Authors: Kelly Braffet
“She’s trying to help you. I’m trying to help you.”
The way Dad would try to help her, her and all the girls like her, the way he would take the video on television and play it over and over again. “It’s none of your business, either.”
“Verna,” he said. “Don’t let them do this to you.”
Let who do what? The bell rang and the hallways filled with noise and chaos and jostling and laughter and all of the noisy chaotic laughing jostlers had seen the video, all of them. Jared waited a minute but she didn’t say anything else. She could feel the empty space she was supposed to be filling with words but she had no words, words were pointless.
After school she went with Dad to pick up a new batch of brochures. While Dad paid, the printer’s old basset hound, who Verna had
known since he was a puppy, came out from the back and pushed his wet nose into Verna’s hand. His eyes were rheumy and he moved as if his hips hurt. When she bent down to pet him his coat felt rough and dirty.
Her hands still smelled of sick-sweet dog when Dad dropped her at home with the brochures and headed for the copy shop across town. Mother was out, and the house was silent. If Layla’s bag hadn’t been on the entryway floor and her car next to Toby’s in the driveway, Verna would have thought nobody was home. Her arm stung as she carried the heavy box of brochures down the hall to the office door, which stood half-open. She nudged it with her knee and then stopped.
Layla was inside. Layla and Toby. Toby sat on one of the old swivel chairs and Layla kneeled on the floor in front of him. Verna could only see her from the back, her head moving, her hands on his knees; Toby’s eyes were closed, his lips moist and parted. She could see his tongue moving behind his teeth.
“Oh, God. Layla.” Verna could barely hear him. “Oh, God. Oh, please.”
Like that, slut
.
His hands were in Layla’s hair, not gripping but stroking, petting; the sweet dog smell was not unlike banana and Toby’s face turned red and screwed up. He let out a noise that was halfway between a grunt and a cry. His eyes opened.
And then, seeing Verna, widened. “Oh, God,” he said, again. “Oh, shit.”
He shoved Layla back and fell off the chair, hands fumbling at his pants as he tried to hide himself. She saw anyway: that part of him, still half-tumescent, slick and wet-looking. Not distended and massive, like the ones wielded by the men in Justinian’s magazines. Then he was standing and, white-faced with horror, shoved his way past her out the door and into the hall. His belt, which he hadn’t bothered to fasten, flapped at his waist, and Verna could hear the jingle of the buckle end all the way down the hallway.
Layla spat calmly into the wastebasket and wiped her mouth. Most of her lipstick was gone. She looked at Verna, her face expressionless. “What?”
What. How could she, was what. Here. With Toby. At all. Verna put the box down. Her hands and her face felt hot and her legs felt unsteady.
“He loves you,” she said.
“Who, Toby?”
Verna shook her head. An inscrutable emotion passed over Layla’s face, something that pulled at her mouth and furrowed her brow. Her eyes grew shiny with tears and then she, too, pushed past Verna. A moment later, through the poorly insulated garage walls, Verna heard her car start.
When Layla missed dinner, Verna didn’t bother to lie. Dad asked where her sister was and she said she didn’t know. As they ate he grew more and more agitated. Afterward, table cleared and dishes washed, Verna was in her room, staring pointlessly at her history book, when she heard a knock at the front door, and then Toby’s voice, and Dad’s, moving into the kitchen.
Quietly, she crept down the hall to the living room and out the front door. The night smelled like wet concrete. Up and down the street, drapes were closed and porch lights were on. The few visible stars shone feebly, as if they might flutter and die at any moment.
She walked around the side of the house, the lawn soft under her feet, to the kitchen window. Mother always left it open to let out the cooking smells and the heat. Staying back so the warm light didn’t reach her face, she could see Mother and Dad and Toby sitting at the table, a plate of cookies between them. Verna could sense the tension from here, she could see it in the way Toby held his back. Mother’s eyes were fixed on her lap and Dad’s were staring out the sliding
glass door. He looked like he wanted to stop the world as much as Verna did.
“It was a m-m-mistake,” Toby said.
There was a brief, suffocating pause.
Dad’s voice was tight. “I think you should leave.”
Toby stood up. Verna pressed her back against the rough wall under the window.
“This is the closest thing I have to a family.” Toby sounded as if he were crying. “The four of you.”
Something shattered. Verna pushed closer to the wall, trying to disappear. “Go!” Mother cried. “Get out!” And then Verna heard the heavy falls of Toby’s combat boots retreating through the house. Distantly, a door slammed and an engine revved.
In the kitchen, a chair scraped against the floor. A cupboard opened. Verna heard the swish of the hand broom and fragile tinkling sounds: cleaning up whatever had broken.
“I’m sorry,” Mother said, and Dad said, “It was my mother’s. I never liked it.”
Footsteps. More tinkling. The chair scraped again.
“Oh,” Mother said. The syllable stretched into something guttural and enraged. “That girl. Why would she do such a filthy, shameful thing? Why Toby?”
“Because she could. Because she knew how it would make us feel.” Dad sighed. “She’s out of control, Michelle. It was one thing when she was only hurting us. But now—”
There was a long pause. Then Mother said, “You’re thinking about Renewal.”
“It’s a good place. A Christian place.”
“You hear things about those camps. Kids dying of heatstroke and—”
“It’s hiking. That’s all it is. They go hiking, and there are counselors. They pray.”
Mother half-laughed but Verna felt as if her insides had turned to concrete. “I’d like to see the counselor that can get Layla to pray.”
“They’re professionals, Michelle. It’s what they do.”
There was a long pause and when Mother spoke again her voice sounded helpless. “Sending her away, though.”
“Getting her back,” Dad said. “Think about Verna.”
The chair scraped; a cupboard opened. Water filled a glass and somebody drank.
Then Mother said, “Soon, okay? Before I lose my nerve.”
Underneath the quiet, waiting night, the world was surging, rising, out of control. Verna’s fists clenched. All she wanted to do was sit down exactly where she was, put her hands over her ears, and let the stillness fill her. Instead, silently, she went back inside. Into her parents’ bedroom, where she took the extension receiver into the bathroom and sat down on the edge of the bathtub because she was shaking so hard that she could barely press the buttons. As Layla’s phone rang, Verna stared at the perfume bottles on the counter: each a different shape, each a different color. All elegant, all beautiful. A crystal sea of golden fluids and sweet smells. Layla would be in wilderness camp, dehydrated and hot with a heavy pack on her back. Layla would be dying, and the perfume bottles would still be here, still be shining.
“What,” Layla said. Sounding annoyed. She thought it was their parents.
“It’s me,” Verna answered. “Don’t come home.”
ELEVEN
Wednesday night, before Patrick’s shift started, Mike wanted to grab a beer at Jack’s Bar and Sandwiches, so they did. Just the two brothers. It had been a long time. Before the accident, they’d gone out together three, maybe four times a week; sometimes they’d bring the old man with them, and sometimes they’d meet him while they were out. Not that they ever planned it that way, it just happened. Patrick would be shooting pool or watching a game or something, and he’d look across the room and there the old man would be, sitting on a stool. As he and Mike walked into Jack’s that night, Lecia called out, “Double trouble!” just like she always had. Out of habit, Patrick almost asked her if she’d seen the old man, and then remembered exactly why he didn’t like going to Jack’s anymore.
There weren’t a lot of people he knew out on a Wednesday, but there were a few: guys he’d worked with, people he knew from school. They looked at him curiously, maybe said
hey what’s up
if they happened to find themselves standing close enough to make silence awkward. “They’re not being weird, dude,” Mike said at one point. “It’s
you. You look at everybody like you think they’re about to stab you in the brain. Why don’t you relax, for crying out loud?”
And maybe Mike had a point. Mike liked people, and people liked him. The old man had been the same way, back before he’d completely pickled himself. When Patrick had started high school, the things Mike was good at—sports, girls, the kind of friendly disobedience that made teachers roll their eyes without making them mad—seemed important and for a while, Patrick had tried to cultivate those skills himself. It hadn’t taken too long for him to realize that those weren’t exactly skills that could be cultivated, and he was better off concentrating on areas where he was actually talented, like running or drawing gross cartoons.
Now he found himself marveling anew at the way Mike could sit on a bar stool and shoot the shit with Lecia like nothing had ever happened. Even when she put one hand on her hip, shook a school-marmish finger at them, and said, “Now, which of you boys is driving tonight, because that’s the one I’m cutting off early,” and Patrick heard the layers in her words, the way she pretended to be stern because she didn’t want them to notice that she really was being stern, Mike just laughed. She’d never cut either of them off before. To the best of Patrick’s memory, nobody had, which was probably part of the problem. But here she was, doing it anyway. And Mike thought it was funny.
Except that five minutes later he was morose again, telling Patrick about some new way that Caro had found to spurn his devotion. And then it was himself Patrick marveled at, that he could simultaneously sit here and nod sympathetically and say things like
oh, man, who knows
, while another part of his brain hoped that Mike would be passed out when Caro got off work tonight so that she could come see him at Zoney’s. So maybe Mike wasn’t the only one in the family who could ignore the obvious.
“Did I tell you that asshole with the dog practically called her a slut?” Mike said.
“Yeah,” Patrick said, feeling sapped. Mike was on a loop, saying the same things over and over. There were no clocks in Jack’s but Patrick guessed the loop was maybe twenty minutes long. Twenty-five, tops.
“Right there in front of me, like I wasn’t going to do anything about it.” Although to the best of Patrick’s knowledge, Mike hadn’t done anything about it. “And like it was his goddamned right to tell her about the house. I was going to tell her. I was going to tell both of you. I just hadn’t yet.” Mike paused. “Do you think that’s why she doesn’t want to get married? Because we’re getting sued?”
“No.” Which was true. “I think she doesn’t want to get married because she doesn’t want to get married.” Also true, albeit with a potentially damning lie of omission. “Besides, we’re not the ones getting sued. The old man is the one getting sued. We’re just the ones getting evicted.” The Czerpaks’ lawyer had given Patrick the details over the phone that afternoon, after keeping him on hold for fifteen minutes.
“Same difference.” Mike was on his fourth beer. Patrick was nursing his first. “Probably the thrill of their fucking lives, taking away our house.”
“I’m pretty sure they’d trade our piece-of-shit house for their kid any day of the week,” Patrick said. He certainly would.
“Our house isn’t a piece of shit.”
“Come on, Mike.”
“I’m serious. How can you say that? You grew up there, man. Mom died there, for Christ’s sake.”
“Mom died in the hospital.”
“Same difference.” God, Patrick was starting to hate that phrase. “She was sick there, wasn’t she? She lived there, didn’t she? We had some good times in that house.” Mike hammered back the rest of his beer and signaled Lecia behind the bar for another.
“Yeah? Name one.”
“The barbecues.”
The barbecues. When the aunts drank wine coolers in the kitchen
and bitched about their husbands and the uncles drank beer in the backyard and bitched about their jobs; when the kids filled water balloons at the outdoor tap and hurled them at whoever was closest. The later it got, the less careful the adults were about keeping track of their drinks, which the older kids finished off in the alley. And their mom, having spent days beforehand making potato salad and pasta salad and barking at anybody who came too close that they better not touch a damn thing in the refrigerator or so help her god she’d start cutting off hands, would be worn-out and snappish by the time everyone went home. But he also remembered seeing the old man grab his mother around the waist in the kitchen and, only slurring a little, say something like
Al, baby, you throw one hell of a party
, and she’d answer, with a smile in her voice,
Go pick up the backyard, you lazy drunk. I’ll deal with you later
.
That moment existed only in Patrick’s head. It wasn’t at 151 Division Street and it never would be again. “It’s just a house, Mike.”
Lecia came over with Mike’s beer. “You sure you’re not driving, big guy?” she said, and Mike answered, “He is,” with a nod at Patrick, although Patrick hadn’t driven in weeks and Mike knew it. When she was gone, Mike leaned over and pointed an accusatory finger. “It’s not just a house. It’s our home. Don’t you even care about that? Doesn’t that bother you, even the tiniest goddamned bit?” He sat back. “But I guess if it did, we wouldn’t be here right now, would we?”
Patrick stared at his brother. “What’s that supposed to mean?” Even though he knew, they both knew. But if Patrick was going to have to hear it then Mike was going to have to say it. If they were going to have this discussion, they were going to have it.
“You did what you did, that’s all I’m saying. Maybe if you hadn’t—” Mike stopped, and then pushed on. “Maybe Dad wouldn’t be in jail. Maybe you’d still have a real job and I wouldn’t be so fucking broke from carrying your ass. Maybe me and Caro would be engaged. Maybe we’d be married, have our own place. People
are supposed to do that, you know. Get married and move out and stuff.”