“Hey!” Dennis called as he carried the cake onto the deck. “In my next life I want to come back as one of Lisa Harrington’s kids.”
“You already
are
one of her kids!” a woman shouted back, and no one laughed harder than Dennis.
Delores dragged a lawn chair close to Gordon’s under the sweet flowering linden tree. With the cake served and presents opened, the children were absolved of any responsibility to behave like guests. They ran between the yard next door and this one in fitful bursts of Frisbee and kickball and now for the most part were just running and shrieking. The adult voices and laughter came faster and louder. The almost frantic clamor reminded him of the prisoners in the last moments of rec time. He was tired. Just being here had been a strain. With rain threatening, the sky sagged low overhead.
“What a nice party this has been.” Delores sighed, settling into the chair. “See those two women over there? The one in the long blue skirt? She’s Albert’s sister-in-law’s cousin, Mary Bianci. She was two years ahead of us in high school. Apparently things haven’t been going too well this week for poor Albert. Mary said his daughter totaled her very expensive sports car, and then the next day his big beautiful house in Dearborn was broken into.” She shook her head. “So much for the safety of suburbia. You can say what you want about Collerton, but I’ve never been broken into, never once!”
“You live on the second floor, though.”
“So? I have a fire escape. They could get in that way. If they wanted to. Sometimes I even leave that window open on hot nights.”
“You shouldn’t do that,” he said, thinking of Mrs. Jukas.
“Why?”
He squirmed under her scrutiny. She probably thought his warning harkened back to his own crime. “It’s not safe, that’s all.” He broke off a blade of grass and wrapped it around his finger.
“There’s no such thing as safe.” She was looking at him.
“Uncle Gordon!” Annie cried, running up from behind. She leaned over the back of his chair. “Mommy said to ask you if you’re having a good time.”
“Yes, I am. A very good time. Thank you, Annie.”
She swung around the chair arm so that her pert, sweaty face was at his. “I’m supposed to find out if you want anything. Some more cake? Ice cream? Punch?”
“Punch would be nice.”
“Okay! Here you go!” She laughed and drove her fist into his shoulder. “Have some punch!”
“Oh,” he said after a moment. “Some punch. I get it.” He tried to smile.
“I think you hurt him! Poor Uncle Gordon,” Delores called as Annie ran off, giggling. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she? She looks so much like her mother. And Jimmy, God, he reminds me so much of Dennis.” She sighed. “It’s amazing when you think of it. I mean, having a child that’s so much like you and yet they’re their own person. My sister Babbie said with her first baby it was all like such a miracle. But then when the second one came along it hit her, that these were really real people and not just babies she was bringing into this really real world.”
In the corner of the yard, an intense badminton volley continued over a drooping net. Dennis watched with his arm around Lisa, talking to Father Hensile and a man he’d met earlier, an older man leaning on hand braces.
“That’s Ernie,” Delores said. “He owns a company that makes umbrellas. They’re famous for their golf umbrellas.”
Umbrellas,
he thought with a pang.
The poor guy can’t even hold an umbrella.
“They look so happy,” Delores said after a moment.
“Do you think she knows?” Gordon said. There was a rasp of leaves in the quick wind.
“You mean about that night?” She leaned toward him, continuing in the same informative tone. “Probably not that. But she knows Dennis, so she knows. How could she not? He’s always been a ladies’ man.”
He stared at them, his family, his stability and mooring point. Without them he had nothing. No one. Dennis’s hand dangled over Lisa’s shoulder. Her arm was tight around his waist. If Delores was right, he didn’t know which was more upsetting, their easy pretense or the false intimacy.
It changes everything. Cheapens it.
His brother had everything but wanted more. Didn’t he know what could happen? Didn’t he care? One wrong move, a misstep, that’s all. He gripped the chair arms, but he wanted to leave.
“Gordon?” Delores touched his wrist. “What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“You look so . . . so sad. Do you feel all right?”
Dennis and Lisa walked hand in hand toward Lisa’s parents. Annie was sprawled in her grandfather’s lap, head back on his shoulder. Mrs. Harrington gestured, and Dennis leaned close. Whatever she whispered made him suddenly seize Annie as if to run off with her. With all the adults laughing, Annie struggled free and leaped back into her grandfather’s outstretched arms.
“How could he do that? What’s wrong with him?” Gordon said.
“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong with him.” Her hand pressed on his arm. “Some men just . . . well, they need more than others, that’s all.”
“Need more what?”
“They need the respectability and the security that comes with being married, but they have other needs, too. They need someone who understands them, who knows what . . . what those needs are. Someone who . . . someone who doesn’t expect much back.” Her voice faltered. “He’d never leave Lisa, though, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
He watched her try to scrape a ketchup stain from her pant leg with a fingernail thick with fuchsia polish.
She has no good sense, no judgment,
he thought. Her kindness to Jada Fossum now seemed only careless and indiscriminate, an act of giving, meritless because of its easy availability, because she couldn’t say no. Her charity was earthy and promiscuous. She had done it not for the girl’s sake or his, but for her own. In helping others, she was pleasuring herself. It was a way of insinuating herself into people’s lives, feeding off their needs and their loneliness.
Delores drove slowly. She lingered at stop signs, waiting so long after lights turned green that cars had to sound their horns before she moved on.
“Well, thank you,” he said, opening his door when she finally pulled up in front of his house.
“I wonder how the puppy’s doing. I hope Jada’s still giving him the medicine. Dr. Loop said she should use it all up.”
“Well, thanks again.” He managed to get one foot out onto the street.
“Do you know she can barely read?”
“Really? She seems smart enough.”
“I don’t think it’s that. I saw her trying to read the directions on the medicine box. First she held it this close. . . .” She held her palm to her face. “Then out like this. I think the poor thing needs glasses.”
“Maybe she does. Well, anyway—”
“You’d think her mother would do something. I mean, doesn’t she care? There’s something about Jada—she’s got this spark inside, you know, like a fire nobody’s going to put out no matter what happens to her.” Delores almost sounded angry.
“I don’t know,” he said, looking back now. “I’ve seen a lot of fires go out.” Billy Leeman had gotten his head bashed in for nothing more than refusing to talk to his psychotic cellmate. All he had wanted was to be left alone so he could read race-car magazines and write letters to his wife.
“But yours never did, did it?”
“I never had one.”
“Of course you did. You do. It’s how you’ve gotten through everything.”
“No. It wasn’t that way with me. All I did was wait. That’s all.”
She laid her hand over his, and he froze. “You’re a good man, Gordon. A really good man. I hope you know that. You need to know that.”
Jada’s legs ached. She had walked from one end of the city to the other. It was all uphill now, and she was carrying Leonardo. He kept sitting down and she would have to drag him along on the rope to get him going again. This last time he began to howl, so she had to pick him up. She looked at every house, trying to find her uncle’s. She hadn’t been there in a couple of years, not since his adopted baby’s christening party. Bitchy Aunt Sue had accused her of stealing her fourteen-carat-gold kisses-and-hugs chain. Marvella had taken it, and what could Jada do but keep insisting it wasn’t her? So then Aunt Sue pulled her out onto the porch, her beery, garlic voice hissing how they’d wasted a lot of time and money, a whole year of their lives, taking care of her when the state took her away from her mother, and how Uncle Bob was always telling her that underneath it all Jada was a nice kid, but this just proved she was like all the rest of the Fossums, trash from start to finish. Uncle Bob quit on her after that, which hurt, because he was the only relative who’d ever cared what happened to her.
“There it is!” she told Leonardo. The truck in the driveway said BOB’S SEPTIC SERVICE in gold letters on the green tank. The house was a duplex her uncle had converted into a three-family. An ankle-high white wire fence bordered the narrow strip of lawn. Lining both sides of the short front walk were small American flags her mother said he was always taking from people’s graves. She put Leonardo down, then wet her fingers and tried to brush the dog hairs off her black T-shirt before she rang the bell.
Jada had lived with them for a year the first time Social Services took her away. Her mother said she’d never let them have her again because she’d come back “spoiled rotten,” crying if her pants were wet or every time she was told no. It always pleased her to hear that. Not just because it meant her mother cared what happened to her, but because it seemed proof of some value, some genuine worth, about herself. When she was seven, the state took her again, but she had to go to a foster home because her aunt and uncle refused. They said it was too painful to have her sent back to her mother, who just undid all their good work.
“Hi, Uncle Bob!” She grinned as he opened the door. His hair was the same gingery color as hers. Anglo straight, though, not kinky like hers.
“Jada,” he said in a flat voice.
Leonardo barked. Her uncle stepped outside and closed the door. “What’s that?” He pointed down at the dog jumping on his legs.
“My dog. Leonardo. He really likes you!”
“You shouldn’t have brought him here. Tiffany’s allergic to animal dander. Deathly allergic,” he said with a look of horror.
“Oh! I didn’t know that. Who’s Tiffany?”
“My daughter.”
“Oh yeah, that’s right. I forgot.” The fat drooling baby that wasn’t even theirs. “She’s like, what, six or seven now?” It seemed that long since she’d been here.
“Tiffany’s just turned four. Last month, as a matter of fact,” he said with the twinge of a smile.
“I’ll bet she’s really cute, huh?”
“She is. She is, she’s really cute.”
“Hey, you ever need a baby-sitter, I got lots of experience,” she said, grinning.
“How’d you get here?” He looked toward the street.
“I walked. Me and Leonardo. Well,
I
walked. But not him, the spoiled-rotten little thing, he got carried most of the way.”
“You walked? Why? What’s wrong? You’re not in some kind of trouble, are you?”
“No! I’m not in any trouble.” She laughed. “I just need to borrow some money, that’s all, and I was hoping maybe—”
“Why? What’s going on with your mother?”
“Nothing. She’s got some kind of flu thing or something. One of those viruses, I guess you call it, and she’s been—”
“She sent you here to ask me for money?”
“No! No, she doesn’t even know I’m here. I just figured you could help me out. I got this, like, field trip, this thing I gotta go on, and I’m supposed to bring the money in tomorrow. For the tickets. For the bus. The bus tickets.” She swallowed. “It’s gonna cost like . . . fifty dollars,” she said, plunging full-speed ahead. Might as well go for it, because from the look on his face she probably wasn’t going to get anything anyway, so what the hell.
“Where’s the field trip to?”
“The aquarium.” The first place that came to mind. She had missed out on a lot of field trips there over the years.
“Fifty dollars to go a few miles into Boston?”
“No, not that aquarium. The one in New York. New York City.” Jesus Christ, she didn’t even know if there was one there. Probably not, from the red-faced way he was staring down at her now, like something inside getting ready to explode.
“All right, look, Jada. I’m gonna help you, but just this one time. But first you gotta tell me the truth. Who’s the money for, you or your mother?”
“Me! I swear!”
“Because if it’s for her, all you’re doing is helping her kill herself. You know that, right?”
Even her nod felt like betrayal.
“You know how many times your mother’s screwed me? How many times she’s lied and cheated and even stole things from me? Last summer we went to the beach for the weekend. One lousy weekend, and my house gets broken into. And all Sue’s jewelry gone and her little TV in the kitchen. Right away I knew it was her.” He folded his arms. “So tell me, tell me the truth, what do you really need money for?”
“The field trip.” If she said food, he’d know she was alone and he’d call Social Services again.
“You sure?”
“Yeah! I’m sure! I got a book all about it. I’m gonna read it tonight. All about whales, sharks, swordfish, codfish—” She stopped just short of saying
cakes.
“Catfish.”
“Who’s your teacher?”
“Mr. Ansaldo.” She watched his hand slip into his pocket.
“Sam Ansaldo? He’s a client. I just pumped him out last fall. What time’s school start?”
“Seven forty-five.”
“Okay. At seven-thirty I’ll be right there and that way the money’ll be safe. I won’t have to worry about Marvella ending up with it. I’ll pay your teacher myself.” He started to open the door. “See you in the morning!”
“Uncle Bob! It’s not for a field trip.”