by Brady Udall
Trish dropped the candles. “That thing,” she said. “That’s not really mine, it was a gift…”
“I’m sorry,” June said, putting the book back down on the table and then quickly picking it up and offering it to her, his face turned to the side. “I didn’t know it was anything…” She took it from him and tried to think of a good place to put it—maybe toss it in the trash, act like it was something that had blown in with the storm and needed to be disposed of. She looked at the ridiculous cover and then at June, whose eyes were open wide with alarm, and she laughed. She said, “You ever read one of these things?”
“Which things do you mean?”
“Trashy romance novels. Like this one here.”
“Only—only every day,” June said. “Usually, you know, right before knitting club.”
“Oh, so I guess you’ve probably read this one, then?”
“Probably. Yeah. Which one is that again? I’ve read so many I get confused.”
“To Love a Scoundrel by Alice M. Montbeclaire.”
“Oh yeah, yes, a classic. Up there with Beowulf and, uh, Gone with the Wind. Remind me what Scoundrel is about.”
“Well, you have Sir Nigel Mountcastle, of course…”
“Oh my gosh, Sir Nigel Mountcastle! How could anyone forget him?”
She put a hand on her hip. “Do you want me to tell you or not?”
June inserted an imaginary key into his lips and turned it. “Please proceed, yeah, I cease to interrupt.” She filled him in on the basics: how Sir Nigel Mountcastle, the Scoundrel of the title, had freed Lady Jane Welshingham from an Irish insane asylum, in which she had been confined under mysterious circumstances, with the agreement that she would become his personal maidservant for a year. Of course, Lady Jane falls for Sir Nigel’s rakish charms, even though he humiliates her at every turn, requiring her to feed him by hand, powder his wigs, and give him his weekly milk bath.
“Ah yes,” June said, eyes closed, trying not to laugh, “the milk bath. It’s all coming back now.”
“The milk bath is for his constitution, of course.” She described how during one of the weekly baths Lady Jane simply couldn’t help herself and ended up stealing a sip of milk from the hollow of Sir Nigel’s collarbone. They were locked in their first passionate kiss, sloshing around wantonly in a tub of milk, when the Earl of Buckington, Lady Jane’s husband, burst in and had them arrested on trumped-up charges of adultery and treason. By the time she had finished the explanation about how Sir Nigel and Lady Jane escaped from Newgate Prison by covering themselves with lamp oil and squeezing through the bars, Trish and June were both laughing so hard their eyes watered and June was punching a pillow with his fist.
Once she had come up for air, Trish held out the book. “You know where I got this thing?”
“Where?” June said, his voice pitched and girlish, and for some reason this sent them into another round of laughter that had them grasping at their stomachs and gasping for air.
“Rusty,” she said, finally, breathing hard. “That’s why he went away so mad the other day. He gave me this as a present and then you stopped by and one-upped him with the motor for the swamp cooler.”
June sobered considerably. He sat up on the couch and wiped his face. “I did? I didn’t mean to.”
“I know,” Trish said. “Don’t worry about it. I think he may have a little bit of a crush on me.”
“Well, that’s…” June nodded and inhaled deeply. “That’s completely understandable.”
The moment the words came out, June stiffened and there was a sudden increase in atmospheric pressure: the easy hilarity drained away in a second, leaving behind a wire of tension pulled tight, waiting to be plucked. June stood, looking around, patting at his pockets as if searching for a way to tactfully withdraw.
“I should really…” He pointed to the door. “Thanks for the hot dogs and everything. Good popcorn!”
“You mean you’re going to leave us here all alone in the dark?” Trish had meant this in a playful way, an attempt to bring back the banter of a minute ago, but there was a reproachful edge to the words that made June look up, eyes wide, as if she had accused him of something.
“What?” June said. “No. Let me help you with those candles. I’ll stay as long as you want me to—or until the power comes back.”
She tried to tell him she was only joking, that he was free to go whenever he pleased, but he was already on his knees, scrambling to pick up the scattered candles. Watching him, it struck her that he had every reason to feel awkward, even guilty; here he was passing time in the darkened home of a married woman, sitting on her furniture, eating her food, even flirting with her while her husband was away. In their few brief conversations she and June had avoided any discussion of her marital situation, and while he may not have known if she was a plural wife or the more standard variety, he certainly had enough sense to guess that her husband, the hairy giant in the wedding picture prominently displayed on top of the piano, might not take kindly to the idea of a single man spending so much time alone with his wife.
The question was: Why didn’t she feel guilty? She was the married one, after all, the one with commitments and obligations, the one with a daughter upon whom very little was lost. Shouldn’t it have bothered her, just a little, that all evening long she’d been considering—and surely this had everything to do with To Love a Scoundrel—how it might feel to slip her arms around June’s sharp, bony shoulders and put her cheek against his chest? It hadn’t occurred to her until now, but lately she had begun to think of herself as single again—Golden was around so little, and even when he was she felt like a married woman in title only. And not just single, but old and single, a withered, buttoned-up spinster giving off the spinster scents of cedar chest and sachet and laundry starch, filling the empty hours reading silly romance novels, a woman with nothing to lose.
“We’ll be fine, June, thank you,” she said, not wanting to come across as too desperate. After a beat, she added, “If you’ll come back and install that fan motor in a day or two I promise I’ll make you something better than hot dogs and popcorn.”
Before going, he helped her place and light the candles: on the mantel and the piano and the dining room table. It had grown fully dark and the walls of the house wavered and pulsed in the flickering light. Trish placed the last candle on the sideboard next to the front window, and June, following behind, lit it with a fresh match. For a moment Trish stood still, taken by the warped image reflected in the glass: a man and woman, one of each, standing side by side, looking for all the world as if they belonged together. And then her eye caught a movement outside, and she stepped forward, straining to peer through the reflected image into the night beyond.
“What,” said June, “something out there?”
She shook her head. “Nothing, it’s nothing.” But she had seen something that had passed across the field of her vision so quickly and unexpectedly, she at first took it to be an apparition or a trick of the mind: a boy, riding his bike slowly down the middle of the road, peering balefully into the dimly lit house as he floated by, his pale face and white, flapping socks ghostly against the darkness, there and then gone.
26.
A SPECIAL BIRTHDAY
SITTING ALONE AT THE TABLE, THE RUBBER BAND ON HIS PARTY HAT biting into the fat under his chin. The hat said HAPPY BIRTHDAY, PODNER!!! with a drawing of a cowboy and Indian with their arms around each other, blowing out the candles on a cake. Gay. Very, very gay. The cowboy looked like Howdy Doody and the Indian like a Chinese lady with a feather in her hair. Everyone in the family had on the same hats, recycled from Clifton’s birthday two months ago.
At the head of the table, Rusty stared at his cake, which was not really his because he had to share it with Sasquatch. The cake was a big lumpy chocolate thing with fifty-seven white candles sticking out of it. It looked like a porcupine if the porcupine had been run over by a truck and left at the side of the road. Fifty-seven was t
he number you’d get if you added Rusty’s age to his father’s. Rusty was twelve and his father was forty or fifty or something—it was his birthday and he didn’t have to do math if he didn’t feel like it.
He was alone because everyone else had gone outside to eat hot dogs and take whacks at the piñata. Rusty and his father had already blown out the candles on the cake and opened their presents, which took forever because his father got a present from each and every person in the family, it didn’t matter if it was a back-scratcher made from a wire coat hanger or a bunch of macaroni glued together in the form of a horse, his father had to open each one and go, wow, boy, isn’t that great, what is it, oh I see, yeah, isn’t that wonderful! What a Sasquatch. What an a-hole.
Rusty got three presents. Let’s see—it was his special birthday, the only one he would ever have, he wasn’t allowed to have it at Skate Palace, he had to share his party with Sasquatch, and these were the presents he got: a set of scriptures with his name engraved on the front, a kite, a light blue turtleneck sweater his mother had knitted back when she was in her crazy-obsessive knitting phase. When he opened up the turtleneck everyone told him to put it on and he said, “I don’t think so.”
“Come on, put it on!” they shouted.
“No.”
“Put it on,” someone said, “you’ll make your mother feel bad.”
“My mother’s not even here!” He almost shouted it.
“We’re taking pictures,” said Aunt Nola. “She’ll want to see.”
So he put it on. “It’s choking me,” he said in the voice of someone being choked.
“It is not,” his father said. “It looks great.”
What did Sasquatch the a-hole know? The truth was, it was choking him badly. He was having trouble swallowing. And it was made out of wool or cotton or something that was making him itch. And it did not look great—it looked like crap. It looked like something you could buy from Goodwill for a nickel.
Four days ago, Aunt Beverly had come up to the Tower where he was being held for his crimes against humanity to tell him that his mother had checked herself into the hospital for a few days.
“It’s nothing serious,” she said, “she just needs a little rest. She’s feeling run-down. She’s had a lot to deal with.”
“She can rest in her bed,” Rusty said. “She does for most of the day anyway.”
“There are people at the hospital who can help her feel better.”
“Will she be back for my birthday?”
“We don’t know. You’ll need to pray for her. She needs your help to feel better.”
He thought about it for a few seconds, and then he said it: “Did she have a nervous breakdown?”
Rusty didn’t know what a nervous breakdown was, exactly, but when he was little Aunt Nola used to shout at him when he was acting up, Stop that right now or you’re going to give your mother another nervous breakdown! Her first nervous breakdown had happened when he was little and he couldn’t remember it but he had always understood that he was the one who gave it to her.
“I don’t think we should call it that,” Aunt Beverly said. “You pray for her. You focus on improving your behavior, and she’ll be back feeling better.”
And now his mother was gone again and he was smiling so hard for Aunt Nola’s camera that his face hurt.
When everybody went outside for the hot dogs and the piñata, he stayed at the table. Aunt Trish put her hand on his shoulder. “Coming out? I know you like hot dogs.”
He turned away. He didn’t want to talk to her, or for her to be nice to him. He wanted her to go away.
“Rusty,” she said. “You have every right to be upset.”
Yes, yes he did. And it wasn’t only because his mother was gone and he was having the cruddiest birthday party since the beginning of Roman civilization. A few nights ago when the power went out and nobody was paying attention to him he rode over to Aunt Trish’s house because she always made him feel better. And that’s when he saw June and Aunt Trish standing in the window together and he knew. June liked Aunt Trish, who was definitely a fox, and Aunt Trish liked June. You could just see it. Which meant June would never like his mother, especially now that she was in the hospital, and Aunt Trish would never like Rusty, which was a stupid thing to think anyway. So his Grand Master Plan was right down the toilet and he was stuck in Old House until the end of time and he didn’t know what he was going to do, and so yes, Aunt Trish, yes, he had every dang right to be upset.
Aunt Trish put her hand on his shoulder and the way she was looking at him, all nice and sweet, was going to make him cry. What a gyp! His mouth was already filling with spit. He blinked a lot and told her he had to use the bathroom.
Instead of going to the bathroom he walked around Big House, jogged around the racetrack a couple of times, and then up the stairs, where he lay down in his old bed, but it didn’t make him feel any better. He went into the Big Girls’ room, rustled through their drawers a little, noted that Pauline was now wearing bras—it was about time, in Rusty’s opinion. He stood at the big window that looked onto the front yard. They were all down there stuffing their chow-holes, running around and ha-ha-haing like a gang of out-of-control retards. His father was wearing one of his birthday gifts, a yellow trucker’s hat with DAD spelled in decal letters on the front, and hoisting Dwight Eisenhower by the neck into a tree. Dwight, whose enormous papier-mâché head was as big as a television and twice the size of his body, had been made by Novella for her ninth-grade civics class project, and now somebody had filled his head with candy and in a few minutes he was going to get the dookie beaten out of him by kids with sticks.
Dwight Eisenhower? Just one more gyp, that’s what Rusty thought. If you could have one president to hang from a tree and beat to a pulp for your birthday party, you’d want Albert Einstein or Abraham Lincoln, it wasn’t even a contest.
Nobody had noticed that the birthday boy, the one who was supposed to get the first hot dog off the grill and take the first crack at Dwight Eisenhower and who for one stinking day was supposed to be the most important and special in the family, was nowhere to be seen. Nobody cared, not the little boys who kept head-butting Sasquatch’s legs and tugging at his belt or the girls who were doing cartwheels and end-overs, saying Daddy, Daddy, watch this! or the mothers who kept bringing Sasquatch food even though he already had mustard on his nose and half a hot dog sticking out of his mouth. Not the older boys and girls who were at this minute sitting around in their little groups having a hearty chuckle about how hilarious he’d looked in his turtleneck and gay party hat, nearly slipping sideways off his chair after he’d gotten dizzy from trying to blow out all fifty-seven candles with one giant breath.
At the top of his lungs he shouted, “I’m not feeling ap-PRE-ciated!” But nobody heard him.
He went downstairs, and instead of going outside to feel bad for himself and eat four or five hot dogs with a big plate of potato salad and make himself sick on piñata candy, which was sorely tempting, he stood at the front door and stared at it for a while, waiting for someone to come through saying, Come on, Rusty, where have you been, we’ve been wating for you, you get to go first on the piñata!
Nobody came. He reached out and turned the latch on the deadbolt.
For a long time he waited, staring at the door until his eyes blurred, until somebody tried to open it, giving it a good shake and then pounding on it. “Hey!” It sounded like Parley. “Hey! What the…? The door’s locked!”
Rusty waited. There was a lot of shouting and he knew they were going to try to get in through the door off the garage, so he took the racetrack through to the laundry room and got to the garage door, just in time. He went into the kitchen and locked the back door and waited. Suddenly there was Josephine’s big round face in the back door window with its mouth open wide so he could see the terrifying braces with their mildewy rubber bands and crusty bolts and wires coated with liquefied hot dog. She shouted low and loud like a man, “It’
s Rusty! He’s the one! It’s Ruuuuussssteeeeee!”
He put his hand down his pants, poked his finger through the open fly of his jeans, and she screamed and fell away from the window.
He heard something in the family room. Teague was outside clawing through a rosebush, trying to get at the open window. Rusty shut it and Teague started yelling, tapping hard on the glass, his arms and neck all scratched up, and though his heart wasn’t really in it Rusty turned, pulled down his Toughskins, and showed Teague the moon.
This wasn’t nearly as fun as it should have been. He sat on the bottom stair and listened to the pounding on the back door, the faraway rattle of the garage doorknob. Somewhere Aunt Nola was laughing and Cooter was barking and Aunt Beverly was shouting orders.
Suddenly the front door shook and his father was yelling, “Rusty! Open this door now! Rusty! Just open it up and there won’t be any trouble! Rusty!”
Good one, Sasquatch. It didn’t take long for his father’s hairy arm to come through Cooter’s doggy door and start groping around for the doorknob. Rusty had not considered this possibility. The doggy door was designed to keep burglars and rapists from reaching the lock, but Sasquatch had arms like Too Tall Jones and to Rusty’s surprise he was just able to reach it with the tips of his hairy fingers. Suave as the Scoundrel, Rusty went into the dining room and got the wire back-scratcher his father had gotten for his birthday off the table. Just when the hand had figured out how to turn the latch by gripping it between the tips of its middle and ring fingers, Rusty nudged it away with the back-scratcher. This happened twice more until the arm lashed out like a python and tried to snatch Rusty by the ankle but Rusty was ready: he jumped back and swatted the hand hard across the knuckles. There was a yelp and the arm disappeared through the doggy door and a few seconds later Cooter came through it, barking and wagging his butt.
