by Billy Coffey
Travis moved his mouth along Jen’s neck. Stephanie Sebolt bent in close to say she wished they’d get a room already when Todd stopped, forming the apex of a triangle with our table and the Shanties’ the remaining points.
His chin dipped as though weighing options never considered until that moment. He pivoted (it was a graceful movement, a girl’s pirouette) and made straight for us.
Todd Foster sat.
He looked a frightened thing that barely took up the space beside Stephanie, staring down at his tray and the fork wrapped inside a thin paper napkin. Not a word fell from his lips. Jen sat so shocked that all she could do was stare. Silence fell. Jeffrey’s mouth went agape. A bit of half-chewed chicken fell out, dappled with ketchup and saliva.
The only one within sight unaware of our guest was Travis, too busy working his tongue from Jen’s neck to her ear. She pushed him away, provoking a “Hey, what’s . . .” that evaporated at the sight of Todd. Every dark emotion Travis kept hidden sprang out all at once, and with such fury it left his eyes narrowed and his cheeks a bright crimson. He managed, “What you doing, Foster?” in a voice so deep it didn’t sound like Travis’s at all.
Todd kept quiet. He freed the fork from his napkin with two trembling hands.
“Hey, man,” Jeffrey said. “Seriously. You can’t be sitting here. That’s your table over there.” He pointed at the long row that made up the cafeteria’s center, where Micky sat staring.
The other Shanties joined, bony and acne-stricken elbows nudging into the sides of those beside them, forming a long line of expressions that were half admiration and half a guilty thankfulness. The Losers may be poor, may have spent their entire years of schooling bullied and mocked, but at least what was about to happen to Todd Foster was not happening to them.
Micky mouthed to me from halfway across the room: Do something.
“Seriously, man,” I said. “You should really go.”
Todd looked up at me, no one else. And in a soft falsetto voice laced with the smallest bit of Virginia drawl, he said, “I can sit where I want.”
Noise at the cafeteria’s other side continued unabated. Trays clanging and voices raised in the chatter of a hundred conversations. Our side, though, had taken on the hushed stillness of a crowd anticipating a fight.
Travis was more than obliged to give them one. He said, “Pick your stuff up and get out of here, Foster. I’m not kidding. Last warning.”
Todd didn’t move. I don’t know that he could have even if he’d wanted to at that point, as scared as he looked.
“That’s it,” Travis said. “This fairy’s taking a ride.”
Principal Taylor’s head turned at the collective gasp that arose. As Travis went to stand, Micky also got up. She walked toward the front and around the tables, putting herself between my father and us.
She said, “Todd, why’n’t you come sit with me today.”
“You heard her,” Travis said. “Get on over there with Michaela.”
Again Todd: “I can sit here if I want.”
Travis sprang. The force of his movement was so sudden and pure it forced Todd to his feet. He was walking at a brisk pace toward Micky with tray in hand, russet hair flapping, when Travis kicked out his shoe and sent him flying. The cafeteria burst into laughter, bringing Principal Taylor our way. He had almost reached us when Micky reached down to Travis’s tray and grabbed a handful of gray meat and browned peaches, shoving it all into Travis’s face. Jen let out a scream.
Laughter turned to a chorus of Oooh as Principal Taylor jerked Micky by the collar of her shirt and herded her toward the steps leading to the hallway and his office. Todd ran, banging open the door to the parking lot with such force that a corner of the glass shattered into a hundred tiny webs, and I laughed, oh how I laughed, because laughing was all I could do. It didn’t matter I’d spent four years at the popular table just because I could play a game better than anyone else. Didn’t even matter the popular table was really no different from the dozens of other wobbly and stained tables that had sat in that lunchroom for years. It was enough to know I had a place to sit. That I fit in.
Travis swore vengeance. The bell rang. Dad came forward with a mop bucket and a roll of towels. I used a napkin to wipe up what I could of what had spilled on our table, then stacked the six trays that remained.
“I’ll get that,” Dad said. “You get on to class.”
“Let me help.”
“No”—not even looking at me—“told you I got it,” he said, and nothing more.
-3-
The only Dullahan I saw at school the rest of that day was Earl, wobbling his way into the school after the last bell, demanding someone tell him where the office was and that whore of a daughter he was cursed with, she done gone and disrupted his afternoon.
-4-
“Was an awful thing,” Dad said at supper. “A hateful thing, and my only comfort is you weren’t there to bear witness to it, Greta.”
Mom looked across the kitchen table to me. Said nothing. Only stared in that way of eyes that had gone soft and lips slackened, as though what she’d heard couldn’t be.
“Watching you with that stupid grin splayed on your face. Know what I thought, Owen?”
He waited for my answer, motionless with a bowl of mashed potatoes in one hand and a serving spoon in the other. “Know what I thought?” he asked again. “I thought, I ain’t never been so sorry to call that boy mine.”
I knew better than to reply with anything other than “Yessir,” which at least got the bowl passed to Mom.
She took it and sighed and spooned her own portion. “Kids these days, so mean and nasty. Isn’t a thing they won’t do or say or try. And Stephanie Sebolt drawn up in it, of all people. Wonder what the reverend will have to say toward that.” The bowl crossed the table to me. Mom held on to it as she voiced what I hoped would be the final thought on the matter. “That poor child. Todd Foster, you say?”
Dad went from being unable to look at me to being unable to take his eyes away from mine, and I couldn’t figure why. It wasn’t me who’d stood up and threatened Todd Foster with a beating unless he crawled back to his own table. Wasn’t me chased Todd out.
“Wasn’t me,” I said. “I told Todd he should go before all that started. I didn’t say it mean.”
“Didn’t say it mean. You still told him to go.”
He stared. I was seventeen, as tall as Dad and twenty pounds heavier, a grown man who by summer’s end would be going off to college, then the minors, then the Bigs. But whenever he looked at me that way I always shrank to a boy no older than six, looking up at a man who possessed unquestioned authority. Mom may have been the rock of our family, but Paul Cross stood as its moral center.
Dad shook his head and stabbed his half a chicken like he meant to kill the bird all over again. Wiping his hands on the napkin settled over his lap, careful not to stain those blue pants. My father had been a proud man once, a pitcher with a golden arm. Now he would be a high school janitor until the day he died. His destiny lay in a dustpan. I had grown to look down upon him as much as up.
He asked me, “Think you better’n him? That boy ain’t worthy of the space you occupy or the air you breathe, Owen?”
“He’s only a boy, Owen,” Mom said, as though that fact was one that none of us had considered. “I pity him.”
Dad’s stare turned to her. “You what?”
Mom blinked. She quit chewing her food, started again. Between movements, she said, “Pity him.”
Dad stood and balled his napkin. “I can’t be here right now,” he said, and turned to leave.
I heard the front door open and shut, the sound of his shoes on the sidewalk. Mom rolled her eyes and shook her head in a noncommittal way, as though saying, Well, there he goes again, looking over her shoulder out the window above the sink to catch Dad’s direction. Maybe go after him.
That was Mom—the family apologist. She was a pretty woman until the cancer ate her away.
Hair fashioned so that it draped over the sides of her face like a picture frame, parted on the left and curled inward to the point of her chin. Brown rather than the coal black Dad’s genes had bestowed upon me, though so light it looked more copper when a high sun lit upon it. Eyes sparkling blue. A mouth quick to part with either a kind word or a smile. I miss her.
“Don’t mind your father,” she said, and began collecting plates. I gathered my own and took it to the sink, happy to know the food I’d left would cause no concern. Mom pulled the cobbler from the oven and set it on the counter to cool. The kitchen smelled of blueberry bushes and peach trees. From the other side of the screened back door came the noise of a cardinal’s call and the sound of a spraying hose, Dad watering the flowers.
“I didn’t do anything to Todd,” I said. “All I did was sit there.”
“Inaction is still action, what your grandma used to say.”
I scraped the plates. Mom started the dishwasher. She asked me, “Was really Michaela did that? Shoved that food in Travis’s face?”
“Every bit of it.”
“She got a fire in her, doesn’t she?”
I had to agree. “Didn’t think she’d ever do something like that, though. Take up for a Shantie.”
“A Shantie’s what she is. Like your daddy’s what he is. He’s a hard man to know, Owen, but he loves his family and does his best to provide us a good life. And you a good future.”
“That don’t give him license.”
“No.” She offered a smile that reminded me of a bright ribbon tied to a broken gift. “But you have to remember your dad had promise before he got hurt. Those years in the mill took most the rest. The little left over . . .” A shrug, a tilt of her head. “He tells me sometimes, you know. The things he hears from kids down at that school. How sometimes they’ll make a mess just to watch your daddy clean it up. The way the teachers talk down to him, even though Paul Cross is about the smartest man I ever knew.” And then this last little bit, slipped as a slender blade into my heart: “Talks, too, of the times you go about ignoring him if your friends are close by.”
“I don’t do that,” I said, though I couldn’t look at her.
“I hope that’s the case. The years haven’t been easy, Owen. Your father and me had our struggles, many of them mighty. But we carved a life out of this place, and it’s a good bit better than the life given to some. And it’s all been for you. Maybe what happened today with Todd cut a little close to the bone. Could be the rejection that boy got was the same your dad feels every day, only turned outward. Maybe he got mad at you because to him, you were casting out someone besides a boy who didn’t belong. Was a man who didn’t belong neither, and never would.”
Half of Dad came into view, one arm and part of a leg. The hose’s nozzle swung in a slow arc from the grass to the far rosebushes set against a shed the size of Micky’s house. The shoulder of that arm looked slumped and tired. Mud streaked the cuff of his pants.
“That ain’t how I meant it. I didn’t even laugh.”
She stood on her toes and placed her hands to my cheeks. Looked at me in that way mothers do, parsing my words. It was as if she knew one of the two things I’d just said was a lie but couldn’t figure which one, whether I was in fact ashamed of my own father or whether I had in fact laughed at Todd Foster’s embarrassment. But then the question in her gaze was gone, replaced by a measure of grace.
“I know that,” she said. “You’re a good boy, Owen. I’m happy for you. You’re about to go off and start a new life. But I confess I don’t quite know how to act sometimes. A mother and wife is all I’ve ever known to be, so now it feels like half of me is gone. Like there’s a hole now. There’ll be one in your daddy too, and I think that bothers him more than he’ll ever say. He’s proud a you. What you’ve become.”
“Sometimes I ain’t so sure what I’ve become, least of all to him.”
The fan twirled a strand of her hair. We stood in silence for but a little while with nothing but the whirring blades and the outside sounds between us, a passing car and the far barking of a dog, the hose at work to loosen the dirt beneath our flowers.
Until finally Mom said, “Why, you are his proof, of course. That’s why he wants nothing more than your love and respect turned back to him. By you he aims to show the world his life has not been a waste.” She held my face as though it were a mirror reflecting back the best parts of herself. “You are your father’s path to redemption, Owen, however unfinished it may lie.”
-5-
Brosius strikes out swinging, bringing a groan from Todd (No, Ethan, I say in my mind, kid’s name is Ethan) that he barely covers. I never saw the pitch Fordyce called, don’t even see Brosius walking back to the dugout with his helmet already in his hands. It’s Micky I’m thinking of, and how I found out later that I hadn’t been the only one held to account for what happened with Todd Foster. How she came to the hill that evening with an Earl-sized welt on the side of her face, red and swollen.
She’d tried in her own limited way to cover it with whatever makeup she had on hand, which looked little more than some lipstick and a bit of rouge. I took one look and vowed to lay Earl Dullahan upon the ground. Only thing kept me from it was Micky saying going down into the Pines wouldn’t matter since Earl was passed out drunk. She possessed a ready answer to counter every point—“Earl won’t ever change” and “He hit Momma some too” and “You doing something will only serve your anger, not my safety.”
All spoken from half a heart through those unlit eyes. I don’t know what scared me more: that Micky had been beat on or that she hadn’t looked to have felt any of it. Some wiser part of me spoke out then with a sureness that shook me, whispering, She’s on a precipice, Owen, that girl’s on the ledge of something and she’s going to jump, she’s going to jump soon—
“—your daddy,” she said.
“What?”
“I said I always thought similar of your daddy. Way he’s pushed you so with baseball. Your momma’s right. You are his redemption, and that will be your burden. Wish Earl’d pushed me similar. He never did. Less you count the time he made me go tumbling down the root cellar when I was a kid.”
“He ever lay a hand to you wasn’t balled to a fist?”
“Earl was never one for affection. I think that’s one reason my momma died. I thought about that. How maybe her heart didn’t swell up as much as it grew brittle from not being handled.”
“You loved her.”
“Weren’t the same.”
We faced east as we were sometimes wont, looking out over the bit of town the hill’s height provided. Side by side, our shoulders touching, and Micky’s bare leg next to mine.
She asked, “You get your tux yet?”
“I’ll get it Saturday. Your dress?”
“Found it at the Goodwill. I tried it on for Earl. He looked at me like I was a Democrat. He always did want a boy.”
“Probably for the best you ain’t. I’d hate to be up here every day with the prettiest boy in town.”
“You’re so stupid,” she said. And in a soft tone meant as a comfort, she added, “It’ll be okay, Owen. Prom. We’ll have fun the best way we can. I just wish we could be going together.”
“Won’t be the same. Won’t be as it should be. Everybody’s asking why I ain’t taking nobody.”
“What you tell them?”
“That there ain’t nobody I want to take. Which is a lie.”
“Lying’s what we do.” She sat there, looking to where the ridges fell into the distance. “I didn’t want to get Todd hurt. Travis woulda lit into him. He wouldn’t have stopped until Todd was half dead, seeing it as some challenge to his manhood or something. And Todd would’ve sat right there and let it happen, if only to prove his own point. I had to do something.”
“What point?”
“That Todd can do what he wants. That just because a where he was born and what he is, it don’t mean he’s something less. But Travis is just
like everybody else in this place. Just like his daddy and Jeffrey’s daddy, like them girls who was with you. Even the preacher’s one. They all the same. All people’s ever gonna see of Todd Foster is he’s a queer from Shantytown. Which is why I always thought I needed him.”
“Todd Foster’s about the last boy in town you’ve need of.”
“You’re wrong there. People’s just lost, Owen. Shantie folk ’specially. It’s like we don’t even understand what living is no more.”
A star streaked across the sky and disappeared over the mountain in a long tail of silent fire. Micky didn’t nudge me. I wished anyway. “I think about all anyone can do is get from one end of it to the other the best way they know.”
Her hand found my leg with a touch so soft it felt like the brush of feathers. The bruised part of Micky’s face turned to mine. She kissed me.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s the very thing. Whole town knows what Todd Foster is. He was like that long before you got here. I remember this one time in kindergarten we had show-and-tell. I brought a snake I caught down at the river by the house. Travis brung a football Bubba give him. Todd, he brought a doll. Like a baby doll. He was always doing stuff like that.”
She faced town again and those few strips of avenues we could see, darkened husks of housetops and the world gone to slumber. Though we shared the space beneath the oak with our bodies so close and the feel of our breath mixing with the air, Micky had never looked so alone.
“It’s a horrible thing I’ll say, Owen, but I got to because it’s true. So you’ll understand. People in this town’ll always call me trash. I’m the drunkard’s daughter, girl of the woman whose heart gave out because those pines took it. But I figure so long as Todd Foster’s in Camden, I can look at him and hold my head some higher. I can pass Todd on some street and think, Least I ain’t as bad off around here as him. That’s why I need him. So long as I’m here, I need Todd Foster to be well and outlive me by a day.”
