by Deb Caletti
“Shit,” Chip Jr. said.
“Chip Jr.,” I said.
“No, I mean shit.” He lifted up his shoe and showed me the bottom.
I swear that dog was smiling.
At home later that night, I saw my parents in the doorway of my mother’s bedroom. My father was holding the ring that she wore on a chain around her neck; I imagined that he’d slipped it out from under the collar of her dress, knowing it would still be there. He took her hand, and slipped the ring on her finger. She just held it there, attached to the chain, until she noticed me. They both jumped back, startled. She released her finger from the ring.
“Ruby,” she said.
“Just heading for bed,” I said.
I ducked into my room, fast. My own hand reached down into the pocket of my jeans. I took out my own necklace and I held it, coiled up in my palm.
It occurred to me then, just briefly, that our hearts had been bought much too cheaply.
WALK WITH DOG AND YOU’LL NEVER WALK ALONE, the Foothills Church sign read. From a good distance down Cummings Road I could see Minister Joe Davis sitting on the lawn, elbows on his knees, chin in his palm, just looking at that sign. Something about this reminded me of my brother the night before, watching those lizards. It was early morning, too early for much traffic, and I imagine Joe Davis figured not too many people would witness this demonstration of his baffled hopelessness. The unknown sign changer had struck again.
I was sent on a morning mission for my father, who, when he woke up, had a sudden craving for Something With Raspberries. This time I was hoping I would not see Travis Becker outside his house, or rather, that he would not see me. I was driving Mom’s car, which still looked like the scene of a brutal cushion massacre.
Joe Davis turned when he heard the car coming. He stood and waved, which told me that Joe Davis probably had bad eyesight but didn’t wear his glasses. He thought I was my mother, I was sure, and this became a certainty when he started waving even more heartily, gesturing me to pull over. Even my mother had the feeling that Joe Davis’s frequent trips to the library were not just about bringing home more of the murder mysteries he liked. Poor Joe, though, had to pick this day to finally get up his nerve and speak to my mother when she wasn’t tucked safely behind the circulation desk. His technique of frantic arm waving could use a little work in the subtlety department.
I didn’t want to be rude, so I turned the car to the side of the road and rolled down my window. Joe Davis trotted over happily until he was a few feet from the car and his vision finally kicked in. His face fell.
“Oh, hi, Ruby,” he said.
“Is there a fire?”
“What?”
“A fire.” I waved my arms around, just teasing him a little, and regretted it immediately. Joe blushed all the way to the tips of his ears.
“I thought you were Ann. I just wanted to show her what the culprit has done now.”
“Do you have any suspects?” I knew he liked murder mysteries. I was hoping suspect-talk would redeem me from my earlier remark.
“Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with the candlestick,” he said. “You know what the strange thing is? I’m actually beginning to enjoy this. Can you picture that dog, big and comforting? A loyal friend at your side, making a winter night feel cozy with the way he sleeps curled up in a ball?”
I nodded and smiled. I decided I liked Joe Davis. He was a cozy person himself, the kind of man you picture walking around in socks with a hole in one toe. He wore khaki shorts with lots of pockets and a Wilderness Society T-shirt, and his watch had stopped at ten past four. When it wasn’t summer, he was usually wearing a rag wool sweater and jeans, clothes that looked like they knew him as well as he knew himself. The Foothills Church was small, and although Joe Davis lived in a little house on the property, he apparently didn’t make much as a minister, as he also worked part time as a carpenter. You often saw his truck, with the ladder hanging on the side, parked around town, in the library parking lot, at the Java Jive, or in someone’s driveway, the truck’s back doors open to reveal a messy array of tools and extension cords.
“Well, I’ll tell Mom you said hi,” I said.
“Please do. I’ll see her on Monday. I’ve got overdue fines to pay.”
“Not you, a minister.”
“Unfortunately, talking about God doesn’t make me exempt from overdue fines, speeding tickets, overflowing toilets, or arguments with my brother-in-law, and that’s just in the last week.”
“Maybe God’s on vacation,” I suggested.
“Maybe I’ve got my head in the clouds,” Joe Davis said.
I waved good-bye. The funny thing was, Joe Davis never even mentioned the wrecked state of my mother’s car. He was either really polite or really blind. Maybe you have as much chance of seeing clearly when you are in love as an opossum has of getting across Cummings Road.
I passed the bald spot on the corner where the goofy things were sold—that day shiny blankets decorated with peacocks and lion heads—and Moon Point. The paragliders had already parked their cars and begun the hike to the top of the mountain. The whale van with the I LOVE POTHOLES bumper sticker was there too, sitting empty. I got the carton of raspberries and some scones at the Front Street Market and headed home. When I got there, I could hear my parents’ voices through the screen door.
“It’s only going to be a few hours. I can’t see how the neighbors will mind, if that’s what you’re thinking,” my father said.
“It’s not just the neighbors.” My mother sounded tired. I’m sure it was much easier to love my father in her imagination.
“Well, what then? I didn’t think you’d mind. So what, I should have asked first? You used to love hearing my band.”
“It’s just . . . I don’t know. I thought you came to spend time with us.”
“I did!” his voice was rising a little. “Okay? I did. Look, Seattle has a bigger pool of singers, and I don’t want to settle for just anyone. I want to hear as many as I can. What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with wanting quality?”
“Nothing’s wrong with it. I want quality too.”
“I have to be honest with you. You really are becoming uptight.”
I hate that, I really do, when people use honesty as a cover for cruelty. You take a moral word like honest, stick it next to something mean, and you can almost make an insult sound righteous. And if we’re sensitive, we believe those insults. We forget that just because something is honest it is not necessarily the truth.
“Uptight? You tell me you’re here to see me and the kids. But you just came to use my house for an audition again. That’s not exactly uptight.”
“Here I’m thinking you’re not going to mind, because, frankly, I don’t see what the big problem is. I thought you’d be glad to help out a friend.”
God. You could almost hear him insert the knife into her heart and twist. “A friend. Jesus.”
“Shit, Ann, don’t start. Ann.” Silence, and then footsteps. I turned around and bolted down the porch steps and down the sidewalk to the car, then came back again as if I’d just arrived. Mom opened the screen door, then let it close behind her with a rattle. It wasn’t quite a slam, but it would do.
She wore her tank top and shorts, and her hair was in a ponytail to help with the heat, which in a few hours would be cranked high. She was barefoot, too, and it all made her seem younger and more vulnerable than she usually did, say, when she was paying bills, with her fingers tapping the calculator buttons, or ironing her work clothes as if she could do it in her sleep.
“Raspberries,” I said. I shook the grocery bag in the air.
I’m not even sure she saw me at first. Her attention was caught by a van driving slowly down our street. The driver passed our house, paused, then backed up. “Just great. Terrific,” she said. “It’s starting already.”
“What?”
“Auditions. A singer for your father’s new band. Here. Today. Female vocalist. His ba
ss player and drummer will be here any minute. That’s probably them now.”
“The invasion begins,” I said. “Remember what happened last time? They wiped out the contents of the refrigerator. All that was left was that French mustard with the brown dots in it.”
“God. I forgot about that part.” She rubbed her temples with her fingertips. “This is insane.”
The van that had been driving backward stopped, and a guy with a goatee and a long braid popped his head out the window. “Is this Chip’s place?” My mother didn’t bother to correct him, only hooked her thumb toward the house. A minute later the goatee guy and his friend in a tie-dyed Grateful Dead T-shirt were unloading equipment, sweating and banging up the front steps into the living room. Poe was barking crazily from inside the house. The high point of his life is when we take the vacuum cleaner from the closet, so imagine his thrill and anxiety. He managed an escape through the screen door as an amplifier went in. He trotted over to us for an explanation. My mother picked him up, set her cheek against his fur.
We sat down on the porch steps. Chip Jr. came outside and sat with us. “The guy with the braid’s name is Mambo,” he said. “Cha-cha-cha.”
We watched Poe sniff around the lawn and rediscover pieces of the garden hose he’d chewed up a few weeks before. The hollow thuds and cymbal crashes of the drummer warming up acted as Poe’s background music. I took the raspberries out of the bag and ran them under the outside faucet. We ate them out of the carton, and red juice dripped from the slats in the bottom and landed on our bare knees. Chip Jr. stuck one on every finger and did a puppet show where every character was eventually devoured in a grisly fashion.
Cars started to arrive, emptying women of all varieties onto our driveway. Some came in pairs, some with a boyfriend, and one came with her mother. You should have seen some of these outfits—leather minis, a leopard elastic top. And the hair. You’d have seen less hair at a sheepdog convention. Voices of all kinds squeezed through the tiny holes in the window screens and blasted out into the hot day, competing for dominance with the strained volume of the other instruments, and that show-off drummer, whose solos sounded like those times when you pull out one pot lid and everything topples out of the pots and pans cupboard. Mr. Baxter, the neighbor across the street, came out to wash the car, but it was no doubt an excuse to glare at us for the noise and gawk at all the spandex. Chip Jr. went inside to spy, and came back with a report.
“That Mambo was drinking your wine from Renaud’s,” he said. “Right from the bottle.”
My mother sighed. She had vacated her body; she was like some shirt you’d worn all day and then dropped to the floor.
“Do you want to get out of here?” I said. I thought of Joe Davis, sitting on the grass by the WALK WITH DOG sign. I thought of the quiet there. I thought of how good it would be for Mom to ride around somewhere with all of the windows rolled down, which is a good cure for most things, in my opinion. “I’ll drive.”
“Then I’m wearing my bike helmet,” Chip Jr. said.
“No,” my mother said. “I can’t.”
“Wait, what am I thinking?” I said. “It’s Saturday. You’ve got the Casserole Queens.” Every Saturday my mother leads a book discussion group for a club of old people. They called themselves the Casserole Queens, my mother told us, because ladies their age always brought casseroles to a fresh widower’s home in hopes of snagging themselves a husband. They called themselves this even though the only one of them that would ever do such a thing was Mrs. Wilson (now Mrs. Thrumond), who ditched the group right after her wedding at the senior center, and in spite of the fact that one of the members of the group was male. According to Mom, they let Harold in because he was a former chef and made great brownies and because they could boss him around.
“I’m not going to the Casserole Queens today. I canceled to spend time with Dad. Fowler’s taking my place.”
“Fowler? They’ll eat him alive.” I’d only met them once before, but I heard they could get pretty rowdy when they were unhappy. I was thinking of the time Harold rebelled, claiming that from that moment on, he would not be the only one to bring food for the group. Apparently this started a mini-riot, with Peach and Mrs. Wong throwing things at him—little wrapped candies, a Kleenex packet—from their purses.
“Fowler’s bringing his poodle. No problem. He won’t even need to talk about the book. I can pick up next week right where we left off.”
“They need you, though.”
“Ha. I think it works the other way around.”
“Then let’s get out of here.” I stood. I could see Sydney next door, hauling the sprinkler to the center of the lawn. She waved, then turned on the faucet until the sprinkler was fountain-high and went back into her house.
“Ruby, thanks. I know you’re trying to help. But I’ve got it handled. Okay? I’ve got it handled. I need to stay here. One of these people may decide to move in or something.”
I sat back down again. The singer finally shut up. You could hear laughter from inside. “I’d give her a four-point-five,” Chip Jr. said.
“Three-point-two,” my mother said.
“Would you just lie down,” I said to Poe, who was turning endless circles in a spot on the lawn, trying to make sure the view was right from every angle, I guess. He finally plunked down, sighed through his nose.
Sydney came back out, veered around the sprinkler fountain and came into our yard. She tossed us each an orange Popsicle. “Party food. I’m hurt you didn’t invite me.” She sat cross-legged on the grass.
“Dad’s having an audition.”
“I figured it out. At first I thought Mom put her tennis shoes in the dryer again. Ba-bamp, ba-bamp, ba-bamp. Then she yelled for me to get a look at the bimbo parade.” She stuck her chest out and patted her hair. “So what, do they measure cleavage as part of the interview?”
“I don’t want cleavage talk,” Chip Jr. said. His lips were already orange from the Popsicle after one bite.
“Sounding like a dying animal shouldn’t be a problem as long as your clothes are tight enough,” my mother said. She opened the Popsicle wrapper with her teeth. Sydney caught my eye, an acknowledgment of my mother’s misery. The drummer, for whom, apparently, silence was not golden, started banging again. Another car crawled down our street, the driver looking at house numbers, as if the noise wasn’t information enough. It was one of those low-slung pickups, the kind of car that looks like the getaway vehicle of a pawn shop burglary.
We watched the girl park, one tire on the curb. Her hair was done up like a three-year-old’s; she wore a shirt that said QT PIE in glitter script.
“Hey, Pigtails,” Sydney called. “Sorry for the trouble. The audition’s over. They found the one they wanted.”
“Goddamn it,” the girl said. She got back in her car, slammed the door, and bumped back down the curb. She gunned the engine and screeched down the street.
“Wow. Anger issues,” Sydney said.
“Hooray for Sydney, champion bimbo chaser,” Chip Jr. said. He stuck his Popsicle in his mouth and started to clap. My mother joined in, hitting her free hand against the fist that clutched her Popsicle. Sydney took a bow. It was a joyful second until Mom’s Popsicle split and the chunk of orange ice fell to the ground. A sticky rivulet rolled down her arm. She looked down at it as if it was a mere representation of all that was wrong in the world. I thought she might cry. I thought I might cry for her.
Poe trotted over and began licking what was quickly turning into a pool of sweet liquid. His beard would be stiff and sticky the rest of the afternoon. It was his lucky day. Which only goes to show that often enough, we owe our good fortune to someone else’s loss.
By evening my mother had forgiven my father. It made me wonder how many times we forgive just because we don’t want to lose someone, even if they don’t deserve our forgiveness. The next day we all went to Marcy Lake and swam. It was a near perfect day, and the air smelled like both the sweetness of sun and o
f the coolness of deep lake water at the same time. We jumped off the dock, and Chip Jr. did cannonballs, and Mom sat on Dad’s shoulders and he tossed her in. We ate a picnic lunch sitting on our beach towels, and you could feel the warm wood of the dock through the terry cloth. Dad’s hair dried funny, and Mom got sunburned near the elastic of her bathing suit where it had shifted around, showing white skin. We went home with that satisfied exhaustion a day of swimming and sun brings. Mom was really happy. Later that night, before my father left again, the sky suddenly got dark, as it will in a Northwest summer, and there was a rumble of thunder and a burst of rainfall. The rain is bratty here. It can’t stay away too long without coming back and throwing a tantrum.
Chip Jr. and I said our good-byes to Dad as pellets of water bounced hard on the ground. I went to my room with a weird feeling in my stomach. It was hollow, with a knot of something that felt like sadness and guilt, though I have no idea what I felt guilty about. My mother had walked my father out to the car. They stood out there for a long time. I listened to the rain falling on the roof and the tree branches and the garbage can lids. We should blame the neighbor, Mr. Baxter, for the rain—he was the one that washed his car the day before.
Mom was out there so long that I was getting worried. I turned off my bedroom light and peeked out my curtains; the window was open in spite of the rain, as it had been a hot day. The rain had that smell of steamy, damp earth and wet asphalt, and I breathed it in. I crouched way down and peered over the windowsill. I could see them in the driveway. My father had my mother’s chin in his hand, and then he leaned in to kiss her. I looked away, and when I looked back, he was smoothing her wet hair from her forehead. That hollow feeling, loss, I guess, was gutting my insides, same as a spoon clearing the inside of a pumpkin before it is carved.
It wasn’t until he had gotten inside the van, until the headlights shone into my window and cast their glow onto my wall, that he rolled down the window and called to her. The car was in reverse and his foot was on the brake when he told her that the baby seat in the back of the van was his after all. His and his girlfriend’s and their new baby’s. A few minutes after that he was gone.
