“No,” Ellie said, nestling into his side. “Not yet anyway.”
“I bet he didn’t.” His mother grabbed a couple of glasses from the draining tray. “Anyway, there’s water, too. What can I get you?”
“I’ll have water,” Ellie said.
“Me, too,” Abbi added. And Matthew nodded.
“Suit yourselves,” Melissa said. She filled the glasses from the tap and handed them around. “Well, sit.”
Matthew sat on the futon with Ellie on one side and Abbi on the other. His mother came in from the kitchen after disappearing for a moment, sat on the cracked leather chair. She sipped her drink. It looked like cola, but Matthew doubted it. He wrote,
I have to move. I can’t see,
and dragged a chair over from the dining table, positioned it so he was one corner of a trapezium. He was always on the corners. He held his glass between his knees, condensation seeping through his jeans.
“So, what brings you all out this way?” Melissa asked.
“A friend of mine, her church gives out food in the park,” Abbi said. “We came up to help.” She spread a flannel receiving blanket on the floor, and after changing Silvia’s diaper, laid her on it. Everyone watched as Silvia rolled from her back to her side, her arm stuck under her body. She whimpered until Abbi scooted her over all the way, and then she lifted up on her arms, a baby push-up.
“Cute,” Melissa said. “Your first?”
“Yes.”
“Matt said he watches her.”
“I need a sitter, and he needs to make some money for a school trip. It works out for both of us.”
“School trip? Where you going?” Melissa asked.
“New York City,” Abbi said. “Right, Matt?”
He glanced at Ellie and slowly bobbed his head up and down once. She wrapped the end of her braid around her finger.
“You going, too?” Melissa asked Ellie.
“I don’t know,” she said.
We should head out. We told Aunt Heather we would be home by now.
He hopped up, showed the notepad around.
Abbi gathered the baby’s things, and Ellie picked up Silvia. Matthew opened the door, the hallway air as stale and depressed as the air in the apartment. He stood in the intersection of his past and his present, his life a Venn diagram, the blue circle and the red circle overlapping purple in his mother’s living room. Set A and set B. This visit wasn’t the good idea he had hoped it would be. He hadn’t moved very far beyond his childhood, not when confronted with the root beer and the breakfast cereal, and his mother trying to take an interest in his life.
He slapped the doorframe.
“It was nice to meet you, Mrs. Savoie,” Ellie said. “I hope we can, maybe, you know, see you again.”
“You know where I am,” Melissa said.
Matthew walked down the stairs, and then ran, slipping near the bottom and jamming his wrists as he caught himself. He slammed into the metal bar across the glass door and, once outside, bent over—his hands on his knees, his head down. He sucked down the autumn sky, tasted the leaves, the decomposing earth.
Then a hand warmed his back. Ellie’s hand, and he spun around and squashed her in his arms. Abbi was there, too, shaking him gently. Ellie pulled away, turned him around. His mother waited there. “This is for you,” she said, handing him a square of lined paper. “Since you’re heading that way, anyway.”
He unfolded the paper. His father’s phone number.
And then Melissa went one way, and the rest of them went the other, and they drove home in silence.
Abbi dropped Ellie off first; Matthew didn’t move from the back seat, and Abbi slowed, coasting to a stop at the side of the road. She looked at him over her seat. “There isn’t a class trip, is there?”
He shook his head.
“What’s going on, Matt?”
I need a kidney transplant. I was hoping my father might be a match.
“Is that what you need the money for?”
Yes. I want to go talk to him. In person.
“Why didn’t you say anything to me and Ben?”
What could you do?
“Well, we could pay for you to go see him, for one. You don’t have to be watching Silvia and mowing lawns.”
I like watching Silvia.
“That’s not the point.”
Abbi, this is something I want to do on my own.
She flattened her lips together. “Haven’t you been on your own long enough?”
And then she dropped him at the apartment, and he found Sienna in front of the television, and Skye in her bedroom, both Heather and Jaylyn gone, and Lacie eating Cheetos, her fingers and face smeared orange.
“Matty, I’m starved. Skye won’t make me anything to eat.”
So Matthew made grilled cheese sandwiches and warmed two cans of tomato soup. He washed a load of laundry, packed the lunches for the next day, and put Lacie and Sienna in the shower.
When Heather came in with Whip, he and the little girls were on the couch watching a movie, subtitles on, microwave popcorn on their laps.
“Where’s Skye?” Heather asked.
“In her room,” Sienna said. “Where else?”
“And Jaylyn?”
Sienna shrugged. “She went out with Leo,” Lacie said. “Even when you said not to. I told her you said not to.”
“Go to bed, both of you.”
“It’s early,” Sienna said.
“I don’t care. Whip and I want the TV.”
I’ll tuck you in.
“I don’t need to be tucked in,” Sienna said.
“I do. I do,” said Lacie. “Carry me.”
“Matt, you take Jaylyn’s bed,” Heather said. “She’s not here. She’ll get the couch.”
He stood up, and Lacie jumped on his back, and he galloped to her bed, dropping her. She laughed, snuggled beneath the Barbie comforter and brushed her hair from her face. “Kiss, please.”
He kissed her forehead. Sienna climbed onto the top bunk. He motioned to her, and she hung her head upside down over the edge of the mattress. He kissed her, too.
Skye lay with her face toward the wall, earphones clamped over her head. Matthew changed into his pajamas in the bathroom, brushed his teeth. He took his medication. Back in the bedroom, he touched Skye’s shoulder, gave her a little shake. She didn’t respond, so he crawled into the bunk and read for a while, enjoying the extra room to stretch out.
Finally Skye got up, left and came back. He took his pad from under the pillow but couldn’t find the pen. Skye bent over. When she stood back up she held the pen, gave it to him.
He bit off the cap.
She covered his hand with hers. “Just . . . turn off that lamp. I can’t sleep with it on.”
He did, and the bunk beds rocked from Skye turning beneath him. She was torturing herself over Silvia. At least, he hoped that was the case. It would be a lot worse if she wasn’t.
Benjamin arrived home to children’s voices, shouting and giggling floating out from behind the house. He shut the truck’s door and carried the two grocery sacks to the backyard, where Matthew’s two younger cousins were chasing each other. “Hi, Deputy Patil,” Lacie said, racing over to him. “Miss Abbi said we can eat dinner here.”
“You’re it,” Sienna said, slamming into Lacie’s back.
“Not fair. I called time.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Yes I did.”
“Nuh-huh. Did she, Deputy?” Sienna asked.
“I’m staying out of this,” Benjamin said. “Where’s Matt?”
“Inside with the baby,” Lacie told him. She slapped Sienna on the arm. “You’re it.”
“Hey, we weren’t playing yet,” Sienna shouted, taking off after her sprinting sister.
Matthew sat at the kitchen table, head in his books, Silvia asleep in the basket in front of him. He glanced up as Benjamin closed the sliding door, raised his pencil.
“What are you working on?”
Matthew held up the book, finger inside it marking his page.
AP Physics
.
“Fun, fun.”
The boy chuckled.
Hope you don’t mind the girls here.
“Of course not.”
My aunt doesn’t want them home alone anymore. Sienna nearly burned down the apartment trying to heat up a pizza.
“They’re young to be by themselves.”
I know. Sometimes my older cousins aren’t the best at being where they say they’ll be.
And Benjamin saw how responsibility hunched Matthew’s shoulders, his burdens chasing him ’round in circles until he was so dizzy he couldn’t see he wasn’t these girls’ father. He was older than he should be, worrying about kidneys and children, and probably much more that Benjamin didn’t know about. He shook his head, remembering his biggest teenaged concerns—pimples and school dances, and his mother’s odd clothing.
He watched the two little girls in the backyard—now playing campfire, roasting leaves over a cold pile of twigs—and tenderly picked up Silvia and bundled her into his chest. He couldn’t believe how much she’d grown over the past three and a half months. A smile spasmed at the corners of her mouth as she slept, and his heart with it.
Benjamin knocked on the table. “Where’s Abbi?” he asked.
Matthew pointed down the hall.
She was showering, and Benjamin silently entered the steamy room, watching her shadow flicker behind the curtain. The water stopped running, and the towel hanging on the curtain rod disappeared into the tub before Abbi stepped onto the bath mat.
“Oh, shoot,” she said when she saw him. She unwrapped the towel from her waist and hit him with it. “You scared me.”
“Shhh. Don’t do that. You’ll wake the—”
Silvia opened her eyes and cried. Benjamin bounced her, touching his nose to her own, saying “Boop” each time, until the baby calmed and reached for his face.
“You’re a good dad,” Abbi said. She turned her head upside down and buffed her hair with the towel, her shins and thighs, first one leg, then the other. She straightened, and Benjamin pulled the hand towel from the holder on the wall, patted the drops of water from her back. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” he said, kissing her neck.
“Mmm. That tickles.”
“Tickles? I’m offended.” He kissed her again, behind the ear.
“Ben, Matt’s in the kitchen.”
“He can’t hear us.”
She snickered. “You’re terrible.”
“Two seconds ago you were telling me that I was good.”
“Well, maybe you can change my mind again,” she said, pulling on her shirt, “but after dinner.”
“Now
you’re
terrible.”
“Did Matt tell you his cousins are eating here tonight?”
“Yep. So much for a quick dinner.”
“Or a good one.” Abbi sprinkled baking powder on her hands, dabbed her armpits. “Those kids have got to be the pickiest eaters I’ve ever met. I finally got them to agree to spaghetti, but without sauce. Only butter. And salt.”
“Consider it a taste of what’s to come in, oh, about two more years.”
“You’re resorting to puns now?”
“Torturous, isn’t it? I promise I’ll stop, if you’ll just go over across the hall and take off that shirt of yours—”
She opened the bathroom door, the cool air sucking the steam into the hall. “Don’t make me start quoting Galatians, Mr. Self-Control.”
“Look,” he said, following Abbi into the kitchen, “Matt’s not even here.”
“Why don’t you go out and play with him and the girls? Run off some of that energy,” she said, plucking Silvia from his arms and motioning toward the sliding door. And then she kissed him long and soft on the lips. “But not too much.”
“Tease,” he said.
Outside, the girls threw a playground ball over Matthew’s head as he made feeble attempts to intercept it, pretending to trip, or bouncing it off his head. Lacie and Sienna giggled and pointed, calling, “Matty’s a monkey, Matty’s a monkey.” Sienna slung the ball past her sister. It rolled toward Benjamin, and he popped it into the air with the toe of his boot, juggled it on his knees.
“Cool,” Sienna said. “I didn’t know old guys could do that, too.”
“Old guy? Well, this old guy challenges you three to a game of dodge ball.” Benjamin stretched the garden hose across the lawn.
“You all stay on that side. I’ll be over here.”
They lobbed the ball back and forth until Abbi called them in to eat. The girls bickered and gabbed enough for all of them. Benjamin enjoyed the sheer exasperation on his wife’s face as Lacie knocked over her milk and Sienna tried to convince her sister the noodles were honest-to-goodness dead worms while both of them kicked each other under the table when they thought no one was looking. Then Lacie asked for dessert, and Abbi offered some carob and cranberry bars.
“These brownies taste funny,” Sienna complained.
Matthew rapped the table, shook his head, but Abbi touched his arm. “It’s fine.” And then to Sienna, “I like to call them healthy brownies. They don’t have any yucky stuff in them.”
“I think I like the yucky stuff,” Lacie said.
Tell me they are not always like this,
Abbi mouthed to Matthew while the girls wiggled into their jackets near the front door.
Don’t you want a dozen?
“Don’t worry. Ours will be an angel,” Benjamin said.
She glared at him. “Just go.”
“Okay, then. I’ll be back soon.” He winked. “Very soon.”
“Take your time. I need a long, hot bath after this meal.”
He gave the kids a ride home, letting them off in front of the apartment, the girls bouncing out of the Durango and inside. Matthew seemed reluctant to get out. The dome light stayed on because neither Lacie nor Sienna had closed the back door. Benjamin shifted in his seat, and Matthew turned toward him. “You okay?”
He nodded and shrugged all at once, picked at the corner of his thumbnail.
“You’re good with them. The girls.”
What’s your father like?
Benjamin blinked at the unexpected question. “He’s different than me. Brilliant. A scientist. You two would probably get along. He’s just who he is.”
But he was good to you.
“Oh yeah. Absolutely. The best. Even if I might have not thought it at the time.”
Don’t know much about mine. He played baseball. Minor league stuff. Wrecked his knee and sort of flickered out of our lives. At least that’s what my mom told me. I can’t remember him.