Caleb stopped and bent down to look Walt in the face. It was completely white.
“You are a sweet sweet dog. Yes you are.” He hugged him tight around the neck. Walt, realizing this would last a while, let his head drop onto Caleb’s back. Caleb’s eyes were pressed closed as if he were praying for the dog. The hug lasted a long time. Peter waited, and felt ashamed he did not love Walt more. He didn’t really care that he was so old. Walt had always been Vida’s dog. She was the one who did what Caleb was doing now, stroked him, whispered to him. He remembered watching her years ago through a window once. She was out on the field with Walt, running and laughing, wrestling with him on the ground, then lying there with her head beside his for the longest time. Peter had been so angry he’d poured Spic ’N Span in Walt’s water bowl, but nothing happened.
The guests began arriving soon after they got back. His mother had put on one of her school fund-raiser dresses and held a glass of wine, talking to Tom’s sister. Dr. Gibb came with a date. Fran sat at the kitchen table with her cousins, Jonie and Meg, who were in college. Tom took his brother out to his wood shop in the garage. Mrs. May called. The traffic was terrible and she’d be late.
Peter and Stuart lay on their beds as if it were nighttime. Their room was eerily tidy now that his boxes were gone. He thought of the picture in the train book. He wanted to show Stuart but didn’t know how to bring it up.
“Last Thanksgiving I was high until New Year’s, totally wasted, day and night,” Stuart said. “It was great.”
“Why don’t you do it anymore?”
“It shrivels your chi to the size of a fig seed.”
Peter snorted, thinking of Brian, Kristina’s boyfriend, the pothead.
“Not your dick. Your chi is your energy, your life force. It needs to flow easily. ‘The true man breathes from his feet up.’”
Neither of them said anything for a while, just listened to the sealike undulations of the party down the hall. This was a good time to show him, Peter decided. His heart began pounding.
“Want to see a picture of my father?”
“Your father?” Stuart had never asked about his father. No one had.
“Yeah. I found it when I was unpacking today.” He hoisted himself up and pulled out a small piece of construction paper from the book on the shelf.
Stuart started laughing. “This is all you have of your dad? She’s never even given you a photo?”
“She doesn’t have any. I think they split up before I was born.”
Stuart looked at the creased, smudged drawing and shook his head. “Jesus. That’s really pathetic.”
Peter wished he’d just hand it back. He didn’t know why he’d showed it to him anyway. He felt hollow in his chest as he waited.
A car pulled up at the curb and cut its lights. Stuart tossed the paper back to him and swung off his bed. “That’s my grandmother!” he called, flinging himself out of the room spastically, like a little boy. Peter put the paper back where he’d always kept it, ever since the day she drew it, and followed him out.
Mrs. May was not old-looking but she moved slowly, as if all her muscles were sore. She gave Peter a nod when introduced but not a hand. To his mother she didn’t even give a nod. When it was time to eat, she sat stiffly on the couch in a boiled wool suit while her grandchildren fetched her a glass of milk and another slice of turkey from the buffet. Peter watched the Belou kids hover near, vying for her scrutiny. He thought his mother should make more of an effort with her, but Vida sat on the other side of the room, nibbling and sipping. He hoped she got drunk. He liked her when she was drunk. When he was younger she’d peek in his room when she came back from parties. If he spoke to her, she’d come sit on his bed and tell him all about where she’d gone and which of his teachers were there. She always seemed so happy after a few drinks: she’d smooth his hair and say how lucky she was to have him. And he’d be so relieved she hadn’t died that he’d hug her tight and she wouldn’t pull away.
She was telling school stories now, the raunchy one about the prank on the school nurse. Her eyes were shiny and overfocused, as if she were on stage.
Tom talked quietly to Mrs. May. They spoke of Skaneateles, and of Connecticut, where she’d just eaten a noontime meal with her sister and her brood of children, grandchildren, and even two great-grandchildren.
Quietly, to Tom, she said, “I never envied my sister her six children. Now—” She threw up her hands, then quickly collected them in her lap again.
Tom’s head bobbed in understanding.
Vida imitated the nurse’s long shrill shriek when she found the sausage in her purse. A boom of laughter followed.
Peter saw no resemblance in the dull face of Mrs. May to the picture of her daughter in the bathroom.
“Vida’s a hoot, isn’t she?” Peter heard Tom’s brother say to him at the door.
“She is,” Tom said, confused, like he’d bought an appliance with too many features.
The hugs with Mrs. May were long and tight. Peter and Vida stayed clear, then joined the others at the door to wave as she moved slowly to her car.
“Funny old fish,” Vida whispered loudly.
Then Thanksgiving was behind them, a long weekend ahead. That Friday, a cold rain fell. They played Parcheesi, Yahtzee, Stratego. Peter and Fran made frappes. They drank them in front of an afternoon movie about dolphins. Stuart groaned at all the Christmas ads. At one point they were all — Stuart, Fran, Peter, and Caleb — under the big afghan on the couch. Who knew where Vida and Tom were? Who cared? All his life Peter had always known exactly where his mother was; knowledge of her whereabouts was crucial, like knowing you had clothes on. But now he was free of that.
When the movie was over, Fran studied his profile. “You have that funny kind of earlobe. The kind that sticks to the skin on your face, like webbed feet.”
Peter didn’t know what she was talking about.
“Look.” She batted her mobile lobe. “We all have the dangly kind.”
Later, he looked at his ears in the mirror. He looked at his mother’s at dinner. It was true. Neither of them had the dangly Belou earlobes.
Before dinner, Tom took him aside and scolded him: the wood box had been empty for several days now. Keeping the box full was one of Peter’s chores, but he didn’t like it because it meant going down to the basement alone. Mrs. Belou’s things were down there, in boxes and garment bags, crouching in the corner.
He couldn’t explain that to Tom, so he apologized and picked up the canvas carrier. Halfway down the stairs he saw Caleb in the yellow and blue dress, zipping Fran into the red and white one. Their backs were to him. Fran’s bra strap was beige. He didn’t want to see them in their mother’s dresses. Before he even registered what he was doing he was back in the living room empty-handed. Tom shook his head and took the carrier from him.
Within seconds Tom returned.
“I apologize, Peter,” he said formally, as if they had just met. “I didn’t know they were playing with”—he paused—“costumes.” He sat down on a hard chair in the corner that no one ever used, and looked at his feet.
It was the pale-eyed girl who came late that night. After Stuart had gone to her, Peter got up and eavesdropped through the front door. They were on the steps as usual, arguing about Christ. Peter was disappointed; he wanted Stuart to be talking about him.
“But why isn’t there any documentation of the thirty-two previous years if on the night of his birth the North Star led everyone to his cradle and they celebrated the arrival of the king of kings? If all this Christmas crap actually happened, why do we know so little about his life? Why was he a poor carpenter instead of a beleaguered messiah?”