“Sorry,” Charles says, but there are real sorries and sorries like this, not even looking at the guy, accompanied by an indifferent shrug.
The guy looks at the back of Charles’s head, then over at Nenny, then at Charles again, clearly weighing what to do. “Who are you with? Where’s your mother?”
What happens then will never leave Nenny, not in a million years. Charles looks that stupid no-cop right in the eyes. “My mother’s dead,” he says, holding the man’s gaze like clenching a fist. When the stupid guy starts to respond, Charles doesn’t even give him a chance. He turns his head and snorks all his snot into his throat, then hocks a massive loogie right into the pit.
* * *
“He said his mother was dead,” No-Cop almost demands of Mom when everyone shows up. He’d sort of half dragged them into the office, like a scene in a cartoon, and made an announcement over the PA when Nenny finally revealed their names. Everyone is shocked when he says this—one, because it was said, and two, because now he repeats it? They all watch Mom.
“His mother is dead,” she says, as matter-of-fact as Charles had been. This, too, is like something dropping to the floor. “I’m his stepmother.”
No-Cop sort of coughs or clears his throat. “Well, I—”
“What exactly happened?” Rick interrupts.
“Your son, sir. He spit in the pit.”
“He what?” Rick says, justifiably confused.
“The pit, sir. The lake? Your son spit in it.” No-Cop sort of lifts then drops his hand. “And, well, spitting’s not allowed.”
Rick’s face remains blank, and he looks around at all of them, as if for interpretation or help.
“He spit in the pit, Dad,” Kat finally says, leaning on Charles’s chair. Charles sits quietly with his hands on his lap.
“Yes, he spit in the pit, dear,” Mom chimes in, a smile playing on her lips. Well, that’s all it takes, for Mom to say it. They crowd this meat-faced wannabe cop out of his own stupid room.
“He spit in the pit,” Bubbles says, grabbing Tiny by the shoulders and giving him a little shake. “He spit in the pit!”
Kat picks it up. “He spit, in the pit,” like limbo, How low, can you go?
“He spit, in the pit! He spit, in the pit!” Bubbles and Tiny sing, swinging each other’s hands. It’s like in-your-face cha-cha-cha. Mom looks at Rick, moving her shoulders to the rhythm. She doesn’t even look at the cop.
“Sir?” the cop says, as if pleading.
“Enough,” Rick says to all of them, even Mom, and that’s it—enough’s enough. He looks at Charles, and Charles knows what to do.
“I’m sorry I spit in the pit,” Charles says, his eyes on the floor.
“Well, all right. Don’t let it happen—” But they’re already halfway out the door. Nobody says anything. They trudge wordlessly to the car.
* * *
It’s a two-hour drive home, most of which takes place in silence. It’s impossible to tell if they’ve ruined a good day or, with their antics, defined one. A twisting tension fills the van, two-sided. On one side is the very real possibility that they’re all in deep shit; on the other is a thing that is impossible to name but crystallizes the moment Rick does something he would otherwise never do, which is to roll down the window and spit. Everyone knows everyone else is smiling, though it’s dark in the van. Somehow, in the midst of all this, because of all this, they’ve become something together, however choppy, however flawed: some kind of unit, some kind of tribe.
Passage
WEEKS GO by. Summer seeps in and with it the heat and the smog. It’s so hot you could fry an egg, as the saying goes, and Peter Garcia from 6B proves it: raids his mother’s fridge and absconds with half a dozen, sets to work on a patch of patio near the still-disgusting pool. The eggs crackle and pop like an effect from a space movie, like alien flesh cooking in a pan, and the Citrus Grove kids circle and watch those suckers fry. It is the first of July. On the Fourth, they walk down to the university parking lot, because Dad hates fighting for a spot on the grass. In the near distance you can hear the boys’ choir singing “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” as they do every year. The fireworks are standard-issue: breathtaking, beautiful, and totally indistinguishable from the ones last year or from the ones in years to come. “Daddy, what’s a grape of wrap?” Tiny asks on the way home. He’s holding a little flag someone gave him, waving it around. “A what?” Dad asks. “A grape of wrap,” Tiny says, then sings, “He is stamping on the village where the grapes of wrap are stored!” Bubbles interrupts. “Wrath,” he corrects. Maybe this is why they call him Bubbles—light as air, so light as to be imperceptible, but then what would they do without him? A few days later, Boots’s aunt comes to visit and says what everyone’s been thinking when she sees the pool: “Pathetic.” Her name is Janine. She’s tall and freckled with fire-red hair—nothing like Boots or her mother at all—and when Boots and Nenny tell her that, no, they don’t know how to make friendship bracelets, she says, “What on earth do you mean?” and shows them how. Now it is their passion, their ritual, their religion—bracelets circle their ankles and arms, adorn their bedposts, spill from their shelves—and when they walk to Thrifty’s to escape the heat, they skip the magazines and nail polish altogether and head straight for the thread. They spend hours in the aisle, poring over color combinations (gold with salmon and aquamarine, turquoise and mustard and dark chimney red), and afterward they each buy a single scoop of ice cream. By late July you can’t even see the mountains anymore. Winter and spring are so clear you might reach out and touch them, but summers, the smog rolls in from LA and slumps over everything like a beast. Cosby starts to smell like baked cheese, and Joey the cat hides in the closet all day. Sometimes it’s hard to even breathe. Bubbles rasps at his new inhaler and stays mostly indoors. One weekend Charles says, “Let me try,” and swipes the plastic mouthpiece with his shirt before placing it between his lips. “Oh shit,” he says, his voice pinched and strained. It’s hard to tell from his reaction if it’s the best thing or the worst thing or both, but when Mom catches them at it fifteen minutes later—Bubbles and Charles passing the inhaler back and forth, their faces giddy and splotched and red—she cries, “Are you insane?” and snatches it from their hands. It’s so hot the asphalt reignites from last year, when crews shut down most of the neighborhood from Wabash to Dearborn. “Come look at this,” Kat says and leads Nenny to the curb at the corner. An assortment of tiny, remarkable things lies embedded in the street: a coil of metal and two house keys and a number of nuts and bolts. “Neat, huh?” Kat says and presses the toe of her shoe into the road, which gives like cooling wax. She pulls two pennies from her pocket and hands Nenny one. They stoop and together push their coins into the melting road. The asphalt folds over the coins’ edges like pulling someone in for a hug, and there the pennies stay, months, years, still there now, even, which is another way of saying forever. (Someone should let Laura Hofstader, PhD, know: when someone dies, it sucks like hell, but it can also bring people closer together because sometimes a person who was a jerk isn’t a jerk anymore.) At Dad’s, Nenny lies across the kitchen floor because it’s too hot even for carpet or couch or chairs. “Da-ad,” she says, because sometimes it takes two syllables to make your point. “Could you ple-ease call Mr. Baldy and tell him to fix the po-ol?” It’s the principle of the thing, dang it. Yes, the world is very big, but children everywhere—especially in this kind of oppressive heat—deserve at the very least a pool. Dad looks at her from the counter, where he’s sorting mail. It’s a look that doesn’t need explaining. It’s not unlike the look Mom wore when Windsor died. There’s something gentle and hurting in a person’s face when they tell you something no one wants to have to say. “Honey, I don’t think Mr. Baldy is going to fix the pool.” And that’s it, those words are enough. From then on and for the next several weeks, each time Nenny sees Chuck Baldy it’s as if it’s for the first and final time: how he shuffles, pale and stooped, to the mailboxes
and back again, bent and weak like an old man. Thing is, he’s not that old. She gets a letter from Boots, who’s with her grandmother in Arkansas. “Dear Nenny,” the letter begins. “Do you like this paper? My grandma took me to a stationery store.” It features drawings of a crocodile, sitting in a chaise longue and sipping lemonade. “Did I tell you about Bradley? He’s my grandma’s cat. He ran away after grandpa died, but now he’s back. He has an extra digit on his paws.” She’s drawn a picture of him and labeled it “Bradley the Cat with Thumbs.” She ends the letter “Love, Boots,” with a postscript not to have any fun while she’s gone. Nenny begins a response letter right away. She doesn’t have any interesting stationery so settles for graph paper instead. “Dear Boots,” she begins. “My dad thinks Mr. Baldy might die. He looks very sick. If you saw him, you probably would not recognize him. I asked my dad what’s the matter, and he said it’s cancer but he doesn’t know which kind. Hopefully he won’t die before you come back.” But he does die before Boots comes back. One day some flowers appear, carnations in a vase at his door, and then another vase, and then two more, and that’s how Nenny knows that Chuck Baldy is gone. September comes and, with it, school. It’s the same parade of dorks and freaks. When Nenny sees Matty Souza, she thinks, Oh yeah, Matty! because she hasn’t thought about him in months. She still loves him, she supposes, watching him play basketball with the other boys, but she feels different, as if summer has tamped down something explosive and left a stillness in its wake. The fourth-grade nun is Sister Constance, and she seems all right. She’s certainly not as cruel as Timothy (who is, though?), but neither does she shine in the way Mary did. She’s from Poland and says things like “Thanks be to the Lord!” for silly reasons, like finding extra chalk in her desk. The heat has begun to abate, if only a little. Now it is possible to breathe. Now a plaid uniform feels less like a death trap and more like what it is: an itchy old sack. One day Dad says, “There’s someone I want you to meet,” and leads them across the parking lot after school. This day was bound to come. People live their lives, they slip and they fall and then they pick themselves up and live new ones. Even Nenny knows this. Previously she might’ve thought this would be a big deal—Dad holding her hand as he leads them to meet his new girlfriend—but it’s not. The woman is cheerful and easygoing. “Hi, everyone,” she says with a sweet smile, and where Dad met her and when exactly they have time to go out is beside the point. The point is she seems nice and not phony at all, and she doesn’t even flinch when they go to Denny’s and Tiny spills his Coke all over the table. She just says, “Whoops,” and helps clean it up. Her name is Rhonda, and soon she is a regular fixture in their lives. Most nights, it seems, she’s coming over to make casserole or chili or stew from scratch, and stays after dinner to read them stories before they shuffle off to bed. Autumn settles in. The crepe myrtles take on the skeletal look they’ll hold through winter and into spring. Leaves fill the gutters and sidewalks; the sun begins to feel that much farther away. The smog clears, and at night, finally, you can see the stars. Mom’s friend at the hospital is a nurse but also a budding stylist, and she comes over one Saturday with a little bag filled with scissors and combs. Her name is Cheryl. She sets up a chair on the back patio and whips a bib around Mom’s shoulders, just like in a salon, and starts spraying Mom’s hair with a squirt bottle. She must have eyes in the back of her head, buried in her mounds of curls, because she calls, “Come on out here, sugar,” to Nenny, who’s been watching from the window. Nenny goes outside, and Cheryl says, “Don’t be shy. Pull up a chair.” She’s brash and graceful at once. Mom’s got her head tipped forward like a woman in prayer, the way you do when someone trims your neck. Cheryl says, “You wanna be next?” and Nenny shrugs. “We’ll give you some cute little bangs.” And then it’s quiet for a long time, Cheryl hard at work and Mom with her eyes closed, leaves drifting across the pool in the early autumn breeze, and the way Cheryl cuts, gently taking locks of Mom’s hair between her fingers and cutting, unhurried, just so, it’s clear that Mom’s told her everything, Windsor and Gabe and all the rest, things she’s told no one else because who is there to tell? When Cheryl says, “I bet it’ll be nice to have your mama back, huh?” Nenny’s suspicions are confirmed, and her love for this woman is immediate and bright. The next day, Mom grabs her gardening gloves and her straw hat and steps into the yard. It hasn’t been touched in months. All the flowers they planted last year are long dead, disintegrated to near dust, and everything, once again, is covered with weeds. A thick layer of leaves and dead bugs floats in the pool, and the stump that Rick found is still embedded in the hill, like a hunched shoulder poking through the earth. Mom sighs and pulls on her gloves. She goes to the corner where Bubbles found his geode—or anyway his rock—and, through the window, Nenny watches as she digs. It is October and everything is quiet, except for the occasional sound of chimes blowing in the breeze. Every Sunday for the last few months Gramma Sadie has come to get Kat and Charles, and together the three of them go to put flowers on Windsor’s grave. This is a new ritual, maybe because lasting rituals take some time to emerge. Just then Nenny sees Mom sit up and with her fingers lift something out of the dirt, something that even from here you can see is melted and deformed—and there it is, there’s that pot Chester buried in the yard. Two weeks later, there’s a massive earthquake in the northern part of the state, and all of Nenny’s fear comes rushing back. Fear is such a lonely place. It is a place impossible to describe, where the only known, certain thing is that we are all going to die. That night she lies awake, curled beneath the sheets, her mind a fractured thing. But Mom is an angel or a psychic or an empath or something else, something otherworldly, because she knows without words and in the morning says, “Come here,” and pulls Nenny close. She’s at the kitchen table, just as she is every morning, reading the paper in her robe. She hugs Nenny to her side, halfway onto her lap, and opens the paper to the middle. It’s a two-page photo feature of the havoc the earthquake has wrought: entire buildings crushed like cakes, libraries and offices completely trashed, homes reduced to little more than piles of splintered wood. Most incredible and horrifying of all is a bridge that collapsed in the quake, the top tier snapping into pieces and smashing down onto the tier below. Mom does something then that no one else would do, because it would not occur to anyone else: she folds the edges of the paper down over the pictures until there’s only one earthquake photo left. In it, a man—not a cop, not a firefighter, just a man—lies on his stomach at the edge of the collapsed portion of the bridge, his arms outstretched and reaching down. On the level below him, standing atop a half-crushed car, is a woman with her own arms raised, reaching back. If you think for one minute How does that help? Showing pictures like that to a frightened child? and you can’t even see what really matters, what happens between the collapse and the folds, then you’re an idiot anyways and you don’t deserve to know. Out goes the fearful tide. The next day they drive—as a family, in the van—to San Bernardino. They haven’t been to San Bernardino in months, not since Gramma B died. They’re going to the rental house; they call it the Beech Street house because that’s where it is. The Beech Street house is a sort of phantom thing in their lives, a nonentity that exists only once every few months, when the tenants forget to pay rent or Rick goes to fix a sprinkler or repair a fence post. But the renters moved out and now it’s time to “just sell the damn thing and move on.” So on Sunday they pile into the van and go for a drive. It’s a short drive but a dismal one. Orange groves and tract homes give way to rocks and then more rocks, then dirt and freeways and houses that look as though they’ve been punched. “Looks like hell,” Rick says of the neighborhood, and he’s right: broken fences and overflowing garbage bins and junk in all the yards. Everyone is quiet, because here’s the thing: this is more than just a weekend drive. The Beech Street house was the first house that Rick and Windsor and Charles and Kat, all four of them, ever lived in—Charles just a baby, Kat seven or eight years old—an
d everyone knows that, so this is a big deal. As with all big deals around here, they talk about and look at other things but never directly at the thing itself. The Beech Street house is a piece of crap. The front yard, yellow with dead weeds, is strewn with debris like the aftereffects of some war. The paint is peeled and cracked like an old man’s skin, curling from the house as though reaching for something. Rick parks and everyone gets out of the van. Nenny looks up at the sky. Thick, churning clouds like overturned earth roll in a breeze too high to feel. Down here the air is still and nothing moves. The chain-link whines as Rick pushes open the fence, and they file quietly behind him. No one says anything, not even Tiny, who shuffles along holding Mom’s hand. Rick reaches into his pocket, then stops halfway up the walk, tries another pocket, then a third. “Mother of shit,” he says, and they all look at one another in surprise. “What’s the matter?” Mom says, because this is supposed to be ceremonial, this whole thing, even if no one said so, and you really shouldn’t say “Mother of shit” during ceremonial times. “I forgot the goddamn key,” he shouts, and they all stand motionless in the afternoon light. Rick is not the kind of man to forget things, let alone something as important as a key. Rick curses under his breath, and Mom says, “All right,” like Come on, it’s not the end of the world. Charles picks up rocks and starts throwing them one by one, like angry missiles, down into the dust. It’s sort of unclear why they’re still here, locked out, milling about in the weed-blown yard. It seems like what should come next is fairly obvious: pile into the van and fight the whole way home. But then Kat—slowly, as if under a spell—goes up the walkway and puts her face to the dirty little window in the front door. Everyone slowly follows, making their way up the walk. There’s a big picture window in the living room, and though the window is filthy, you can still see inside. The living room is dim and empty, orange carpet the color of mildew stretching from wall to wall. Nenny realizes she’d been expecting something else, strewn diapers or stained walls or something creepy and disturbed, like an animal carcass rotting in a corner, buzzing with flies. But it’s empty and clean. “Mommy, whose house is this?” Tiny whispers, and Mom whispers back, “This is where Kat and Charles used to live.” Nenny can’t help but glance over at Rick. The night they returned from Uncle Max’s, the night Windsor died, was a horrible, lonely night. They came home, and there was Charles in his shell and Kat crying upstairs, and after some time—minutes or hours, it’s impossible to say—Tiny fell asleep on the floor so Mom said they should all go to bed. Nenny doesn’t remember falling asleep, but she does remember waking up, a moment so small it could fit in a real moment’s hand, when everything felt normal, everything felt fine—but then she saw the rise and fall of Kat’s back, the rhythm of her breathing in the dark, and she remembered again, like being slapped, that nothing was normal, nothing was fine at all. The clock said 4 a.m. She got out of bed and wandered down the hall, haltingly, as if in a dream, hoping vaguely that Mom would wake up and hold her on the couch while she brushed her hair—but stopped short on the bottom step. Rick was standing in the kitchen, barefoot and in pajamas, staring out the window and sipping from a mug. Rick doesn’t drink except for wine, partly because he can’t stand the taste and partly, mostly, because his father was a mean and miserable man, a man so consumed by rage and addiction that he’d drink perfume and rubbing alcohol when the booze was gone. But something about the way Rick stood there, his glasses on at 4 a.m., unaware of her presence behind him (though he’d been in Vietnam), methodically raising the cup to his lips, over and over, told Nenny it wasn’t coffee in that mug. A terrible thing is like a room in a house—you go in, you close a door, before you know it you’re there all day—and Rick was as much in that room then as he is now, standing in front of the Beech Street house as if alone, peering through the glass. It occurs to Nenny, peripherally, like someone dropping something small in the far reaches of her brain, that he didn’t actually forget the key—that he knows exactly where it is. Years from now, when Nenny and Charles and the boys are practically grown and Kat has moved out, they’ll be sitting at the dinner table like they do every night when, out of nowhere, Tiny (who by then goes by his real name, not Tiny anymore) asks, “Hey, Rick, you ever kill anyone in Vietnam?” Loudly smacking his food, a false air of casualness to his words. Mom will get a look on her face as though someone has opened and then closed a door. Rick won’t even look up from his plate, will just calmly say, “I shot at people but never had any kills,” sipping then setting down his wine. Some information arrives wholly formed, like a package laid neatly in your lap, and when Rick answers Tiny’s question, a number of things become immediately and immensely clear. The first is that everyone, not just Nenny, has circled and fixated on this for their entire lives, even Mom. The second is that Rick knows this, knows the enormity of it, how some things will keep you up at night—which leads to the third thing, which is that he’s probably lying, telling them what they need to hear so that something can remain intact. Some lies are acts of deceit; others, acts of preservation and love. They drive home from the Beech Street house in silence, and the next day it starts to rain. Great, torrential sheets pour from the sky, silver like a tarnished mirror. Water swirls in churning eddies in the streets, gushes down the sidewalks and off roofs. At school, the classroom smells dank and sweaty, the particular stench of damp children shut indoors. “Cats and dogs,” Dad says when he picks them up, wiping mist from the windshield with the back of his sleeve. In the afternoons, fat, unholy worms wriggle in the wet beside the pool, and Nenny and Boots stand on the balcony under umbrellas, watching Tiny finger-pinch worms and drop them into a jar. “Your brother’s gross,” Boots says, more in admiration than disgust, and Nenny agrees. The new superintendent’s name is Mrs. Landry, and she’s okay. She’s already arranged for someone to clean the pool—they installed a replacement pump, skimmed the surface of leaves and dead flies—but it’s not the same. Before, with Mr. Baldy, they had a purpose, a cause, and now that the pool is clean they don’t have one anymore. The rain keeps falling and whatever you’ve heard, it all applies: the angels are peeing, God is crying, he’s watering his lawn. “In Texas they call this a ‘frog strangler,’” Bubbles says, and who knew he knew such a thing or why he knows it. During recess everyone stands under the eaves. Steve Smoot tips his head back and drinks the water streaming from the roof. “That’s a good way to get diarrhea,” Jackie Monroe notes, and everyone stares at her, because though probably accurate, it’s still a gross thing to say. It’s true that a storm like this would normally send Nenny into a panic, flood her with images of cars careening off the roads, everyone swept away—but strangely, it doesn’t. It’s a rain so strong and full there’s no room to be scared, only quiet with awe. On Tuesday it rains and on Wednesday it rains and on Thursday it’s raining still. Thursday night, Dad decides to make lasagna because Rhonda’s coming over and he aims to impress. Other things too: He doesn’t leave his underwear on the bathroom floor anymore, and every night he makes sure they brush their teeth. In the mornings he folds his sheets and blankets and stores them neatly under the couch, and he has taken to lighting a match after he poops as a courtesy to them all, which is something he never remembered to do before. All proof, one supposes, that love is powerful. Nenny wonders if this is what Dad was like when he met Mom—courteous and attentive and not wandering the land of his own distant thoughts. This dad is easy to love, because through his gestures, however small, it’s like he’s returned from some long trip and you know that he loves you back. Nenny and the boys are sprawled in the living room while Dad remembers how to cook. Bubbles has a notebook in his lap, Tiny’s on his stomach on the floor, his legs triangled behind him, drawing little people with crayons. It’s Fantasy Island on TV, which is a show that nobody likes, so the volume’s low. And anyway, Nenny’s got a new book that Boots lent her. It’s called Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, and it’s nothing like the Baby-Sitters Club. The Baby-Sitters Club is about, well, a bunch of babysi
tters, while this one is about a girl and her family, and also about the size of the world. The news comes on, and Dad says, “Turn it up,” so Bubbles does. “The sun rose this morning on a Germany where everyone can travel at will,” Tom Brokaw says. Tom Brokaw has the grainy voice of a frog, like it stuck halfway when he was clearing his throat. He’s wearing gloves and a thick coat, standing in front of a big crowd of cheering people. Dad comes around the counter. “Turn it up! Turn it up!” he says, and Bubbles says, “I already did,” and Dad says, “Turn it up again!” and Bubbles makes a face like Geez Louise but does. “The sound that you hear and what you’re seeing tonight,” Tom Brokaw says, rather poetically, “not hammers and sickles but hammers and chisels, as young people take down this wall”—he pauses dramatically—“bit by bit.” Dad stands motionless by the couch, his mouth hanging open. He stays like that for a full minute, then says, “That’s incredible. This is incredible.” He’s wearing oven mitts. Nenny and the boys look at one another and kind of shrug. On TV, people are dancing and chanting in the streets, waving around bottles of champagne and things like hammers and other tools. “I’ve got to call Rhonda,” Dad says, looking around wildly for the phone even though it’s always on the wall right there. “Rhonda!” he practically shouts. “They’re tearing down the wall!” Which is a weird thing to phone-yell at your girlfriend. There’s a pause. “The wall,” Dad says. “The Berlin Wall.” There’s another pause while he listens. “Yeah, okay. See you at six.” He listens some more. “Sure, Jell-O is fine. Jell-O’s great, hon,” and hangs up. He comes back looking a little deflated but stands again by the side of the couch. A series of images plays on the screen: soldiers straddling the giant wall, striking it with picks; people foot-boosting one another up and helping each other from falling down; an old newsreel clip shows a woman weeping into a handkerchief while soldiers drag another woman away. “Daddy, what’s a berling wall?” Tiny asks from the floor. Dad doesn’t answer right away, just stands by the couch incredulously shaking his head. “Dad?” Bubbles asks again, and when Dad answers, he says, “It’s been there a really long time,” which is not an answer at all. Who knows what any of it means, but clearly it’s a big deal. Maybe Dad will scrap the lasagna and take them to McDonald’s instead. Nenny thinks of Sister Mary, wonders if she’s also watching the news, wonders if a nun’s house even has a TV. She sees Mary frequently in the halls at school, and when Nenny waves, however sheepishly, Mary always waves back. She watches Mary’s new class line up and wonders if they know yet about the size of the world, or if that comes later, if that’s a second-half-of-the-year kind of thing. On the TV, strangers embrace, tears streaming down their cheeks. Next week Sister Constance’s brother, who lives in West Berlin, will wrap up and box a chunk of discarded wall the size of a fist, and it will travel first by car and then by train and then by air and then likely by train again to arrive, somewhat miraculously, at Sacred Heart, where Sister Constance will stand at the front of the class and try her best not to cry. Now Nenny sits in the living room with Tiny and Bubbles and Dad, hoping secretly that the lasagna will burn, rain trickling outside, a rare euphoria being broadcast on the screen, and thinks about Mary, thinks about God—God as Tom Brokaw with his gravelly voice, God as that woman crying, that soldier with the pickax, or that man, some random guy, just reaching up and grabbing pieces of the wall, using his own bare hands to tear it down.
Every Other Weekend Page 17
