by John Fulton
“Mom says I have to stay.” I looked up at her, and she put her hand out toward me again. But I moved another step away. I didn’t want her to touch me. I really didn’t. “I’ll be home later tonight. We’ll all be home later tonight.”
“You’re going with her?”
“I’m just staying a few more hours.”
“You’re choosing to go with her?” He was shaking his head at me.
“I’m not choosing anything.”
“Jesus,” he said.
“Don’t you do this to him, Billy,” my mother said.
“I’m not doing anything to anyone.” He looked at me and said nothing. He just nodded, as if I knew what that meant, before he turned around and went back to his cab.
I watched him as the cab drove off. I almost ran after him. I almost shouted at him to wait. I wanted to tell him that I had changed my mind, that I was going with him. Instead, I stood there and watched until the yellow car drove down the hill. When it disappeared, the lady cop got back in her car and my mother walked up behind me and put her hand on my back. “Don’t touch me, please,” I said.
She took her hand back and stepped away from me.
* * *
My mother was shaky after my father had left and needed some time to just sit. So she made us all get back into the Buick and started the engine and ran the heater on high until we warmed up. A white mist covered the windows through which Curtis Smith’s house slowly lost definition. You could just barely make out the cop car as it pulled away from the curb and drove down Mars Drive. “Why was he looking at me like that?” I asked.
She was tapping her fingers on the steering wheel and thinking about something. “He’s just upset. He’ll get over it.”
“He won’t get over it,” I said.
“He’ll get over it.”
“Why was he mad at me? I’m not the one he should be mad at.”
“I’m sorry,” she said then, though she didn’t sound sorry. She sounded angry. “I’m sorry if I’ve involved you too much in all this, okay?”
I looked out the window and let my mother know I was going to remain silent, which really pissed her off.
“Okay?” she said in a fierce whisper.
“Whatever,” I said. It was the right word to say this time. It was satisfying as hell to say, in fact.
My mother wiped the mist from the rearview mirror, looked at herself, and forgot all about whether or not I accepted her apology. “I’ve ruined myself,” she said. “I can’t see anybody looking like this.” Her tears had melted her cosmetics away. She began cleaning her face off with Kleenex and handing me the bright, bruise-colored clumps of tissues, which I had no place to throw except on the wet mat at my feet, where they made a pulpy mush of color. She redrew her face, pausing to clear the fog from the mirror a few times. When she’d finished, she turned around to show Jenny and me. “How do I look?” she asked.
“Okay,” Jenny said.
Our mother wiped a large peephole in the fogged window and looked out at the house. “It’s not why you like him?” I asked her. “The house, I mean.”
“Does it have a pool?” Jenny asked. She was looking out at it, too.
“In the back,” she said. She looked over at me. “No, Steven,” she said. “That’s not why.” She seemed to pause and think about her answer carefully. “It’s certainly not why. But I can’t say it isn’t important. The fact that he knows how to put his life together and keep it together is something to consider.”
I saw Jenny’s face fall. She was looking down at her lap. “Maybe I don’t want to meet him now,” Jenny said.
My mother put her hand on Jenny’s cheek. “It will be okay,” she said. “I promise.”
“It’s not going to be okay,” I said.
She thought of something. “He’s a pilot,” she said. “Curtis has a small plane. I’m sure he’d take you up in it.”
“I don’t care if he has a stupid plane,” I said. “I don’t care what he has.”
“I just thought you might like to know.”
“I don’t want to meet him,” Jenny said.
“You can stay in the car. How would that be?” My mother knew exactly what she was doing, since any kind of isolation was the severest form of punishment to Jenny. She hated more than anything to be excluded and left alone.
“I don’t know,” Jenny said.
“I’m not going,” I said. “I’m staying with Jenny.”
“Okay,” my mother said. “You stay in the car, then.” My mother stood up out of the Buick and slammed the door. For an instant, both Jenny and I watched her from our seats. Then Jenny burst out, not even bothering to close her door, and sprinted to my mother’s side. I should have stayed in my seat. I should have sat right there. I should never have moved. But I was afraid of being left in that car. I was every bit as afraid of loneliness as Jenny was. I was afraid of losing our mother. And so I picked up my white garbage bag and zipped my coat, walked around to Jenny’s door, locked and closed the goddamned thing, and followed them.
Six
CURTIS SMITH’S DOORBELL MADE the sound of an imperial gong. Jenny clung to our mother, their arms entwined. I hugged myself, cradling my arm in its sling, as if my injury were the most precious thing in the world to me, while a rain so fine and insubstantial that it hardly seemed to exist tickled my face and neck. “His children’s names are Andrea and Curtis Junior,” she whispered. “They’re staying at Curtis’s house this week, so you’ll be meeting them.”
“Don’t expect me to be nice,” I said.
She reached over and squeezed my good shoulder firmly. “I do expect you to be nice, Steven.” She looked at me for a moment, and I could tell that she was embarrassed or worried. “Why don’t you go put that garbage bag in the car, kiddo? I don’t think you need to carry it around, do you?”
I looked down at it. I sure the hell wasn’t going to give it up. It gave me something to do with my good hand, for one thing. It gave me something to hold on to. “I like it,” I said.
But there was no time for an argument because the door opened then, and a man shorter, fatter, older, and no better dressed than my father stood in the doorway. He had his kids—Andrea and Curtis Jr.—on either side of him. I could tell they were scared—all of them. The little kid, Curtis Jr., who had a soft, fat face with blue eyes and who was squirming beneath his father’s arm, must have been five or so. Before anything was said, the boy started picking his nose, and Curtis took his son’s hand and held it tightly. “No,” Curtis said. The boy was dressed in these brown corduroy pants and a white oxford with one of those polo ponies on the chest—Ralph Lauren for little kids. The girl was taller—she might have been ten or so—and was staring down at her shiny-as-hell black shoes with a fine strap through which the pink of her stockings seemed to burn and give off light. She wore this dress that came down just below her knees and was the color and texture of cotton candy. She hated us. I could tell that without even seeing her face.
“Hi,” Curtis said to all of us. Nobody answered. Even my mother remained silent. Curtis looked at me, and I was shocked to recognize his eyes. Shallow and blue, they were his mother’s, and I thought about how we each knew the other’s mother, only he loved mine and I—or so I told myself—hated his. He was, as far as I could see, a slob. For one thing, both his children—probably thanks to his ex-wife—were better dressed than he. He wore blue jeans with the cuffs rolled up once over a pair of spit-shined cowboy boots, the brown leather textured like rattlesnake skin, and a shieldlike belt buckle with a chunk of turquoise in the middle. His arms were muscled, but his belly stretched the green fabric of his polo shirt a little. His hands were thick and short, like paws. In one, he still held his son’s nose-picking hand while the other held the door open with powerful, stubby fingers. His thin blond hair was a burnished, reddish gold. His teeth were very white. “Would you like to come in?” he asked.
“Thank you,” our mother said.
The ceilings in the house
were so high that Jenny and I couldn’t stop looking up. “Wow,” Jenny said, “this is big, huge.” She actually said that.
“Shush,” I said, even though it was too late to shut her up.
“Your mother’s going to give you the tour later,” Curtis said. He hung my mother’s and sister’s coats on hooks in the hallway, helping them take them off in a gentlemanly way. I refused to let him take mine. We wouldn’t be staying that long, I told him. Then he led us into the sitting room through a tiled entryway that clicked beneath my mother’s shoes and squished, slippery, beneath my sneakers. There were balconies on the inside of that house, too. They extended out from the second and third floors into the airy height of the steepled ceiling, cut in places by long, rectangular windows through which you could see sections of blue evening sky.
Our two families sat in the living room on couches opposite one another. I put my sack of shitty clothes down between me and my mother and sister. Because she knew what was in the bag, Jenny scooted farther away from me and closer to my mother, which I didn’t mind at all. That’s when I really noticed that room and a particularly freaky thing about it. It was more or less the living room I pictured in my dream—the one where my family was playing chess and backgammon and acting completely civil. The couches were the same soft shade of white as the couches in my dream. Just as in my dream, the pulled curtains were white, the carpet and two sitting chairs were white, and a large window in front of us looked out on what my father had called the million-dollar view, a view of the Salt Lake Valley where a wet, blue evening had just fallen over a grid of bright dots, alive, circulating with light.
“Do you play?” he asked me. I was looking at this grand piano—also white, a hard, shellacked, celestial white—pushed to the back of the room.
“No,” my mother said, as if this fact embarrassed her, “he doesn’t.”
“Neither do I,” Curtis said. “But my daughter does. We could get you lessons if you wanted.”
I didn’t respond. Curtis’s son was picking his nose again and this time, without saying anything, his father gently took the offending hand and held it.
“I guess Steven doesn’t want to talk right now,” my mother said.
“I understand,” Curtis said. I wished he hadn’t said that. I understand. Jesus. How could he have really meant that?
When he looked over at Jenny, she said right away, “Hi, I’m Jenny.” She’d evidently decided to be as social as ever and to deny that anything terrible was happening. When she put her hand out, her skinny fingers were shaking, and we could all see that she was terrified.
Curtis smiled and reached across a glass-topped coffee table to shake her hand. “Very nice to meet you, Jenny.”
Then she went on to Curtis Smith’s kids. “Hi,” she said to the little girl, who wouldn’t even look at her until Curtis said “Andrea” in this disciplinarian tone, and she finally met my sister’s gaze with her chubby face.
“Hi,” Andrea said, though she wouldn’t shake my sister’s hand, and Jenny had to move on to the little boy who, when she addressed him, buried his face in his father’s side.
“Jenny is very sociable,” my mother said, laughing awkwardly. “She really likes people.”
“I wish I could say the same for mine,” Curtis said.
“She can be a real jackass, is what she can be,” I said.
“All right, Steven,” my mother said.
Curtis looked at my mother for a long moment without saying anything. “It’s been raining all day,” he finally said.
“Yes,” she said. Her face was chilly and still.
“I’m glad you came, Mary,” he said. I knew—by the way he’d said that and by the way he couldn’t seem to stop looking at her—that he must have had to convince her to come, that he’d had to ask more than once, that the decision hadn’t been easy for her and still wasn’t, and that more than anything in the world right then Curtis Smith wanted my mother to stay. “I really am glad you came.” You could hear it in his voice—how glad he was, how much he loved her, just as she’d said he did. She smiled at him—God, did I wish she hadn’t smiled—and he smiled back, and they held each other’s gazes for a long time and in a way that made me feel sick, though I was empty, hollow. I could neither throw up nor shit my pants. I could only sit there and be sick.
“What’s wrong with him?” little Curtis asked, staring at me.
“Well,” my mother said, laughing very inappropriately, considering what she said next, “somebody hurt him, I’m afraid.”
“Oh,” the kid said, still looking at me.
Curtis Smith’s daughter stood up from the couch, walked over to a side window, lifted the white curtain, and peered out. “You don’t just stand up like that in the middle of a conversation, Andrea,” Curtis Smith said.
“Who was that man on our lawn?” Andrea asked, still peering out the window.
I saw my mother glance at Curtis Smith. “That was my father,” I said.
“Come back over here and sit down,” Curtis said.
Andrea didn’t move from the window. She turned around and looked at me as if she were trying to see the resemblance between me and the man who had been shouting on her lawn. “Is he going to come back?” she asked. “I don’t want him to come back.” Little Curtis was staring at me again with these large, dopey, frightened eyes.
“Stop staring at me,” I said.
“Steven,” my mother said.
“Is he?” Andrea asked again. “Is he going to come back?”
“No, Andrea,” my mother said.
“Yes, he is,” I said, looking right at Curtis Smith. “He said he was coming back.”
“When is he coming back?” Andrea asked.
“Nobody is coming back,” Curtis Smith said.
“I think he is,” Andrea said.
“He promised he would,” I said.
“See,” Andrea said.
“Enough, Steven,” my mother said.
“What’s he have in his bag?” Little Curtis was pointing at it.
“Stuff,” I said.
“I want you to stop looking out that window, Andrea,” Curtis said. “Why don’t you play us a song on the piano?”
“I don’t want to play the piano,” she said.
“One song,” he said. “It’ll make you feel better.”
She walked over to the instrument, sat down, and started playing this lush rendition of that old love song “The Rose”—all the girls in my junior high school in Boise had known it and sung it to each other on the bus—about rivers and thorns and flowing waters and how love is a rose, a very beautiful rose that has thorns. I was surprised by her skill, by the fact that she played without looking at her hands, her eyes closed and her small, pudgy body fluid and loose in that pink cotton-candy dress, as she worked the pedals with her feet and sang in this surprisingly big, womanly voice—a voice you wouldn’t expect a ten-year-old girl to have—until she all at once stopped playing and said, “I think he’s going to come back. I do.” She seemed about to cry.
My mother lost it then. “He is not coming back!” she half shouted. Andrea ran across the room and curled into her father, who looked ridiculous because he was actually smiling, straining to pretend that everything was as it should be. “I’m sorry,” my mother said to Andrea.
After that, we ran out of things to say for what felt like ten minutes. My mother cleared her throat, folded her arms, and unfolded them. Curtis fisted up a hand and kneaded it into his thigh until his knuckles cracked. His son was pulling on a button on the couch cushion and yawned without covering his mouth. “Well,” Curtis finally said, “this is difficult for all of us, I know. I’m a little nervous myself.” When nobody said anything, he tried again. “It’s great for all of us to meet.”
“Yes,” my mother said. “It is.”
“What’s that a picture of?” Jenny asked Curtis Smith. She was pointing to a photograph sitting next to me on a mahogany side table.
“T
hat’s me in front of my airplane,” he said. In the photograph, Curtis Smith was dressed in a flight suit, holding a crash helmet and standing in front of a small plane, which I happened to know was a P-38 Mustang; I’d built and painted a plastic model of that plane a few years before. “The P-38 was the best fighter we had in the Second World War,” he said. “A great war plane.” Something about Curtis Smith was surprising me. I hated the fact that he didn’t look like a successful lawyer. I’d wanted him to be some rich man’s shadow, some guy with a mirrored cigarette holder and an English accent. I’d wanted him to be a real asshole and not this squat, thick man who wore blue jeans and who might just be nice, as my mother had said. He was shaking his head, admiring his photograph before he put it down. “I get a little carried away with planes. I sometimes think I should have gone into aeronautics. You have any interest in flying, Steven?” he asked. He was trying to be suave and conversational now, threading his fingers together and pressing both hands against his knee, which had begun to motor up and down. “If you’d like to go up some time, we could do that. It scares Curtis here a little. He’s not really ready for it yet, are you?” He gave the kid this very affectionate hug, pulling him in close because he was clearly afraid, though not at the moment, of planes.
“Steven’s quite interested in flying,” my mother said. “He used to build model airplanes and paint them all the time. Didn’t you, Steven?”
“Would you please shut up,” I said.
She grabbed a lock of hair at the back of my head and tugged. “You watch yourself,” she said.
Curtis turned around then and asked his kids to leave the room, to go down to the TV room for a while. “I’d like to talk to Jenny and Steven for a minute,” he told them.
“Why?” Andrea asked. “I don’t want to leave.”
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to, honey,” he said. He clearly knew how to lay down the law with his kids because she didn’t ask again. She got up and took her little brother by the hand, and they walked out of the room and left us alone with Curtis.
“I want to assure you of a few things,” he said, turning back to us. He cleared his throat and looked at my sister and then at me. “You’re both old enough to understand, and so I thought maybe you’d like to know something.” I had no idea what he was about to say and it half scared me. “Your mother won’t be staying here at first. She’ll be staying at my sister’s until things get settled. You understand?” I didn’t, but I didn’t say anything. He explained that his sister lived just down the hill, that she was a very nice person, that her family would welcome my mother. “Mary will be here during the day. She’ll be here for meals, for breakfast and lunch and dinner. Later,” he said, pausing, looking at my mother and smiling, then looking back down at us, “later, when things are more set, she’ll be here more”—he was looking for a word—“permanently. We thought that, being a little older and understanding the situation, you might like to know that.”
