Tom and Rhonda have advanced in the line and are now near me, standing under one of the ceiling fans. I give a little wave to Rhonda and smile, and she arches her eyebrows at me. Just then Tom grabs her up for a balance and swing, all those feet stomping in unison, and she looks back at me as Tom begins to pivot on his big shoe. She looks down at her own feet, still unsure, as Tom holds her waist and lifts her arm, and her pivot foot, as if trying to find its place by itself, slides fully in between Tom's legs. I watch this, and it seems like a magic trick waiting to happen, that in the next half second as his leg swings back around, it will meet her shin and somehow pass right through it, like a scarf through a ring. Instead their feet tangle, Rhonda cries out, and Tom pitches forward chest first onto the floor. He lands with all his weight on his chin and sternum, the sound like a bowling ball hitting the floor. Rhonda's hands fly up to her mouth and Tom's face freezes into its wide smile, and already he is protesting that he's fine, he's okay, while this chorus of noise rises up over the string sounds. Tom's feet drum against the wooden floor, trying to find traction, his hands trapped under him. The line stops, people bumping into one another, craning their necks to see the trouble. Rhonda looks over at me, and when she does I realize I'm doing nothing but sitting here, not jumping up to help. I shake my head and look at her, feeling once again the helplessness which seems to have taken root in me. I start to get up, then two of the men from the line are there picking Tom up by his arms, patting his back. He smiles, shaking his head, and I hear him say that he thought it was part of the dance. Everyone laughs big over this, let off the hook, relieved. Rhonda keeps dancing with him, but even from here I can see how shaken she is, her lips a thin white line.
When they finish I watch her smile as he thanks her, bowing to her a little. She rushes over to me, her eyes already starting to rim up.
“Let's please go,” she says.
“It wasn't your fault,” I tell her.
“No, it never is. Everything just crashes down all around me.”
In the dark of the parking lot I hear the next song starting up, the sound of it muffled, made brittle by the cold.
The next few days we don't say much. There is no more talk of upcoming dances. Rhonda spends more time looking through the back window, past the tree with the split trunk, out into nothing. She doesn't even seem to see the tree anymore. She cancels our next appointment with Dr. Goodwin, and silence settles over our house the way it did just after Sarah died. Wednesday would have been her second birthday, so, as planned, we head out to Greenview to visit her gravesite. We have stopped bringing flowers, saying it is because they are always stolen. What we don't say is that it just seems so useless, the emptiest of gestures.
At Greenview, a fast-food paper cup sits on the ground beside Sarah's brass marker. Nearby are the leftovers from a campfire some kids have lit, sections of charred logs, blackened Coke cans and beer bottles. Down the hill below us, two boys are bundled up in denim jackets, fishing out of the small pond. We stand there a while, reading the words that seem so old by now.
“I don't know what to say anymore,” Rhonda says.
I shrug. “I don't think there is anything. There is no
thing
to say.”
She slips her fingers into mine. “It stops seeming real after a time, I think. I keep telling myself I shouldn't let that happen, let it become unreal. It's the easy way out.”
“Well, but it's not real,” I say. I kick over the cup, and the leavings of a milkshake pour out. “
That's
more real. A milkshake. You can understand a milkshake, get your brain around it.”
She nods. “When that man fell, I thought for a moment I'd killed him.”
“He fell because his legs are screwed up. They always have been, I bet. At least he knew what it meant when he fell, why it happens.”
“You don't know that, Curt. He might cry every night of his life. He might put his fist through walls.”
“He might. I'd even say he should. But it does no good, for him or us. There's no proper response. Hell, there is no response, proper or not. I don't have one, do you?”
She shakes her head.
“How about you?” I shout across the lawn. “You have one?” The kids look up from their fishing and then away from us. The wind picks up, our breath coming in white mists.
“Why don't you come with me to work tonight,” I say. I take her hand.
“You never ask me.”
“Well, I am now. It's a party. Come be with me.”
She nods. “Okay.”
We stand for a while longer before we go. I leave the milkshake cup where it is.
That night at Kmart, Rhonda right away starts in talking with Lisa, feeling her distended stomach, asking her about breastfeeding and epidurals. It's like she wants to meet this head on, these moments I only want to avoid. With everyone pitching in we finish the floors by midnight, and then the boys and their wives and girlfriends, so practiced by now, start the music and the beer and the snacks all flowing through the store. We sit in the snack bar and drink beer, careful not to spill on our clean floors. Rhonda sits up close to me, the way all the girlfriends do, as if they can't get enough of being close. A couple times I see Rhonda staring at the swelling in the front of Lisa's dress, and I know she is thinking about wanting to try again. The thought of it seems impossible to me, and for a minute I'm afraidâafraid that Rhonda is moving on, getting past this without me.
After everyone is nicely buzzed, Wilson suggests a game of hide-and-seek, while some of the others start riding bikes around the store. I find a public radio station playing Irish music, and I try to pull Rhonda out onto the floor, to show off the moves we've learned. She resists.
“C'mon, Curt,” everyone shouts. “Hide-and-seek.”
I look at Rhonda and shrug, then go to the breaker panel in the stockroom and snap off the lights. I leave the power on to the appliance department, so that out in the store the only light is the faint blue glow of the TV sets. The Irish music echoes across the store while everybody runs off to hide.
“Hey, you're it, Curt,” Carlos shouts back at me. Rhonda puts her arm around me.
“I'll be it with you,” she says.
“I'm no good at this,” I shout across the store. “Give me a hint.”
All is quiet, except for the fiddles and flutes of the music playing, a faint static hiss. The store in the dark seems huge and empty. Here and there I hear the suppressed laughs of Lisa or Tammy, one of them out there in the dim aisles. Soon, a bike horn honks, echoing across from the sporting goods department.
“There's your hint,” Wilson shouts, and everyone laughs. Soon the others pick up the joke, and we hear the electronic
beep
of a talking book from the toy department, a rubber duck squeak from infants, the bike horn again, louder and faster this time. Rattles shake, pop guns pop, a bell rings, a toy piano, a Talking Elmoâ¦all these noises, all at once, like, I think, the ghosts of children, playing invisibly through the empty store. Then I am holding Rhonda as if to crush her.
“We don't have to look,” she says. “Baby, we don't have to.” She turns me a little, in time with the music, pushing my hands into place.
“Come on, dance with me,” she says. “Balance and swing. We need the practice.” The music is a fast reel, and I pick up the pace of it, twirling her faster and faster in the dark, pivoting on my foot. I try to think of all that Phil told us, all his empty cheer. I try to put my weight into the spinning of it, the way he showed us, closing my eyes and leaning back, feeling Rhonda do the same. The sounds of the bike horns and bells and rattles and toys grow louder; they are shouting to us, impatient for us to come find them.
“Keep going,” Rhonda says. “Give me your weight. Go ahead. Give it.”
We're cruising down
Dickson Street in the ragged vinyl buckets of my Pinto, and Sugar is chattering around a mouthful of peaches, telling me I'd better back up, he has just spotted a beret. I keep driving.
“Reed, you
have
to stop,” he says. “Think of Bobby Seale, Sergeant Barry Sadler. Hey, Pablo
Picasso
, man.” He tosses his fruit cup out the window, steals a Camel off the dash. “You saw it, right?” he says. I nod, sigh, pull over, and brake. Already he is hovering at low-middle on my happy-with-him gauge because he has again made us late picking up Lyndsey at the Hen House, and the back wheels of my Pinto are scraping from the weight of the acetylene tanks he buys to make more of his large, homely sculptures. His words, not mineâhe likes to say he is of the large-homely school. He welds the sculptures without ceasing, finishes one and starts the next, lets them rust away in the basement, in the attic, scattered around the yard.
So we're late and I'm torn because a feed cap is one thing, but this one really is a French beret, dark blue and new looking, which you have to admit is not something you see on the street every damn day. So I back up, wait for traffic to thin. We sit while the radio bounces out an old Donna Summer tune, then a commercial for the Hairport. The road empties and I throttle up again, hear the shush of wind and pavement as Sugar swings open the door, leans out, and just beyond his knees the sidewalk blurs past and he is yelling, “A little left, Reed, a little left,” then reaches and snags the beret, knuckles an inch from the asphalt. Dirt and styrofoam whip around the floorboards. I ease back into traffic.
“Man, we nailed that sonofabitch,” he says, slams the door, pries gum from the beret, and all I can see is Lyndsey and the several ways she gets irritated, twirling her hair, shaking her wrist so her watch slides down, chewing her lip. She is all about promptness. She expects things to be on time. Sugar slaps dust from the beret, tries it on. He tilts the rearview to check himself. Except for underwear, he never washes the clothes he finds before he wears them, and thank God underwear is a rarity. Mostly it is shoes, hats, T-shirts, the odd pair of pants. His latest T-shirt, minus a sleeve, advertises the Page High Girls' Field Hockey Team. The back says, GIRLS KICK BUTT! He found it along Route 36, on the way home from the parts yard. He won't drive because of his logging leg (he calls it), which has hobbled him going on twelve years now. I don't mind, so Lyndsey minds for both of us, but what she would never let herself admit is that it was truly a righteous grab, that I never let the Pinto dip under ten mph, that to someone watching we looked better than any rodeo trick rider, better than Tex Ritter or Monty Hale hauling a woman into the saddle. Lyndsey doesn't know these names. None of the movies she likes feature horses or gunplay.
I check my watch. “We missed Lyndsey,” I say. “She's home by now and way pissed.”
He fans his smoke out the window. “Hey, really, it's my bad, and I'll tell her that.”
“I think she knows that, Sugar,” I tell him. He nods, adjusts his beret. It covers the bald spot in his graying red hair.
“You need to marry that woman,” he says. “All signs indicate that this is your last chance. And she's a good one, Reed, so don't blow it.”
“I know,” I say. The back wheels scrape. “I'm trying not to.”
What I don't say is that
he
is the biggest chance that I will blow it. And you can't blame Lyndsey, can you? Sugar (his last name, his only name) and I are thirty-five, the both of us, Siamese twins joined at high school vandalism. Lyndsey is twenty-three, and I remember what that felt like, how you hit the exit door of state college and the ink on your diploma is still moist and you feel like you can step along the next forty-some years without the least stumble if only you are bright enough to avoid any deep woods and keep to the bread crumb trail that runs from your dorm room to the nursing home, about eight feet away. A few years will show you that the ones who tossed those crumbs ahead of you are only parents, bosses, teachersâall manner of fallible fuckups. But at twenty-three you don't know that yet. There's your generation gap, in ten words or less. Not the Lilith Fair or websites or nose piercings or sexual stamina or hair loss. Only that chasm in understanding. What else you don't know at twenty-three is that if you hurl yourself down that path, along the way all you will ever find is what everybody else has found before you, all you will see is a tree stump in a glass case, the rings labeled year by year.
At home Lyndsey is shoving chairs and a coffee table around the room, rearranging the house that Sugar's parents gave him when they retired to Puerto Rico. Last month she repainted everything. The house is out away from town down a dirt road, which is a good thing given the pipe bombs, but lately Lyndsey has been showing me photos of split levels and two-car garages in the weekly real-estate circular. Cul-de-sacs, planned communities, etc. She would like to have neighbors, bushes, fluoride in the water, backyard barbecuesâall the normalcy she missed out on growing up. She shops for houses on the Internet.
Lyndsey has put the dog out in the yard, tethered to the clothesline, and I watch through the window while Sugar unloads his acetylene tanks and rolls on the grass with the dog in the cold and walks around looking at his latest sculpture, which he is making from tractor parts and the soup cans he blows into shards. He likes to blow things apart, then weld them back together, and this makes in those sculptures a kind of tension I like, even though I do not much care for midnight blasts and the balls of flame he sends into the treetops. The dog is a bloodhound named Ernest, who Sugar found and named (drunk, he will try to explain this) after
The Importance of Being Earnest
, saying that he didn't think Oscar Wilde would mind the borrowing or the misspelling, and that anyway Mr. Wilde shouldn't have taken the title as it would have been, with the altered spelling, perfect for Ernest Hemingway's autobiography, though I may be confusing the storyâbut somehow out of it all he managed to name a dog. He used to have a goldfish named Wuthering Heights, and a mynah bird named Absalom, Absalom.