Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (10 page)

But Cy’s was the best burger around—well, at least for fast food with a play area—made of organic meat. So I wouldn’t let it go to waste. I ate it grimly.

Ben was standing at the sink and taking an unusual interest
in the cramped porch outside the window, which didn’t even belong to me but to the college radio station out back. A look around him confirmed that it was completely empty. I restrained a temptation to sigh and instead said, “Just as long as no one puts pink panties on your head.”

He turned around, eyes wide. “What?”

“When you turn to granite. Hopefully no one will put pink panties on your head.”

His laugh burbled forth, sudden, starting as a low chuckle that couldn’t be contained, and ending with his head thrown back and his laughter echoing in the room. He stopped as suddenly as he’d started, though his eyes still laughed with devilment as he looked at me, “Dyce, if you didn’t exist someone would have to invent you, you know that?”

“What I meant—” I said painstakingly, trying to explain, as I usually did, even as I rejoiced inside at my success in making him laugh. Ben was so tightly controlled that sometimes I was afraid he would explode just out of sheer internal pressure. I wondered if he was like that with everyone else, too, and if he knew how infuriating it could be.

“Oh, I know exactly what you meant,” he said. “You were imagining me as that damn cowboy statue, with Madame Virginie’s parachute-like pink panties on my head.”

I made a face at him. “Well, it would help if you didn’t try for the stoic granite look.”

“Oh Lord, not again,” he said.

I had no clue what he was talking about, because I hadn’t told him that in two weeks at least, but I chose not to pursue it, because I didn’t want to get him in a mood again. “Look,” I said. “I’ll admit to you it’s a little weird that the table is . . . well . . . that someone with some sort of expertise in finishing made the notes on the bottom of that table, but—”

“They did? What did the notes say?”

I told him, and I told him how much I thought it might be worth, what a really great find it was, and in the end he shook his head. “I can’t persuade you to call the police, can I? Or to give up the damn table?”

“Well, the fact that I didn’t tell them about it would now seem . . . suspicious.”

“No, it won’t,” he said, decisively, but his eyes still looked amused. “I’ll tell them you were dropped on your head when you were a baby and that you can’t help it.”

“You didn’t know me when I was a baby.”

“So what? Your mom tells me stories, Candyce Chocolat.”

“Oh, you will
not
repeat that in public,” I said.

“Perhaps,” he said, crossing his arms on his chest. “Or perhaps I will call the nice policeman and tell him that Ms. Candyce Chocolat Dare would like to talk to him.”

I wasn’t going to explain that the nice policeman was the sexiest thing God had put on two legs. I couldn’t. Besides, with my luck, if I invested my hopes in the man, he’d turn out to be a member of Ben’s club who hid it better. So instead I rolled the burger wrapper into a ball and threw it at Ben. It fell short, of course, on the floor, and while he bent to pick it up, I went out the door and to E’s room to pack up his stuff for his dad’s place.

Packing for E’s three days away was always a weird thing. At some very instinctive level I felt as if E wasn’t supposed to go anywhere else. But I knew with absolute certainty that I’d only barely escaped having E removed from my custody altogether, given my lack of visible means of support and my unorthodox approach to life. So I made the best of a bad thing.

Of course, sending E to Daddy actually meant sending E to Daddy’s new wife, because on Mondays and Tuesdays Daddy was at work. All-ex’s wife was . . . a woman I barely knew. It seemed very strange to send E into her
care. It seemed even stranger that E had a different set of clothes there, and a different set of toys. I always wondered if he had the same or a similar plethora of stuffed animals. I’d asked him once, and he’d said something about cars, but at his age it was hard to get an exact description.

Sighing, I got the little backpack that E took back and forth between the houses. When I sent him to All-ex I usually sent back—washed and folded—whatever he’d been wearing when he’d come back the previous Tuesday evening; his favorite sleep-with toy of the moment, which right then was a realistic platypus that Ben had bought him from some online store called Real Zoo; and his favorite read-aloud book, currently an illustrated version of William Allingham’s
The Fairies
.

What he brought back was usually the outfit he’d been wearing on Saturday, all washed and dried and folded, plus bananas, apples, and whole-wheat muffins, plus the book and sleep-with toy looking as if they’d never been unpacked.

If something out of the ordinary was going on, there would also be a note written in the new Mrs. Mahr’s well-rounded finishing-school handwriting, usually saying things like, “Please give Enoch his antibiotic at nine a.m. and six p.m.”

Lately there had been notes about E’s Pull-Ups and the need to wean him into big-boy pants, to the point that I had given up on opening the notes. Because, look, they were probably right. I mean, E did need to wear real, grown-up cotton pants someday. On the other hand . . .

On the other hand, he was having fewer and fewer accidents every week. And when he did have them, it was easier to deal with the Pull-Ups than with cotton pants, because I didn’t own a washer and dryer and going to the Laundromat was a production, not to mention expensive.

I emptied his backpack—there was still a muffin in there, though I’d managed to make E eat the fruit. The banana had to be mashed with graham crackers and an orange, and the apple had to be baked, but I had managed to make him eat them. I found a note I dimly remembered seeing. It was under the muffin, looking slightly greasy.

I opened it, sighing at the expected screed about Pull-Ups, and instead found a couple of lines: “Dear Candyce, Alexander and I are concerned about Enoch’s speech development. We’d like to take him to a psychologist for evaluation, but Alexander seems to think he needs your permission for anything of the kind. Michelle.”

Yes, indeed. Evaluation on psychological issues, problems of development, and such all required my explicit permission in writing—mostly because the lawyer I’d engaged for the divorce had wisely secured it.

I rolled the paper into a ball and threw it in the direction of the door, thinking to take it to the bathroom trash on my way there. And hit Ben on the thigh.

“What?” he said. “I didn’t say anything this time.”

“I didn’t even know you were there,” I said. “I was just . . . gah.”

“You were gah?” he said. He was engaged in some complex game with E that involved giving him a stuffed animal, getting another one in exchange, and repeating ad infinitum while E said, “Bah, bah, bah,” and grinned.

“I’m always gah,” I said. “It’s just more gah than usual. All-ex wants to take E to a psychologist to figure out why he won’t talk.”

“Well . . .” Ben said.

“Bah!” E said.

“Don’t you start. Do not start, Benedict.”

“No, but . . . you know, I know you speak to him and say he speaks back, but . . .”

“Selective mutism,” I said, digging the sentence from
my back brain. “It’s not unusual for highly intelligent children to refuse to speak to anyone but one of the people around them. Officer Hotstuff said that—” I realized too late what I had said, as I watched Ben’s lips form the words
Officer Hotstuff
?

I resisted the temptation to tell him to shut up, particularly because I was aware that he hadn’t said anything. A wave of blush came up to my cheeks, causing them to blaze with heat. I turned away and removed everything from the backpack, then got the outfit that E had been wearing when he’d returned on Tuesday—a little pair of chinos and a button-down shirt—and put it at the bottom of the backpack. I gathered the other stuff from around the room, half-expecting Ben to say something, or ask something. But he continued his game with E, seemingly not noticing what I’d said.

Good, then. We wouldn’t go down that road. I picked up the platypus and stuffed it into the backpack. I wondered if I should stuff the bran muffin back in on top of it all. It wasn’t even homemade but one of those you can buy at coffee shops, all wrapped in plastic.

I’d bet it was full of fiber and organic honey sweetener and whatever else. Organic and natural seemed to be my ex’s new wife’s touchstones. Without me, my poor child would not even get his minimal daily requirement of preservatives and colorants. Not that Ben helped with that, of course, going and getting him organic burgers.

“What?” he said. “What did I do now?”

“Nothing,” I admitted, fairly sure I’d given him a dirty look and even more sure that if I explained that it was because he hadn’t given E any colorants or preservatives, he would simply proceed to having me committed. Or persuade Mom and Dad to do it.

The fact that he smiled and shook his head, as though he could guess what I hadn’t said, made me want to stuff
bugs in his purse. Even if I had to buy him a purse for the purpose.

I edged past him, trying to think if there was anything else I needed to send with E that he would need. I purely hated having to drive across town to All-ex’s suburban house to take some little thing I’d forgotten.

Ben’s cell phone rang, and he fished it out of his pocket. Something must have been wrong on the home front, because he sounded a little too relieved as he said, “Les. Oh, good. What?” He walked out of the room—and my room—to the living room. I could hear him say things like, “No. No. Of course not.” Then a pause. And after a sigh, “Les, I can’t. I’ll explain when I get—” Another pause. “Must we have drama? Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?”

Yep
, I thought. His saying such things while sounding unearthly calm . . . well, if I were in a relationship with him and he talked to me like that he’d have had a shoe or a stuffed animal thrown at him by now. I wondered if he drove Les as insane as he did me. And then, because I hated feeling any kinship at all with Les-finishing-school-Howard, I thought it was a good thing Ben was gay. Men—at least in my view—tended to be a bit more controlled. Any woman worth her salt would have put a hatchet in Ben’s head by now.

He was still talking, in his calm, exacting way, and I decided not to go out to the living room until he was done. After all, it must be hard enough for Les to deal with him, without hearing someone move around in the background. And besides, I didn’t want to hear. My arrangement with Ben was that we both stood ready to hear the other’s confidences, but unless there was something truly seriously wrong, we didn’t ask for them, much less listen in on the other’s conversations or read his or her letters or anything of the kind.

It was a hard-and-fast rule come to after I had opened the door of the piano practice room just after class—looking for Ben, who often tried to practice before going home, because his mother’s piano was shared with six younger siblings—and found Ben making out with the student council president, who, as far as I could see, did not lean that way.

I’d walked away in confusion, of course, but afterward had tried to get Ben to tell me all, only to meet with a granite wall that all my efforts had only managed to make more solid, until my stubborn friend had stopped talking to me for an entire two weeks. It was the longest rift in our friendship. And I had never found out exactly what had happened with the student council president, either, except that he was now married and he and his wife were leading lights in the society of Goldport, the set that All-ex and his wife moved in.

Ben had told me then—and I’d not dared ask now—that it simply wasn’t his information to give away or his secret to share. When we’d made up—after two miserable weeks—we’d established the rule that we would each determine what we would and could share with the other, and the other wouldn’t push.

It had in a way been a sanity saver as my marriage disintegrated. I knew that Ben was there, should I need to talk about what was going on, but I didn’t
need
to talk about what was going on, and he’d accept my silence implicitly.

I now accorded him the like courtesy, and between keeping E occupied—and preventing him from bursting into the living room—and making a list of what I needed to do and buy on my trip to Denver, because I’d left the other one in the shed and felt leery of going there although I had no very rational reason, I stayed out of his way a long, long time.

In fact, I hoped that the fact that his conversation was
taking so long meant that Ben and Les were making up. No, I did not in fact think that Les was the best thing that had ever happened to Ben, but I suspected part of my issue with this was that Les didn’t look anything like the type of guy I’d imagined Ben settling down with. There is this tendency, when you’ve known someone forever or just about, to think that you know exactly who’ll make him happy. And Les was definitely not what I thought would make Ben happy. I’d always thought Ben would end up with a guy somewhat like himself. Well, not necessarily as tall but . . . well, masculine. Not small, willowy, and seemingly in need of protection.

On the other hand, of course, Ben was—objectively speaking and my dearest friend though he was—no prize. There were the silences and the reserve. Les had managed to stay with him for a year and change. A line that I suspected came from a Jane Austen movie floated through my mind, and I wondered who I thought I was, that I had the right to determine in what manner my friend should be happy.

At which point my phone rang, and it was All-ex, which made sense because he always tried to interrupt me when I was settled down with a blanket and a pint of Rocky Road in front of the TV, ready to watch one of Jane Austen’s miniseries.

“Candyce,” he said, which was one of his bad habits. Well,
speaking
at all was one of his bad habits, really. But calling me that in particular.