“You’re lying.”
“How do you know?”
“There’s only a one-in-four chance that I’d get it right—one-in-five if you counted your thumb as a finger—so the odds were against it. And besides, ‛lie’ was written all over your voice.”
I laughed, truly impressed. “The Amazing Lexis strikes again.”
Lexie grinned for a moment, and I noticed how her smile fit with her half-closed eyes. It was like the face you make when you’re tasting something unbelievable, like my dad’s eggplant Parmesan, which is poison in anyone else’s hands.
Lexie reached over to pet Moxie again. “Too bad Calvin couldn’t come with us.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, right.” I probably would have gone the whole night without thinking about him once, and now I felt a little guilty about that—and annoyed that I felt guilty—and irritated that I was annoyed. “Why would you want the Schwa on a date with us, anyway?”
“This isn’t a date,” Lexie said. “People don’t get paid to go on a date.”
She thought she had me there. “Well, you’re not supposed to know I’m getting paid—and since you know and are still letting me take you out, it is a date.”
She didn’t say anything to that. Maybe she just couldn’t argue with my logic.
“There’s something ... unusual about Calvin,” she said.
“He’s visibly impaired,” I told her. “Observationally challenged.”
“He thinks he’s invisible?”
“He is invisible ... kind of.”
Lexie screwed up her lips so they looked kind of like the red scrunchy she wore in her hair, then said, “No, it’s more than that. There’s something else about him that either you don’t know or you’re just not telling me.”
“Well, his mother either disappeared in Waldbaum’s supermarket or got chopped up by his father, who sent pieces to all fifty states. No one’s really sure which it is.”
“Hmm,” Lexie said. “That’s bound to have an effect on a person, either way.”
“He seems okay to me.”
“He’s very sweet,” Lexie added.
“Ripe is the word,” I said. “He’s gotta start wearing deodorant.”
The lights in the amphitheater started to dim, and the crowd began cheering for the band to start.
“Maybe you should walk the dogs,” Lexie said.
“Huh?”
“I said maybe you should walk the dogs, and Calvin should be my escort.”
I wasn’t expecting that. It hit me in a place I didn’t know was there. All I could think of was one of those medical shows. They’re operating on some poor slob, they accidentally nick an artery, and he starts gushing. “We got a bleeder!” the surgeon yells, and everybody comes rushing to the operating table. Nobody was rushing to me, though.
“Sure,” I said. “If that’s what you want.”
The band began to play, and I quickly wiped away the tears I was bleeding, even though I knew she couldn’t see them.
Lexie confronted her grandfather the next morning, telling him she knew that he paid boys to hang around with her. I showed up at Crawley’s that afternoon, determined to quit before I got fired, but Crawley didn’t give me the satisfaction.
“You are a miserable failure,” the old man told me. “You couldn’t even keep our financial arrangement a secret.”
“She already knew,” I told him.
“How could she already know? What do you take me for, an idiot?”
“Sometimes, yeah.”
He grunted, then threw a chew toy at Fortitude, who was gnawing on his shoe. The toy bounced off the dog’s nose, and she went for it, trotting off happily with the toy in her jaws.
“Apparently, whatever you did, it disgusted my granddaughter enough that she’d rather be with that Schwa kid than with you. You are hereby demoted to dog walker again.”
“Who said I’m doing anything for you anymore?”
“You did,” Crawley said calmly. “You accepted twelve weeks of community service.”
“Well, now I unaccept it.”
“Hmmph. Too bad,” Crawley said. “I was actually beginning to think you had some personal integrity.”
I grit my teeth. I don’t know why it mattered what he thought of me, but it did. He was right; I was a miserable failure—even at quitting.
“Do you want me to walk the dogs now or later?”
“Walk them at your leisure,” he said, and rolled off. For once he didn’t gloat over his little victory.
I went to get the leashes and spent my afternoon trying to think of nothing but walking dogs.
10. Earthquakes, Nuclear Winter, and the End of Life as We Know It, over Linguini
My parents had a fight on the day I got demoted to dog walker. Maybe it was no worse than other fights they had over the years, but I noticed it a whole lot more. Maybe because seeing the Schwa’s sorry home life made me more tuned in to my own.
I heard them even before I walked in the door. They were screaming at each other like the Antonoviches two doors down, who would end our dependence on foreign oil if you could harness the sheer vocal energy of their fights.
“It’s the Big One,” Frankie said when I came in the door. “I estimate eight-point-six on the Richter scale. Better hold on to something.” He pretended to watch TV while listening to the fight.
Christina crouched by the kitchen door, sticking her nose in, and writing in her diary. “It began at five-eleven pm,” she said. “Thirty-seven minutes straight, so far.”
“Red sauce?” I heard Mom yell. “I’ll give you red sauce!”
We all knew the Big One was a clear and present danger. For years we hoped the pressure could be released through smaller tremors, and for years it had worked. I was beginning to think maybe the Big One wouldn’t come at all.
“If it wasn’t for me, you’d all starve!” Mom yelled.
“At least we’d be out of our misery!” Dad shouted back.
The Big One was all about food. Mom was no slouch when it came to cooking—but, like I said, Dad stood in a league by himself. No parent I know—mother or father—could whip up dishes the way my dad did, but he didn’t often get the chance, because the kitchen was Mom’s. Dad might have been the Vice-Vice-President of Product Development for Pisher Plastics, but Mom was the Empress of Bonano Food Productions, and I pity the fool who challenges her reign.
Dad was that fool. It was his destiny.
Well, if the Big One was tonight, they picked the wrong day to have it. I had just walked fourteen dogs, been dumped by a blind girl, been dumped on by her grandfather, and right now I wanted a cold soda.
“Antsy, don’t go in there,” Frankie warned. “We ain’t got any body bags.”
I figured I could slip in and out unnoticed. The Antsy Effect was nowhere near as potent as the Schwa Effect, but in my own family, it worked just as well.
I pushed my way past Christina, who was scribbling her life away in the diary, logging her impressions of the battle for future generations.
The scene was weirdly dramatic. Like something out of Shakespeare. Dad waved a spatula in the air as he spoke, making him look like a swordsman, and Mom spoke with her hands so much, it looked like karate.
“I’m tired of eating your family’s lousy, tasteless recipes,” Dad said.
“Tasteless recipes? My grandmother’s rolling in her grave!”
“It’s from indigestion.”
She threw an artichoke at him, and he batted it away with the spatula.
I went to the refrigerator, took out a Coke, and then something very strange happened. I flashed to Howie and Ira playing “Three Fisted Fury,” ignoring the Schwa. Anger began to boil up inside me. Yeah, I could get in and out of that kitchen unnoticed, but suddenly I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to ever again. I had a right to be noticed.