Chapter 2
Had Helen gone to work, everything would have been different. But in feeling sorry for herself, she had started hitting the bottle a little earlier than usual, had gotten almost drunk, and knowing she was in no shape to work, had called the restaurant ahead of time. She did this about once a month, and the owner of the restaurant accepted it, simply because Helen was so good at her work, and the money she earned was relatively little. Had she been less eager to drink, she would have been a hostess in one of the swankier restaurants in the city. As it was, she had to settle for a third-class hash house on Long Island.
By two-thirty in the afternoon, she had finished her bottle for the day. Helen had the good sense to limit herself to one bottle no matter what, knowing if she began adding to it, little by little, she would become a worse alcoholic than she already was, and she was bad enough so that her liver was already showing signs of giving up the struggle.
She lay on her couch in the living room for an hour, then sat up, feeling dizzy, but first feeling the effects of the alcohol starting to pass. By the time Andy came home, at six, she would look sober again, and she would have his dinner on the table. Andy would remember almost nothing of what had happened between them. His animal lusts sated for the moment, he would be content to ignore her. He had come from a home where the father had treated the mother like dirt, and so had assumed this was the way all husbands treated their wives. Wives were meant to keep house, clean clothing, prepare meals, bring home a little extra money when they went to work, bring up the kids, and occasionally fuck. He, in turn, was required to bring home enough money to pay the bills, take her to a movie once a week on Saturday night, go out twice a week, once to binge with the fellas and play poker, and once to get laid properly from a prostitute, and smack his wife down if she ever objected. To date, Helen had had the good sense to never object.
But deep down, Helen was a romanticist. She read all those Carousel Romance novels by Valerie James and Rhoda Seville, and she imagined that somewhere in these United States life was something like that. She ached to have a man come and sweep her off her feet. There were Carousel Romance novels lying all over her house in the living room, in the master bedroom, in the kitchen, and even in a basket in the bathrooms.
By quarter-to-four she was reading one of the romance novels, and she was just getting engrossed, when she heard a knock at her front door. She was seated in her living room, a nicely furnished room with throw rugs instead of carpeting, and almost-Victorian furniture she had gotten from various sales. Helen had done all the furnishing, including the sending of the furniture to various re-upholsterers so that it all looked matching.
Walking from the living room to the small foyer, she opened the front door and found herself facing a boy, no more than fifteen, but tall, about five-feet-eleven, slender, with light-brown hair, tan skin, twinkling brown eyes, a short nub for a nose, and a wide smile. He was athletically built because he was on his high school track team, and the moment Helen saw him, she smiled at him.
It had been almost a year since she had seen Chris Cerrone, or, as his father always called him, Zip, or Zippy. When he had been born, the boy had looked like a hairy little monkey. So his father had nicknamed him Zippy, after the famous TV monkey. His friends all called him Zip. The nickname had stuck, even though the hair had all fallen off two days after he had been born. Since then, he had sprouted a fine head of hair, and there was hair visible under his arms because he was wearing a sleeveless undershirt. Helen had no doubt he had hair in one other place but she didn't stop to think about it.
Zip had grown a lot in the past year, about four or five inches. There was the littlest hint of lint on his face. One day, in about a year, he would have to start shaving.
"Hi, Aunt Helen," he said, smiling. "Mom asked if she might borrow some flour. She's baking a cake." Even his voice had changed. It was deep, not sonorous, but still deep and smooth. Helen liked it. He was becoming a man.
"Sure, Zip," she nodded. "Come on in."
She led the way from the foyer to the right, into the kitchen, and finding a large measuring cup, she filled it with flour and handed it to the boy.
"I'll bring the cup right back," he said, smiling.
"No hurry," she told him.
"Hey," he said, stopping and looking at her, no longer with the eyes of the little boy he had always been, but rather the way a man would look at a woman, "did anyone ever tell you, Aunt Helen, that you are one really stunning lady?"
"Come on, Zip," she teased. "You're starting to sound like your father. He's the Casanova of the neighborhood, and I'm afraid you're thinking of following in his footsteps."
"It doesn't alter the fact that you're beautiful," the boy told her, reaching out and touching her face.
Helen grabbed his hand, intent on pulling it away. Hell! He was a fifteen-year-old boy and had no right to so much as think of something like this. She was a mature lady, not some teenager. If he had been about twenty years older everything would have been fine. She would have loved listening to an older man talk to her this way. God! Romance seemed to be either something one read about, or else it was something the rest of the world experienced, but she didn't.
"Zip," she insisted. "Stop trying to grow up too quickly."
"Why?" he asked, tilting her chin up to him with his free hand. "I still think you're really a wow, Aunt Helen. Gee! I hope Uncle Andy appreciates you."
"Zip, get that flour over to your mother."
"Yeah, sure. But tell me, why does it bother you to hear me tell you what a good-looking woman you are?. "
"Zip!! ! "
"Good-looking? Hell, no! You're great-looking," he smiled, and before she realized what was happening, the boy bent and kissed her smack on the lips. It wasn't a long kiss, but it wasn't a short one, either. What was more, she felt his tongue flick across her lips, and suddenly something happened inside her. Something sensuous came to life as it never had with her husband, and it took all her inner strength to keep from responding to the boy.
Pulling his lips from hers, he winked at her, saying, "I'll bring the cup back as soon as Mom's finished with it," and before she was able to reply, he was gone. it;