Fragile Beasts (11 page)

Shelby laughs at my joke.

I look over at Klint, who’s staring at the leaves in his soup like they’re turds.

“What’s this on top?” I ask for him.

“Some sour cream and fresh basil. Try it. You’ll love it.”

I stir it the way she did and take a bite.

“She’s right,” I tell him. “It’s great. It doesn’t taste anything like Campbell’s.”

“I like Campbell’s,” he grumbles.

“This is a nice house,” I say to Miss Jack, in an attempt to change the subject from food.

“Thank you,” she replies. “It was built by my brother, who was also Shelby’s grandfather.”

“But Aunt Candace did all the decorating,” Shelby chimes in.

“You have good taste,” I tell her.

Klint kicks me under the table.

“So tell me about yourself, Klint? What do you do for fun?” Miss Jack asks.

He takes a break from glaring at his soup and looks up at her.

“I don’t know,” he says.

“How interesting.”

“Aunt Candace can relate to what the two of you are going through right now.” It’s Shelby’s turn to try and change the subject. “She lost both her parents when she was thirteen.”

Miss Jack glances disapprovingly at Shelby. I get the feeling she didn’t want her niece to tell us this or she didn’t want Shelby assuming any of us can relate to each other.

“A fire in our home,” Miss Jack explains. “My father was able to save my brother and me. He went back in to save our mother and never came out again.”

“That’s terrible,” I say.

“Yes, it was terrible. It’s very hard to lose someone you love and depend on.”

“Was it a house like this?”

She laughs, a happy, genuine laugh that sounds a lot like Shelby’s. Hearing it come out of her is like hearing merry-go-round music coming from inside a prison.

“Certainly not,” she tells me, suddenly turning serious again. “My father was a coal miner.”

“What? I don’t get it. I thought you owned the coal mines?”

“My brother was very ambitious,” she replies, abruptly ending the conversation with the tone of her voice.

We all start eating. I check on Klint, who finally dips his spoon in the soup, being careful to avoid the leaves.

“I don’t enjoy small talk,” Miss Jack announces after a few minutes of silence.

“Neither do we,” I tell her even though I do kind of enjoy small talk. Talking about big things usually depresses me.

“Especially Klint,” I add.

“I see. So Klint’s reticence comes from a disdain for discussing trivialities, not from rudeness or ignorance.”

Klint and I look at each other trying to figure out exactly what she said. I think Klint may have been insulted, but I’m not sure.

“Right,” I answer.

“What is your situation now?”

We don’t say anything.

“Now that you no longer have your father,” she further explains.

We still don’t say anything.

“Your father didn’t leave you well provided for?” she assumes.

“No,” I answer.

“Shut up,” Klint says.

“Why?”

“It’s none of her business.”

“But it’s true.”

“That doesn’t make it any of her business.”

“And obviously it’s very inconvenient that he wasn’t able to provide for you,” Miss Jack continues.

“Yeah,” I say.

“No,” says Klint.

“A little,” I explain. “But he wasn’t old. Why would he be thinking about dying?”

“Anyone can die at any age. That’s not the issue here. The issue is whether a man was responsible enough to make sure that his children would be taken care of if something should happen to him.”

I wish I could make her understand about Dad. He wasn’t irresponsible; he just never worried about anything. It’s a quality in him I envied even though it didn’t always turn out to be the best quality for a dad to have. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to only live in the moment, to think everything important was out of your control so you shouldn’t care about it, to see the future as a simple collection of plans to tackle household chores and make beer runs.

“He took good care of us,” Klint jumps in angrily. “He worked hard. He would’ve never left us.”

“The way your mother did.”

“This is so messed up,” Klint goes on, his rage deepening. “I don’t need to sit here and have some old lady I don’t know say bad things about my mom.”

“But Mom did leave us,” I remind him. “And you hate …”

“Shut up!” he screams at me.

Luis shows up in the doorway.

“Is there a problem with the soup?” he asks.

“No, Luis,” Miss Jack replies calmly. “The soup is excellent.”

“It’s really good,” Shelby adds nervously, her eyes darting back and forth between her aunt and Klint, who’s staring a hole through his bowl.

“What is your situation now?” Miss Jack repeats as soon as Luis leaves.

I check on Klint again. The tips of his ears are bright red, a sign that he’s boiling mad. Whenever he strikes out, he rips off his batting helmet, throws it on the ground, and stalks away from it like it’s the root of all his troubles, and I swear I can see his ears glowing all the way from the stands.

No matter what I do or say at this point, he’s going to be pissed at me. I convinced him to come here. It’s my fault.

I consider Miss Jack’s question. I think about all the phony “How are you doings?” I’ve had to listen to for the past week. I think about the teary faces peering into mine, how everybody gets worked up when they see us not
because they care about us but because they’re excited by the drama we provide. Having me and Klint around is better than watching reality TV; we’re actual reality.

Now someone is asking me a specific question about my life in a detached way like she’s giving me a test about myself, and even though I don’t know why she wants this information, I feel like giving it to her.

“We can’t stay here on our own,” I begin hesitantly, glancing at Klint whose ears get redder. “We wish we could, since this is the only place we’ve ever lived. All our friends are here and our school … and Klint’s team,” I add.

I wait for a reaction from him but get none.

“Our mom wants to take us to live in Arizona where she’s living with this guy … our sister’s there, too, but she … she’s different now.”

I stop. Explaining our situation is harder than I thought.

“Have you kept in close contact with your mother since she left?” Miss Jack asks.

“We’ve seen her once.”

“Once? In how many years?”

“Three.”

“Did you want to see her more?”

“Sure.”

I look at Klint. Nothing.

“Why do you think she wants you to live with her now?”

I shrug.

“We are her kids. I mean, what is she going to do? Let us starve in the streets?”

“You don’t think she’s happy to have you come live with her?”

“I think she feels like she has to take us. It’s her obligation.”

“Why wasn’t it her obligation to take care of you before your father died?”

“I guess she thought Dad would take good care of us and he did.”

“So she simply decided you didn’t need a mother anymore.”

Maybe that was it. Maybe she thought I didn’t need her anymore. I get a sick, panicky feeling in my stomach as I think about that morning on my way to the bus when I had my last conversation with her before she left. She said soon I wouldn’t hug her anymore. It wasn’t true, but she thought it was. Did she think it was a sign I didn’t need a mother? Do human mothers make that decision? I know animal mothers do. Bird moms push their babies out of the
nest. Wolf moms snap and growl if grown pups come back to bug them. Sea turtles don’t even wait around to see if their babies are born. But I thought human moms understood they were in it for the long haul.

What if she left because she thought I wanted her to? Was there a part of me that did want her to go?

After she had been gone awhile and Dad and Klint and I had settled into our bachelor lifestyle and weren’t too miserable, I’d still have sad moments when I’d wish I had a mom around to ask me about my day and actually listen to my answer, or notice it was cold and make me wear a hat even though I’d take it off as soon as I was out of sight of the house, or cook me one of my favorite dinners when I seemed down, or defend me against Dad and Klint and say things like, “Now, Carl, you’re being too hard on Kyle. He’s a wonderful boy,” or “Klint, being a good baseball player is not the most important thing in the world. Your brother has many fine qualities, too,” or do little feminine things like put air fresheners all over the house and make sure there were always clean towels in the bathroom, but then I’d realize I was thinking about things moms did on TV, not what my mom did.

Some nights when we were sitting at the table eating spaghetti for the fourth night that week, I almost felt relieved that she wasn’t around to yell at us and complain about how her life sucked, but I hated myself for feeling that way.

“Did you know that El Soltero guy?” I blurt out instead of answering Miss Jack’s question.

She sets her spoon down so quickly she gets soup on the table.

“I was just wondering. I mean, I have a poster of Miss February 2006 in a Bud Lite T-shirt and red high heels sitting on the hood of a pickup truck and I don’t know her, and Klint has a poster of Roberto Clemente and he was dead before we were even born. But I don’t know how it works with bullfighters. Can anyone get a bullfight poster or are they special? Do you have to know the bullfighter?”

She clears her throat.

“Yes, I knew him.”

“You never told me that,” Shelby practically gasps.

“You never asked,” Miss Jack replies.

“Why would I ask something like that? I always thought it was just another piece of Spanish art.”

“He thought to ask,” she says, looking at me, then Shelby, then at the drops of red seeping into the tablecloth.

Miss Jack clears her throat again.

“If you felt differently about your mother, would you be willing to leave your school and friends and go with her?”

I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. I give up. Miss Jack is obviously not going to let the topic of our situation drop. The price of a dinner with Shelby is going to be total, excruciating soul-baring.

“I’d probably go. I mean, if Klint would go, too.”

“What about you, Klint?”

“No,” he says darkly. “I would never go.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t imagine feeling differently about my mother.”

“Why do you hate her so much?”

He finally looks up at her.

“You’re a bitch,” he hisses across the table.

“Oh my God,” Shelby cries, and covers her mouth with her hands.

He slams his fists down on the table, making soup slosh out of all our bowls.

“No, this is stupid,” he shouts. “This is totally fucked up.”

He jabs a finger at Miss Jack’s unyielding figure.

“She just wants to screw with our heads.”

He pushes his chair aside and storms out of the room.

The stained tablecloth looks like the scene of a knife fight.

“Sorry,” I say.

I start after Klint, then turn back.

“Vaya con Dios,” I tell Miss Jack.

It’s the only Spanish I know. I heard it in a Clint Eastwood western I watched once with my dad.

A
nother silent drive—only this one is worse because there’s nothing to anticipate at the end except a dark, empty house full of packing boxes and maybe getting my head smacked.

Klint never loses his temper, especially around strangers. He loses it around me all the time, but I don’t mind. I find it kind of flattering. It means he can relax around me and reveal his true emotions. I just wish occasionally he’d have an emotion other than anger.

I’ve seen him take abuse that would reduce a lot of guys to tears. I’ve watched Coach Hill get so close to him when he was bawling him out that the bills of their caps overlapped. Veins standing out in Coach’s neck, spit flying from his mouth, fists clenched at his sides while kicking dirt on Klint’s shoes, his face turning as red as the symbolic flames on the front of their school jerseys—Coach Hill has to destroy in order to rebuild—but Klint just stands there, unflinching, staring past him until Coach realizes the futility of screaming at someone who’s not there.

I’ve heard Mom tell him she wished she’d never gotten pregnant with him because it ruined her life, and how he’s a pig and a selfish jerk like all men. I’ve seen her smack his head with a pound of frozen ground chuck and do this thing with her finger where she flicked her long nail at the side of his face and sometimes it left a little cut. Through it all, Klint never reacted.

I was surprised by the way he talked to Mom at the funeral home, but I chalked it up to the stress of the day and everything else going on in our lives. He was mad, but even then he didn’t freak out. He told her off, but he didn’t scream. He didn’t run. He didn’t spill soup.

Miss Jack really got to him, and I don’t know why.

Klint parks Bill’s truck in his driveway and walks to his door. The outside
porch light comes on and I see Bill peer out. I get out of the truck, throw a wave in his direction, and head to our house while Klint talks to him for a minute, both of them doing it out of loneliness, not because they have anything to say to each other.

Mr. B darts out of a bush in front of my feet, and I practically trip over him. He flies to the top of our porch, stops in an orange streak, then sits there licking a paw, waiting, and watching me with fierce, golden eyes.

I sit down next to him and scratch him between his ears. He purrs and butts his face against mine. I saw a show on the Learning Channel that said this is how cats give kisses.

I grab him, flip him over on his back, and hold him like a baby. He squints his eyes at me and keeps purring. He’d never let anyone else do this to him. He’s a wild, tough cat who only comes inside to eat in the morning and sometimes to curl up on my bed for a few hours on a winter night.

He just showed up one day in our backyard. He was good-sized but painfully skinny and had caked blood on the end of his tail and around one eye. I started feeding him without telling anybody. He wouldn’t let me touch him so I couldn’t clean off the blood, but it ended up falling off on its own.