“What are you doing?” B.B. said.
“Dime a feel,” the boy said. Then, in a different tone, he said, “Week or so, they start eating food.”
“I never heard of anything like that,” B.B. said. The loofah popped up in his mind, expanded. Their drunken incredulity. The time, as a boy, he had watched a neighbor drown a litter of kittens in a washtub. He must have been younger than Bryce when that happened. And the buriaclass="underline" B.B. and the neighbor’s son and another boy who was an exchange student had attended the funeral for the drowned kittens. The man’s wife came out of the house, with the mother cat in one arm, and reached in her pocket and took out little American flags on toothpicks and handed them to each of the boys and then went back in the house. Her husband had dug a hole and was shoveling dirt back in. First he had put the kittens in a shoebox coffin, which he placed carefully in the hole he had dug near an abelia bush. Then he shoveled the dirt back in. B.B. couldn’t remember the name of the man’s son now, or the Oriental exchange student’s name. The flags were what they used to give you in your sundae at the ice-cream parlor next to the bank.
“You can hold him through the auction for a quarter,” the boy said to Bryce.
“You have to give the dog back,” B.B. said to his son.
Bryce looked as if he was about to cry. If he insisted on having one of the dogs, B.B. had no idea what he would do. It was what Robin, his ex-wife, deserved, but she’d probably take the dog to the pound.
“Put it down,” he whispered, as quietly as he could. The room was so noisy now that he doubted that the teenage boy could hear him. He thought he had a good chance of Bryce’s leaving the puppy if there was no third party involved.
To his surprise, Bryce handed over the puppy, and the teenager lowered it into the box. A little girl about three or four had come to the rim of the box and was looking down.
“I bet you don’t have a dime, do you, cutie?” the boy said to the girl.
B.B. reached in his pocket and took out a dollar bill, folded it, and put it on the cement floor in front of where the boy crouched. He took Bryce’s hand, and they walked to their seats without looking back.
“It’s just a bunch of junk,” Rona said. “Can we leave if it doesn’t get interesting?”
They bought a lamp at the auction. It had a nice base, and as soon as they found another lampshade it would be just right for the bedside table. Now it had a cardboard shade on it, imprinted with a cracked, fading bouquet.
“What’s the matter with you?” Rona said. They were back in their bedroom.
“Actually,” B.B. said, holding on to the window ledge, “I feel very out of control.”
“What does that mean?”
She put From Julia Child’s Kitchen on the night table, picked up her comb, and grabbed a clump of her hair. She combed through the snaggled ends, slowly.
“Do you think he has a good time here?” he said.
“Sure. He asked to come, didn’t he? You could look at his face and see that he enjoyed the auction.”
“Maybe he just does what he’s told.”
“What’s the matter with you?” she said. “Come over here.”
He sat on the bed. He had stripped down to his under-shorts, and there were goose bumps all over his body. A bird was making a noise outside, screaming as if it were being killed. It stopped abruptly. The goose bumps slowly went away. Whenever he turned up the thermostat he always knew he was going to be sorry along about 5 A.M., when it got too hot in the room but he was too tired to get up and go turn it down. She said that was why they got headaches. He reached across her now for the Excedrin. He put the bottle back on top of the cookbook and gagged down two of them.
“What’s he doing?” he said to her. “I don’t hear him.”
“If you made him go to bed, the way other fathers do, you’d know he was in bed. Then you’d just have to wonder if he was reading under the covers with a flashlight or—”
“Don’t say it,” he said.
“I wasn’t going to say that.”
“What were you going to say?”
“I was going to say that he might have taken more Godivas out of the box my mother sent me. I’ve eaten two. He’s eaten a whole row.”
“He left a mint and a cream in that row. I ate them,” B.B. said.
He got up and pulled on a thermal shirt. He looked out the window and saw tree branches blowing. The Old Farmer’s Almanac predicted snow at the end of the week. He hoped it didn’t snow then; it would make it difficult taking Bryce back to Vermont. There were two miles of unplowed road leading to Robin’s house.
He went downstairs. The oval table Bryce sat at was where the dining room curved out. Window seats were built around it. When they rented the house, it was the one piece of furniture left in it that neither of them disliked, so they had kept it. Bryce was sitting in an oak chair, and his forehead was on his arm. In front of him was the coloring book and a box of crayons and a glass vase with different-colored felt-tip pens stuck in it, falling this way and that, the way a bunch of flowers would. There was a pile of white paper. The scissors. B.B. assumed, until he was within a few feet of him, that Bryce was asleep. Then Bryce lifted his head.
“What are you doing?” B.B. said.
“I took the dishes out of the dishwasher and it worked,” Bryce said. “I put them on the counter.”
“That was very nice of you. It looks like my craziness about the dishwasher has impressed every member of my family.”
“What was it that happened before?” Bryce said.
Bryce had circles under his eyes. B.B. had read once that that was a sign of kidney disease. If you bruised easily, leukemia. Or, of course, you could just take a wrong step and break a leg. The dishwasher had backed up, and all the filthy water had come pouring out in the morning when B.B. opened the door — dirtier water than the food-smeared dishes would account for.
“It was a mess,” B.B. said vaguely. “Is that a picture?”
It was part picture, part letter, B.B. realized when Bryce clamped his hands over his printing in the middle.
“You don’t have to show me.”
“How come?” Bryce said.
“I don’t read other people’s mail.”
“You did in Burlington,” Bryce said.
“Bryce — that was when your mother cut out on us. That was a letter for her sister. She’d set it up with her to come stay with us, but her sister’s as much a space cadet as Robin. Your mother was gone two days. The police were looking for her. What was I supposed to do when I found the letter?”
Robin’s letter to her sister said that she did not love B.B. Also, that she did not love Bryce, because he looked like his father. The way she expressed it was: “Let spitting images spit together.” She had gone off with the cook at the natural-food restaurant. The note to her sister — whom she had apparently called as well — was written on the back of one of the restaurant’s flyers, announcing the menu for the week the cook ran away. Tears streaming down his cheeks, he had stood in the spare bedroom — whatever had made him go in there? — and read the names of desserts: “Tofu-Peach Whip!” “Granola Raspberry Pie!” “Macadamia Bars!”
“It’s make-believe anyway,” his son said, and wadded up the piece of paper. B.B. saw a big sunflower turn in on itself. A fir tree go under.
“Oh,” he said, reaching out impulsively. He smoothed out the paper, making it as flat as he could. The ripply tree sprang up almost straight. Crinkled birds flew through the sky. B.B. read:
When I’m B.B.’s age I can be with you allways. We can live in a house like the Vt. house only not in Vt. no sno. We can get married and have a dog.