by Dale Peck
Meanwhile her hair’s still hot and heavy on the back of her neck, and not even a barrette on the dresser. She steps into her Tevas, finds even their thin straps too constricting in this heat and kicks them off, then heads into the hall. The floorboards are worn smooth as a baby’s bottom beneath her feet. She hasn’t noticed that in years.
Twins! she calls, skiing her feet over the soft planks, avoiding by instinct the domed nailheads that rise a little out of the warped old wood. Christine, Carly! Have you been in my things again?
She looks into their empty room and the first thing she notices is the clock between the unmade beds. It’s after ten. She whirls around then, looks in her parents’ bedroom, and there on her mother’s half of the crisply made bed is a rectangular outline impressed into the taut bedspread with its repeated motif of a basket of violet irises. Her mother’s suitcase, she realizes with a pang.
She turns and heads toward the stairs.
Twins! she calls again. Are you guys in here?
What is it about those two? She calls them twice more as she heads down the steep narrow staircase—it’s almost like a ladder, she thinks, nearly tumbling, has it really only been a month since the last time she slept here?—but it’s not until she goes into the living room and pulls the rubberband out of Carly’s palm-treed pigtail that they actually look up at her.
Um, sleep much? Christine says.
Yeah, what time did you get in anyway? Carly says. She makes a production of blowing away the pale brown bangs that have fallen in her face even though they barely graze her eyebrows.
The girl walks to the mirror set in the ornate Victorian hat stand by the front door, begins the elaborate process of twisting her hair into the rubberband. It takes both hands to do it, and she can’t help but notice how her breasts press against the halter top when her arms lift up to frame her face. It seems slightly vulgar all the sudden, and she finishes her hair quickly and turns from the mirror.
What time did Mom and Dad leave?
Um, like seven, Christine says.
Did Mom do the pot thing?
Practically cymbals, Carly says, pantomiming.
Shit. I can’t believe I slept so late.
How was the movie? Christine says, smirking. Did you even see it?
For the first time the girl notices the scattered magazines and piles of little bits of paper all over the floor and coffee table. The piles are color-coded, red, blue, green, black. It looks like her sisters are making confetti by hand.
Um, what are you doing?
Carly makes a face.
We have to make these like collage self-portraits for camp. It’s the stupidest thing ever.
What are you guys going to be, airheads?
No, no, it’s totally cool, Christine says. She reaches around behind her and holds up a big piece of glossy white cardboard. There are lines drawn on it—some kind of sketch?—but it takes the girl a moment to realize it’s the twins’ faces because she forgot to put her contacts in and because the white spaces of the drawing seem to be filled with writing. When she squints she realizes the sketch is based on the picture they took at the fair last year, the one they had scanned onto matching T-shirts. Christine points with her finger: First we like projected that picture we took at the fair last year on this cardboard, you know, the one we had scanned onto T-shirts—
Christine like totally took her shirt off.
Christine blushes.
I had my swimsuit on.
Barely.
Anyway. Then we like traced the picture, well, not the whole picture, just like the outlines of the major color groups. It’s not as easy as you’d think because your hand keeps like making a shadow and then you can’t see the lines, and then when you do get it done you have to write in how you’re going to lay out all your colors and whatever.
She just did it just to flirt with this boy.
Did not!
Did too!
Whatever, Christine says, blushing even more hotly. Anyway. After you’ve finished the picture. You cut out all your colors from magazines and glue them in place.
Paste by numbers, Carly says, blowing at her bangs. It’s like so eleven years old.
And what are you, twelve?
Thirteen! the twins protest in unison.
The girl blinks.
Well, all I have to say is, if that’s this month’s Redbook you shredded Mom’s going to murder you. She starts toward the kitchen then, then veers toward the stairs. What do you want for lunch anyway? she says, ducking instinctively at the third step, which is only six feet below the landing above. I was thinking I might barbecue asparagus. Justin’s mom gave me a recipe.
Ew, stinky pee! the twins say at the same time, falling into a paroxysm of laughter.
Upstairs the girl rummages through half-empty drawers, eventually trading the suggestiveness of the halter top for a more demure T-shirt, orange, blousy. She tries it tucked and untucked, then decides she doesn’t like the way it goes with the cutoffs and finds the ancient pair of olive cargo shorts she got at the Army-Navy in Albany. She tucks the T-shirt in and slips on her Tevas again.
I was thinking chicken shish kebabs, she says as she descends the stairs. Or beef. Onion, cherry toms, some pineapple. I think there are green peppers in the garden too. She is in the doorway to the living room. How’s that sound?
Carly pushes her hair off her forehead.
What?
Never mind, the girl says. I’m going to the grocery store, I’ll be right back. You want anything? she calls as she leaves the room, but they are already absorbed in their picture.
That is so the color of poop, Christine is saying. And it is not going to be my shirt.
A magnet in the shape of a milk bottle holds a twenty-dollar bill to the refrigerator, and the girl grabs it on the way out. Outside, it’s a perfect day. Just perfect. Not nearly as hot as her south-facing bedroom, thanks to the shade of the two maples that flank the front walk and a breeze that carries the smell of phlox and manure and fresh-cut grass. Not theirs though. It looks like her father hasn’t gotten to the lawn in weeks. The grass is so long it folds over and brushes the tops of her feet in her sandals. That is something she noticed even before she moved out, the slight deterioration in things since Brian and Darcy left. Unmown grass, untrimmed hedges. When she got in last night her headlights had glinted over something shiny in the ditch in front of the east pasture: a six-pack of empties someone must have tossed out a window. That’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t have lasted an hour when Brian still lived here. Either he or their father would have picked them up immediately. But with Brian gone most of her father’s time is taken up with the cows and so little things slip by. The cans have been there long enough that the grass has folded over them—it looks like the ditches haven’t been mowed at all this year—and the girl had fished them out and tossed them in the back seat before parking in the driveway and sneaking into the house, and when she pulls the door open this morning the first thing she notices is that her car reeks of stale beer. It’s an oven too, and she rolls down the window and takes the six cans to the recycling barrel before she starts it. Or, rather, tries to.
One, two, three, start, she says, and turns the key on the LTD. The engine turns over easily, jauntily even, just refuses to catch, and she turns the key off, gives it a little gas. Okay, two, two, three, start, she says, and this time the engine coughs a little at the end of its cycle, then goes quiet again. She pumps the pedal one more time, then, Three, two, three, start, she says, and the engine groans, coughs, splutters, and catches. She guns it a little, pats the dashboard. That’s it. That’s my girl.
At the Shop-Rite in Greenville she can’t choose between chicken or beef and picks up a package of each. It looks like a lot of meat for only four people, though, but then she remembers the boy, who always eats as if it’s his first and last time. Okay then. Canned pineapple, two big white onions, a net bag of cherry tomatoes—why her mother only plants beefsteak she’ll nev
er know. A package of butter and a head of garlic for the asparagus. She counts the stuff in her cart. The express lane in the Greenville Shop-Rite recently went from eleven items to nine. You wouldn’t think it would make a difference but it does. She still has room for salad dressing though, and she grabs a bottle of Lo-Cal Thousand Island on her way to the front of the store. And what was that spice Justin’s mom told her to get for the asparagus? Thyme? Parsley flakes? Something green and—marjoram, that was it. She grabs a bottle. With the marjoram she has ten items in her cart, and she transfers them all to the baby seat as if to emphasize the smallness of her load. If the checkout girl says anything, she’ll say she thought the onions counted as one thing. Like the tomatoes, she’ll say, if it comes to that.
Back at home she kicks off her Tevas outside the side door. Of course no one cleaned the ashes from the barbecue the last time they used it, so she has to get the shovel and bucket from the living room fireplace before she can light the coals. The twins are still in the room, which is awash in bits of paper.
I thought you were making a portrait, not a mural.
Carly frowns.
“Choices,” she says. She makes the quotation marks with her fingers.
Christine looks up. Looks at the girl, then at Carly. They frown in unison, then smile.
Right, Christine says, Justin called, even as Carly says, This guy came by.
The girl’s eyes rally between her sisters, settle on Carly.
Who came by?
I don’t know, Carly says. Christine talked to him.
The girl looks at Christine, who shrugs.
I don’t know. He said he was looking for Donnie. His dad knew him or something. I sent him to Junior Ives’.
Donnie’s not at Junior’s today, is he? I thought he was at Walsh’s.
Christine shrugs. I don’t know. I thought he was at Junior’s. That’s where I sent him.
Right, the girl says. Dad didn’t call, did he?
Carly shakes her head. He said they probably wouldn’t know anything until this afternoon. Justin called though. He said he misses you.
Oh, grow up.
On the way back out the girl grabs her mother’s garden shears from the mudroom. Hercules, drawn by the activity around the grill, has stretched out in the sun on the driveway, and the girl stoops down to scratch his swollen belly.
Here, you’re a fat old man, aren’t you? Yes, you’re my big fat baby.
Hercules lifts his head a little, licks the girl’s hand, then stretches out again. His tail thumps the ground in little puffs of dust.
The girl approaches the garden warily, as if she is sneaking up on her asparagus. As if it might shrink at her approach, a defense mechanism like a bull snake’s feigning death. Her dream flashes in her mind again and she shudders, almost afraid to unlatch the gate. When she does she disturbs a rabbit—in the carrots, thank God.
As she walks down the rows she can’t help but think the garden looks a little ragged this year. Just like the lawn. The earth under her bare feet is dry and flaky—it must have been a week since it was watered—and the weeds in the onions are taller than the onions themselves. The radishes weren’t replanted the last time they were harvested, and what was that, two weeks ago? She was home for dinner that night—it was the last time she was home for dinner—but she can’t quite remember when it was. The two hollow rows look like a pair of parallel mole tunnels, half collapsed. Actually, she sees when she gets closer, one of them is a mole tunnel. Her mother would go ballistic if she saw that. The three of them used to be so diligent about the garden. She and Darcy and their mother. But it seems like her mother went at it half-heartedly this year, alone—planting late, tending haphazardly, not bothering with any of the flower borders she and the girls used to set down every spring. Now there are only a few marigolds that managed to reseed themselves from last year. The geraniums are still wintering on the sun porch and the pink and purple impatiens the girl picked up from Story’s nursery hang off the fence where she left them a month ago, stifling in their white plastic pots. The only thing that looks healthy are the wild pink roses that cling to the supposedly rabbit-proof fence—not!
But her asparagus is fine, she thinks. A few scattered green tips actually poke through the straw bedding. Not as many as she’d like maybe, but when she peels back the straw she sees there are dozens more hiding just out of the sun. More than enough for lunch, especially with only five at table.
It’s a funny thing, harvesting asparagus. Delicate and brutal at the same time. Like an operation. First you peel back the straw carefully so you don’t snap the stalks in the middle, but then you drive a pair of garden shears right into the earth at the base of the plant to sever stalk from root. The metal blades grit against the grains in the dirt with a faint sound that sets your teeth on edge if you think about it, and the girl tries not to think about it, peeling and cutting, peeling and cutting, laying the stalks out on the ground like a picket fence. It’s like an operation, she thinks, like cutting ribs out of the scarecrow’s chest, and suddenly the girl drops the shears to the ground and presses the back of her hand to her mouth. Her left hand, of course. The one with the ring. How could she have overslept, today of all days? Gone out to that silly movie with Justin and then slept straight through to ten o’clock as if she hadn’t a care in the world?
She gives herself a moment, half sadness, half reproach. She has no idea why she’s so upset. It’s not like it’s a serious procedure. What was the word her father used? Precautionary? Exploratory? But still. She could’ve at least dragged herself out of bed to have breakfast with her mother before she went to the hospital. When she’s caught her breath she takes her hand from her mouth, looks at the ring again. The finger it’s on is flecked with dirt. It doesn’t look elegant as much as it looks like a banded bird leg, a tag to remind her that no matter how far she migrates everyone will always know where she belongs now.
She takes a deep breath then, finishes harvesting the asparagus. One of her mother’s old bandannas is knotted and hanging on the gate, and the girl unties it as gently as if it were a snarl in her mother’s hair and smoothes it out and lays the asparagus in it and carries it up to the house that way, like a baby in its carrier. She sets the shears and asparagus down on the picnic table and is just checking on the coals when she hears gravel crunch in the driveway. Surely Donnie can’t be here already, she thinks, it’s not even noon. But when she glances at her watch she sees that it is in fact ten past, and then she looks up and sees a white Lincoln sitting in the driveway.
There’s glare on the windshield and she can’t make out who’s inside. The license plate’s a kind of tan noncolor—not New York. She squints, but can’t make it out.
The car idles a moment, then shuts off. There is a little ticking noise as the hood immediately cools and shrinks, so distinct in the quiet afternoon she can hear the sound bounce off the wall of the dairy barn and echo across the yard. Then, slowly, the driver’s side door opens and a young man gets out of the car. Thirty-something, baby blue pants, short-sleeved brown shirt. Not quite old enough for such a car, she thinks. Her first thought is that it must be his father’s, and when a moment later the passenger’s side door opens and an older man gets out, she nods her head. The older man is a little shorter than the younger and big around as a barrel, and his calves where they stick out from his denim shorts are white as the base of the asparagus plants she just cut. But you can see the resemblance in the softness of cheeks and nose. A fringe of beard like Abraham Lincoln’s outlines the father’s jawline, the son wears a soul patch beneath his lip. But give the boy some time, she thinks, his face will get as florid as his father’s, as soft as a carnation past its prime.
Meanwhile, the coals aren’t quite ready, and she uses the ash shovel to spread them over the bottom of the grill to make them burn faster. She’s thinking she really should take the bucket down to the ash pile and dump it, but if she doesn’t get inside and cut up the meat and vegetables and
get them on the skewers she’ll never have lunch ready for Donnie and the boy when they come in. But for the moment she’s stuck there waiting for the two men, who walk up the driveway slowly. Shyly? Nervously? She can’t really tell. The older man looks a little uncertain but even without her contacts she can see the big smile on his face. There is a slowness to his step that seems unrelated to his weight, as if he is trying to set his feet down without hurting them, and she’s willing to bet he’s bald under his brown suede cap, which is way too hot for a day like today. The younger man does look nervous though, and he has a hard time holding to his father’s pace. He gets a few steps ahead, then drops back, then gets a few steps ahead again. He has a crewcut, and even though it looks cool she’s willing to bet it’s probably just because he’s losing his hair too. Men. Justin already frets over his temples, asking her if she thinks his hairline’s receding. Like the tide, she says. It’ll be gone in an hour. She can feel the sun beating down on her own head, and if she had a razor in her hand she’d shave her hair off in a heartbeat.
The men stop when they are a few feet away from her, on the other side of the grill.
Hi there, the father says. He has a deep voice, as friendly as his smile.
Hi.
The son sort of waves.
There is a silence then, and the girl realizes the car’s hood has stopped ticking.
We came by before, the son says after a moment. I think I talked to your sister.
The girl nods. She is putting the rack on the grill. It’s a little greasy, and she tries to handle it with only the thumb and forefinger of each hand. She should probably clean it, she thinks, but it’s late. The fire will kill any germs.
We’re looking for Donnie Badget, the boy says now.
No, Dale, the father says, turning to his son. I keep telling you, the man who worked for Uncle Wallace is Donnie Sutton. Donnie Badget is the guy who built my car.
