“Let me see if we have any milk left.”
“Milk? She doesn’t drink milk with dinner. She’s not four.”
“Kids need milk, for their bones.”
“Yes, little mama.”
“We don’t have any,” Heidi says, shutting the fridge hard, her voice suddenly flat. When she comes back to the couch with her bowl, she doesn’t sit as close to my brother.
“Sorry,” I hear him whisper behind me as I get my food. “I’m such an idiot.”
I sit on a foam chair.
“So Heidi went with me last weekend.”
“To Dad’s?”
“She got the full monty. ‘Patrick, where’s that puppy?’” My brother can do the most amazing impressions of my father, making his voice just as rough and cracked and pissed off. “‘Goddammit, did he run off again? You kids have got to keep an eye on him!’”
“‘Did he pee in the pool?’” Heidi says, but her imitation is rotten.
“‘No, I think he shat on my tennis whites! Goddammit, that’s a golf ball coming out of his ass!’”
Heidi breaks into peals of high-pitched laughing. I can tell they’ve been doing this all week.
“Mom has a new name,” Garvey says.
“What do you mean?”
“She’s not Mom or Meredith. She’s Your Fucking Mother. You better get used to it. ‘Do you know what Your Fucking Mother did?’” It’s amazing how he can just switch into my father’s body. “‘She literally stole the family jewels!’ Did you know that, by the way?”
I don’t know what he’s talking about.
“I think I’m going to lie down,” Heidi says.
“I’ll come,” my brother says, taking her bowl and putting it by the sink, then coming back to help her up.
“I’m fine,” she says, but she lets him. Then she bends back down to me and gives me a kiss on my forehead like my grandfather did at bedtime. She smells nice and I hope my brother will marry her like he said. They call good night to me over their shoulders and disappear, arm in arm, into her room.
I do our dishes. There’s a TV in the corner and I would turn it on but I’m scared Deena will reappear and want to talk to me again, so I go back to Garvey’s room, read more about the man who is a breast, and go to sleep.
I forget to go to the bathroom, so I wake up in the middle of the night. As I quietly open the door and cross the sticky hallway, I keep hearing my brother imitating my father. You kids have got to keep an eye on him! I can see that twenty-five-dollar mutt and his prickly hair and long ugly face. You kids. You kids. And he isn’t talking to me or my brother anymore.
I don’t flush or wash my hands for fear of waking someone, but as I cross back I look down the hallway and see that someone else is up. Garvey. I can see the narrow outline of his back. He’s moving, stretching or scratching, tilting his head to one side. I want to go back to bed, but I have a feeling he needs me, wants some company.
“Hey,” I whisper as I move closer, but he doesn’t hear.
A few more steps and the whole scene changes, from Garvey alone itching his back to something else altogether. The hand on his back is not his own and it’s not a hand but a foot and a shin. There are two of them, locked together, moving together, kissing, twisting, all in complete silence. And then they turn, Garvey carrying her in a frontwards piggyback, his legs buckling slightly as he moves toward the couch, her legs wrapped around him, both of them naked, scraping against each other, and then falling into the cushions, her enormous breasts flopping to the sides and Garvey scooping them and shoving them into his mouth, all the while his bum moving up and down and her hands down between their legs, and her face, Deena’s face, in a silent scream.
4
On Monday my mother picks me up and we drive straight to Ashing. It feels like I have been gone many years. We pass the Christmas tree farm, the inn at the corner of Baker Street, the Citgo station, and then my mother, instead of driving through the middle of town and up the hill to Myrtle Street, turns right onto Water Street and then left into a parking lot. It looks like a miniature motel, beige with white trim, with six apartments, three up and three down. My mother pats my leg. “We’re home.”
Our apartment is on the bottom in the middle. There’s a large 2 on the door, which she opens with a key she’s already hidden in the little lantern above the doorbell.
“I don’t think either of us want to bother with carrying a key,” she says. We never, as far as I know, had a key to our old house. I don’t even remember there being locks on the doors.
All the furniture has been moved in, chairs and couches and beds that used to be on Myrtle Street. I sit on the sofa with yellow flowers that used to be in the den. Is my father sitting on the floor now?
“Come see your room.”
I follow her down a long hallway. My room is small and dark. The one window looks out at our car in its spot. But my old beds are in there, with the same white bedspreads, and all my stuffed animals are on top. I forgot to pack any of my stuffed animals in June, and now they seem strange to me, stupid, with their puffed-up bellies and sewn-on smiles.
“Well?”
“I like it.” I hate it. “Can I see yours?”
Hers is at the end of the hallway, as large as the living room, with French doors that go out to a deck, and the canopy bed she took from the guest room. All my life I’ve been asking to have that bed in my room.
“We need to hang things on the walls, buy some plants, but it has potential,” she says. “And it’s convenient, being downtown. You can meet your friends whenever you want.”
I nod.
“Does Dad know we’re back?”
“I have no idea,” she says.
“Can I go up there?”
“Now?” She looks at her watch. It’s only two-thirty.
I get my bike out of the car and put the wheels back on it.
It’s Labor Day, and Ashing is clogged with cars and pedestrians streaming off the train from Boston, making the trek to the beach. Some kids my age are hanging out on the steps of Bruce’s Variety. I recognize a couple of them, but I don’t know anyone’s name. I’ve gone to the same private school all my life and only know the kids from Ashing who go there too.
“Reggie,” one of them says as I pedal by. I’ve heard this word before. I think it’s a blend of rich and preppie. I don’t know, when they say things like that, if they know me specifically, or just that I don’t go to school with them.
I live in Water Street Apartments now, I want to call out. My mother doesn’t have a job and she’s worried my father won’t pay the child support.
I pass the yarn shop. No orange Pinto. I look for Neal in every face I pass. When I get to Dad’s I’ll call Patrick and find out everything about the summer. Mallory’s at her aunt’s on the Cape until Wednesday.
I ride straight up the hill and then take a right at the blinking light to the stucco house on Myrtle Street with the halfmoon driveway. I stop there, like a tourist. The front of the house is a facade no one but the mailman uses, with pretty white stones instead of regular gravel, and slate steps that wind up through the rhododendrons to a wide terrace. Through the windows is my father’s den but he wouldn’t be in there during the day unless it was raining. Once, when I was in second grade, I was dropped off here after a birthday party by a parent who didn’t know any better. I climbed up all the steps and was greeted at the top by a stray dog who was lapping up rainwater that had collected in the wide saucer of a planter. He attacked immediately, knocking me over, ripping open the skin on my arms and left ear. I screamed and screamed but no one heard. I remembered the goody bag full of jelly beans in my coat pocket and tossed it down the steps. The dog leaped after it and I got myself inside. I still have faint lines on my arms from that attack. The front of this house is fake; all the activity is in the back. I can hear shouting coming from the pool.