“Hey, hey! The Jesus boy,” Mr. Jay roared, his heavy accent not too different from Portuguese. “Or maybe St. Superboy.” I placed a bottle of soda on the uneven counter and handed Mr. Jay a dollar bill. He gave me my change in pennies, seventy-five of them pushed across the counter, one by one, with his pointing finger. He wasn’t even counting, just wanted me in the store as long as it took him to mumble a prayer under his breath. Where the hell was I going to get my Pepsi now? I looked out the window and was
distracted by Peter ambling around the corner, his bundle buggy and red scarf trailing behind.
The minute I left the store, I turned up Palmerston, Pepsi bottle in hand. I scanned the rows of houses, looking for the flash of Peter’s red scarf. When I was on my throne, my father kept our garage door open. Peter passed by once. I saw him clearly above the heads of everyone crammed in the garage, and I desperately wanted to be stuffed in his bundle buggy, carted away from them all. But Peter simply looked ahead and kept walking. Since then he had been showing up in my nightmares, moving toward me, his scarf flapping in the wind. Seeing him, even in my nightmares, made me feel safe: he was unchanged—someone I recognized. The men with no faces were still chasing me, but they would disappear the minute Peter reached me and his face eclipsed the sun, his tumour gone.
I ran a bit, looking over the hoods of parked cars, across the yards of the Chinese neighbours with their bean poles and flapping plastic bags all set up in their front gardens. But Peter had vanished.
When I got home, Terri was standing at the kitchen table, carefully wrapping a small block of cheese. She placed it in a bag and held it out to me. “Go ahead,” she said. “There’s some stew and bread in there for your friends.” At first I wasn’t sure if I should reach for it. Maybe it was some kind of trap. “I’ve seen you from the window sneaking out food after school.” With one hand tucked in my pockets I played with the bulge of pennies Mr. Jay had given me. She dropped the bag on the table, then swiped my Pepsi from my hand and took a long swig. “You’d better take it over before Mom gets home.” Terri’s eyes got wide. “Think of the baby.”
Edite knew where Agnes was staying. It pissed me off that she would snitch us out to Terri. But what if Edite hadn’t said anything? What if Terri had figured it all out herself? If she had, it meant others would too. And James didn’t want anyone to find out.
“Suit yourself,” she said.
“Are you going to say anything? I mean, we’re taking care of Agnes. Her parents may come back and punish her for ratting—”
“No, I won’t tell. Agnes has enough on her plate. She’s probably better off now that she’s been abandoned. Senhora Gloria’s a piece of shit for doing that. And that perv for a husband is an asshole. I just can’t figure out what a guy like James is thinking, taking Agnes in. But then again I don’t get what he’s doing with a bunch of kids like you.”
I didn’t have an answer for her. I needed to go, deliver the food and warn James that Terri had figured it out. Usually I left the food in the backyard behind the garbage can, where James would find it. This time I’d risk delivering it in person, before my parents got home.
“Hey!”
“What?” I hugged the bag with both arms.
“Be careful,” she said.
Only when I had made my way through our backyard and into the laneway did I allow myself to breathe.
It was too early for the worshippers to start gathering. Some people had left flowers and prayer candles at our garage door, the same kind we’d light at my grandmother’s headstone at the cemetery. Some were still lit.
Pressing my ear to the metal door of James’s garage gave
nothing away. In the month since school had started, all the promised fun had vanished. When we were there James asked us to watch our language. He seemed to think Agnes was delicate.
The world can be cruel
, he said. Ricky had given James a large flannel sheet with cowboys and Indians going at each other. James had hung the sheet up along the fold of the peaked roof to create a floating wall. Agnes slept on one side. Manny told me he had found a cot mattress in the Patch, folded up like a jelly roll cake. He hoisted it up through the loft opening, all by himself. Manny knew which day to pick up the clothes and sheets, all crumpled and packed in a garbage bag next to the shiny blue trunk. Ricky was in charge of delivering James’s rent money to Red on the first of the month. So far he’d only had to do that once. Ricky didn’t make coffee any longer—the smell bothered Agnes—but I caught him once using Lemon Pledge around the garage, even though James just had a couple of workbenches, a scarred table, and a broken rocking chair Manny had salvaged from the laneway. When he thought we weren’t looking, Ricky would drop money into the crock James kept on a shelf. Manny kept adding to the pot, not so secretly too, earnings from the bikes he stole then sold. James had shown Manny how to sand down the serial numbers with a file. He’d told Manny to spray-paint the bike frames—
You’ll get more for them
—but that had stopped now, since the fumes weren’t good for Agnes or the baby. I dropped the coins my father let me keep into the crock too. I made sure Manny and Ricky saw me do it, which wasn’t the way I was taught; when the church collection basket came my way, my mother told me it wasn’t nice to show people how much I was giving.
The handful of times I saw James, I’d ask him if there was anything more I could do. James told me I
was
doing enough, bringing food for him and Agnes. Once, he was in such a good mood he caught me by the waist near the Patch and lifted me into the air. “You got God on your side,” he chuckled. “I can’t take you away from that.” He let me slide down his body till my toes touched the gravel. “But anything you need, just ask, man.” My waist burned where his hands had grabbed me.
It started to rain. Drops were coming down hard, ringing across the roof and against the garage door like bullets. I looked over my shoulder before I lifted the door. I ducked underneath and closed the door behind me. I could barely make out Streisand’s voice cooing her “Love Theme.” I wasn’t quite sure where it was coming from. The garage smelled of warm wood and socks.
“Did you forget something?” Agnes’s uncertain voice spilled from the loft.
“It’s me,” I said. “Just brought some food over.”
“James isn’t here. He went to pick up some milk. He likes to warm it for me.”
She came down the ladder wearing her slippers. Her hair was short and uneven, and her belly had changed, it bumped out in front of her from nowhere, it seemed.
“I haven’t seen you come down in a while,” I said.
“You haven’t been around a lot.” Agnes reached for some dishes and began to set the table. “I’m not sleeping very well. James is out most of the night. When it gets dark I go to my old house. I still have this.” Agnes reached into her sweater and showed me her house key from around her neck. “I pick up small things. Things we could use but that won’t be noticed if they’re missing.”
Agnes had brought her touches to the garage: a doily runner she draped over the table, frilly tea towels dangling from some nails above the water pail where we washed dishes, and a sewing machine sitting on the floor next to a bolt of fabric.
“I thought I’d sew a few things,” she said, patting down the apron she had wrapped around her belly. “I don’t want James spending any more money on me.”
I nodded. She pulled out a chair and opened her hand to suggest I sit. Agnes was playing house, and she wanted me to play the game with her.
“Okay. Just a little after-school snack,” I said in that
aw, shucks
tone that made me sound like a kid and that I hated. I thought of all the times I had wanted to be alone with Agnes, but this wasn’t the way I had imagined it. I thought one day I’d be tall and she’d look at me differently, the way I had always looked at her. I fantasized that she’d run to me, her arms out wide, and I’d be able to lift her in the air and twirl her a bit and as she slipped against me her T-shirt would rise up. I dreamed she’d then take my hand and tuck it under her T-shirt, guide my hand up to her breast, where it would rest, my finger allowed to rub her nipple. I’d usually wake up at this point, drenched with sweat. I’d lie in bed thinking about the word
tit
and how that was the root word of
titillating
, or thinking of the word
areola
, which was the proper word for the whole nipple. Anything to get me back into that dream.
I watched Agnes’s fingers untie the plastic bag. She removed the bread and cheese and lifted the Tupperware bowl onto the table. She unsealed the corner of the lid, closed her eyes, and breathed in the smell of beef stew. “It’s still hot,” she said.
“How come James is gone so much?”
She shrugged. “I don’t ask.”
“Don’t you wanna know? Where he goes at night or what his plans are?”
Agnes ladled a bit of the stew into my bowl. “I don’t think it’s important. I just figure he sees us like a family. He’s never had a real family.”
The garage door lifted. Agnes flinched. Manny and Ricky ducked underneath the door. They were both soaked. With his foot, Ricky lowered the garage door behind them.
“What’s for dinner?” Manny asked.
Agnes went to the shelf above the hot plate and brought down two more bowls. “Dry yourselves off.” Manny grabbed a chunk of bread. I caught his wrist, squeezed hard. He dropped the bread onto the table.
“It’s okay, Antonio,” Agnes said. “There’s enough for all of us.”
“Is she kicking yet?” Ricky asked.
Agnes put her hand on her belly and blew a long bang off her face.
“You know the baby’s a girl?” I asked.
“For sure,” Ricky whispered.
Manny had sat in the rocking chair, adjusted the handle, kicked up his heels to the wall before gently rocking. “When is
it
coming?” Manny asked.
“February, late Feb—”
“You think it’ll be normal?” Manny interrupted.
The way Agnes looked at him made it clear that she didn’t need James to protect her.
I’d be lying if I hadn’t wondered the same thing. Manny said the best we could hope for was a baby born cross-eyed or
retarded or a hemophiliac, which was really bad because if it got cut or bruised it would bleed to death. I knew Senhor Batista was her stepfather, so there was no chance they were mixing blood. But when I thought of him mounting her—the hole in his throat wheezing as his breath misted over her face—I couldn’t help but think of the crazy stories my grandmother told me about back home: Senhora Xica, who had been warned not to kill a chicken while pregnant, she gave birth to a baby that was half-human, half-chicken. It fluttered and banged its head under the kitchen table for an hour after it was born, until it died from exhaustion, my grandmother had told me with tears in her eyes. Or the story of another pregnant lady, who picked up a cat, then her baby was born completely covered in fur. Or another, who refused to listen to all the women in the village about wearing necklaces while pregnant, only to give birth to a stillborn, its umbilical cord tied neatly around its neck.
I marched over toward Manny, thought if I was close enough and needed to I could kick him in the teeth.
Just then James lifted the garage door. Manny stopped rocking. The hollows around James’s eyes were grey and soft. He placed a jug of milk on the table and lightly ran his hand across Agnes’s belly. She let her shoulders roll back.
“Manny, do something useful—fix that rocking chair for Agnes.”
Agnes climbed up the ladder to the loft, her slippers slapping against her heels.
Manny hesitated for only a second before going to the workbench and pulling the toolbox from underneath. He lit a cigarette and put it in his mouth, then got right down to work, screwing in loose spindles.
James yanked the lit cigarette from Manny’s mouth and crumpled it in his bare hand. The smoke escaped between his clenched fingers. The cigarette fell to the floor. He sat down at the table. Manny refused to look at him. James grabbed a hunk of bread and tore at it with his teeth.
“I’ve got a job for you, Ricky,” he whispered.
“Is there anything I can do?” I offered. “My parents won’t be home for a bit.”
“This job’s for Ricky.” He grabbed my thigh under the table. I couldn’t stop the boner that was beginning to press against my pants.
James let go of my leg and motioned for Ricky, who got up from his chair and came over to him. It was as if Ricky was waiting for a sign as James dunked some bread in the stew’s sauce. Some gravy dribbled down his chin. “I like the food your mom makes. It makes this place feel like home,” he said to me.
“I can get other things, you know. Wine, liquor, beer. People who can’t pay money bring stuff like that when they come to the garage.” I crossed my legs under the table.
James turned to Ricky, who had been waiting expectantly, and cupped his hand to Ricky’s ear. He whispered something that made Ricky’s face light up.
“I know where my dad stashes his booze, so if—”
“I don’t want you to steal from your family, Antonio,” James said. He squeezed my shoulder. “I got Ricky a little job on the side, something that’ll bring in a bit of cash. You need to be patient. I have another plan for you,” he said. I held my breath, tried hard not to let on he was hurting me.
“I
S YOUR FATHER HOME
?” James said, standing at my front door.
At first I thought he was some kind of mirage. I hadn’t slept well—the thought of what James had in store for me had kept me awake.
“What are you doing here?” I said. “You can’t be here.”
James stubbed his boot against the swinging door. “Your father wanted to see me.”
“James! Come inside.” It was Friday morning, too early for my father to be in a happy mood, but he reached out his hand and James shook it. James wore a clean shirt and his jeans had a crease. He had shaved and had his hair parted down the side. “You know James, Antonio.”
James held out his hand. I froze. I wasn’t sure what was happening. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be.
“Antonio! Shake the man’s hand. James is going to be the new driver for Rebelo and Son Ltd.”