother said that she had gone to see a friend who had a house on a lake in Minnesota. “Which one?” Roy asked. “There are 10,000 lakes in Minnesota, Roy,” his grandmother told him, “if you can believe what it says on their license plate, but the only one I can name is Superior.”
    While Roy’s mother was in the land of 10,000 lakes, there was a sanitation workers strike in Chicago. Garbage piled up in the streets and alleys. Now the weather was very warm and humid and the city started to stink. Big Cicero, the hunchback with a twisted nose who once wrestled Killer Kowalski at Marigold Arena and now worked at the newsstand on the corner near the house, said to Roy’s grandmother, “May they rot in hell, them garbagemen. They get a king’s ransom as it is just for throwin’ bags. Cops oughta kneecap ’em, put ’em on the rails. The mayor’ll call in the troops soon it don’t end, you’ll see.” Roy’s grandmother said, “Don’t have a heart attack, Cicero.” “Already had one,” he said.
    One afternoon Roy looked out a window at the