Beyond Deserving (32 page)

“I think the Italians do,” Katie says. She has found a stool and is watching Fish with pleasure. “Just enough to slick the pan.” She bursts out a quick loud laugh. “That looks like a Fast Eddy pan.”

Fish grins. “The ultimate dipshit.”

They rented a cabin from Eddy and his wife one rainy winter, on the Sechelt Peninsula. At nine o'clock one night, Eddy showed up from Vancouver to reclaim an iron skillet his wife needed to make an apple pancake. He jumped around and spun right out of there, to make it back on the last ferry. Whenever they saw anybody uptight over something stupid, after that, they called him Fast Eddy.

Fish slides the egg carefully onto the warmed skillet, humming a Dylan tune. “Lay lady lay, across my big brass bed—”

“Lo.” A girl in a short black polka-dot skirt, yellow tank top, and pink Birkenstocks appears beside them. “Hey Fish, you put on one of rich son's thousand and one shirts. Think he'll miss it?”

“Carol Lee,” Fish says. He finds a saucer for Katie's egg.

“Fork?” For a moment Katie tries to act like the girl isn't there. She is a tall leggy one, with hair halfway to her waist.

“My brother was playing bigshot host, I didn't want to go home. I've been asleep in the kid's room. I saw where you put the key.”

“Oh well,” Fish says. Katie eats her egg.

“Sometimes I help Fish out,” Carol says to Katie.

“Sometimes I do too,” Katie says.

“Aw Katie,” Fish says. “She's just a kid.” Katie rinses her plate off at the sink. He comes up behind her. “She lives up the street from my first job. She hangs out, you know? Sticks her legs out in the sun, heats up coffee, holds the other end of a board—”

Katie turns around, drying her hands on her jeans. “Don't mind me,” she says to the girl.

“I've got a couple of joints,” the girl says. When neither Fish nor Katie take her up on her offer, she pouts and says, “It'd be easier to stay here, you know? I mean, my brother can be a real jerk when he's entertaining. He's okay otherwise, but—”

“Don't go on account of me,” Katie says. Seeing the girl out of sorts makes her relax. She doesn't think Carol Lee has too big a claim.

Carol sits down on the floor in the center of the kitchen. “I wondered what you looked like.”

“It's cool,” Fish mutters. “Hey it's okay,” to no one in particular.

“They sit around at night and watch tv,” Carol says. She crosses her legs in a yoga-like position. “He sits in his chair with the throw that has ducks on it, and she sits on the couch with her legs tucked under a lap robe she crocheted. She's a bank teller. Every night she says, ‘My legs are aching, Joey,' and he says, ‘Would it help to massage them?” He rubs her calves a few minutes and then he gets out the vibrator from the basket where she keeps magazines. She turns the vibrator on, while he turns up the tv. In a little while she hands it to him and he rubs his neck with it. Sometimes I hear his teeth clicking.”

“The American family,” Fish says. “Huh, Katie?”

Katie shrugs. Obviously, this is a little act of Carol Lee's.

“She used to be fat,” Carol says. “Then she joined this group where they have meetings, and weigh in, and tell each other about the candy bars they sneaked during the week. She comes home and tells us what everybody said.”

“And now she's not fat?”

“Not fat. She cooks these vegetable dishes, and baked potatoes. She goes to exercise classes. She nags Joe about his gut. She says he should come to the group, that he'll get better if he does. Like he's sick or something. She says a gut on a man is a time bomb, especially when he overworks. Joe's a CPA.”

Katie laughs. “So what?”

Fish says, “Pop talk. Crystals, channels, Alcoholics Anonymous. AA people came to jail and tried to lay it on us. Ex-addicts and drunks, really full of it. They said they knew where we were at. Shit. When the meeting was over they went home. That's not where we were at. My pop got sucked into that shit. They turned him into a pipsqueak, that and frying his brain.”

“Do you think it's stupid, Fish?” Katie asks. “People talking to each other, if it makes them feel better?”

“Shit, I don't care,” Fish answers magnanimously. “Whatever gets you through the night. But not me. I'm not getting brainwashed with anybody's group think. And I'm not telling about the fuzz in my navel and how I used to fuck my mother.”

“Silly,” Carol says.

“You sure?” Fish says.

“I like to hear stories,” Katie says. “As long as they're funny.”

43

They smoke Carol's dope and go for Fish's truck. Katie suggests a drive. They stop at Safeway so Fish can buy another half-gallon of Chablis. He holds it up for Katie to see as he gets back in the truck. “White,” he says. He likes red wine, but he knows she doesn't.

“Our house is out this way,” Fish says when they reach the edge of town.

“Have you been there since you got home?” asks Katie.

“Nope. Michael's taken care of it. They're supposed to be out the end of June.”

“Ooh, I'd love to live in the country,” Carol coos. “Someplace with lots of trees so people couldn't see what I'm doing.”

“Sounds like our house,” Fish says. “And a yard big enough to build a boat in someday.”

The first lawyer Katie went to said she should make Fish sell the house and split the money with her. “Not on your life,” she told the witch. She doesn't want Fish to spend the rest of his life in Michael's basement because of her. And child support! It isn't Katie's mother getting the divorce. Katie found another lawyer and didn't even mention the house or child.

Fish slows on a long dark curve. “We're not far,” he says, and Carol says, “Drive by.” Katie says, “Yeah, Fish, drive by.” She has been trying to imagine living there again. She rides with her window down, the air blowing in her hair. They come up on the house, which sits far back at the end of a long drive, hardly visible from the road. Fish cuts his lights and rolls onto the drive. Katie can see, in the flash of illumination, that the grounds have been tidied up, trash hauled away, bushes clipped back. The grass is neatly mowed. She doesn't think Fish will like the new look.

“I guess they're good tenants, huh?” she says. Fish is opening the wine. She crawls down out of the truck and closes the door quietly. The driveway surface crunches under her shoes. There are lights on in the house. She takes a few steps away from the drive, and sits on the grass. Fish and Carol make their way over to join her, and they pass the wine around in silence. In a while, Carol produces another joint.

“It looks okay,” Fish says. “What the hell, the grass got cut.”

“I heard Michael say the woman's pregnant,” Katie says.

“Yeah?” from Fish.

“I had a baby once,” Carol says.

“Yeah?” Fish says again.

“My folks kicked me out when I wouldn't have an abortion. That's when I started living with my brother. He's okay, you know, for somebody 32?” Katie and Fish laugh and lean toward one another. Carol, oblivious, says, “I was sixteen. She's four now. I just saw her for a minute. God, it hurt.” She lies back on the grass. She says, “It'd be different now. It'd be great to have a little kid to be with all the time.”

Katie feels almost cozy with the girl. She reminds her of her own younger days, though she never was silly about babies. She turns to Fish. “Are you awake?”

He moves closer and puts his arm across her shoulder. He says, “I was thinking about the time Michael and Ursula and I went to a concert in a park in Portland. We brought four people home. One of them was Carmen. She lived with them for fifteen, sixteen months after. She was about Carol's age.”

Carol appears to have fallen asleep.

“Fish, look at the fucking moon,” Katie says. Just then someone comes toward them with a flashlight, startling them. “Who's out here? Who is it!” a man's voice says.

“Oh shit,” Fish says, jumping up. The light is on his face. He puts his arm up to shield his eyes. “Hey, don't do that, man,” he says. “We're nothing to get excited about. We were just driving by.”

“Well, get out of here,” the man says. He isn't very old.

“Listen,” Katie says, moving toward him. “It's our house, see? We just got back into town, and we drove by, that's all. It's our house. Katie and Fish. It's our house.”

“Who is it, Sky?” A fat woman with a light girlish voice stumbles through the darkness. As she comes closer, Katie sees that she is pregnant, and it is only her belly that is so large.

“You go in, Prudence,” Sky says.

By now Fish and Katie are on their feet, and Carol has come up to a sitting position. “Like, when are you due?” she pipes up. Prudence drops to the ground beside her. “Anytime,” she says. “They're kicking me to death!”

“Hey man, sorry if we scared you,” Fish says, extending his hand. Sky hesitates, then shakes it, and says, “We didn't want people camping on your property.”

Prudence groans, trying to stand up again. Carol and Sky help her up. “You guys could come in, I was going to make some tea,” she says. “I can't sleep.”

“Naw,” Fish says.

“Like, what kind?” Carol asks. “Do you have spearmint, or rosehip?”

“Oh sure,” Prudence says, stumbling ahead of them as they troop toward the house.

They enter through the front room into the large kitchen. Katie is dazed for a moment. The kitchen is bright, like an operating room. They have added a row of fluorescent lights, and they have painted. The ceiling and walls are stark white, and the cabinets are pale yellow with stenciled flowers around the edge. Someone has put in a lot of time. A gleaming black kettle on the stove starts to whistle.

Prudence has a dainty face, one you might call heart-shaped, with a pointy chin and round eyes set out so far you can see all the lid. She has long delicate arms, stuck out from her swollen body like twigs on a snowman. When she stands it looks like two people could sit on her belly. She has to lean out over her distension to get the kettle off the back burner. She motions toward the table. “You guys sit down. What's your names? I didn't hear.”

Katie does the introductions. Fish looks uncomfortable. “I'd like to look around the back, if it's okay,” he says. “To remember the place, you know? I haven't been here in a year.”

Sky takes a couple of beers out of the refrigerator and opens the back door. He has the sort of baby face that takes a long time to age, and then gets soft all at once. He might be thirty. It is hard to tell.

Carol pulls out a chair and sprawls at the table. She is wide awake now. “Are you using a midwife or what?” she asks Prudence.

Katie rushes to follow the men out the door, though they pay no attention to her. Sky has turned on the back light.

“Here Fisher,” he says, handing Fish a beer. “That what they call you? Your last name?”

“Fish,” Fish mumbles.

“You understand we can't move before we're supposed to, end of June? Pru's due any time, and the house we're supposed to move into isn't ready. Actually, we're moving into the house of Pru's mother, and it's her new house that's not done. Everything's logjammed.”

“Yeah, it's cool,” Fish says. He guzzles his beer and starts walking around the yard. “Did my brother pay for all this shit?” he said.

Sky coughs, and says, “We worked it out, reimbursement. I hope you like what we've done.” They have cut back some bushes, cleared a space, and laid a circle of stones. Around the stones they have dug a narrow dirt bed where small flowers are poking their heads out. The back fence has been propped and repaired.

“I dunno,” Fish says. “I wouldn't have done it myself.”

Katie sits down on a bench near the back door.

Fish stops in front of the shed. She can see that Sky has replaced the stick of wood Fish used for a handle with a real door knob. She wishes fiercely that only she and Fish were here, that time could move back, or forward, and give them another chance. When they bought this house she thought, we'll have a real life after all. Just like she thought when Rhea was born. A real life seems a wonderful and possible dream, if only she did not smash it. One of her eyes begins to throb.

She thinks what Fish would probably want is to turn out the light, find a stool, sit in the dark, and get drunk. She knows he is eyeing all the “improvements” with disgust, wanting to pile his belongings where he wants, to paint over those sweet little stencils, and spill grease on the stove. He turns around with a wild look on his face. Only she sees it.

The last night he spent in this house, before he got busted, she made Poor Pizza, with pork and beans on top. They laughed until her sides hurt, eating it. It was awful.

He opens the shed. Even in the dim light, she can see that it has been swept out, and the odds and ends rearranged. There are still boxes of bottles. “Didn't get to these?” Fish asks.

Sky comes closer and peers in. “I turned in all the beer bottles out of there and from the yard. But the wine bottles—we do recycling, of course, and I could haul them—but I thought there might be some reason you were saving them. Maybe you make your own.” His voice is strained.

“Don't haul them away,” Fish says. He shuts the shed door and whirls around, nearly nose to nose with Sky. “And don't paint anything else, or fix anything else, either.”

“Sure man, whatever you say.” Sky backs toward the house.

“I'm living in my brother's fucking basement,
man
.”

“Yeah, well. July 1, it's yours, I guess, huh? I was hoping we could get an extension—”

“You know July 4th? Fucking Independence Day?”

“Sure, what about it?”

“It's my birthday. Forty-five, man. And I want to be in my house,
man
. I want all my bottles to be here, too.”