Marlo is one of those people with rings on almost every finger, silver in various patterns. She fidgets with the rings as she talks, as though none of them are quite the right size.
“But a dead person wouldn’t actually have much need of any money,” I said. I had the feeling that Chad would have approved of my approach.
“That shows what you know,” said Marlo.
“Make believe I’m dead,” I offered.
“Plus, only three days into the pay cycle, with your laundry bill, which covers the cleaning of work apparel, the withholding taxes and the Social Security and the workman’s comp payment and everything else, you might not want to count too heavily on the check.”
“You could give me an estimate,” I said.
She popped the end candy off a tube of peppermints, a round pill she put on the end of her tongue.
I delayed leaving, timing my visit to see Danielle come off duty, and when she did she was walking with Hugo, a line chef from the kitchen, a tall, red-haired guy who spent a lot of time with tiny earphones, getting them to fit into his ears just right. Even now he had earphones around his neck, the thin, stringy kind, like a fashion accessory Line chefs make good money, and they have a future, working their way up from shoving lasagna into the big ovens, picking up the secrets of the trade.
Danielle wasn’t holding hands with him, but she was close to him, matching him stride for stride as they came through the swinging doors. Hugo sported a western-style belt and fake-pearl button shirts when he wasn’t dressed in his chef whites. His cowboy boots made impressive clumping, scuffing sounds on the asphalt as he strode easily along, a little over six feet but only about 170, I guessed. A ballplayer build, tennis, soccer. We had always been friendly in a casual way.
“Hi, Steven,” she said, hesitating politely in case I had anything I wanted to say. Giving me an open, serious expression, ready to talk, ready to listen. I had called her three times and didn’t want to leave a message on the machine.
Hugo gave me a cool, easygoing, “Hey, Steven,” and one of those smiles you see in magazines, what fluoride can do for your teeth.
Danielle did give just a little bit of a glance back in my direction, a profile shot, disguising her curiosity by reaching up at the same time and fussing with her hair.
They left, walking along together, his arm touching hers, toward Hugo’s metallic blue sport van. It was a new model, custom-detailed, with metal edge mudguards hanging behind the rear wheels, and sky blue curtains on the side windows, the kind that pull all the way shut.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I get nervous waiting.
So does my dad, but he covers it better, straightens pillows on the sofa, tells me what to wear.
“Liz says the elevator is working again,” my dad said.
Dad had ordered my blue dress shirt washed with extra starch. It buttoned up stiff and unnatural, little creases starched into place releasing with soft sighs as I flexed my shoulders. The sleeves were too short for me, and I kept my elbows tucked in to disguise this. I put on pants I almost never wore, hairy wool, too tight around the middle.
Mom was late.
He had not told me, but I suspected that his plan had been for her to hear the piano as she approached our door. Maybe she would stand outside and listen to the music, rapt, thinking, Just like old times. Dad and I had not discussed it in every detail, but we both believed that Dad was going to win her back, get her to stay a few nights. Maybe she would develop the habit of staying around, finishing up her dissertation at home after she paid her parents her semiannual visit, down in the desert.
Henry the parakeet popped the mirror with his beak every now and then, ringing the little bell attached to it. Every half minute or so the bird did it again, pecked his reflection. Every month or so he would decide to feed the mirror, smearing it with puked-up seeds. When I reached in to scratch his head, he closed his eyes in anticipation.
And then the yellow burst of energy was out of his cage, a flurry of wings, twice around the kitchen. He did a flying circus tour of the living room, as he did once or twice a month, when I changed his cuttlebone. With a whispered, miniature explosion of wings, he settled on top of my dad’s head.
“How you doing, Henry?” said Dad, in a gentle, resigned tone. Dad had always lived with a pet of some kind, and after dinner in the right mood he’d unwind tales of cats rescued from avocado trees and stray dogs cured of mange.
He mouthed at me, as though he did not want to hurt the parakeet’s feelings, “Put him back!”
Hard metallic raps, her key ring on the doorknob. I had expected her to have a key to the apartment.
I captured Henry just in time.
When you first see someone after a while they look different for a few heartbeats.
And then they look the same.
“The traffic was a disaster,” Mom said, hugging Dad, hugging me, brisk, happy to be here, but nothing dramatic, like she had been gone for a weekend. She had left two years ago, living on the north coast. While she kept in touch through the fax machine and E-mail, she had not been in this apartment in months. “All the way through Pinole the freeway was packed like a junkyard.”
Dad was explaining that he should call the restaurant, change our reservations, and Mom said she wasn’t hungry.
You could see Dad’s disappointment, so Mom corrected herself. “I can have a salad,” she said.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I said I was.
I could see her eyes searching my features for signs of boxing damage, puffiness, the kind of flattening and swelling that days will not erase. And if she had asked I would have told her this was part of the attraction—it was the kind of muscular competition her family loved, raised to a new order of danger.
“Steven’s doing good,” Dad said, a way of claiming responsibility for me that made it sound as though I was planning a career in sainthood, doing good.
“But Steven looks so—”
“He’s growing up,” said Dad, meaning: You should be around to see it.
Mom wears her hair tied up in a knot at the back of her head, and wears lace-up work boots, hiking boots, steel-toed, heavy-duty footwear. Her mother and father run a construction supply company near Barstow, selling tar paper and linoleum tile wholesale and retail, and Mom always dresses like someone prepared to hike into a quarry, her clothes well ironed and even attractive in a desert-warfare way.
“I guess that’s it,” she said. She touched her mouth, asking with her eyes what was wrong. “Why not football?” she had asked in an E-mail message months ago. “Why not basketball? Why boxing?”
“I did catch a punch on Monday. It healed up.”
“Here, in the mouth,” she said. “I can see it.”
“It’s okay.”
“What’s okay about getting slugged in the mouth?”
I gave a laugh, and said that the point is to avoid getting hit.
“You wish,” she said, looking around at the furniture. My parents had agreed that I should live in East Bay with Dad because the schools were better than way out in the country, but I had begun to wonder if Mom might change her mind and invite me to move into an A-frame up north, somewhere close to a rural high school. I knew that if I waited long enough Mom would finish her dissertation and come home.
Dad had slipped into his well-worn Southwick tweed, and needed only a briar pipe to appear collegiate and gentlemanly, someone you’d pick out for an ad for single malt scotch. They both looked great. Dad didn’t gaze off dreamily at his hands or at the view the way he often did. He concentrated on what Mom was saying, his head tilted forward, looking wide awake but at ease.
Mom rested her hand on the top of the piano, filling us in on what the tule elk were up to, overbreeding, filling up the acreage in Point Reyes National Seashore, needing birth control devices. If you put birth control chemicals in the water, other animals would drink it, with unpredictable consequences.
She tapped the piano’s wooden
surface, a string inside vibrating softly. Mom lived in a world of rock and talon. She liked to dance to music, and got vaguely restless sitting through all four movements of a symphony.
“The place looks good,” she said.
I stooped and picked up a tiny yellow feather behind her back, over by the sofa.
Dad put his hands in his pockets, jingling coins, letting himself enjoy the compliment, maybe afraid to look at me or say anything abrupt, nervous that the rosy mood wouldn’t last.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Dad had mentioned his choice of eating places the night before, wanting to know what I thought. Dad and I ate there once or twice a month—the choice was no surprise.
The veal was plastic, but no one in my family ate it anyway, since it comes from baby cattle kept in cages. I knew that the chicken was dry, but Mom likes that. She thinks if it’s sinewy and hard to swallow it must be low-fat and practically health food.
If Mom enjoyed seeing the old sights along Solano Avenue she didn’t say so. Dad had wiped out his passbook savings account to lease this sage gray Acura, sure that it would impress Mom. Our other car was parked on a side street near the apartment building, a Nissan sedan with foam rubber stuffing coming out of the dash.
Mom didn’t complain, though, when Dad hunted for a place to park. He was not quite sure how to maneuver this car, bound to go back to the dealer in a few weeks. Mom could tell the car was a special effort to impress her, and she played along, getting the car stereo to play, adjusting the bass.
“Oh, this is nice,” she said, in a friendly, Miss Manners voice, Dad holding open the door.
Dad cuts spaghetti with his knife and fork and doesn’t roll it up on the tines, which I have always thought is one of the major joys of spaghetti eating. He’s careful about little details, holding an extra napkin in one hand, dabbing at his lips after every other bite. He’s even fussy about the bills he can’t pay, keeping the credit card slips in tidy order in his wallet.
I couldn’t come into a restaurant these days without realizing what it would be like to wash the dishes, and I eyed the orders of cannelloni being bused past, thinking—I bet that cheese sticks to the plate. The china was Homer Laughlin Seville, dishes that looked more expensive than they were.
“Daddy didn’t come right out and say he needed me to help with the inventory,” Mom was saying. “But I got the hint. Mom wants to help, but her cataracts are getting too bad. Years of desert UV radiation, I guess.” The three of us used to go to Stinson Beach for picnics, and Mom would get excited if she saw a lesser scaup or a surf scoter or any other slightly uncommon bird. She was pleased once when I started keeping a life list of birds I had seen, trying to be just like her.
“What’s there to inventory?” I asked. I had a dish of spaghetti and meatballs, Donofrio’s a restaurant right out of a gangster movie. Coach Loquesto advised that pasta was an important food group, “a plate now and then,” but that sugar was death. When I thought about my fight the next day my appetite withered.
“What’s there to inventory,” she echoed, a system she had patented, mocking you by repeating your words. “He sells blue-rock river gravel for forty years and you wonder what he has to count up before he can sell the business.”
Dad took a long moment, tearing off a piece of the world’s toughest garlic bread, but then he chimed in, “I thought your dad was organized.”
My grandfather owns four skip loaders, a thirty-five-year old John Deere tractor, fire clay, Portland cement, gravel, river sand, bathroom grouting, forty pounds of wallpaper paste—which no one uses anymore—shelves of latex and high-gloss paint, and not only does it have to be counted up, you can’t just throw stuff away and write it off as a loss on your taxes anymore.
At least, this is the story Mom told. “You have to have environmental protection experts,” she concluded. “They come out all dressed up like astronauts and take away the gallons of paint thinner in a special truck.”
“So he’s retiring,” said Dad, plunging ahead to the human element.
Her eyes were alight, and she leaned on her elbows, excited about counting ninepenny nails. Dad was already starting to look a little tired—she wears him out.
My grandfather was one more reason I felt compelled to learn how to throw a left hook. I had grown up hearing stories about how he played on the practice squad for the Chicago Bears: Tommy Carroway, wide receiver, too small to be able to take professional weight tackles, but a man who could chop wood twelve hours a day, swim the Russian River in full flood, and who had gone to Vero Beach to try out for the Dodgers four years in a row, as a third baseman, never quite making the team.
In recent years Grandpa had once surprised a burglar in the deluxe extra-wide trailer he and Grandma lived in at the edge of the desert. He hit the criminal with a straight right to the throat, and the man nearly died. Grandpa would tell the story when asked, whenever he visited, which wasn’t that often—he was a busy man.
But you could see the tough-guy glint in his eye when he talked about landing the blow, and the glow of affectionate approval in Mom’s, just as you could hear Dad’s bland “Gosh what a story,” and realize that this response did not measure up.
Dad had trouble with a renegade spaghetti noodle, and finally got it into his mouth. “Your Dad thinks every human being should wear a forty-five strapped to his hip.”
My mother beamed at my father through her lashes, renewing a time-honored disagreement. “Daddy has liberal views on gun control,” she said.
“Liberal, as in—the more firearms the merrier,” said Dad.
“And what I was thinking, Steven,” said Mom, giving me a sideways look. “Maybe you could come down and help out.”
I took a sip of ice water.
My mother could see my surprise, and my reluctance, so she sidestepped. “Not tonight. Not tomorrow. But in the next few days. Fly down to Palm Springs—Daddy and I can pick you up, and you’ll have a change of scenery.”
I put down my fork. This was not the vision I had, Mom staying in the desert day after day. I knew that if Dad could work the magic on Mom that he did on half the women in the East Bay, she would come back and live with us.
I said, “I’m busy with my boxing.” I’m fighting a grown man named Stacy Martell tomorrow, I wanted to say.
You picture a man you are going to fight the next day very clearly, visualizing his nose and mouth and eyes.
Mom absorbed this, or made a show of it. Then she asked, “Are you and that new girl Danielle still …” She made a little loop-the-loop with her fork, signifying anything from friendship to a passionate love affair.
I had mentioned Danielle in my E-mail. “We’re friendly,” I said, matching Mom’s ambiguity with some of my own.
“Ask about Raymond,” said Dad, looking right at my mother, giving her a pointed instruction that won a level glance in return.
She took a few moments, touched a piece of bread into the olive oil on the plate before her, use-worn china, hard-to-break.
Then she asked, “How is Raymond?”
I explained that Raymond was still exercising out at the gym, pounding the speed bag, and maybe I was convincing, maybe I wasn’t. My father had remarked to me that Raymond was developing a “furtive way” of looking around at things.
Dad smiled and put a hand out to touch hers. She took his hand, and there was something about the way she opened his palm and patted it, like someone about to tell a fortune, that gave me a little hope.
That night, alone in my room, I picked up my phone.
Danielle had a list of phone numbers, her pager, her computer line, her personal phone, her mom’s. Danielle belonged to a golden retriever club, a swim club, a church group that sells chocolate, and a volunteer organization that visits people in the hospital. I called a couple of her numbers until I got her mom’s voice on the answering machine again, telling me I had reached Binnie and Danielle.
I knew what must be happening, Danielle sitting there in t
he kitchen, screening calls, TV remote in her hand.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Did I hear a sharp burst of argument in the night? My father’s snappy counterargument, pretending he didn’t understand why she was mad at him? My mother restraining her shout with a whiplash whisper?
I made myself not hear my father explaining that he liked his friends—his women friends, especially—too much to let them go.
I tried to send them a thought, calm down.
The next morning I got up before dawn.
The kitchen was making little, meditative noises, the fridge humming, the electric clock on the wall counting down the seconds, a sound you would never notice in daylight. Henry was silent under his cover. My dad hated to throw anything away—the bird drowsed under an old pajama top.
It was a comfy lope to the crest of the hill, and then an easy pace back down again, four miles round-trip, saving plenty of stamina for today’s three rounds.
I opened the front door quietly, not wanting to wake anybody.
I stumbled. My mom’s duffel bag was there, right by the door, with a pair of hiking boots tied together, and a makeup kit, incongruously pink, with see-through stripes, lip gloss and eyeliner inside.
Dad was up, padding around in his sheik of Araby bathrobe, watching the coffeemaker dribble as though it absorbed all his attention.
“So,” Mom said as I made my entrance. “The new Steven doesn’t sleep until noon every day.”
Much of the night I had watched videos with the sound turned to a murmur, respecting my parents’ privacy. I have a small collection of championship bouts, mail-ordered from a catalog Loquesto loaned me, grainy black-and-white footage. The old-time boxers looked leaner and paler than modern men, their ears sticking out from their old-fashioned haircuts. In those days, when a boxer was hurt, his opponent hung on with one fist and pounded him with the other.
Mom briskly made small adjustments in her luggage, first aid kit, waterproof snack bag, the kind of travel equipment you could take into the Himalayas.
Redhanded Page 6
