“Sure,” I said. “Yes.”
She called him and put me on, holding the phone out as if daring me to’ take it. She pointedly left the room.
“Arty,” my father said, and asked me how I was holding up. My father is not a talker and neither is his son. I stood closemouthed in the living room, trying to make him fill the silences. We dismissed the Steelers and the snow.
“So,” my father said. “I’ve been meaning to have dinner with you. How’s this Saturday?”
“Okay,” I said, trying to sound bored.
“Okay,” he said. I paced between the couch and TV. “Okay, how about putting your mother back on?”
I dropped the phone on the couch and hollered for her.
Lake Vue, where my father now lived, was new. I had never been in it, but when the bus picked up, the kids who got on there were wearing neat Levi’s and rugby shirts and blue suede Puma Clydes. They were semi-preppy in their down vests, and scorned long-hairs like Warren and me. I imagined them poking fun at my aunt’s old Nova.
As the week progressed, I grew to resent the Lake Vue kids.
“The lake’s not even there,” I explained to Lila. “It’s a good five miles away. The only view they have is the Agway across the road.”
“Yeah,” she said, “but I bet they’ve got hot water.”
By the time my father came to pick me up Saturday, I blamed him for leaving us to rot at Foxwood while he and the mystery woman he was seeing blew my and my mother’s money at Lake Vue.
He was on time, driving the Nova. The bumper was sticking out of the trunk, the rear quarter-panel crumpled.
My mother came outside in her sweater and made sure I had the bag of his stuff. She didn’t want him to come in because the place was messy. The three of us stood on the lower landing in the cold.
“What happened there?” she asked—gleefully, I thought.
“Little fender bender,” my father said.
“Little,” my mother said.
“It’ll fix up.” It had been three weeks since we’d seen him. I had expected him to look different, somehow changed or dressed-up, but there he was, my father, in his steel-toed workboots and jeans, unshaven because it was a Saturday. “Have you talked to Astrid?”
“Yes,” my mother said.
“How is she?”
“Fine.”
My father waited but that was all she was going to give him. “Well, good,” he finally said. “Arty, are you all ready?”
“He has some things you left.”
My father thanked her and took them, and without peeking in the bag, put it in the backseat. While they hashed out when he would return me, I slid into the front. My mother waved me away as if I were leaving for good.
The Nova made it up the drive easily. Though he owned it, it was not my father’s car. The seats smelled of my aunt’s cigarettes, and my father had either observed or not disturbed her ritual of keeping a useless box of tissues on the shelf beneath the rear window. We headed west, away from Lake Vue.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“I figured we’d split a pizza, if that’s all right. My stove’s got problems.”
“Sure.”
“How’s everything at your place?”
“Fine,” I said.
“I know your mother doesn’t like it there.”
“It’s okay.”
“She says you’re a big help,” he said, but I didn’t bite.
We passed the county fairgrounds and its sign advertising the same three days in August and stopped at a plaza where there was a Fox’s Pizza Den. My father ordered for us. I thought he’d meant takeout, but he peeled off his coat and arranged it over a chair, and I did likewise. I wondered if he was living with this woman and didn’t want me to see or whether he thought—correctly—that I would compare his apartment to ours and count it as further proof that he was cheating us.
It was not a remarkable meal. We were both hungry and embarrassed, and once the pizza came, said little. My father did not offer me a beer.
“Your mother says you have a girlfriend.”
“No,” I said.
“Working on it.”
“Sort of.”
“Want more?”
“No thanks,” I said.
On the way back, my father said he had to stop by his place for something. This made sense to me. His mistress—at the time the only word I knew to describe her—would have cleaned up and cleared out.
But when we got to Lake Vue, my father parked the car and said he’d be right back. Colored floodlights bathed the front of the complex aqua. My father’s apartment was on the first floor beside a tunnel with an ice machine. He stopped at his door and hunched over his keys. In the quiet of the car I wondered what he was hiding from me, and like a sign, the bag of his crap in the backseat shifted.
I got out and flipped the seat forward and tossed the bag over my shoulder, nudged the door closed with my toe. There was a white Eldorado a few spots down, but the other cars were Fairlanes and Biscaynes and Satellites from the same era as my aunt’s Nova. On the walk a broken beer bottle glittered.
The door to my father’s apartment was open a sliver, just enough to see light, a nap of lemon-lime shag carpet. I swung the bag in front of me as if it were a shield or weapon and stepped in, almost knocking over an unplugged space heater.
“Hello?” my father called—beside me, behind the closed bathroom door. “Arthur?”
“Dad?” I said, but I was not answering him, I was questioning him and exactly what I was looking at.
The first thing I noticed was the rec room couch against the wall in what I thought was the living room. It had sheets draped over its cushions, a pillow at one end, at the head a stack of library books. On the floor lay one of my old sleeping bags. In a corner stood the wicker peacock throne, beside it Astrid’s old dresser. His locked toolbox. That was all, there was nothing else but rug. I took a step into the room to see what the kitchen was like, but there wasn’t one, just as there was no bedroom; the paneling went all the way around, no windows or doors, not even a closet. In the near corner a hotplate sat on an end table, a cardboard box of saucepans beneath it, another box of cans. A dusting of orange powder said he’d had macaroni and cheese recently. Paper plates, one set of silverware in a motel glass, a lidded mug from Dunkin’ Donuts. It was clean and, except for the sleeping bag on the floor, neat. There was really nothing wrong with it.
“Arty,” my father said from the bathroom.
“I brought your things in,” I said, retreating, and kicked the space heater.
He came out of the bathroom, buckling up. “This is what I didn’t want you to see.”
“It looks okay,” I protested.
“That’s nice of you.” He surveyed the room as if I might be right. “Let’s not tell your mother about this. She has enough worries.”
“Sure,” I said.
He picked up the space heater and herded me toward the door.
In the car he said, “I don’t plan on being there long,” and in his completely unconvincing tone I recognized my own hopes.
“So,” he said next to the coachlight, “we’ll keep this between us.”
I was leaning down to his window and holding the space heater.
“And tell Ast I miss her.”
“I will,” I said, and he patted my hand.
My mother was watching from the window. When I was halfway up the stairs, she came outside to see what I was carrying.
“Why, that’s just what we need,” she exclaimed, and waved after my father’s car, its taillights swallowed by the dark pines.
Inside I put the heater down on the floor and hung up my coat.
“Did you have a good time?” my mother asked.
“Yeah,” I said, and headed for my room, though I knew she’d follow me.
SIX
ANNIE FINDS THE MITTEN at the foot of the drive. Tara has a runny nose and shouldn’t be out too long, but all af
ternoon she’d been bugging Annie about the snow, standing at the front window watching it fall. Brock’s back on days and the club’s closed, getting ready for the Turkey Trot. They’ve been stuck in the house all week; the Maverick won’t go. Brock thinks the fuel line is frozen, or maybe it’s the battery. It pisses Annie off; Glenn would know. “I want my snowsuit on. I want to make a fort.” She couldn’t put Tara off forever.
Annie is sick herself, the flu has her couchbound, a flat glass of ginger ale by her head; otherwise she’d have been outside with Tara. Annie said ten minutes, then, groggy from the Nytol, drifted off watching “All My Children.” When she woke up “General Hospital” was on.
“Ta-ra!” she calls.
The dead stalks rustle. Fields swell into distance, cut by iced-over creeks leaning with weed trees. Power lines dip away, spidery towers stride off into fog. The snow shrouds the horizon in white. It’s been like this all day.
Annie steps onto the road and calls both ways, arms crossed, holding her bathrobe to her chest. She has long johns on and Brock’s boots, unlaced. Trails of snow fine as sand snake over the road. The mail’s here, in the box a Thrift Drug circular with holly on the front. Monday the county plowed and spread the road with grit; now it’s white save a brown hump down the center. Annie can barely make out the skinny tracks of the mail Jeep among several others closing over, a flame-shaped hole left by the exhaust where Mr. Werner stopped to reach for the box. Immediately she thinks of Glenn and the restraining order they threatened to get. She hasn’t let him see Tara since the fight. He’s been calling and apologizing, demanding his rights. He’s not dangerous, Brock says, just pathetic. Now Annie isn’t sure.
She runs around the side of the house clumsily, the boots flopping. “Tara!” she calls. “Tare?” Beneath the water tower the road ends at a striped guardrail. Three or four times during the summer Annie saw a man in a blue car parked in the turnaround. A plain car, official-looking. The first time she spied him reading the Eagle she assumed he was from the water department, then noticed how old he was. Clare Hardesty asked her cousin the cop; no one seemed to know him. Annie figured he was harmless, a retiree trying to get out of the house. Now she sees him watching her and Tara splashing in the baby pool, his hand behind the raised newspaper, working.
“Tara,” Annie shouts into the trees, “this is no time for games.”
She listens to her own voice die, waits in the silence for a giggle, a twig, the rubbing of her snowsuit. Far off, a truck gears up on the interstate, and she starts for the backyard.
Rounding the corner, she stumbles and falls hard, biting her tongue. She feels it yet forgets the pain immediately. The back is white. The snowman the two of them made yesterday leans forward, nods as if looking for its lost carrot nose, fallen and already covered. Soft ghosts of footprints scamper under the clothes carousel. It’s impossible to tell today’s from yesterday’s, they’re nearly filled in. Bomber’s old house is odorless in the cold, his chain hanging from a rusty nail in the sycamore. She stands looking at the edge of the woods, arms limp, breathing steam. The trees are bare, a few birds gliding above the tangle, lighting and calling. The paths in back run clear around Marsden’s Pond and up to the interstate. She can hear the trucks better here, the whine of their chains.
The porch is empty, jammed with summer junk. Annie runs around the last side of the house, fingers numb now. She’s not in the car. Annie slams the door as if the Maverick’s guilty, and it’s cold enough that the window explodes, filling the driver’s seat with snow and blue cubes. “No,” Annie cries, “you shit,” but doesn’t have time to mourn. She looks up and down the road again, in the ditches, then sprints inside.
It is dark to save on the electric. Plastic sheets cover the windows; the winter glow makes the carpet look ratty. She turns down “General Hospital” and calls through the downstairs. The lunch dishes wait by the sink, Tara’s plate with its bear hanging on to a rising bunch of balloons, an elbow straw nodding out of the matching cup. She goes through the rooms, runs upstairs. “Honey, don’t hide from Mommy,” she calls. The bunny Glenn bought sits in Tara’s rocking chair, a carrot stitched to its paw. The shower curtain draws back on rubber flowers. She gets a rug burn looking under their bed, finds Barbie’s blouse and, with it in one hand and the mitten in the other, heads for the front door, repeating her name.
Outside, the snow won’t let up. Annie follows the path back toward Marsden’s Pond for a few hundred feet, but when she reaches the top of the knoll overlooking it, sees nothing. The snow has chased off the kids from the high school. She needs her own boots and gloves to go any farther. She needs to call Brock. She turns and runs back toward the house.
“Overlook Home,” a receptionist answers. She tells Annie to calm down, asks the name again.
“It’s an emergency,” Annie says.
“I’m sorry,” the woman says, “he’s already left for the day.”
“How long ago?”
“I don’t know.”
Annie sees the mitten sitting next to the phone, a few beads of melted snow clinging to the wool, and can’t think of the question she needs to ask next. “It’s an emergency,” she tries again.
“Do you need an ambulance?” the woman asks. “Do you need the police?”
Without answering her, Annie hangs up and calls her mother.
“I’m coming,” her mother says. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes depending on the roads. Call what’s-her-name—your neighbor.”
“Clare.”
“Call Clare,” her mother says.
“Should I call the police?” Annie asks.
Her mother hesitates, then says, “Yes, I think that would be wise.”
At lunch Brock gets stoned in his car with Tricia from payroll. The windshield is covered with snow; no one can see them. Tricia is heavy and blond and fun and from Ford City. She loves Neil Young.
“I’m living with Kenny,” she says, “but when it’s permanent I’ll feel it, you know?”
“And it’s not right now,” Brock says. They have fifteen minutes left, and he’s wondering if he has enough vacation time to take a half day.
“Kenny? Are you kidding? We went to school together.”
“Same with me and Annie.” The heater cranks, a leaf stuck in the fan. Smoke leaks out the window. She likes him, he knows; she lets him look into her eyes. It’s more than attraction on his part. He’s never been with a woman this big, has never considered it before. The possibility itself seems a bounty. He has been trying to figure out why he thinks he is in love with her. He wants to accept it, give in, make a fool of himself. He’s got to get out of Annie’s, it’s too crazy; she always wants to talk about Barb, about how he didn’t have to hurt Glenn. Brock doesn’t want to abandon Annie but Tricia may be expecting something more than friendship. He’s ready for a change, a break. Hell, he’s lying to himself, he’s dreaming.
“The Needle and the Damage Done” takes him inside the dash, into some lost summer night, a dark back road. The roach falls apart. Tricia has gum and gives him a stick. He checks the sideview mirror. Behind them a few cars cruise for a spot; the front office people are getting back from the Hot Dog Shoppe, Natili’s, Hojo’s. He reaches over to put his Visine back in the glove compartment, and Tricia meets and then kisses him, the gum sweet between their tongues.
“What are we going to do about this?” she says. Clare has the car because it’s Friday, and Friday her mother, Regina, visits her friends at the Overlook Home. Regina used to live there, but a few months ago she asked if she could come home, and when Jerrell and Clare said no, refused to eat. Now she sees her friends three times a week and they have to pay twice as much for her dinner. They’re on their way out the door when Annie calls, and Clare has no choice but to bring Regina. They can check the fields and woods down by the pond and then, if they haven’t found her, drive around looking.
Annie says she doesn’t have a better plan.
“Lost?” Regina says when
Clare gets off the phone. “How do you lose your only child?”
“I’m sure it’s a mix-up,” Clare says. “Her father probably has her right now.”
“That’s not the child’s father she’s living with?” Clare knows she knows; Regina’s only saying it to point out how wrong it is.
“That’s her young man.”
Regina shakes her head. “He cleans bedpans for a living.”
“We’re leaving, Mother.”
Outside, after Clare scrapes the Bonneville off, it stalls on her. It’s given her trouble before; she keeps telling Jerrell it’s going to die soon.
“You might try the choke,” Regina says.
“Do you see a choke?” Clare asks, but it’s pointless, Regina can barely see to read. Annie’s is only across the road and down a half mile; they could almost coast. Turkey Hill used to go to Saxonburg until they put the highway in. Sometimes Clare thinks she would like the privacy. She cranks the starter and the engine turns over, protesting; she gives it a little extra, revs it, and starts down the drive.
She turns onto Turkey Hill and the water tank looms, giant, blue.
Clare sees Annie waving by the mailbox, hatless, hair a tangle, flat on one side. Jerrell is always asking Clare why she bothers; the girl is trouble, anyone can see that.
“Oh,” Clare says, “and how do you see trouble?”
“Easy,” Jerrell says, “you just look. There it is—trouble.”
“You don’t even know her,” Clare says. “She’s very nice.” But Annie is not very nice, is not a friend like the one Clare imagined when Mrs. Peterson’s family decided to cart her off to Florida. She is young in all the wrong ways; she never knows when to stop. She treated Glenn like trash, for Brock, and from what Clare has seen (and sometimes she likes what she sees: Brock doesn’t worry about the oil bill, he likes the night life, the strip beside the Pullman works), Brock isn’t the marrying kind. Like Jerrell, she asks herself what Annie could possibly be getting out of it. Her answer changes when Jerrell collapses on her, sour-breathed from his three beers watching the Penguin game, musky from climbing all day. He is a lineman for the phone company, and at times Clare dreams of dialing a fatal number, a bolt of energy that will reach him wherever he is around the county and knock him, safety belt and all, senseless through the wires: She loves him, she supposes, or else why would she still be here—not for Warren’s sake, he’s never listened to her. Where else would she go? But thinking like this is silly; she is not going anywhere. She does love the idiot. She is not perfect. She would have settled for Glenn.
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