This is Just Exactly Like You (26 page)

The karaoke guys—Jeff and Aaron—show up during dinner, start setting up. They’re wearing T-shirts with the sleeves cut off, and one of them has on a black leather cowboy hat. They’ve got tight jeans, cowboy boots, big belt buckles that say JEFF and AARON, respectively. They look like they go to the gym often enough—overmuscled, shirts one size too small, veins showing in their arms. They seem proud of themselves, of the whole JEFF AND AARON! KARAOKE situation. The one with the cowboy hat, Aaron, lights a cigarette from a crushed pack he pulls out of his front pocket. They run wires back and forth, plug things in, move the microphones to where they want them.
Test one,
Jeff says.
Test two.
Aaron tries out the mikes for himself. He leans in, says,
Hey, hey?
Then he answers himself:
Hey, hey.

Rena says, “Mother of God.”

“
Madre de Diós
,” Hen says, around a mouthful of crust. Jack stares at him.

Aaron signals to the cook, Tommy, and then he flicks a switch on a console on the table. A row of blue and red lights comes on behind the microphones. A projector throws a pale square of light up onto the wall, and JEFF AND AARON! KARAOKE flashes up in cursive, the color of the lettering shifting from red to green and back again. Then the graphic flips up on its end and starts spinning, quickly at first, and then slowing down and finally falling over, like a quarter on a table top. Jeff and Aaron have put some time into this.

Aaron flicks another switch and music starts coming through the big box speakers they’ve got on stands on either side of the table, something Jack recognizes from the call-in show he listens to with the dog, something they seem to play most nights. Synthesizers, drums. And then Aaron walks around the front of the table, holding the microphone with both hands, closes his eyes, and starts singing.
You should’ve seen by the look in my eyes, baby/There was somethin’ missin’.
He holds the
n
out in
missin’
a long time. Rena leans across the table, whispering. She says, “What song is this?”

“You know it,” he says.

“I do?”

“Just wait.”

Aaron’s voice sounds like a record played slightly faster than it’s meant to be, thin and high. Like he’s under water, or a long way away. He isn’t bad. He’s just not great. He’s almost certainly singing on the biggest stage he’ll ever see. When he gets to the chorus, Jeff comes out from behind the table, a move they’ve clearly choreographed, and sings backup. “Holy, holy shit,” Rena says. Jeff and Aaron are right on the verge of harmonizing.
And I’m gonna keep on loving you/’Cause it’s the only thing I wanna do.
Hen’s completely taken in by Jeff and Aaron, is watching everything, recording it. Rena stares, her mouth a little open. Jack can tell she’s trying not to laugh. There are plenty of things he likes about her, but it comes to him that maybe what he’s starting to like best is that when she’s around, these last couple days, anyway—he can’t quite remember if it was like this before, if she was like this before—what he likes is that the universe seems tilted partway off its axis, and she finds ways to enjoy that, finds ways to make him enjoy it, too. Jeff and Aaron sing the whole song. Neither of them looks at the words on the screen. They’ve got it memorized. This is their act, their gig. This is what Jeff and Aaron are all about. They finish, Jeff hanging on to a high note, and the place goes kind of bonkers for them, the kids over in the corner, especially. Jeff and Aaron are stars inside Gubbio’s. Jack looks over at the tables of locals. The girls are trying a little harder than he’d noticed at first, miniskirts and tight jeans and little halter tops. They’ve maybe put on more perfume than normal for tonight.
Amber, let me have some of that.
One of them gets up, goes over to the table, starts flipping through the white binder. Thin green skirt, a too-tight pink T-shirt that says CUTIE in sequins. There are two dimples in the small of her back, right above her ass. She keeps smiling at Jeff and Aaron, hooking her hair behind her ear. Jeff and Aaron start up another song, a country song Jack recognizes from the radio, something about bull fighting and Rocky Mountain climbing. The whole bar claps and cheers, and Aaron tips his hat to the crowd, a move that looks easy when he does it. The CUTIE chooses something out of the notebook, puts her card on top of the machine, steps back, and cocks her hip out and watches them from over on one side.

“This might be the most important thing that has ever happened to me,” Rena says. “Is it always like this in here?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

“We may never leave,” she says. She gets up, takes their empty pitcher to the bar, comes back with a full one, and sets it down. Then she walks up toward the table, says something to the CUTIE, and the two of them flip through the book together. Jack pours their glasses, checks Hen’s Diet Sprite to make sure he’s got enough left. Hen takes the red plastic cup back from him without once looking away from Jeff and Aaron. He’s mouthing the words to the song they’re singing. He may well know the words to every song ever recorded.

Rena sits back down at the table. “I signed us up for one,” she says. “Do you sing?”

“No,” Jack says. He’s terrible.

“Come on,” she says.

“I can’t do it,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

“What about Hen?”

“I don’t think he’ll—”

She looks at Hendrick. “Would you like to sing with me?”

“Yes,” he says.

“See?” says Rena, looking at Jack.

“
Quiero cantar una canción,
” he says.

“Holy crap,” she says.

Jack squeezes his eyes shut for a second, then opens them again.
Well, Oprah, we always knew he was a genius. We just didn’t know which kind
.

A new song starts, and four girls run up to the front, cluster around one of the microphones, start shouting along. Jeff and Aaron sing into the other microphone. Jeff gets his arm around one of the girls, then around a different one. More people come in. Gubbio’s is filling up. There’s a line at the binder of people waiting to sign up for songs. Jeff and Aaron are huge. Rena says, “Seriously: We can stay for a while, right?”

“We can stay as long as you want,” he says.

She reaches across the table for his hand, takes it, lets it go. The song ends, and the girls sit back down. Aaron says into the microphone, “Rena Soluski. Rena, you out there?”

She says, “Last chance, champ. Sure you don’t want to try it?”

“You don’t want me up there,” says Jack. “I’m telling you.”

“If you say so.” She stands up, holds her hand out for Hendrick. “You ready?” she asks him. “Do you still want to go sing with me?”

“Yes,” he says, and works his way out of the booth. He takes her hand—of course he does—and they walk up to the microphone, and the place gets pretty loud. Here’s this six-year-old boy getting ready to sing. Everybody’s clapping, whistling. The local girls think he’s just the sweetest thing in the whole world. Jack sips his beer, tries to wrap his head around the idea of his son standing up there in front of all these people. Hen’s got his feet together, and he’s looking down at his shoes—galoshes, red with yellow striping, the only shoes he’d let Jack put on him before they left. Rena whispers something to him. He shakes his head a couple of times, marches a little bit. Rena hands a microphone to him, gets another one for herself. The song comes on, and Jack knows it right away: His father owned this record, played it endlessly when he was a kid. Kenny and Dolly. “Islands in the Stream
.
” For a long time, Jack thought the chorus was
Olives in the street.
Because when he was eight, that made as much sense as anything else.
That is what we are.
The music comes around and Rena sings the first verse alone, her voice soft, not quite on key. Hen stares at his microphone. The bar stares at Hendrick. Rena sings.
Baby when I met you there was peace unknown/I set out to get you with a fine-tooth comb.
A little red ball bounces above the lyrics on the screen. She makes it through the first chorus. She’s enjoying herself, he can tell, getting into it a little bit as she goes along. The lights move through their sequence. Rena goes blue, then green, then red. When Hen joins in on the next chorus, the hair on the back of Jack’s neck stands up. Beth would love this. Or she’d say they were making a spectacle of him. One or the other. The crowd’s cheering. Hen’s mostly speaking instead of singing, but it doesn’t matter. He’s doing it. He’s actually doing it.

Rena’s dancing now, sliding her hips back and forth. Hen’s a statue, microphone out in front of him like it’s some injured bird he’s picked up.
Sail away with me/To another world.
Hendrick sings
And we’ll rely on each other/uh-huh,
and the whole place screams. Rena reaches out to pull him closer, but he sidesteps her, keeps singing. Another verse, the bridge, another chorus.
No one in between/How could we go wrong?
The song doesn’t end, Jack remembers now. It just repeats the chorus until it fades out. Hen keeps right on going, knows the words already, starts the chorus over one more time even as the music fades. And then, suddenly, it’s just Hendrick alone, singing a capella. The music stops completely. Gubbio’s is dead silent. Hendrick sings.
Islands in the stream/That is what we are.
When he finishes—and there’s a moment where Jack thinks he might not stop, that he might sing “Islands in the Stream” for the rest of his waking life—there’s a long beat before the crowd goes jackshit insane, everyone shouting for his son, for Rena, for the two of them. Rena takes a big bow. Hen puts the microphone down on the table, and the contact bangs through the PA. This is one more thing that can’t be happening, something else that is not possible. The Beanbags would need video evidence. Jack almost needs video evidence. Everyone keeps clapping until the two of them are sitting back down in the booth again, and then Aaron says into the microphone, “Let’s hear it for that kid one more time,” and the place goes electric all over again.

Soon enough another song starts up, the local girls again. Rena grins at him, touches his leg with hers under the table. He can’t tell if she did it on purpose. “So this is Gubbio’s,” she says.

“Yeah,” Jack says. He can’t quite hear right. His tongue’s thick in his mouth. His teeth taste like rocks. Hendrick’s stacking the sugar back up again, back to his old self, singing along with the girls.

“I like it here,” Rena says. “This is a good place.”

About a week before Beth leaves, Jack wakes up in the middle of the night to a kind of scratching sound. That’s what registers first. He wakes up and his eyes adjust to the thin sulfured half-glare of the streetlight coming in from Frank’s yard next door, the streetlight Frank badgered the power company into hanging this past spring.
I’ll tell you, Jack
, he said, standing there in the strip of weeds between their driveways,
got to do something to keep a certain element from wanting to come up to your property. You know what I mean?
The light streams into their bedroom all night long now, no matter how Jack angles the blinds. He’s been to look at privacy shades, but the things cost a damned fortune.

The scratching is still going. He lies there on his back, blinks. The ceiling fan’s noisy, too, broken or breaking, ball bearings scraping in there on whatever ball bearings scrape on. Plus there’s a ticking. Something has definitely gone wrong with the fan. Pretty soon, it will probably go ahead and cut fully loose from the ceiling and fall directly on his forehead in the middle of the night, and it will kill him, or at least give him a concussion. But that’s not the noise. It’s something else, something out in the hall, scratching. Jack works through his options: Burglars? Terrorists undeterred by the streetlight? Hendrick?

Not Hen. Can’t be. Hen still and always sleeps through the night. So: Terrorists or burglars. Or just one burglar, even. But burglars don’t stand in your hall and scratch things. Burglars sneak past security systems, over laser beams, steal the diamond necklace. Jack and Beth have neither lasers nor diamonds. They have the silver tea service in the hutch out front, a wedding present from her mom. Why they have it, how they’d use it—he has no idea. He’s not sure he’s had a cup of tea since they’ve been married, much less a service of tea. He gets out of bed, bangs the living shit out of his toe on his way around, sees in all sorts of colors, swallows sentences. For a second he thinks he’ll throw up, but that passes. He reaches down to touch the toe, to make sure he hasn’t knocked it off, or bent it out at some awful angle. He’s off to a bold start.

First he checks Hen’s room, the official fatherly thing to do, stand completely naked in the hall and check on your son in the middle of the night. He’s sleeping, of course. Stock still. Face down and turned just to the side so he can breathe, arms behind him, palms up. He’s a rocketship. At first, after he was diagnosed, after it all set in for good, he’d sleep so still they’d wake him up to make sure he was still alive, stand over him, watch him fall back asleep. Then she’d want to wake him up again.
Even if he is dead, what will we do?
Jack wanted to know.