“Everything does,” said DeAnne.
“Wow, cool.”
Robbie took a wide berth around the drain, and as DeAnne stood at the front door, fumbling in her purse to find her keys, he stayed at the curb, looking back toward the yucky hole.
“What if it rains while the kitty’s down there, Mom?” he asked.
“It isn’t going to rain for days, and the cat will get hungry and go home long before then,” said DeAnne. She got the door open. “Come on inside, Robbie.”
“Do you think the kitty’s playing with my ball down there?” he asked as he came through the door.
“Kitty,” said Elizabeth. “Yucky hole, all gone.”
“That’s the story,” said DeAnne. “Looks like we can’t keep anything from you, Elizabeth.”
“Drink,” said Elizabeth.
Robbie had already rushed ahead to the room he shared with Stevie, shouting out the story about the ball and the kitty and the yucky hole long before he got to the room. DeAnne smiled as she took Elizabeth into the kitchen to get a drink. If anybody could get Stevie out of his blue funk, it was Robbie.
A moment later, Robbie was in the kitchen, looking mournful. “Mommy,” he said. “Stevie told me to shut up and die.”
“What?” asked DeAnne.
“He doesn’t want a little brother anymore, Mommy,” said Robbie.
DeAnne set Elizabeth down on the kitchen floor. “Stay with your sister for a minute, would you?”
“Can I turn on the TV?”
“The cable isn’t hooked up yet so there’s hardly anything to watch,” she said, “but suit yourself.”
She found Stevie lying right where she had left him before going on the walk. “Son,” she said.
“Yeah?” he mumbled.
“Son, sit up and look at me, please,” she said.
He sat up and looked at her.
“Please don’t ever say anything so terrible to your brother again.”
“I’m sorry,” said Stevie.
“Did you really tell him to shut up and die?”
Stevie shook his head. “Not exactly.”
“What did you say, then?”
“I told him to shut up, and when he just kept yelling about a snake eating a kitty I just told him to drop dead.”
“Where did you ever hear an expression like that?”
“Everybody said it back at my old school, Mom. It doesn’t really mean that I want him to die.”
“Well, Robbie doesn’t understand that, Stevie. You can’t say things like that, even joking. Not to your own brother.”
“I’m sorry.”
He looked so miserable. And DeAnne could understand how, after years of sharing a room with Robbie, the dedicated extrovert, Stevie could have moments of complete exasperation, for once Robbie thought of something he wanted to say, he would say it, even if you begged him for silence. He simply could not leave a thought unspoken. The miracle was that Stevie was usually so patient with his brother.
“I’m sorry, too,” said DeAnne. “I shouldn’t have told you off like that.” She sat down beside him on the edge of his bed and put her arm around him. “You’ve had a tough day, and here I am, no help at all.”
“I’m fine, Mom.”
“Can’t you tell me what happened?”
“Nothing happened,” said Stevie.
“Did you make any friends?”
“No!” he said, so vehemently that she knew there was far more to the story than he was telling.
“Were they mean to you?”
“No,” he said.
“Is Mrs. Jones a nice teacher?”
He nodded, then shrugged.
“Did you have any homework?”
He shook his head.
“Do you just want me to leave you alone for a while longer?”
He nodded.
She felt so useless. “I love you, Stevie,” she said.
He murmured something that might have been “love you too” and then, as she got up, he rolled back over, curled up on his bed.
She left his room, feeling deeply depressed. As she walked down the hall she could hear the television in the other room. Robbie was switching from channel to channel, so it alternated between loud hissing and very fuzzy reception on the local channels. For just a moment she couldn’t bring herself to go into the same room with her children. She was supposed to know what they needed and provide it for them, and she was going to let them down because she didn’t have a clue.
She went to the front door, opened it, and stepped out onto the porch. Then, in spite of the scoffing of her rational mind, she had to leave the porch and walk across the lawn and stand at the curb and look at the storm drain up the street. The yucky hole. Just to see if the kitten had come out.
Of course it had probably come out while she was in the house and so it was absurd to stand here, watching. She would go back inside. Right now. This was foolish.
A movement in the corner of her eye caught her attention. She turned toward the house, and there in the side yard between the house and the neighbors’ fence was a gray rabbit. Robbie had told her he had seen one, but she hadn’t believed that a wild rabbit could really be living in their neighborhood. It looked at her steadily for a moment, then loped off into the back yard.
She followed it, hoping to see where it went. Rabbits might be cute and furry, but they were rodents, like rats and mice, and they could carry diseases. She had to get some idea where it lived or at least where it came from. But when she got to the back yard it was gone.
She walked the wood-slat fence, to see where it might have gone under, but she couldn’t see any rabbit-sized gaps. She also examined the latticework skirting around the base of the house, though the thought that the rabbit might live under her own house made her shudder. She hated the way that southerners built their houses up off the ground instead of putting in a massive concrete basement the way houses were supposed to be built. Anything could get in under the house—it must be filled with spiderwebs and beetles and who knows what other disgusting creatures, right there where all the waterpipes and wiring and heating ducts were. It made her feel naked, to know that her house was completely exposed on its soft underbelly.
But it didn’t look as though there were any place where the rabbit might have slipped through or under the skirting. It was just gone. Probably went across to the driveway and back out into the front yard while I was walking around the other way, she thought.
DeAnne walked back around the house and was horrified to realize that she had left the front door standing wide open. She had never done that—she was an inveterate door locker. But this time she had forgotten. I was just stepping onto the porch, she remembered. I didn’t plan to go into the back yard chasing a rabbit.
That was no excuse.
As she hurried toward the door, a man stepped through it. A man had been in her house! A stranger! With her children! She screamed.
He looked at her, startled and abashed. An old man, white hair sticking out like tiny feathers under a baseball cap. “Ma’am, I’m so sorry—”
“What were you doing in my house!” Somehow she had covered the gap between them and now shoved past him, to stand in the doorway between him and the children.
“Ma’am, the door was open and I called and called—”
She yelled over her shoulder. “Robbie! Robbie, are you all right?”
“Ma’am, please, you got to understand—”
“Get away from here before I call the police,” she said. “If you have harmed my children in anyway, I—”
“Ma’am,” he said, “I used to live here. I just haven’t shook the habit yet of walking in. I shouldn’t have done it, I know, and I am so ashamed of myself, giving you a scare like that, I was plain wrong and I apologize, sometimes I think I still live out in the country I guess where a open door means come on in, folks is to home.”
Robbie came up behind her. “Did you call me, Mom?”
“Is your
sister all right?”
“We got a fuzzy channel on the TV and she’s watching this guy who hits people in the head.”
“Thanks, Robbie.”
“Can I go back now, Mom?”
“Yes, please, thank you.”
The old man resumed his explanations. “My boy Jamie owns this house.”
“That doesn’t give you the right,” said DeAnne.
“I know it, like I said, I was plain wrong and I’m sorry, I won’t ever do it again. But ma’am, you ought to be careful and not leave your front door open like that. Folks don’t do that in the city. So when I saw it open, I did like country people and didn’t even think twice. If it was closed I would’ve knocked and waited.”
“I shouldn’t have left it open,” said DeAnne. “That was careless of me. Stupid of me.”
“Well, now, not stupid. I’d say it was trusting of you and kind of sweet. Though I guess I hope I’m never on the wrong side of you again, cause you got a scream like to wake the dead.”
DeAnne looked around, embarrassed. But apparently nobody had heard—at least, nobody was charging out of their houses to see why a woman had screamed at this hour.
“Ma’am, all I came by to do was to tell you that I been looking after this house for fifteen years now, ever since my boy built it for me and my missus, only she’s dead now and my boy’s wife sort of left him and he was lonely in his place and he wanted me for company and he needed the rental money on this place to help pay the child support and you know how it is. I moved. Spent the loneliest Christmas of my life here this winter, and so I suppose I’m glad to be moved out of it and I know I’m glad to think of a family here. Why, next Christmas Santa Claus will come to this house, will you think of that!”
Now that the fear was wearing off, she could see that there was no harm in this old fellow.
“My name’s Bappy Waters,” said the old man.
“Pappy?” asked DeAnne.
“Bappy, with a B. Short for my real name, which is Baptize.”
“Not really,” said DeAnne.
“Oh, yes. My papa was a Holiness preacher and he believed in baptism the way other folks believe in air. It was the cure for whatever ailed you. Other folks might hold with doctors or even with laying on hands, but Papa, he just pushed you down in the water and held you there till the devil come out of you. He was a deep baptizer, my papa was, and I was the firstborn in his family. And what with our last name being Waters, my name was sort of bound to happen, if you think of it. In fact he was set to name me Baptize All God’s Children in the Holy, but Mama put her foot down on that and said that if he named a child that he’d deserve it if the boy grew up and shot him dead, and not a jury but would call it justice. Not that I was there to hear the conversation, mind you, but I heard reports of it, you may be sure.”
DeAnne couldn’t help but laugh. He was a charmer, this old man. And she could see how a country boy, a preacher’s son, might act differently around an open door than a city man. How his stepping in like that meant nothing at all. In fact, it was kind of nice to imagine living in simpler times, when you could just leave your door open and a passing visitor would poke his head in and find you maybe in the kitchen baking bread or scrubbing the floor and you get up and serve lemonade and chat awhile. In the days before television and telephones and urgent errands. Bappy Waters was a visitor from a simpler time.
“What was it brought you by?” asked DeAnne.
“Well, I know this house inside out, you see. I done all the handiwork here for fifteen years. So if anything goes bad, like a pipe gets bust in the winter or your cable needs hooking up or whatever, why, I’m equipped and qualified and I know where everything is. Why have some stranger go crawling up in the attic or under the house looking for what I know right where to find it, and besides, when you call me it’s free.”
“Oh, I couldn’t ask you to—”
“Just protecting my son’s investment in the property, ma’am.”
“Call me DeAnne, please.”
“Why, so I will. I knew a DeAnne when I was a boy, she was the prettiest little thing in the county. Died when she was just a slip of a girl, though, got herself drowned when her boyfriend was driving drunk and took them off into the Dan River in spring flood. There was only a half dozen cars in the county in those days, it being the Depression and all. Though truth to tell in Gary County the Depression started about halfway through the War between the States and it hasn’t let up since.” He laughed, and DeAnne laughed with him.
“For instance, ma’am, your kids are watching television, and I wonder if you know that I can just hook you right up to cable.”
“We haven’t paid for cable.”
“Well, you just go down to the cable office and give them your money and you’ll be just fine. They give you your box, then, if you want any of the extra channels. But the house is all wired, is what I’m telling you, and you just connect up to the wall, and it was their decision to leave it connected when I turned my box in at the end of December, so you won’t be stealing a thing.”
“Well, then, I’ll have my husband connect the TV to the wall,” she said. “When he gets home, which is any second now.”
Bappy nodded and touched the brim of his baseball cap. “I understand, ma’am. After seeing me in your house like that, of course you aren’t about to let me inside, and I don’t blame you a bit. Tell you what, here’s my number. I wrote it on this card for you already. Anything goes wrong with the house, anything at all, you give me a call. That’s the home I share with Jamie now, and I’m always there, and when I’m not a machine picks up, if you can imagine. If it’s something I can’t fix myself, I’ll call whoever can.”
“Thank you,” she said, taking the card.
“Times are tight, ma’am, and rent’s high enough without y’all having to worry about paying for repairs and such. Think of me as a sort of free discount on your rent.” He grinned again, touched the brim of his cap again, and then walked to the driveway and went left, around the house. That put another little scare into her—where was he going?
But by the time she got to where the front walk joined the driveway at the corner of the house, he was already backing down the drive in a little pickup with garden tools and a couple of big metal tool chests in the back. He was leaning out the window to see where he was backing, and of course he saw her as he slipped by. He stopped the pickup near the foot of the driveway. “Nice to meet you, ma’am,” he said.
“Nice to meet you, too,” she said, though it had not been nice. Or, well, in fact, it had been nice, once she got over the first scare, only it still bothered her, even though she understood the whole thing now, it still had her heart beating so hard that she could feel her own pulse in her head.
“Um, I don’t know how to say this, ma’am, but it looks like you got yourself a habit needs breaking just like I do.” He pointed behind her.
She turned. She had left the front door open again.
She turned back around, furious with herself, intending to explain—she’d just been walking to the driveway to see what he was doing. But he was already backing out into the road, laughing a little, it looked like. And then he waved a jaunty little wave and drove off.
As soon as she got inside she had to lock the door, then go through the whole house, looking behind all the furniture, checking all the closets, the bathrooms, the cupboards to see if he might have taken something or moved something or left something behind or just—just touched something. She wanted to take everything out of the cupboards and wash it all. And in the back of her mind there was also the question—what if someone else went through that door besides old Bappy, maybe before he did, and was now hiding somewhere in the house, waiting for them to go to sleep tonight?
Even as she moved through the house, she knew it was irrational of her to check everything like that, but this was exactly the way her mother had always checked over the house when they got home from a trip, and besides, once DeAnne thou
ght of the possibility of someone sneaking into the house, she had to know. She could not just put it out of her mind. Her mind didn’t work that way.
I screamed, right out in the front yard, and it was loud, and not one neighbor came out to see why.
Step called at 5:30 to say he was going to be late, but one of the guys he was working with would take him home. Don’t wait dinner for him. When she told him about supper at the Cowpers’, he said, “Take a picture of me and tell them I’m a miserable rotten husband who has never made it home in time for dinner in the whole time he’s worked for Eight Bits Inc.”
“Very funny,” said DeAnne.
“And it’s true.”
“Please get home before eight, will you? Stevie had a terrible time at school today and he isn’t talking to me about it.”
“Ah, a father-and-son moment.”
“I’ve never seen him like this, Step.”
“I’ll be home.”
She took the kids to the Cowpers’ and it was a circus. The Cowper kids were so undisciplined, running around and screaming, that Robbie soon joined in, and Elizabeth only refrained because DeAnne kept a firm grip on her. Stevie, however, sat at his place and quietly, dutifully ate whatever was put before him. He answered questions in a low voice and volunteered nothing. DeAnne had a sneaking suspicion that whatever had made Stevie upset at school was no longer the reason for his behavior. That what she was seeing now was sullenness, spite. Anger, passively expressed. Stevie was hurt at school somehow, but now he was just mad.
The Cowpers, however, had no notion that anything was wrong. Because they seemed not to care at all what their kids did, they were able to stay at the table and converse for a while after supper. But DeAnne could not bring herself to adopt their attitude toward child care. She felt an unceasing need to know what Robbie was doing and whether he was safe. Who knew what kind of insane games the Cowper children might decide to play? Hadn’t she seen them climbing on the car this afternoon? All through the after-supper visiting she got more and more anxious until finally, using Elizabeth’s bedtime and the possibility that Step had come home as an excuse, she headed home at seven-thirty.
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