“What they did to him wasn’t right,” my brother said the night Reiss was finally sentenced. Or maybe it was the night he was charged. We were still young then, each of us newly married, my brother trying to make a go of it in business, me pregnant with my first child. We were having dinner at my brother’s house and my sister-in-law, Wendy, was serving chicken stuffed with spinach and cheddar cheese. Wendy loved strange combinations. She couldn’t serve meat without adding something to it: chicken stuffed with cheese, hamburger stuffed with mushrooms, steak stuffed with spinach. Everything with Wendy needed to be supplemented.
“That’s ridiculous,” Wendy said. “Reiss would have been a monster whether he’d been bullied or not.”
My sister-in-law was always looking for a fight. Even when she and my brother were first married. No matter what he said, she said otherwise, though he never got mad about it. Liked her fire, he’d say. I didn’t. I tried, because I loved my brother so much, but Wendy wore me down. She was beautiful, but in the way an ice sculpture is: cold, hard, and finely drawn.
“Who’s to say,” my brother responded. “Maybe the evil would have stayed dormant in Reiss if those kids hadn’t pushed him so hard.”
“Not for nothing,” my sister-in-law snapped. “Don’t you think it’s strange every kid in the high school picked on him? Don’t you think Reiss might have had something to do with it? Maybe they recognized something evil in him. Maybe it wasn’t so much taunting as self-preservation.”
“I remember one time Ezra Watts crammed raw chicken down Reiss’s throat,” I said. Involuntarily I looked down at the chicken on the plate in front of me, pink verging on raw, bits of unmelted yellow cheese clotting on the plate.
“They picked on your sister,” Wendy said, “and she didn’t become a serial killer.”
Sunny’s face turned red. Their dining room chairs were black, the carpet white, silver mirrors reflected your every sin. Black and white and red all over. “No one picked on my sister,” Sunny said. He swelled up like one of those exotic lizards. He was my protector, always had been. Even after I became the mother of four strong boys my brother always worried about me. Picking on me was the only thing Wendy could ever do to annoy him.
When my boys and Sunny’s daughter were in elementary school, my husband had to stop working. He got sick. It was a hard time for us. Although we had health insurance, money was tight. So I went to work at one of my brother’s gas stations. He owned five by then. He was successful for the same reason he’d been popular in high schooclass="underline" because people liked and trusted him.
On my first day on the job, Sunny showed me around the candy counter, which was the part of the gas station I’d be manning. There were all sorts of tricks to the trade: The key to the cash register needed to be inserted in a particular way, the combination to the refrigerators had the numbers of my birthday. There was a place for receipts, envelopes set aside for special people who came by, refill boxes of candy tucked in a dark closet. Sunny kept his arm around me while he showed me the ropes. By then he was closing in on thirty, but he still had that golden aura. He was tall, fair-haired, balding just a little bit, which he hid by cutting his hair real close. He wore a Yankees hat all the time, and a slippery leather jacket.
When he told me my salary, I jumped. “That’s crazy,” I said.
“You take it, Big Sis,” he said. “Set some aside for a rainy day.”
I thought of what all that money would mean.
“Don’t tell Stew,” he whispered to me. “Just keep it for yourself.”
“I can’t do that,” I said. “For better or worse. You know. But I will take the money. It will help.”
He teared up then. He was a sentimental man. Once I came across him crying over the beauty of a sunset.
“You okay?” he asked, meaning was it all right that my husband was sick, that my boys were crazy, that we were not able to move to a big house like he had. That I was working at a gas station, selling candy bars. That my life was turning out harder than expected.
“You know what,” I said, “it is okay.” I still had a lot, more than I’d ever expected, really. What Wendy’d said so many years ago was true. Kids had teased me in high school; just like Jared Reiss, I’d been the butt of jokes. They told me I was slow, a screw-up, ugly, and sometimes when I looked at my four handsome wild boys and my devoted husband, I swelled with joy. Fact was, I’d never expected my life to be easy.
Sunny cleared his throat then, wiped his eyes. “You’re the only good person I know,” he said, which seemed funny to me. I wasn’t good. I was just content.
The gas station at which I worked was located on Hempstead Turnpike at the intersection of the high school, the penitentiary, and the hospital, so an assortment of interesting people came by to buy gas and candy. Students, criminals, teachers, doctors, nurses. I loved trying to guess what type of candy people would buy, because unlike every other choice you make in life, a decision about candy is based only on pleasure. The young went for Skittles, the older ones for rich chocolate. People agonized over Dots because they knew they could suck out a filling, and yet they always gave in. The temptation of something so soft and sweet was hard to turn away. Some people threw their money at me. Others looked at me steadily when they ordered. Raisinets were unpopular, and I told Sunny to stop stocking them. I kept a list of those candies that were selling well.
“Why don’t you alphabetize the candy bars,” my sister-in-law said one warm September afternoon when she dropped by to see me. By that point, I’d been working at the gas station for two years and this was the second time she’d visited. I suspected trouble and fought down the tightness in my back. She must’ve just been to a conference, because she was wearing a suit. Pink, trim, feminine, high heels. She sold cosmetics.
“You should put the Snickers next to the Take Fives,” she said, pointing. “And move the Chunkies next to the Charleston Chews. Wouldn’t that be faster?”
“I don’t want to go fast,” I replied. “I like spending time with people.”
Time had been hard on Wendy. She was as beautiful as she’d always been, but her mouth had acquired a pinch. She and her daughter didn’t get along well, and Sunny liked to come over to my house, small though it was, and play baseball with my boys. Whenever it was his turn to bat, he hit a home run and the boys would have to go scattering far and wide to field it. The neighborhood kids liked to join in the games, the ice cream truck came by. The mothers sat on lawn chairs and my husband, who could barely walk by then, would maneuver himself onto the stoop and clap.
“Don’t you want to do something with your life?” Wendy said.
“I have four sons. I think that’s quite a bit of an achievement,” I answered, though I felt bad as soon as I spoke, because she and my brother had only been blessed with one child, a little girl who twitched when you touched her and had none of my brother’s largeness of spirit.
“How do you think it makes Sunny feel, seeing you work here?” she whispered.
That shut me up. I’d never thought about that. She was right. My brother was proud, although he’d never acknowledge it. He talked often about his wife’s beauty. I knew he felt I’d married beneath myself and he had offered to send my boys to private schools. I’d said no, not because of my pride but because I knew it would ruin my relationship with my brother, and that was more important to me than anything.
Next time he came into the gas station I asked him about it. Did it upset him that I worked there?
“Wendy bothering you?”
“I don’t want to be an embarrassment.”
He hugged me then, and as he enveloped me I smelled his aftershave. I also smelled summer, youth, and hope, fresh grass and baseball and beer. What a gift, I thought, to have someone like him by my side my whole life.