Child of My Right Hand (23 page)

Heinsohn said, “We'll be in touch.”

“And ma'am,” said Officer Trent, “I want to thank you again. That chocolate was really tasty.”

The cops moved into the cool evening. Before Jack closed the door, she glimpsed Sam bounce up to be petted, and maybe to sniff a little peace officer crotch.

“We need to talk,” Jack said, back inside, eyes aggrieved.

“I don't want to.” Simon started down the family room stairs.

“Get back here!”

“Let him go,” Genna said. The oaken risers moaned under Simon's weight. “We should talk first.”

She heard Simon start down the basement hallway to his bedroom and turned towards Jack, her gray eyes wary.

They met in the principal's office Tuesday afternoon with Doctor Burroughs, Marla Lindstrom, and the drama teacher, Ms. Cherry, whom Genna felt she already knew because Simon had said so much about her. What a cute, cheery young woman, who clearly valued Simon for the right reasons. Ms. Cherry—Please, call me Rona—immediately offered to let him out of the show. Suspecting this might happen, Genna had questioned Simon before school. Oh no, Mom, the show must go on. So Genna shook her head and tried to sound braver than she felt. Whistle a happy tune, Genna. The young teacher's face lit with joy. Broadway! Dimples! I'm so glad, Mrs. Barish. We wouldn't have been nearly as good without him.

Dr. Burroughs, whose appearance was even more badger-like than in the fall, gave his little gray head a shake. He'd warned them, hadn't he, that these attitudes still existed in the community? They nodded, miserably. But if that was the family's decision, he'd support it one hundred and ten percent. Or some such nonsense. Only a few hours had passed, but she couldn't precisely recall the platitude that had dribbled from the principal's bearded lips. Genna was more interested in what Marla had to say. The entire meeting, forty minutes when it could have been five, she focused on Jack and Marla, trying to intuit the state of affairs—affair?—between them. She wasn't sure why—maybe how much time he was supposedly spending in his office, an unwillingness to meet her eyes?—but she'd begun to fear again that her Valentine's Day suspicions had been correct. She and Jack had fought so badly last night she was absolutely raw on the subject of Jack and Marla, Jack and Simon, Jack and anything at all, and found herself wishing as she waited—her spirit drip, drip, dripping, spirit water torture—for the meeting to end, that Jack would slide a proprietary hand onto Marla's slender thigh, or she on his. As they exited Badger's office, it was all she could do not to whisper in the guidance counselor's shell-like ear, If you want him, honey just take him somewhere, and hump him.

Instead, she and Jack thanked everyone oh-so-blandly, then returned to their car in frosty silence. How self-indulgent, with everything that was going on, to be fighting with Jack, to be jealous of Marla, as if that were the issue. All the way home, with Jack an uncommunicative block behind the wheel, they didn't speak. They entered the empty house through the garage. Last night's hot-chocolate pan remained in the sink, unwashed.

“I'm going to my office,” Jack said. “If that's all right.”

“Why wouldn't it be?”

He looked as if he were about to fire back, then walked out. A moment later, she heard the car reverse out of the garage. In her study, Genna found the junk paperback she'd been reading,
Excess of Hope
, from the Nexus fantasy series, by E.B. Gomez. Now that Lizzie's teenage chill limited how much they spoke, she tried to read the same books to stay in touch that way. She'd linger where she believed Lizzie had: to sniff a black rose or to watch the violet sunset on the third moon of Zeron.

After her mother died, Genna had struggled to keep her alive by recalling places they'd been together. That was emotional life with Doris: remote sharing. With Daddy, she'd shared hardly anything at all, not just because he wasn't her real father, as they said back then, but because he was so tall and male, remote as a mountain.

That's what scared her about Lizzie, the distance she sometimes felt, as if an alien gamete had passed through her, unmarked by thirty years in her ovary. A genetic second coming of Doris. Just add semen and wait. And Simon, in whom she saw so much of herself, and now that she knew, so much of Sweets, she didn't need a book to know how he felt. What was upsetting her—other than a goddamn cross in her yard!—was that she'd returned from San Francisco feeling she'd made that sort of connection to Sweets and now this. Although Simon didn't use the word, and maybe he didn't even understand, Sweets had apparently provided him with a male hooker, a very proficient, and to hear Simon, a gorgeous one at that. What was she supposed to do? Pretend it hadn't happened? Lose her father a second time? Insist Simon get tested for AIDS? She was so distraught she didn't know what to say to Jack, and so she'd said nothing.

Genna desperately wanted her mother, never mind that in life Doris had resisted being the sort of mother on whose bosom she or anyone else could pour out their troubles.

I'm scared, Doris. I'm scared, you frosty old bitch!

Now you're talking, Genna.

Scared for myself, scared for Simon.

Don't slouch.

I opened my heart to Sweets.

Doris—or whatever this was, some rancid trick of a worried mind?—raised a weary eyebrow on the left margin of page 206 of
Excess of Hope
.

Like mother, like daughter.

Can I trust him?

I could, except where it mattered most.

“Sam,” she called. “Sam!” The big dummy poked his golden muzzle into her study. “What say we go for a run? What do you say, Sam?”

A toothy grin.

***

After the article appeared Thursday in the
Tipton Gazette
, their phone rang off the hook. The
Cincinnati Enquirer
. Some reporter from WGUC, the NPR affiliate in Cincinnati. Colleagues from her department and from Jack's. The Dean of Arts and Sciences. The provost. Norris White, faculty advisor to the African American Students Association. The heads of the Cincinnati and Hamilton, Ohio, chapters of the NAACP. The article hadn't explicitly stated that the Barishes weren't black; most strangers had therefore made a logical, if incorrect assumption about race. When the family met over dinner—Genna had baked boneless chicken and vegetables in marinara, served it over egg noodles—Simon said, “Guess what?”

“What?” asked Jack, as much as he'd said to her in three days.

“It's not bad enough that in Tipton, Ohio, I'm gay, fat, and Jewish.” Simon heaped his plate, passed the pot to Lizzie and topped his mound of noodles with two plump breasts, a pool of sauce, but as few cooked vegetables as he could manage. “Oh, no. Now everyone thinks I'm African American.”

She glanced at Jack, then at Lizzie, who had passed the noodles after taking a single spoonful. Simon cut his meat into larger-than-anyone-else's bite-size pieces and distributed them through his noodles.

“I was walking in the hall, and a couple of the moonfaces pushed into me. ‘Hey faggot,' they said. ‘You're really light for a—' And then they used the N-word.”

Simon swallowed his first wad of chicken-pasta.

Jack asked, “Did you report them to the principal's office?”

Just like him to make this about something Simon failed to do.

Mouth full, Simon shook his head. “I told Mrs. Lindstrom.”

“Good for you,” Genna said. “What did she say?”

“‘It's amazing how stupid some people can be.' Then she got them in trouble. She got Nick Fleming in trouble, too.”

“Good for Mrs. Lindstrom,” Jack said, perhaps to needle her. “What about you, Lizzie, anybody say anything to you today?”

“No more than usual.”

“What does that mean?”

Lizzie shrugged, sullenly, Genna thought.

“Tell me,” Jack said.

“Kids are always teasing me about Simon.”

Genna recalled her very different experience as Billy's sister. No wonder she and Lizzie felt so estranged sometimes.

“What do you do about it?” Jack asked.

Lizzie's eyes laughed. “I tell them to kiss my skinny Jewish bottom.”

“Go, girl,” Simon said, and for a moment the Barish clan ate in silence marveling, at least Genna was, at her unknowable daughter, at the challenges that brought them together.

Simon broke in, brightly, “I had a good day at rehearsal.” He crammed his mouth with more pasta and chicken. “I know all my lines.”

“That's good,” Jack said, then apparently couldn't resist. “About time.”

Simon grinned, too relieved, she thought, to be offended.

“Fourteen days to opening night. Have you bought tickets?”

“Every performance,” Genna said. “I told you.”

Later, while Jack undressed, she feigned total involvement with yet another rerun of
Golden Girls
. He didn't bother, as she did, to disrobe in the bathroom when they were quarreling. Jack was still so vain, even now that he didn't have any particular reason to be, although she noted from the corner of her eye—as Blanche swished across the small screen wearing yet another outrageous outfit—that Jack seemed to have lost some weight.

“Can we talk?” He crossed in front of the television wearing absolutely nothing. That brown mole on the cheek of his ass. He stepped into a pair of pajama bottoms then snatched the remote from her nightstand. The screen went silent, green-gray.

“I can't compete with the television.”

“Very little can.” She allowed him to see her looking at him. His chest hair was graying. “So talk.”

“There are things,” he began, “you haven't been telling me.”

Now you know how I feel. “Like what?”

He gazed at her over his majestic nose, so broad, so honest, so Jack. “Why don't we start with whatever Simon told you Monday.”

“Ask him yourself. He's your son, too.”

“Why won't you tell me?”

“When you said we should talk, you meant I should.”

She was goading him. Later, she'd concede it. For now all she could do was watch the color rise in his cheeks, the vein throbbing in his neck, and think, No way I'll tell you anything.

“You said it yourself, ‘He's my son, too.' You should tell me what he said.”

“‘You said, he said.' You sound like a goddamn idiot. Isn't there anything, or anyone, you want to tell me about?”

“As a matter of fact, there was. But you make me so goddamn mad”—his eyes flashed—“I'd be fucked before I say a word. If anything happens we could have prevented if you weren't being so goddamn offended, or whatever it is you're being, it's on your head, not mine.”

Jack lunged at her. Fearing he meant to hit her, Genna flinched, but Jack was only grabbing his pillow. “I'll sleep on the couch.”

She heard him pause at the closet to rummage for a quilt, then his footsteps evaporated down the hall. In the morning, with first light washing the gray trunks outside their window, she felt more than heard him slip into the room then under the bedclothes. Last spring, when she was the Woman Who Drove, that's what she'd do, guilty as a teenager, sneaking into their bed so the kids would think she'd spent the night at home. She sighed and heard Jack sigh, the Morse code of tired love. She slept so miserably without his big body beside her. The next time Genna woke sunlight sparkled, penny-bright, in the room, and she knew without reaching behind her that Jack was gone.

Then she realized what had awakened her. A car in their driveway! There was never a car this time of day, but she heard it a second time, tires compacting gravel, Sam barking, defending the realm. A car door opened, slammed. Genna heaved out of bed, nine-forty-seven, tied on her robe and peered through the shutters, remembering the petrochemical stench of the cross. A blue Windstar, what the hell? She hurried towards the front hall, pinching hair behind her ears. Should she call the police? She pulled the front door ajar just as Marge, the soccer mom from Roscoe, reached to touch the bell. Genna hadn't seen her in months. Without practice, which was just starting up, their paths hadn't crossed.

Marge wore jeans under a red and white windbreaker, Tipton colors. Apparently, she'd just had her hair done. Blond to the roots. She balanced a covered dish in one hand, struggling to steady it, while discouraging Sam's snuffling adoration with the other.

“Sam!” Genna grabbed the oaf's collar and dragged him inside. Slammed the door harder than she meant and rejoined Marge on the porch. “Sorry.”

A determined smile, which nothing, apparently, could dislodge, was pinned to Marge's lips. Genna was about to ask her business when Marge held out the white and blue corn flower casserole dish.

“I read about what happened. I'm sorry.” Marge chewed her lips as Genna remembered her doing the first they met. “It's nothing fancy, but with all the strain you've been under, I figured you might a been too busy to cook.”

“Oh.” Genna accepted the covered dish. “This is so kind. Please come in.”

Marge shook her head. “Can't, I'm on my coffee-break. Looks like a nice house, though.”

Genna felt a twinge of shame for how much nicer it was than Marge's. “Thank you.”

“Anyway.” The woman's eyes narrowed. “I hate them bastards. Maybe you think we're all the same. But you came and talked to me and my neighbors, so maybe you don't. When the Klan marched at the high school ten, twelve years ago, you heard about that?”

Genna nodded.

“Me and my friends, I wouldn't want you to think we agreed with them bastards, hon. Most folks here, we're not like that.”

Genna found herself blinking back tears. “I know.”

Marge hugged Genna briefly and awkwardly, then stepped back.

Genna asked, “Do you know who did this?”

“I have no idea.”

Genna couldn't help herself. “Would you tell me if you did?”

Marge got a funny look on her face, then grinned. “You bet I would. Well, I got to get back. Just so you know, I was making turkey tetrazini last night, and my Megan who plays with your Lizzie, said, ‘It's as easy to make two as one, isn't it, Mom?' I kissed her I was so proud. By the way, how's your son holding up?”

“Better than I am.” Genna wondered how much Marge knew about Simon and possible motives for the attack. “Honestly, I don't know how he makes himself enter that building every day.”

“I want you to know, I voted for the levy and so did my father. Told him it was time.”