Expiration Date

Once you walk up Oxford Avenue, away from the El, you enter Northwood, which has always been the nicest part of Frankford. In fact, if you lived in Northwood, you never admitted to living in Frankford.

Northwood had slightly wider streets—some of them brick-paved—with singles and twins and trees and big backyards and everything else everyone in Frankford wanted.

I grew up resenting the whole Frankford/Northwood divide. The dividing line, of course, was the Frankford El. We lived one block south of the El, in a cramped rowhome. Zero trees, a grim factory parking lot across the street.

But go just two blocks north of the El, and it’s a completely different story. Aforementioned trees and backyards. Why couldn’t my mom have moved there after my dad died? Just a few blocks away? Take a walk on the wild side, Anne. Sure, maybe the mortgage would have been a couple extra grand—maybe $11,000 as opposed to the $9,000 you’d pay in Frankford—but surely we could have swung that, right?

Couldn’t we?

Mom had moved there eight years ago, finally leaving Darrah Street. I honestly don’t know why she stayed in that house so long, other than inertia. I used to pretend that it was because she missed my father, that she couldn’t bear the idea of moving away from the house they’d shared. But if that was true, she never let on. She almost never talked about him, and packed up every photo of him and put them in the hutch in the dining room. Maybe it was the lingering memory of my father, but I just think she hated the idea of moving.

So she’d traded a standard issue Frankford rowhome for the slightly more upscale standard Northwood twin. Instead of neighbors jammed up against both sides of her home, now she had a single neighbor jammed up against only one side of her home.

“More wine, Meghan?”

“No thank you, Mrs. Wade.”

“There’s plenty here. And call me Anne, willya?”

“I’m okay. I have to drive later, and I really don’t have much of a tolerance. I’m kind of a cheap date.”

A mild lie from Meghan. She could hold her liquor like a bartop. She just didn’t want to insult my mother’s choice in grape-based libations. Not that she’s a snob. But chances are, the Charles family never served pinot grigio from a cardboard box.

We all stood around the kitchen—me in my arm sling, Meghan, my mother and her boyfriend—making introductions and small talk. Mom was so stunned that I brought somebody, she didn’t even notice the sling. In my twenty plus years of dating life, I’ve never brought anybody home. Ever.

But now I was happy for the witness, because Whiplash Walt was in rare form. Touching my mom’s shoulders, her back, her waist—like he was planning on killing her later and wanted to place as many fingerprints as possible, just so the Philly PD would be extra-clear on who’d done it.

Whiplash Walt was a lawyer, just like Meghan’s father, but they inhabited two totally different planes of existence. Nicholas Charles Esq. regularly lunched with the mayor and the Philadelphia political elite. Whiplash Walt spent his days handing out cards to anybody wearing a puffy neck brace within a five-mile radius. Whiplash, as his name might imply, did personal injury. It was how he’d met my mom, in fact. She tried to sue the hospital where she’d worked as an accountant for a slip-and-fall thing. She’d lost the case, but won Whiplash.

Mom asked me if I wanted another beer, but instead I helped myself to some of Whiplash’s whiskey—Johnnie Walker Black. Probably a gift from a grateful client. God knows the cheap bastard wouldn’t spring for it himself.

Mom excused herself to go to the basement. I knew where she was going.

“It’s okay. It’s your house. You can smoke here.”

“You know I don’t smoke, Mickey.”

“I totally know you do.”

“You’re being silly.”

I turned to Meghan.

“She totally smokes.”

“I do not smoke.”

Mom excused herself anyway to go downstairs to smoke. In a few moments we would hear the wrinkling of the wrapper, then the flick of the lighter. And in a few minutes we would all smell cigarette smoke.

I explained to Meghan, not bothering to lower my voice.

“Both of my mom’s parents died of lung cancer. She wants me to think that she quit smoking in 1990, when her father died. And I really do think she tries to quit. She just never has.”

Whiplash was clearly uncomfortable with this, so he made some small talk with Meghan. Once he found out her father was the Nicholas Charles, the small talk became more pointed, asking what her father was working on now, and hey, does he go to the Capital Grille every so often, and hey, is your dad looking to hire oh I’m just kidding but really I’m not.

My mom returned to the kitchen, absolutely reeking of smoke. It wafted from her clothes and invaded our nostrils. I fought back the urge to sneeze. We all sat down to eat.

Within sixty seconds Whiplash had whipped through his dinner. Then he stood up and wordlessly made his way down to his basement office. But not before giving my mom a none-too-subtle pinch on her ass.

The plates in front of Meghan and me were still full, as we hadn’t had time to pretend to enjoy more than a few bites of our rigatoni and meatballs. My mom leaned in closer to us, all confidential-like.

“He’s working on a case.”

I leaned in, too.

“Don’t worry about it.”

Whiplash spent a lot of time in Northwood, but he’d never move here. Going from suburbia to Northwood would be serious slumming, even for a personal injury lawyer. So he kept his own condo in Ardmore, but spent most of his time at my mom’s house.

“More wine?”

“I’m good, Mrs. Wade.”

“Hey, I told you. It’s Anne. We’re all adults here.”

“Right. Anne.”

Bringing Meghan had been a tactical decision. With a buffer in the room, my mom might not come at me with both barrels blazing. She might even be forced to answer a question or two directly.

“Mom, what do you know about Grandpop and the Adams Institute?”

The fork in my mother’s hand froze for a brief moment, like the fancy slow-mo bullet time of a Wachowski flick. She smiled.

“That’s where I thought I’d end up when you told me you wanted to be a writer.”

And then the fork completed the journey to her mouth, which chewed and grinned at the same time.

The Adams Institute was a popular punch line in Frankford. Misbehave, and your parents would say, “You’re going to drive me straight to Adams if you don’t knock that off.” Or, “Where we going on vacation, Mom?” “To Adams, if you don’t stop goofing around.” Adams was the loony bin. It was the most beautiful piece of land in Frankford, spread across ten gorgeous acres on the fringes of Northwood. But nobody wanted to end up there.

Meghan laughed politely.

“How many years did Mickey’s grandfather work there?”

Oooh, kapowie. Anne hadn’t seen that one coming. She was very practiced at smacking away my questions. She had since I was a kid. But the two-on-one assault had left her flummoxed.

“Oh, gee. I think he retired a few years ago? We really don’t talk too much. You know your grandpop, Mickey.”

I took a slug of Johnny Walker Black for courage.

“How long before Grandpop found out Billy Derace was there?”

You should have seen the death stare on Anne’s face then. My God. Blue eyes like dagger icicles.

“Billy who?”

“Mom. The guy who killed dad.”

“Excuse me.”

My mom pushed her chair back, wiped her mouth with a white napkin, placed it on the table, then left the room.

Meghan and I exchanged glances. I took another gulp of Whiplash’s good scotch, which burned my throat as I followed my mom into the kitchen.

My mother’s palms were pressed to the edges of the countertop. I didn’t know if she was trying to keep her balance or keep the counter from resisting the earth’s gravity and floating into the air.

“Mom?”

She looked up. Tears were running down her cheeks. I had the strangest sense of déjà vu. Wasn’t I just here—my mother looking at me and crying? Like, thirty-seven years ago?

My mom wiped her face dry.

“You don’t understand. For years I’ve been waiting for the call that your grandfather’s murdered someone over at Adams.”

“Not just someone. Billy Derace. Why didn’t you ever tell me the truth? You said it was a bar fight. But this guy just attacked Dad out of nowhere. I read the news clips.”

“When would you have liked to know? When you were nine years old? Or maybe when you turned sixteen? Twenty-one, just in time for you to go out drinking?”

“Any of those times would have been better than you lying to me.”

“I never lied to you. You assumed things.”

This was true. I had filled in the gaps. But only because I’d never heard the full story, and had little else to go on. My mother was masterful at shutting down awkward conversations or ignoring them completely.

I tried a different way at it.

“I found a bunch of newspaper clippings that Grandpop kept—all about Dad’s murder. I think he saved every newspaper article, and even got a copy of the police report.”

“Well, that’s a surprise. Your father hated your grandfather and always assumed the feeling was mutual. Who knew he gave a shit.”

It was always that. Your grandfather. Your side of the family. Your gene pool, not mine.

“Why did he hate Grandpop?”

“It’s a long story, and we have a guest.”

Now it was “we.” Now I was part of the family again. Our weird dysfunctional family of two.

“Okay, now here’s what I don’t get. You don’t like him. That much is obvious. You never speak to him, you barely seem to tolerate his existence, and yet you’re always bugging me to visit him. You put me in his friggin’ apartment, Mom. Why would you push me toward somebody you hate? Somebody you tell me my own father hated?”

“Because he doesn’t have anybody else.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“And because someday he might wake up. And the doctors say if he does wake up, he’s going to need some help. I can’t do it, not with work. You’re his grandson.”

Then I understood what my mom had wanted all along. A way to ease her conscience. A way to take care of everything. Me. And my grandpop.

That is: me taking care of my grandpop. Because she sure as hell didn’t want to deal with him.

We didn’t say anything for a short while. I knew Meghan could hear every word of this. My mother’s house, as spacious as it may be by Northwood standards, wasn’t a Main Line McMansion.

“Why did Dad hate Grandpop? Was it because of the divorce?”

“I should have never brought that up.”

“Come on, what’s the difference now? Dad’s gone, and Grandpop is not in a position to care.”

“I wish you’d just forget about it.”

“No, I’m not going to forget about it. This is bullshit. Can you for once, please, just tell me something about my family so I don’t have to keep on inventing details?”

Oh, the look my mother gave me. A withering, icy-blue stare that instantly reduced me to a child.

“I didn’t find this out until after you were born, but apparently your grandfather used to beat up your grandmother.”

My skin went cold as I imagined my grandmother—my sweet grandmother who had nothing but kind words and cookies for me growing up—being struck.

Mom saw she had me. She kept going.

“Your father said he really didn’t remember it until after you were born. But when he became a parent, I guess it all came flooding back. He was depressed all the time, and spent most family holidays avoiding your grandpop Henry—only talking to him when he had to. And that’s the way their relationship stayed until your father died. Now can we finish dinner?”

In 1917 a Philadelphia developer named Gustav Weber went to Los Angeles on his honeymoon. He fell so deeply and promptly in love with the Spanish mission-style architecture that he decided to re-create a piece of Southern California on the East Coast. Upon his return, Weber bought a triangle of land on the outskirts of Philadelphia, divided it up into blocks with street names like Los Angeles Avenue and San Gabriel Road, and then built the homes of his dream: stucco bungalows with red-tiled roofs.

Weber, however, didn’t take into account the harsh East Coast winters that killed the plants and froze the occupants of the uninsulated homes. By the time the Great Depression hit, Weber was bankrupt.

But Hollywood never died.

My grandmom had lived there—at 603 Los Angeles Avenue, near San Diego Avenue—ever since I can remember. While her ex hopped around various apartments in Frankford over the years, Ellie Wadcheck—she never went back to her maiden name—stayed put. I used to waste away many summer afternoons in the postage stamp–sized yard behind her house. Especially in the years after my father died, and my mom needed someone to watch me.

I didn’t think anything was weird about Hollywood, PA, until I went to college, and discovered that my friends thought I was full of crap.

Meghan didn’t believe me either—at first.

“She lives where?”

“Hollywood. It’s a neighborhood in Abington.”

“How have I never heard of this?”

“Oh oh oh, you’re a rich girl, and you’ve gone too far…”

“Shut up.”

We stopped at the Hollywood Tavern. I didn’t have a chance to finish my Johnnie Walker Black at my mother’s, and I needed another drink. Meghan decided she could use one, too. Maybe something that didn’t come from a box.

The place was a former show home for the Weber development that was later fitted with a brick addition that stuck out like a cancerous growth on the face of the mission-style pad. Inside, the bar was designed for serious drinking and sports watching. I ordered a Yuengling; Meghan had a white wine.

“My God, you weren’t full of crap. This place looks like it was scraped out of the Hollywood Hills, flung across the country and it landed here.”

“Pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

“Did any famous actors grow up here?”

“I don’t think so. Unless you consider Joey Lawrence famous.”

We drank. I pretended to watch baseball—a Phillies night game. But mostly I was thinking about what my mother had said.

Grandmom Ellie was surprised to see me. I never dropped by unannounced. In fact, I usually tried to wriggle out of family commitments whenever I could. Not that I didn’t like to see my family, but I always found the first ten to twenty minutes of reacclamation to be awkward and painful. There was always an undercurrent of guilt to it—gee, it’s been so long, Mickey, you’re never around, you don’t seem to want to associate with the rest of us…but anyway, how are things? How’s the writing career coming along?

But Meghan took the edge off. Oh, how my grandmom fawned over her.

“Look at how beautiful you are! My God. Mickey, do you tell this beautiful woman how gorgeous she is every day?”

“Hi, Mrs. Wadcheck. So great to meet you.”

Meghan even pronounced the name like a pro. She was a quick study, that one.

“Oh, you’re so lovely.”

The interior of my grandmom’s bungalow hadn’t changed…ever. If I were to pop one of those white pills now, I have a feeling I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the early 1970s and now until I stepped outside and checked the cars. Everything was off-white or blinding yellow. Yellow is her favorite color.

Grandmom insisted on serving us giant tumblers of Frank’s vanilla cream soda—which let me tell you, does not go well with Yuengling or Johnnie Walker Black—as well as a tray of the most sickeningly sweet butter ring cookies I’ve ever tasted. If she noticed that I only picked up my soda with three fingers of my left hand, she didn’t let on.

Instead, Ellie Wadcheck smiled at us, but you could tell she was waiting for the other shoe to drop. You could count the times I’d dropped by just to visit on…my missing right arm.

“I wanted to ask you about something, Grandmom.”

Deep in the throes of sugar shock, I lied and said I was writing a piece about my father, and how he’d died. In my defense, I wasn’t totally lying. Maybe there was a magazine piece in this, or even a book. But writing about my father and his killer hadn’t yet occurred to me. It was just something to say to my grandmom.

She smiled at us.

“Billy Derace was the son of a whore.”

Meghan and I sat there, momentarily stunned.

“Don’t hold back, Grandmom. Tell us how you really feel.”

Grandmom laughed. She was pretty much the only relative who thought I was remotely funny.

“Oh, I didn’t know her. But she was notorious. I’ll never forgive that Billy Derace for what he did, but I’m not surprised, considering how he was raised. He was born to a very immature mother. She married young, but refused to stay home. She worked all day and went out drinking and dancing every night. Eventually the husband had enough, he left. Everyone in the neighborhood talked about it.”

“This was Frankford?”

“Yes—where I lived with your grandfather until I moved here. Anyway, there was a rumor that Billy had a younger brother who died when he was young—only three years old, they say. And Billy was the one watching him when he died.”

Meghan turned pale.

“What happened?”

“The story goes that he choked on a piece of cereal. Billy didn’t know what to do. This was…oh, 1968? 1969? Nobody taught children the Heimlich maneuver back then.”

“Where was his mother? In 1969, Billy had to be only nine or ten years old.”

“Yes, he was. His mother was out at a bar, and I suppose she thought that a nine-year-old was mature enough to care for a toddler. Billy and his brother were often left to fend for themselves.”

Meghan glanced over at me, eyebrow raised a little—but I was already taking mental notes. A three-year-old choking to death would certainly have made the newspapers back in the late 1960s, wouldn’t it? But then why wasn’t Billy taken from his irresponsible mother?

“So Billy was probably a little crazy.”

My grandmom paused.

“Well, he wasn’t a normal child.”

“And he probably grew up crazy, and then one day in 1980 attacked my father with a steak knife at random.”

Grandmom looked at me.

“I don’t think it was random.”

Throughout his short life, Anthony Wade never made much money. Some other dads, it seemed—the fathers of kids I knew in college—couldn’t help but walk out onto their front lawns and find $100 bills sticking to the bottoms of their shoes. Some fathers inherited their money; others chose careers that more or less guaranteed them a lot of money; still others worked very hard and eventually made a lot of money.

My father worked hard, but never made much money.

The Wadcheck men seemed to be drawn to the two professions that sound cool but suck ass when it comes to making money: writing and music. Unless you’re lucky. And if you’re lucky, you don’t need writing or music. You just need to be lucky, as well as the ability to open up your wallet as the greenbacks come tumbling from the skies.

My father gigged with his band or solo almost every weekend of my childhood, but the most he made was $100 at a time—and that was for two nights of performing, five hours each night. And that was in the late 1970s, early 1980s. When I was born, my mom told me, he’d be lucky to come home with $25 in his pocket.

And a lot of that money usually went to musical equipment—replacing guitar strings, saving up for new speakers or effects pedals.

My father was perfectly content with the amount of money he made playing music. His art supported his art.

What it didn’t do was support his young wife and infant son.

So Anthony Wade had to work at least two other jobs at all times—usually steady but grinding custodial work for whoever was hiring in Frankford at the moment. He also gave guitar lessons to whoever could cough up $5 for a half hour of instruction.

Even when I was a kid I knew my father was miserable with these other jobs. His mood determined the mood of the house. And many weekdays, his mood was lousy.

This probably explained why, when I embarked upon my own low-paying career as a journalist, I avoided the pitfall of a wife and kids. If my profession supported my profession, then that was C is for Cookie, good enough for me. At least I wasn’t dragging anyone down with me.

But I didn’t know the half of it. Because my grandmom started to explain that layoffs were so common, and money so thin, my dad would take other kinds of jobs. Jobs that, she said, broke her heart.

“Your father let them do all kinds of tests on him.”

“Who?”

“Those people at the institute. You know, the one up the boulevard.”

The ex-journalist in me started feeling the tingles. Stories were all about connections. Here was another connection with that lunatic asylum.

“You mean the Adams Institute? What kind of tests?”

Grandmom frowned as if she’d swallowed a fistful of lemon seeds.

“Government drug tests. This was around the time you were born. He’d signed up after reading an ad in the newspaper. Young, fit, healthy male subjects needed for government pharmaceutical studies. Two hundred a week, guaranteed for four to six weeks.”

“I thought the Adams Institute was a mental hospital.”

“Most of it is, but they also did tests. Oh, Mickey, you should have seen him. My twenty-three-year-old son suddenly looked like he was forty years old, bags under his eyes, yellow skin—he looked like he hadn’t slept in a week.”

The image of my father in my mind was of a man much older than his physical years. I remember being stunned when I hit my early thirties, and realized that I had just outlived my father. I didn’t look like I’d gone skinny dipping in the fountain of youth, but I also didn’t look as old as the father in my memory.

Meghan reached out and touched Grandmom’s hand.

“You never found out what kinds of drugs he was given?”

“Blind tests, Anthony told me. They didn’t tell him what they were pumping into his veins—they only promised there’d be no long-lasting side effects. I think that was nonsense. Your father was never the same after those tests.”

And I had a feeling I knew who’d been administering those tests.

“No.”

“Come on.”

“No. The last time you took these pills, you woke up and wouldn’t talk to me. The time before that, you lost feeling in your right arm. Are we sensing a pattern here, Mickey?”

“How else am I supposed to figure out what really happened? I have to ask Erna Derace. Ask her everything she knows about Mitchell DeMeo and his tests.”

After the weird dinner with my mother and the visit to Grandmom in Hollywood, Meghan had driven me back to Frankford Avenue. I assumed she’d be heading on her way, but she followed me up and then kneeled down and started picking through the boxes and crates again. I asked her what she was looking for, and she gave me a duh look that I probably deserved. Meghan was looking for DeMeo’s notes, of course. Anything to do with Billy Derace, or my father. Preferably both. Something that would explain the random attack in Brady’s that night.

But I had had another idea. A shortcut.

Asking Billy’s mom.

“Such a bad idea,” Meghan said.

“How else am I supposed to figure this out?”

“Gee, I don’t know, how about the old-fashioned way—research. You were a reporter, right? I mean, you weren’t pulling one long scam on me or something, thinking I had a thing for press cards and long skinny notebooks?”

“Did you?”

“Alas, you’re not a reporter anymore.”

“I still have a few long skinny notebooks.”

We spent some more time poring through the dusty cardboard boxes full of notes and newspaper clippings and files that didn’t make any sense. Meghan found a motherlode of family trees, but no “Deraces” or “Wadchecks.” No notes that would explain the “tests” my dad was given.

Around nine Meghan asked if I had anything to eat around the apartment. I asked her if she liked peanut butter and apples.

“Let’s order something that is not peanut- or apple-related. My treat.”

“You forgot the beer. Grains are an important part of the Alex Alonso diet.”

We ended up calling for pizza from a place down the street. I walked under the El to pick it up, and burned my three good fingers on the box carrying it back. A guy in a tattered gray sweater asked me for a slice. I told him sorry, I was just delivering it. He told me to go screw myself. I love this neighborhood.

By the time I carried the pizza two flights up, though, I had convinced myself that the pills were the way to go. Meghan disagreed.

“Those pills are going to fry your brain. Do you want to end up in a coma like your grandfather?”

“I’m not eighty-four years old. And besides, you told me they were placebos. Sugar pills.”

“My friend doesn’t know everything. In fact, I seem to remember that he almost flunked biochemistry sophomore year.”

“Look, I don’t have a choice. I need to figure out the connection between Billy Derace and my father. Maybe I can push it and go to the late 1970s, or even 1980. I can snoop around and see what I can piece together.”

“You told me you tried and you couldn’t go any further than 1975.”

Meghan blinked, caught herself, turned to the side.

“Okay, for the record, I can’t believe I made a statement like that…”

“Look, maybe I didn’t try hard enough. Maybe it’s not just supposed to come to you.”

“Hmmm.”

From there we ate our slices in silence. It was ghetto pizza. Very thin on the sauce, with bad, greasy cheese. Frankford didn’t have much going for it in the 1970s, but it once had the be-all, end-all of Philadelphia foods: slices of Leandro’s Pizza. The tiny shop used to be on the ground floor of the stairwell leading up to the El stop. Step off the El, you couldn’t help but follow that intoxicating scent all the way down the concrete staircases, and the next thing you knew your hand was stuffed in your pants pocket, fingertips searching for the two quarters, one dime and one nickel it would cost to procure a slice. During my jaunts to the past I’d purposefully avoided Leandro’s. It would be like a eunuch visiting the Playboy Mansion.

By midnight we’d turned up very little that made any sense—so many of the notes and clips were about Philadelphians who were living in the 1920s and 1930s, none of them Deraces or Wadchecks.

So I finally convinced Meghan that the white pills were the way to go. Wearily, she agreed.

And then I remembered that I’d locked them in the medicine cabinet.

“Let me guess. You have no idea where the key is.”

“Nope.”

“Do you have a hammer?”

“I don’t know. You snooped around here all night. Did you see a hammer?”

“What’s in the silverware drawer?”

“I have silverware?”

Meghan checked the wooden slide-out drawer that contained a number of puzzling kitchen tools—none of them a hammer. Corkscrews. Many rusted beer bottle openers, some of them emblazoned with the logos of long-dead Philly brews like Schmidt’s and Ortlieb’s. There was a large, plastic-handled steak knife, but it didn’t look like the type that could saw through a tin can, let alone a padlock.

“I think I saw a dustpan and whisk broom in the closet. Would you mind double-checking that?”

“What, are you going to sweep the lock away?”

“No. I’m going to use something big and heavy—your head comes to mind—and shatter your medicine cabinet. Again, for the record, I can’t believe I’m saying these particular words out loud.”

“Why don’t you let me smash it?”

“You’ve got three good fingers. Do you really want to lose another one or two?”

She wrapped her right hand in a dirty gray oven mitt that looked like it had been used to hand-stomp out a grease fire, then picked up a heavy glass ashtray. She walked into the bathroom and a second later, I heard a loud pop and shatter. Then nothing.

“Are you okay?”

“Well, it’s open.”

I looked inside. The door was obliterated, glimmering fragments of mirror were all over the sink, floor, toilet seat and tub.

“I thought you were going to, like, do it on the count of three or something.”

“Would that have made you feel better?”

We cleaned up the glass and I plopped myself down on the couch. Meghan sat on the floor next to me, on her knees.

“What are you doing?”

“I thought maybe I could still talk to you when you were…you know, back in the past. I heard you mumbling in your sleep. Maybe you’re still connected with this time when you go on your little trips.”

“Am I supposed to be able to hear you?”

“I’ll shout. Come on, this is your idea. I’m just trying to help.”

I took two pills, looking into Meghan’s pretty eyes. She reached out to hold my hand. My eyelids grew heavy, slammed shut. When I woke up on February 28, 1972, I was looking at Erna Derace.

She was holding a gun.