Watch Over Me

by Christa Parrish

  He went to Abbi as she folded laundry on the couch, diapers and boxer shorts and panties. It embarrassed him a little, watching her untwist bras from socks and then sling them around her shoulders; the cups dangled at her chest or bulged from the sides of her neck. At home he’d fold Sienna’s and Lacie’s underclothes, but not the older girls’, and certainly not his aunt’s silky thongs and lingerie. He didn’t even like taking them from the dryer, but he would if he had to.

  He looked at his feet, but at Abbi’s tap on his knee, he looked up.

  “Hey, what’s up? You feeling okay?”

  He nodded. She always asked if he felt okay now, and he almost hated to admit he liked it, her concern. He didn’t get it much from anywhere else.

  Since the day of his clot, his relationship with the Patils had shifted. He wasn’t that kid who mows the lawn anymore, but, honestly, he wasn’t quite sure what he had become. He knew, however, he trusted Abbi and the deputy—something else he’d never had.

  I need a favor.

  “As long as it’s legal.”

  Do you have a credit card?

  “Yes, I do.” She dropped her bras on the top of the laundry pile, a nest of straps and hooks.

  I want to buy something on-line.

  “I said legal, remember.”

  A bracelet.

  “A bracelet?”

  Yeah. There’s this girl.

  “A girl?”

  Are you going to repeat everything I write?

  “Sorry,” she said, grinning. “I just . . . Sure. Absolutely. I can order it for you.”

  He followed her to the computer, set on a board across stacked milk crates. She typed in the address he gave her, and he pointed to the center photo, a polished sterling bangle with an awkward bend in it.

  “This one?”

  Matthew nodded.

  “Are you sure? It looks mangled.”

  It’s a Möbius strip.

  “What’s that?”

  He took a sheet of paper from the printer, folded the long edge of the page, scoring the crease with his nail, then ripped the strip over the edge of the tabletop. He gave the paper a half twist and, snagging a piece of transparent tape from the dispenser next to the keyboard, joined the ends together.

  Watch, he wrote, and then drew a star in the center of the tape. He placed her finger on the ink spot, guided it along the surface of the paper until she reached the seam again, but on the side without the star.

  “I’m on the opposite side.”

  There’s only one side. Keep going.

  And she did, dragging her fingertip along the smooth paper until it returned to the star. “That’s kinda cool.”

  Of course it’s cool. It’s math.

  “Math, huh? How romantic.”

  I think so.

  “Does she?”

  We’ll see.

  “Whatever happened to flowers and chocolate? And poetry?”

  I don’t think it works if she has to read it to herself.

  “You do have a point.” And she left it there—no apology. “Does this girl have a name?”

  Ellie.

  “So, when are you and Ellie coming for dinner?”

  He shook his head.

  “You have to. Ben and I need to check her out. How about Friday?”

  Dialysis.

  “Shoot. Right. Saturday, then. Or Tuesday, or Thursday.”

  Saturday.

  She clicked on the bracelet, typed in the payment information. “I’ll send it to your address.”

  He touched her shoulder, shook his head again. Here, please. Someone at the apartment would open it.

  “Okay, here it is,” Abbi said. “I’m happy for you, Matt.”

  Me too.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he had been able to say that.

  Chapter TWENTY-SEVEN

  They came up the driveway together, Matthew and the girl, and Abbi smiled at how they walked, close but not touching, he stumbling to match his strides to her shorter ones. She heard whistling, short bursts of sound between whispery puffs of air, and then a female voice before the knock on the storm door. Her knock, not his, dainty and hesitant. “Come in, you two,” Abbi said. “Ellie, right?”

  The girl held out her freckled hand. “Mrs. Patil, thanks for inviting us.”

  “It’s Abbi. Please. And you’re welcome anytime. I hope you like Indian.”

  “I’ve never had it,” Ellie said, and Matthew shrugged.

  “Something new, then. I made it mild.”

  “Because my darling wife can’t handle anything spicy,” Benjamin said, Silvia against his waist, dangling from his arm. “Not because she was concerned about the two of you. You must be Ellie.”

  See, you’re popular.

  “At least I know you couldn’t have told them that much. I’ve looked in your notepad,” Ellie said.

  Matthew leaned toward her, nudging her with his whole body. She shoved him back, and they both glanced at each other, then away, smiling and blushing. Benjamin laughed. “To be sixteen again.”

  Ellie’s 17.

  “An older woman. I’m impressed.”

  “Leave the boy alone and set the table,” Abbi said. “Matt, he’s joking. Just ignore him.”

  “I’ll hold the baby,” Ellie offered, and she and Matthew sat at the kitchen table while Abbi finished the meal, passing Silvia between them, holding her in the air over their faces and performing to make her smile—blowing raspberries against her bare stomach, speaking in high-pitched voices, and jiggling her until she cooed. Abbi couldn’t help but look on in wonder at how Matthew adored Ellie, how his eyes followed every flick of her braids, each time she crossed her ankles.

  Boys had never looked at her that way. Boys had never looked at her, period—not until she let Travis Harrington stick his hands up her shirt.

  It had been Jessica Bloomquist’s thirteenth birthday party. A boy-girl party, all the hormones shut downstairs in the finished basement, with everyone eating pizza and drinking orange Crush, and wondering when the making out would begin.

  It didn’t take long.

  Jessica lifted a plastic sand bucket from behind the couch and said, “Let’s see who gets the closet first. I’m the birthday girl, so I pick.” She pulled out two scraps of paper, her own name on one, and on the other, the name of the boy she liked. She laughed. “I got my birthday wish, and I haven’t even blown out the candles yet. Who’ll time us? Seven minutes, okay?”

  So she and the kid closed themselves in the dark, and the rest of them pretended to watch television and play pool, listening for any sounds from the closet. Finally someone opened the door, and they came out from between the garment bags and parted like the Red Sea, girls following Jessica to one side, behind the sofa, boys clustering near the mini-refrigerator.

  “He kissed me three times,” Jessica said, covering her face with her hands, peering out between her fingers. “Twice with tongue.”

  Couples went in and out of the closet while Abbi drank too much soda and ate half a bowl of Doritos, and then her turn came. She saw Travis ram his finger down his throat in not-so-mock disgust before he squeezed in beside her.

  He smelled like pepperoni and cologne. She didn’t want to think about what she smelled like, a cold, clammy dampness in the armpits of her silk blouse. She hadn’t put on deodorant because the short sleeves on her blouse were loose and fluttery, and she didn’t want anyone to see white streaks of Secret if she lifted her arms.

  “Sorry you got stuck with me,” she said, flattening herself against the wall to find space that didn’t exist. Travis did the same, pushing several garment bags on the floor.

  “I guess we’d better do at least something,” Travis said.

  “Okay.” But she didn’t mean it. She couldn’t remember a time when her mind churned faster, flying from one thought to the next, a car radio scanning for the perfect mood music. And she wanted to cry, her throat tightening like the previous year when she tripped and
fell while going up onstage for her art award during the sixth grade moving-up day, and everyone saw her underpants. Including Travis.

  She didn’t want her first kiss to be with Hairy Harrington, his pale legs carpeted in super-long strands of straight, black fur, and who threw rounds of bologna up into the air during lunchtime, catching them on his face with a splat before eating them.

  Walk out, walk out, she thought, but his open mouth clamped over hers, like a suckerfish.

  She kept her eyes open, waiting for the kiss to be done, telling herself, This isn’t so bad, as Travis’s hard nub of a tongue speared her own. But he kept going, panting through his nose, and Abbi didn’t have the courage to push him away. He’d tell the whole school she was a prude.

  And then his left hand was under her shirt and on her breast.

  She’d been aware of it hopping around, from her waist, to her bare lower back, and then flat against her ribs. She’d hoped the time would end before it landed anywhere she didn’t want it to, but there it was, a warm lump under her shirt, unmoving, and the kissing stopped, as if Travis was shocked he’d made it so far and waited for her to reach up and shove his hand away.

  “I knew you were cool,” he said, and dove back into her mouth, his fingers kneading and twisting first above her bra and then, because she still did nothing, beneath it. Seven minutes can’t last forever, and finally the light poured in. She turned her back to the door and managed, somehow, to pull down her shirt and wipe the fat ring of spit off her face before joining the girls on the couch.

  “So?” Jessica asked.

  “He kissed me with tongue, too.”

  After that night, Abbi found herself with a reputation. She liked the attention more than she hated it, and she did hate it; no girl starts junior high thinking she’d be that girl. But she finally had an identity outside her weight—which had been all those around her ever noticed—and she took it, even if it meant a quick feel in a dark closet.

  Soon, though, the groping progressed. It had to, if she wanted to keep her value. She watched her life slip out of control and had no idea how to stop it, because how could she start saying no when all along she’d been saying yes?

  At twenty, after years of pain and irregular bleeding, she finally went for an exam. The doctor diagnosed pelvic inflammatory disease caused by untreated chlamydia, telling her, from the extensive scarring in her fallopian tubes, it wasn’t her first episode. And then he told her she would probably never be able to get pregnant. She’d been a Christian for a year then, abstinent for two, and just figured, This is what I get for what I did. She never meant for Benjamin to suffer along with her.

  After dinner they played Scrabble, Abbi managing to scrounge together only one five-letter word while the others stacked and strategized their way to a three-way rout, Benjamin coming out on top, Ellie and Matthew tying for second. She scored nearly seventy points less than them, and declared herself an artist, not a wordsmith.

  “How many points for spelling sore loser?” Benjamin asked.

  “Ha, ha,” Abbi said. “Winner gets to change Silvia.”

  I’ll do it.

  “The menfolk sticking together. I like,” Benjamin said. “But no, I will take care of diaper duty.”

  “Mrs. Patil, can I call my mom?” Ellie asked. “She’s going to come get us.”

  “Yes, of course. But please call me Abbi.”

  “You’re making her feel old,” Benjamin said.

  This was her Benjamin, talkative and witty. This was the man she fell in love with, and she hadn’t realized how much she missed it until now. She watched him pin the diaper on Silvia, knowing it would leak if she didn’t fix it. And she would, in the bathroom, quickly, so he didn’t find out. Matthew saw it, too. He flicked his head toward Benjamin with an amused half grin, and Abbi touched her finger to her lips. The boy smiled wider, opened his pad. It won’t be my lap she’s peeing on.

  “There. Done,” Benjamin said. “A work of art. Like origami.”

  Matthew snorted.

  “Origami?” Abbi said, handing Benjamin a bottle.

  “That’s right.”

  “I think you’d better stick with literary analogies.”

  “There’s no way I can compare a diaper to great literature. That’s why I chose art. Most of it is . . . Well, most of it is what comes in diapers.”

  “I can name a few stinkers you made me read. Like The Brothers Karamazov.”

  “You wound me.”

  Abbi laughed. “Not as much as that book did me.”

  Now, children. Play nice.

  “Oh, really,” Benjamin said, standing, passing the baby to Abbi. He pinned Matthew’s shoulders against his side, beneath his arm, and rubbed his knuckles into the top of the boy’s head.

  Ellie returned from calling her mother and stared at them all. “Did I miss something?”

  “Nothing at all,” Benjamin said, releasing Matthew. “Except your boyfriend, being a smart-mouth.”

  “He doesn’t know how to be anything but smart,” Ellie said.

  “No kidding,” Benjamin said.

  After Matthew and Ellie left, Abbi cleaned the kitchen, and Benjamin helped, rinsing the plates before loading them in the dishwasher, scrubbing the burner plates of the stove where the rice water boiled over and cooked on. She said, “I like her. Ellie, I mean.”

  “So, you approve?” Benjamin threw the sponge into the sink.

  “I do.”

  “I’m sure Matt will be relieved.”

  “I think he was happy to show her off a little.”

  “Well, I doubt he gets to do that at home,” Benjamin said.

  “He really has it bad for her. I think it’s adorable.”

  “I have it bad. Am I adorable?”

  “I don’t know. Are you?”

  “I certainly think so.”

  “Well, then, maybe you are. Let me check.” She kissed him. “You taste pretty adorable.”

  “It’s from the dahi bhaat. Which was very, very good, though I have the sinking suspicion you used soy yogurt.”

  “You know I did,” she said, laughing.

  “So, you going to bed now?”

  “I have a little sewing I wanted to get done, and then I’ll be up.”

  “How long?”

  Abbi shrugged. “Not too long.”

  “How long is not too long?”

  “Why? Do you have something in mind?”

  “No,” Benjamin said, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling and batting his lashes.

  “You’re terrible. I promise I won’t be long.”

  He sighed. “Apparently, I’m not adorable enough.”

  She gave him a little shove down the hallway, and said, “Don’t forget Silvia,” and Benjamin hoisted her to his shoulder with another sigh. “Ew, she’s wet through. How come she never does that for you?”

  “Because I know how to fold a diaper.” She laughed again. “Give her here.”

  “No, no, no. I’ll get her in a quick bath, and by the time I’m done, I expect you to be upstairs. In bed. Preferably naked.”

  Abbi kissed him again. “You expect it, huh?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Okay.”

  Benjamin craned his neck backward, raised his eyebrows. “What, no argument?”

  “I’m tired of arguing,” she said.

  “Good,” he said, smoothing her hair behind her ear. “Me, too.”

  Chapter TWENTY-EIGHT

  Heather had found a new man—Walter. They met at the dry cleaner. He drove a semi and had a couple of boys who lived with an ex-wife in Sioux Falls. He saw them when he passed through on a job. Matthew didn’t like or dislike him. He couldn’t say he’d liked or disliked many of Heather’s boyfriends. They usually weren’t around long enough.

  Heather thought this one would keep; he could tell. She hoped he would, at least. She invited him to dinner on Saturday and made the little girls take baths, and the older girls dress appropriately. To his aunt,
that meant Skye wasn’t clad head-to-toe in black, or in sweat-pants, and Jaylyn covered her bikini with shorts and a T-shirt.

  She didn’t want competition.

  Walter brought flowers and wore a tie, and he took his shoes off at the front door. Heather dripped all over him, picking lint off his shoulder, tracing the tattoo on the back of his hand—any excuse to touch him.

  “Call me Whip,” he said, when Matthew shook his hand.

  “He’s deaf,” Jaylyn said. “He can’t call you anything.”

  “Shut up, Lynnie,” Lacie said.

  “Don’t tell me to shut up, you little—”

  “Both of you shut up,” Heather said, and then sighed with embarrassment. “Girls. Try living with four of them.”

  Walter, standing behind Matthew, squeezed his shoulder and planted a little pat on the upper arm. Lacie gave an exaggerated five-year-old frown, all eyebrows and lips, and flapped her arms in exasperation. “You gotta look at him if you’re gonna talk to him. Never mind, I’ll do it. He said, ‘I bet this one’ ”—she pointed to herself—“ ‘never gives you any trouble.’ ”

  Matthew ruffled Lacie’s hair, and they all sat to eat. Heather had covered the table with a beige cloth. She wore a lime green half apron, ruffled around her waist, and served spoonfuls of Potato Buds and tough strips of cheap flank steak. And frozen broccoli boiled until near disintegration. They didn’t eat on paper plates, however, and Matthew knew he’d end up washing the dishes, even though it was Jaylyn’s job.

  She’d leave them piled on the counter until they stunk.

  They all talked too much, vying for attention, and Matthew couldn’t keep up with all the threads of conversation. He closed his eyes, disappearing, alone in his head. He was invisible, hidden from the world. And he stayed that way, jaw in his palm, until someone knocked his elbow out from beneath his chin. Skye. “Come on,” she said. “It’s that time again.”