"They're too easy, if you ask me. These black and Hispanic kids have one like an annual check-up. Nobody cares."
"Ronnie, that's not the point! We need to discuss this girl before Nelson comes home!"
Harry always thought Ronnie was terribly obtuse-called him an enforcer, a deliberate-foul artist-but Janice doesn't find him obtuse so much as on occasion having a quality of being in the way, of not letting anything just glide past if he doesn't absolutely agree with every detail. He has sat in too many living rooms refusing to leave until the man of the house sees the necessity of buying insurance, it's that blunt thereness he has. Harry was fascinated by Ronnie's big prick and it is big, flat along the top as if you could rest a wineglass on it at half-mast, but what struck Janice the first time was the relatively little difference between it erect and not. Whereas with Harry it was like night and day, between being curled asleep like a baby and being wide-eyed and six feet tall and up and at it.
"O.K.," Ronnie says in his plodding, relentless voice, "the point is
Ruth did a lot of screwing back then-who's to say it was Hotshot that knocked her up? Did the girl look like him?"
She tries to be honest. "It's awful to say this, but I've forgotten exactly what Harry looked like. There was something about her, a kind of, I don't know, pale glow, and a way she couldn't quite sit still, that rang a bell, I thought."
"You thought. You'll have to do better than that before you owe her anything."
"She didn't say I did owe her anything. What she did say was her mother told her to come see us because she'd be alone in the world."
"We're all alone in the world, it turns out," he says. Janice doesn't know quite what he means but it hurts. Harry may have felt it but he would never have said that to her. She wonders sometimes if Ronnie married her just to score somehow on Harry. His lashless, pink-lidded eyes shift in embarrassment past her face, which she knows looks shocked, toward the clock on the microwave, worried about dinner or Nelson arriving home. He tells her, "There'll be money in it at the end, believe me, if you have anything more to do with this bimbo."
"She works as a nurse, and her mother must have left her something, there was all that money from selling the farm."
"I bet. How'd you leave it in the end?"
"We'd get in touch with her. She won't with us."
"Good. Don't. To me, it smells like a scam."
"But I was here. When you were a child, did your parents ever tell you the stranger at the door might be an angel in disguise?"
"No," he says. "They never said that. They said the person at the door probably wants to pull a fast one. Suppose you concede that old Fuckbunny was her dad, she may figure she can sue us for hundreds of thousands in back child support."
Janice takes a step forward to touch his shoulder and to offer herself to be touched. "Ronnie, honey, why are you so rude about Harry? He's dead. He can't bother us now."
"He bothers me. He screwed my wife. Twice he screwed my wife," he adds, meaning Thelma then and her now, as a softening joke, and she rests her body against his, its comforting blocky golf-sweaty hereness. His hands find their habitual places on her. She would never have believed in her teens what an innocent homely comfort it could be, after sixty, to have your bottom groped. He weighs her two buttocks as if they are precious. It occurs to her they should do more in bed, while they're still alive. But at their age there is so much to do, all these errands going nowhere, all these little commitments.
Footsteps sound on the back porch, the screened sun porch. Nelson must have parked his car, a '94 ivory-white Corolla he traded Janice's Camry in on-she had given it to him when she married Ronnie and wanted to rid herself of her last link with the Toyota franchise-out back in the garage, seeing his mother's Le Baron out front. Guiltily she and Ronnie break apart in the kitchen. Nelson sees that something has been up, his stepfather has been pawing his mother. To cover her embarrassment she tells him, Ronnie interrupting to correct where she tells it differently the second time, about the strange girl's-woman's-visit this morning.
Nelson's deep-socketed, distrustful eyes dart back and forth as he listens. Listening is part of what he does for a living, and he lets them talk while he fishes a Coors from the refrigerator. He is forty-two. He has put on weight, but nothing like Harry did; Nelson learned the lesson there. His thinning hair, dark but with his father's fineness-Harry's blond hair would just lift off his head when it dried from being combed-is cut so short his skull and face are naked in their angles, like a convict's. He wears a kind of social worker's uniform-khaki pants and a white shirt with necktie but no jacket. A jacket would overstate the distance between him and the clients at the Fresh Start Adult Day Treatment Center at Elm and Eighth Streets. The clean shirt and tie establish his authority, as one of those who guard the gates of Medicare and Medicaid, which compensate the day-treatment centers that have arisen to replace the Gothic institutions that used to house what were called the insane. His title is mental-health counsellor; his salary comes to twenty-seven thousand a year. His qualifications are a bachelor's degree (major: geography) awarded by Kent State in Ohio and a counsellor's certificate earned ten years later in a year's (1990-91) course of study at the Hubert F. Johnson Community College, in new buildings along the river in South Brewer, while living, he and his three dependents, at 89 Joseph Street courtesy of the new widow. Still here, he sits with his mother and stepfather at the round kitchen table with their makeshift meal and their beverages. Nelson has the Coors, Ronnie a Miller Lite in deference to his weight and blood pressure, and Janice a continuation in an orange-juice glass of the New York State sherry she nipped on returning home, to wash away the sour aftertaste of the bridge with its realization that Doris was a failing friend, a haughty old half-deaf crab. Like Ronnie said, we're alone. All we have is family, for what it's worth.
Nelson asks, "Mom, did you think she was conning you?" Ronnie in concluding the story had given his opinion that this was the case. Nelson generally avoids conflict with his stepfather, though when Janice first announced she might be marrying him he sounded just like Harry, putting Ronnie down.
"Well, I wasn't sure," she says. "She seemed sincere, but then it was kind of brazen, you could say."
"Con artists can be sincere," Ronnie says. "That's what makes them good con artists. They fool even themselves."
"What's worth conning about us?" Nelson asks with his professional mildness, making a question of everything. "We're just scraping by, in a house too big for us, that we ought to be selling. You're retired from the insurance con game and Mom and I work at shit jobs, for not much." His eyelashes, always long for a boy's, flutter in his deep sockets. His haircut makes him look like a Marine or monk.
Ronnie's thin-skinned face flushes. He says, "For a guy who snorted an entire car agency up his nose, you're one to talk about con games."
Janice intervenes, "As I told Ronnie, she seemed to have enough money. Her clothes were good quality."
"What kind of car did she drive?" Ronnie asks.
"You know, I was so rattled I forgot to look. No, wait." She tries to remember the morning-the maple shadows on the street, the mail truck passing… "A Lexus," she announces. "A lipstick-red Lexus, brand new."
Nelson flicks a triumphant glare at Ronnie. "A step up from a Taurus," he says. To his mother he urges, "I think it's great that she had the guts to come around at all. Not that anything that happened back then was her fault exactly. Did she look like Dad?"