“Really,” I said. I assumed my mother had told him to say this.
“Lynn’s loved paintings since she was a little kid,” Wylie said. “She used to just stand there and stare at them, like she was sleepwalking or something. You could talk to her and she wouldn’t even hear you.”
“You loved paintings when you were a kid?” Darren said.
“When I was a kid,” Donny said, “I loved baseball and, I don’t know, making fun of girls.”
“Some things never change,” Darren said philosophically, then elbowed his brother, and they both laughed.
David wiped his mustache delicately with his napkin and patted his belly as though complimenting it on a job well done.
Meanwhile Donny, Darren, and Wylie all used pieces of bread to clear their plates of any last vestiges and sat back with an air of regretful finality.
Donny grinned at Wylie across the table. “For a skinny guy, you can put a lot away.”
“It’s probably his first square meal in weeks,” our mother said.
“If I don’t eat real regular, I get irritable and off-balance,” Donny volunteered.
“Now that makes sense,” she said, looking at Wylie.
“I feel good now,” Wylie told her quietly.
“I’m sure glad to hear it,” David said. “You were giving your mother quite a scare.”
“Was I?” Wylie said.
“Now, son, you know you were. Running around with all those—” here he paused, and smoothed his mustache with his right index finger—“antisocial types.”
I watched Wylie smile at this, first gently and then widely.
“Those antisocial types,” he said quietly, “are good people doing important work, and they’re my best friends.”
“Those people are spoiled brats and trust-fund babies. I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that they’re living off their parents while they run around thinking they’re righteous because they spike trees.”
“You don’t know that they spike trees,” I said. “You don’t know anything about them.”
“You’d be surprised what I know,” David told me. “I know it’s not all fun and games and some big party like you kids think it is.” His lips were sputtering beneath his mustache. “I know that there are serious issues at stake.”
“Like hell you do,” I said. I was drunk.
At the end of the table, my mother covered her face with her hands. “Why are you defending those people?”
“Why shouldn’t she defend them?” Wylie said.
“Now, listen, young lady,” David said. “I’m as environmentally sensitive as the next person—”
“Sure you are, when the next person’s a toad killer,” Wylie said.
“What’s that mean?” Donny said, and Darren shifted in his seat.
“Toad killer,” Wylie said slowly. He was still smiling, his jaw clenched, and the words issued from between his teeth in a whisper. He stood up. In the flickering candlelight his smile shimmered with rage. “As in one who kills toads just for the fun of it.”
“Sit down,” our mother said. He ignored her. Across from me, Darren wiped a finger over his plate and licked off some final morsel. His father rose heavily to his feet and held up his palms in what I guessed he thought was a soothing gesture. But it had the opposite effect, and Wylie whirled on our mother and said, “You don’t understand anything.” I said his name, and he looked at me and shook his head, then ran out of the house in his clean, bare, callused feet.
I was the only one who went outside, calling his name again, twice. I knew he heard me, but he didn’t turn around, running silently down the street and disappearing around the corner.
Inside, my mother was shaking her head, David had his arm around her, and the sons were doing dishes. I couldn’t stand to stay in there. I went back outside and sat on the trunk of the Caprice. Lights around me blinked on and off: distant headlights showing through the gaps between houses, people drawing the curtains on a window down the street.
Later, much later, I fell asleep with the nagging feeling that there was something I could have done but didn’t, might have prevented but let slip — a slim thought that kept getting away from me, like something glimpsed out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned my head, it was gone.
Eight
July came, summer bursting into full bloom, the long heat of arid days and the brown edge of wilt around plants. The city announced a water shortage and promoted discounts on rock-garden materials and low-flush toilets. On the Fourth, my mother and David invited me along to watch fireworks explode over the muddy dregs of the Rio Grande, but I declined. Instead I sat in a lawn chair in her tiny backyard listening to the manic end of a bipolar swing: the quiet, crickety hush that usually blanketed my mother’s neighborhood gave way to the whistle of bottle rockets, the screech of tires, the occasional backfire, hoots and hollers of people driving by. Children calling out the names of other children. A vodka and tonic sweated peacefully in my hand.
Of all the seasons, summer felt the most like childhood. I was thinking about vacations when Wylie and I were little, the four of us piling into the car for road trips to Colorado, my dad’s family in Chicago, or, once, the Grand Canyon. My father loved maps, and every night in the motel room he’d unfold one and draw a blue line over the road we’d traveled that day. One time, in a small town on the outskirts of Denver, I woke up in the middle of the night in a strange motel room, dizzy, entranced, sick with fever. My brother was breathing noisily next to me — he was a mouth breather — but he looked like a stranger, and so did my parents in their bed. Laid out on the desk was an unfolded map tracing our path from Albuquerque, heading north, but the world was a puzzle, the geography foreign: I didn’t recognize the route we’d taken or the location of home. My father rolled over and asked what I was doing.
“I’m trying to do my homework,” I told him, “but I don’t understand it.” He pressed a large palm flat against my forehead and then scooped me up. Shivering in my nightgown, I fought against him because it hurt my skin to be touched, and a minute later I threw up in his lap. He was three years older than I was now.
“And so what,” I said out loud, to myself, in the dark. I finished my drink. In a lull of quiet between illegal fireworks I heard the crunching sound of someone walking around the side of the condo. I stood up and found myself on the receiving end of a bear hug given by Angus Beam, my cheek smashed against his bare shoulder, my feet momentarily off the ground. I’d forgotten the odor of his body — part close skin, part distant chemical — and the dense spray of orange-brown freckles across his grinning face.
“Happy patriotic holiday,” he said, releasing me. “Need anything plumbed?”
“Actually, there is a strange smell coming from the garbage disposal. Like a nasty, rotten kind of smell. Can you help with that?”
“I know just the thing,” he said. “Get me a lemon and two glasses of ice.”
“You’re kidding.”
He went into the kitchen without answering. I brought him the supplies, and he cut the lemon in half with a Leatherman he pulled out of his back pocket.
“Watch,” he said. He poured a glass of ice down the disposal, switched it on — a ferocious, grinding sound — and turned on the cold water. He ground up half the lemon, too, then wiped his hands. “You’re all set.”
I stuck my nose over the sink, and the smell was gone. “Hey, it worked,” I said. “What’s the other glass of ice for?”
“I was hoping you’d make me a drink with it.”
His eyes shone. He was the only person around who ever seemed truly happy to see me. We poured vodka, tonic, ice, and lemon juice into his water bottle and went for a walk, holding hands like a couple of civilized people.