Halfway House

by Katharine Noel

“Luke still doesn’t drink coffee. I don’t understand people who don’t drink coffee. You’re not Mormon, are you?”

  “Lutheran. Kind of. I was.” Should she wake Luke? She found herself looking through the cabinets for coffee. Finally, she located a can in the freezer, its red sides misty with frost. She held it out and Angie said, “Oh, God, I love you. You’re wonderful.”

  “That’s the coffeemaker on the counter,” Wendy said unnecessarily. “I’m going to go tell your brother you’re here.”

  In the bedroom, she touched his shoulder. He grumbled and pulled the sheet up.

  “Luke.” She shook him a little. “You should get up.”

  Luke half woke, reaching out and pulling Wendy down beside him. “You’re back,” he said. Eyes closed, he began to fumble with the rubber band of her ponytail; he liked to sleep with his fingers in her hair, hand cupping her skull. The first time he’d done it, it had made her feel so protected she might have cried if she’d been a crier.

  “Luke,” she whispered, catching his hand. “Luke. Your sister’s here.”

  His eyes opened.

  “I think it’s her. I mean, it is her. Making coffee.”

  “Oh, crap. Oh, crap.” He threw off the covers, found his boxers on the floor. “What’s she like?”

  “She seems pretty—” She knew the word was manic, but she was embarrassed to say it, like she’d be appropriating something of Luke’s, pretending greater sophistication than she had a right to. Hedging, she said, “I don’t know what she’s usually like.”

  Standing up, Luke had none of the softness he did in sleep. He was tall, with rough features. His long hair fell into his face; he pushed it back with both hands. “Is she talking a lot? Like almost too fast to understand?”

  Wendy nodded, for some reason beginning to feel scared, as though she’d done something wrong.

  “Crap,” he said again, pulling on a T-shirt. She followed him downstairs. Angie was jerking open kitchen cabinets; she’d taken down a tin of baking powder, a plastic Tupperware bowl with a warped green lid, a jug of Gallo wine, all the coffee cups.

  At his appearance, Angie threw herself across the kitchen. “Luke!” she said. “My baby brother. You’re so skinny! Look how skinny he is!”

  “What’s happened? Why are you crying?”

  “Nothing’s happened. I’m just happy to see you. Can’t I be happy to see my little brother? My skinny baby brother I haven’t seen in months?”

  “I thought you were working.”

  “I quit; it was ridiculous, cooking all those fucking eggs; this trapper kept asking me out, black teeth, and he ate his bacon and eggs on flap-jacks with syrup; we’re in New England and it’s seventy-five cents extra for real maple syrup, otherwise you get that brown sugar water. Scrambled eggs you just kind of chop with the side of the spatula right before they go out. I need to be cooking somewhere where my talents can be used; it’s ridiculous to be chopping up eggs for five dollars an hour; the trapper, in the back of his truck, had pelts nailed to boards, beaver, the town pays him to trap beaver because of the trees—”

  “Ange, slow down.”

  “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

  She was pacing the kitchen; some coffee spilled from her cup without her noticing. Wendy grabbed a sponge from the sink, knelt to wipe it up. She couldn’t put her finger on what Angie sounded like. Then she realized. It was like hearing her own thoughts, spoken without any editing.

  Angie said, “I’m just glad to see you. I want to see Madison, I want you to take me where you like to go. The drive here, it was amazing, I only had to stop once between Pennsylvania and here, I’d look at the gas gauge and it would be on the half mark, and then I’d look back an hour later and it would still be at half; it was like Hanukkah. God, this coffee is so good; what is this coffee?”

  “Coffee?” Luke said.

  Wendy said, “Like Hanukkah?”

  “You know, lamp oil, only supposed to last a day but it lasts eight.” She glanced at Luke and said, “Joke. I’m not manic.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. Christ, Luke. You’re looking at me like I just ran over your dog.”

  Luke put his hands over his eyes.

  Angie glanced at Wendy, looking both nervous and defiant. Crossing the room, she touched Luke’s arm. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t sleep. It makes me stupid.”

  “Are you taking your meds?” he asked, muffledly.

  “Are you?” Angie snapped. Wendy could see her struggling to get calm; she balled her fists and exhaled hard. “I’m taking them. All right? I’m not manic, I was just stressed out at home. And I’m glad to see you.” She hit him softly in the stomach. “I’m glad to see you.”

  “I can’t believe you still have that car. It was about to fall apart when Abe left it.” Luke sighed and let his hands drop. “I should call Mom and Dad.”

  “They know I’m here.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “They do,” she insisted. “They do.”

  He rolled his eyes, but he smiled. She laughed. They seemed to have forgotten Wendy was in the room, and when she spoke—“Well, I guess I’ll go to work”—her voice came out abrupt and loud. She let the screen door bang behind her.

  Tuscan Sky was on State Street between a store that sold tie-dyed shirts and a Mexican restaurant that advertised burritos as big as your head. Every time Wendy looked for a job she promised herself she’d find something other than waitressing, but nothing paid as well. Besides, she’d worked at restaurants since she was fourteen. She’d never been good at joking with customers, but she was good at always staying polite and attentive because she didn’t lose her calm during rushes. In fact, rushes were her favorite part of the job. She liked the order of waitressing, the hundred details you brought into line to get people’s meals out.

  All morning, as she served omelets and Bloody Marys, Wendy remembered how Luke had covered his face. He was usually so easygoing; she only saw him really upset when his sister was in trouble. His sister was also the one person who could make him howl with laughter. When Luke answered the phone, Wendy always knew if it was Angie because of the animation that came into his face. They could stay on the phone for hours. Sometimes Wendy lost patience—especially if it was the third time that week—and picked up her things to leave. Luke would say to Angie, “Just a minute. Bye, Wen.” He would tilt his mouth up to be kissed, then down to the phone again. “Okay, I’m back.”

  In the kitchen, she entered the codes for quesadillas, 516, and blueberry pancakes, 1114, into the computer without glancing at the cheat sheet. Her own competence calmed her. She closed out another check and wrote Thanks across the bottom. She signed it Meredith; in restaurants, she always wore the left-behind name tags of ex-waitresses. She couldn’t stand customers calling out “Wendy,” using her name like they knew her.

  In her imagination, Angie had been wildly sad, frail with suffering, pulling her sleeves down over her hands the way that sad girls always seemed to do. The real Angie seemed closer to someone who might come up to you on State Street, wanting you to listen to some cockamamie idea, less tragic than annoying.

  Carrying four plates, she walked to the heavy kitchen door and in one practiced movement kicked it open and turned her body to slip through. After she tipped out the bussers and the bar, she usually made about sixty dollars for seven hours. Brunch wasn’t really simpler than dinner to serve, or much cheaper to buy, but people were shocked when the bill came and they realized how much they’d dropped on breakfast, which made them prone to undertipping.

  By three in the afternoon, weekend brunch had leaked away. Only a few cranky families remained, and a four-top of hair-sprayed Kappas getting drunk on mimosas and trying to maintain hilarity. The manager was upstairs, so she and the other waitress ate olives and sliced oranges out of the bar tray. It used to be that mis-cooked or sent-back food was given to the staff, but this new manager had decided that policy would encourage errors, so now they had to throw out
mistake food. By this time in the afternoon Wendy was starving. She looked out at her tables, trying to calculate how much longer she’d be here. The Kappas had maybe ten more minutes; their mirth was collapsing. At least one of them would stagger off to the bathroom to make herself throw up, and the others would exchange meaningful glances. For Wendy, as for the customers, Saturday brunch started out well, seeming like a good idea. Now the restaurant felt dim and claustrophobic, the last diners snapping at each other before raggedly gathering up their purses and windbreakers and emerging at last back into the bright, spent afternoon.

  When she got home, Luke and Angie were lying on the living room floor, Angie’s head propped on Luke’s shins. Smoke from Angie’s cigarettes made the air hazy, like early twilight. Next to each other, they looked more alike than Wendy had thought this morning. Angie was fairer and didn’t have Luke’s heavy forehead, but they both had narrow blue eyes and high ruddy cheeks. A song that had been popular when Wendy was in seventh grade—probably the time in her life she least liked remembering—played on the stereo.

  “Why are you home?” Wendy asked Luke.

  He grinned. “Called in sick.”

  “Oh.” She held his gaze. It made her obscurely angry, though it wasn’t like it should matter to her. Anything he made from his job was just extra spending money.

  “Did you bring us presents?” Angie asked.

  “What? Presents?”

  “No presents,” Luke said, mock-sad, to Angie. He reached up to encircle Wendy’s ankle with his hand, rubbing gently through her sock.

  Angie said, “What kind of girlfriend is that?”

  Wendy couldn’t think of words to play along; her terrible honesty always forced her to say something like what she said now: “I was at work.” She looked down at them, sprawled on the floor. Her hair and clothes reeked sweetly of bacon grease and the Comet she used to scrub down the side-work station.

  From the stereo came the sound of bagpipes: “Come on Eileen,” another song she hated from junior high.

  “Oh, God. I love this song.” Angie jumped to her feet, tottering for a moment before finding her balance. She ran to the stereo, turning the volume up so high Wendy felt the words in her chest more than she heard them.

  “Dance with me,” Angie said. Wendy shook her head. Angie pulled on Luke’s arm. “Dance with me, dance with me.”

  “He doesn’t like dancing,” said Wendy.

  But Luke let himself be pulled up. Angie let go of his hands and jumped around the room, jumping onto the couch and from there onto the chair. Luke jumped up on the couch. They bounced, shouting along with the song. Angie jumped to the coffee table; Luke jumped to the La-Z-Boy, which tipped precariously. He shifted his feet apart, riding the wobble of the chair like a surfboard, his sister laughing.

  When the song slowed, Angie grabbed the floorlamp and sang like Elvis, her voice deep and gargly. Luke doubled over, laughing. Angie made her eyes go heavy, hips jerking.

  As soon as the song ended, Wendy said, “I’m going to the grocery store.”

  “No, I’ll go,” Angie said. She let go of the lamp, which tottered. Wendy grabbed it before it fell. Still in Elvis’s deep warble, Angie shouted over the music, “You guys are putting me up! I’ll make dinner!”

  As soon as she left, Wendy turned down the stereo.

  Luke said, “God, she’s manic.”

  “She said she wasn’t.”

  Luke shrugged. “She’s the smartest person I know. I mean, she’s smart enough to be self-aware.” Talking about her, he looked happy even through his concern. “She’s a mess. She’s funny, though, isn’t she?”

  “She’s nice.” He hadn’t noticed Wendy was wearing her long hair loose the way he always bugged her to. She felt a wince of hurt at Luke saying Angie was the smartest person he knew. Sometimes, anything he admired about someone else seemed like a way she herself fell short. “She didn’t ask anything about me.”

  “She’s manic.”

  “I know. You’ve said that, like, ten times.”

  “Well, you’re acting like she made a social faux pas. It’s serious.”

  She sighed. “Did you call your parents?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Don’t you think you should?”

  “Wen, I’ve been dealing with this for a long time. I think I can handle it.”

  “Fine.” She turned away from him to begin fixing the living room. “They’re not worried. Don’t call them.” Why was she being a pain about it? He was right; she had no idea what she was talking about. But he looked at her, hands on his hips, then sighed and went into the kitchen. The phone chirped as he lifted it.

  * * *

  Wendy had first met Luke during the year she was getting residency. Luke used to come into Cleveland’s for breakfast, sometimes alone and sometimes with different girls who looked radiant and disheveled, wearing his clothes. He was a big, shaggy boy whose accent marked him as East Coast and whose worn-out sweaters and holed sneakers marked him as well off: no poor student would dare look like that. If he was alone, he’d read for twenty minutes and then, apparently bored, get up and find an issue of the Isthmus or the Onion. He’d been growing his hair, and it was at an awkward chin-length stage.

  Usually the college students who came into Cleveland’s alone were intense and pretentious, smokers, bad tippers. Luke was different, but he annoyed her anyway: out-of-state and therefore paying full tuition, casual about his studies and his right to be here. And casual about the women he slept with, since Wendy rarely saw the same one twice.

  He used to try to talk to her, but she didn’t respond except to say A few months; it’s fine; the tips are fine. Then, pretending to forget that he always ordered hot chocolate, Some coffee?

  A year later, when she was enrolled as a student, he came up to her at the Union when she was studying. “Katy,” he’d said, which was the name tag she’d worn at Cleveland’s; it impressed her that he remembered. After they’d talked for half an hour with Luke leaning on the back of a chair, she invited him to sit down.

  Almost the first thing he’d told her that day was that he had a manic-depressive sister, and Wendy had pretended to have more than a vague idea what that meant. She’d been flattered that he’d told her, not aware it was one of the first things he told everyone. She’d even been tempted to say something about her dad’s drinking, which she never talked about.

  She asked Luke to walk her home, planning to sleep with him right away. She’d only slept with one person before, a high school boyfriend everyone had assumed she would marry. She was tired of being careful and good, tired of how she finished papers days before they were due, of how she could agonize for fifteen minutes about whether to buy the second-cheapest shampoo rather than the cheapest. Tomorrow she would be the radiant, disheveled girl that he took out to breakfast, and that would be the end of it. But at her door Luke had asked for her phone number and loped off into the night. He’d been the one who insisted their relationship go slowly, and she had felt both lucky and disappointed.

  Wendy heard Angie’s car approaching from blocks away. Its engine made a rattling sound, like coins in the dryer. Luke’s car had surprised Wendy when he’d bought it last month; it was so modest, and she’d liked him for that. Now it struck her as one more way in which he’d connected himself to his sister.

  When Angie burst into the house, she had three paper bags of groceries in her arms. “They started to give me plastic,” she said. “At home I use my own bags. Probably paper’s just as bad, but it used to seem healthier. Not after that paper mill. I shouldn’t have gotten paper. I love your grocery store, though. There’s more out in the car. I was listening to the most amazing radio program on the way over here, I had to get off the road so I could really pay attention. In Norwegian. I didn’t know I could understand so much Norwegian! I hope you like rhubarb. I got a lot of rhubarb.”

  Angie had also gotten a lot of tinned oysters, a lot of granola, small apricots the size and c
olor of walnut shells, three spiral notebooks, a set of camping pots, four kinds of shampoo, a carton of saltines, six kinds of pasta, frozen coffee cakes, lox, a club lock for the steering wheel of Luke’s car and a second club lock for Wendy (who didn’t have a car), two packs of Hershey bars, bacon, a video of The Little Mermaid (“Because you have the same hair,” Angie told Wendy), three flavors of melting Häagen-Dazs, green, red, and yellow apples, tangerines, a ten-pack of blank tapes, JellO mix, nonfat milk, low-fat milk, reduced-fat milk, whole milk, two more cans of Maxwell House coffee, two dozen gladiolas, and a scraggly handful of carnations, dyed green and lilac. There were nine paper bags in all, and when Wendy felt around on the floor of the backseat—her back, bad from waitressing, spasmed once as she bent—she found gravel and felty Kleenex and pennies and also things that had fallen: more shampoo, boxes of cake mix, celery. Against the dirty car floor, the celery’s narrow ribs gleamed like jade.

  About the carnations, Angie asked, “Aren’t those the ugliest and best things you’ve ever seen? I watched this woman picking through for the best ones, I loved her, she had on one of those plastic rain scarves.”

  Wendy asked, “How did you afford all this?”

  “Visa.” She lit a cigarette with one hand. “Visa Visa Visa, baby.” She smoothed the empty paper bags with the palms of both hands, her movements quick and repetitive. In the window behind her, darkness began to gather in the branches of trees. “I’m going to return these now.”

  Luke said, “Ange, it’s night. It’s dinnertime.”

  Angie hesitated. Her hands still rapidly smoothed the bags.

  “Let’s make dinner. I’m going to get you a glass of juice.” Luke took the paper bags from Angie’s hand. Wendy hadn’t seen him focused like this before, concerned, parental. It made her oddly lonely. “Sit down at the table.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Just for a minute. Here. Your juice.”

  Angie took the glass meekly, then looked at him. He said, “Drink your juice.”

  Later that night, in bed, Luke used his mouth and hands to make Wendy come, over and over.