Even though she never went to church, Pip had been losing her college friends one by one, after texting them one too many times that she couldn’t hang with them because she’d promised to play a game with Ramón or take him to a thrift store to buy sneakers. This hampered social planning, but the real problem, she suspected, was that her friends had begun to write her off as a squatter-house weirdo. She was now down to three friends with whom she drank on Saturdays and stayed in textual touch while carefully withholding information; because she really was kind of a squatter-house weirdo. Unlike Stephen and Marie, who came from good middle-class Catholic families, she’d barely even lowered her station in going from her mother’s little cabin to Thirty-Third Street, and her student debt was functionally a vow of poverty. She felt more effective at doing her house chores and helping Ramón than at anything else in her life. And yet, to answer Igor’s question, she did have an ambition, if not a plan for achieving it. Her ambition was not to end up like her mother. And so the fact that she was effective at being a squatter didn’t give her much satisfaction; it filled her, more often, with dread.
As she rounded the corner onto Thirty-Third Street, she saw Stephen sitting on their front steps, wearing his little-boy clothes, his secondhand Keds and secondhand seersucker shirt, its short sleeves strained by his large biceps. The subtle evening mist was making shafts of the golden light beneath the nearby freeway viaducts. Stephen’s head was bowed.
“Hello, hello,” Pip said cheerily, as she dismounted.
Stephen raised his head and looked at her with reddened eyes. His face was wet.
“What is it?” she said.
“It’s over,” he said.
“What’s over? What happened?” She let her bike fall to the ground. “Did Dreyfuss lose the house? What happened?”
He smiled wanly. “No, Dreyfuss did not lose the house. Are you kidding? I lost my marriage. Marie’s gone. She’s moved out.”
His face twisted, and cold fear surged outward from Pip’s center; but when it passed below her waist it became a terrible warmth. How well aware the body was of what it wanted. How quickly it gleaned the news it could use. She took off her helmet and sat down on the stoop.
“Oh, Stephen, I’m so sorry,” she said. Until this moment, their only hugs had been of hello and good-bye, but her limbs were suddenly so shaky that she had to put her hands on his shoulders, as if to keep her arms from falling off. “This is so sudden.”
He snuffled a bit. “You didn’t see it coming?”
“No, no, no.”
“That’s right,” he said bitterly, “because how can she remarry? That was always my ace in the hole.”
Pip squeezed him and rubbed his biceps, and there was nothing wrong with this; he needed a comforting friend. But his muscles were testosterone-hardened and warm. And the great impediment was gone, moved out, gone.
“You guys have been fighting so much, though,” she suggested. “Almost every night, for months.”
“Not so much lately,” he said. “I actually thought things were getting better. But that was only because…”
He put his face in his hands again.
“Is there somebody else?” Pip said. “Somebody she…”
He rocked in a kind of whole-body nod.
“Oh, God. That’s terrible. That’s terrible, Stephen.” She pressed her face into his shoulder. “Tell me what I can do for you,” she whispered into the seersucker of his shirt.
“There is one thing,” he said.
“Tell me,” she said, nuzzling the seersucker.
“You can talk to Ramón.”
This brought her out of the unreality of what was happening; made her aware that she had her face in somebody’s shirt. She took her arms away and said, “Shit.”
“Exactly.”
“What’s going to happen to him?”
“She’s got it all figured out,” Stephen said. “She’s got the entire rest of her life plotted out like some corporate master plan. She gets custody and I get visitation, as if that was the point of adopting him — visitation. She’s been…” He took a deep breath. “She’s involved with the director of the home.”
“Oh, Jesus. Perfect.”
“Who is apparently friends with the archbishop, who can get the marriage annulled for her. Perfect, right? They’re going to put Ramón in the home and try to give him voc ed, and then she can pop out three quick babies in her spare time. That’s the plan, right? And what judge is not going to give full custody to the mother with a full-time paying job at a place for people like Ramón? That’s the plan. And you would not believe how righteous she is about every bit of it.”
“I can sort of believe it,” Pip ventured to say.
“And I love the righteousness,” Stephen said, his voice trembling. “She is righteous. She really does burn with moral purpose. I just didn’t want to have three babies.”
Well, thank God for that, Pip thought.
“So Ramón’s still here?” she said.
“She and Vincent are coming back for him in the morning. Apparently they’ve had the thing planned for weeks now — they were just waiting for a bed to open up.” Stephen shook his head. “I thought Ramón was going to be what saved us. To have a son we both loved, so it wouldn’t matter if we disagreed about everything else.”
“Well,” Pip said with some hostility, owing to the obvious persistence of Marie’s hold on him, “you’re not the first couple whose relationship having a child didn’t save. I was probably a child like that myself in fact.”
Stephen turned to her and said, “You’re a good friend.”
She took his hand and wove her fingers into his and tried to calibrate the pressure of her squeeze. “I am your good friend,” she agreed. But now that his hand was in direct contact with hers, her body was making clear, with thudding heart and shallow breath, that it expected to have his hands all over it in a matter of days, possibly hours. It was like a big dog straining on the leash of her intelligence. She allowed herself to bump his hand once on her thigh, where she most wanted him to place it at this moment, and then released it. “What did you say to Ramón?”
“I can’t face him. I’ve been out here since she left.”
“He’s just been sitting in there without your saying anything to him?”
“She only left like half an hour ago. He’s going to be upset if he sees me crying. I thought you could sort of prepare him, and then I could talk to him reasonably.”
Pip here recalled Annagret’s fateful word weak; but it didn’t make her want Stephen any less. It made her want to forget about Ramón and stay out here and keep touching, because being weak might mean being unable to resist.
“Will you talk to me, too, later on?” she said. “Just me? I really need to talk to you.”
“Of course. This doesn’t change anything, we’ll still have the house. Dreyfuss is a bulldog. Don’t worry about that.”
Although it was obvious to Pip’s body that, in fact, everything had changed, her intelligence could forgive Stephen for being unable to see this so soon after being dumped by his wife of fifteen years. Heart still thudding, she stood up and took her bike inside. Dreyfuss was sitting by himself in the living room, dwarfing a scavenged six-legged office chair and mousing at the house computer.
“Where’s Ramón?” Pip said.
“In his room.”
“I guess I don’t even have to ask you if you know what’s going on.”
“I don’t meddle in family affairs,” Dreyfuss said coolly. Like a six-legged spider, he rotated his bulk in Pip’s direction. “I have, however, been checking facts. The St. Agnes Home is a fully state-accredited and well-reviewed thirty-six-bed facility, opened in 1984. The director, Vincent Olivieri, is a forty-seven-year-old widower with three sons in their late teens and early twenties; he holds an MSW from San Francisco State. Archbishop Evans has visited the home on at least two occasions. Would you care to see a picture of Evans and Olivieri on the front steps of the home?”