Kids These Days (16 page)

I picked up a bottle of grout cleaner. “Do you think they'll be OK?” I asked.

“I don't think she'd divorce him until Maggie was older, if that's what you're asking.”

“That is definitely not what I was asking.”

“Oh.”

“I don't think Mid has any clue at all that that's an option.”

She wiped a circle clear on the glass door, looked out at me. “I don't really think he's got much of a clue about a lot of things.”

“He's trying.”

“Oh, bullshit, he's trying. He's taking his fifteen-year-old daughter to parties.”

“One party,” I said.

“Plus he's letting her date that boy.”

“You know about that?”

“Carolyn told me. He told you?”

“We saw them today, riding around. But come on—that can't be by himself. Carolyn's letting her date him, too.”

“I have no idea what Carolyn's doing or not doing.”

“Sure you do.”

“All I know is, our fifteen-year-old doesn't need to be dating any thirty-year-olds.”

“Nineteen.”

She said, “You cannot be for this. You don't
get
to be for this.”

“I'm not,” I said. “But weren't you the one who was so ready to have her on the pill?”

“That was so she could have safe, clumsy sex with awkward boys her own age. I don't know why she doesn't have anything better to do.”

“Like what? SAT prep? Volunteering at soup kitchens?”

“Either of those would be fine.”

“I don't know what we're arguing about,” I said.

“I know you don't,” she said, her voice thin.

I said, “What's the matter?”

“What's your real problem, anyway? Is it that you feel like you
can't
raise a child, or do you just not
want
to?”

I listened to the water hit the tile, run down the drain. “Sometimes it's both,” I said. “I don't want it to be, but it is.”

She pressed her belly against the shower glass. “You do see this thing, right?”

“I do.”

“You don't, apparently, because this is the same conversation we always have. Why can't you just surprise me once? Would that be so hard?”

“I'm trying,” I said, though I wasn't sure if I actually was.

“I'm ready. I'm ready to be a little fucking surprised.” She was crying. “You're a bastard sometimes,” she said. “This was supposed to be the fun part.”

All I knew was that I needed to be doing something, anything other than what I was doing, which was sitting on my ass. I stood up. I took my clothes off. I got in there with her. I stood behind her, close. She had the water too hot. I squeezed some shampoo from the bottle, started washing her hair.

“I already did my hair,” she said.

I said, “I'm doing it again.”

She leaned back into me. “How does this make anything any better?”

“It doesn't.”

“You're the only husband I have,” she said. “We should get to be a team.”

“We are a team.”

“You don't ever want to talk about it. You don't ever want to
do
anything about it. All you do is ride to the doctor and not talk to me, and ride back home and not talk to me. It's not fair.”

I rinsed the shampoo down her neck and back. I could taste it in the water coming up off her skin. “There's nowhere here to build a swingset,” I said.

“What?”

“I was thinking the other day—there's a pool, and the beach, but there's no yard. We don't have a yard. There's nowhere to put a swingset.”

“You were thinking about that?”

It was clear she didn't believe me. “I was,” I said.

“Mid and Carolyn have a swingset,” she said. “We can use theirs.”

“A kid's supposed to have a swingset,” I said.

Alice said, “A kid's supposed to have a lot of things.”

She had red hair right then, our two-year-old child. Luzianne. Spartica. She was sliding down the slide in her red hair and her red dress in Mid's clear-cut backyard, and Alice was standing at the bottom, arms out, waiting for her. Carolyn was filming the whole thing on an old sixteen-millimeter camera, all chrome and black plastic. The twins flipped a jump rope, chanted out rhymes about Delton and Nic, sitting in a tree. Maggie sat in the grass watching the rope spin. And me? I was in the pool, up on Mid's shoulders—we were wanting to play the game where one team tries to topple the other, push the top man into the water, but there was no one else in the pool. No other teams, no other takers.

I picked up the bar of soap, started in on Alice's shoulders, her arms, the backs of her legs. All that familiar ground. I didn't tell her about Mid, or about Hurley, or about the agents. I couldn't. We stayed in the shower until the hot ran out, until the water ran so cold we couldn't take it anymore, and we had to shut it off.

The volunteer fire department was a glorified metal garage, the parking lot full of pickups and SUVs and motorcycles. The air smelled like shrimp. Alice and I hadn't talked much on the way over, but a thin truce had settled down between us, and I was grateful. Every now and then I'd reach over, put a hand on her leg, and she'd let me keep it there until I had to shift gears. I was counting that as a positive.

We were late, but Mid wasn't there yet, and neither was Delton. Alice went inside, leaving me to wait with Sophie and Jane. Feral cats lived in the scrub off to the side of the building, and the twins wanted to stay outside to watch them slink in and out of the open, pick at bowls of food the firemen left out for them. They got bored, though, and started in kicking sand at each other until finally Sophie pissed Jane off enough for her to kick back so hard her flip-flop came off, landed in a grimy puddle. “You're a total a-hole, Sophie,” she said, which was how I knew she was Jane. She pointed at the puddle. “Get my shoe.”

“You're the one who kicked it off.”

“You're the one who made me.”

“You're the one who can't take a joke.”

“You're the one who's acting like a giant B.”

They both looked at me, checking for a judge's opinion. I felt like using the first letters of disallowed words might not be an entirely fair way around the curse jar, but I let that lie. I didn't want to get involved. I got the flip-flop out of the puddle, wiped it on my shorts, handed it back to Jane. “Here you go,” I said, holding it out. “Good as new.”

“Make her give it back to me.”

“I don't think she wants to.”

“You're on her side.”

“I'm not on anybody's side,” I said.

Jane took her shoe. “You are,” she said. “Everybody is.” She sounded so sure that I almost believed her, and I was wondering how I might even the score when Mid pulled into the lot, saving me from having to wade any further in. They both ran to hug him, made an older couple driving a Cadillac stand on the brakes to keep from knocking them down. It wasn't close, but it launched Mid into some prepared remarks on looking both ways.

“We know,” they said.

“I know we know,” he said. “But we didn't do it.”

“We will,” they said.

“What should I tell them, Walter? That safety is a virtue? That it's the better part of valor?”

“Dad,” one of them said. Or both. Here was Mid in all his paternal splendor, smoothing over the fight, a hand on each girl's shoulder now, steering them safely through another afternoon. The storm blew itself out just like that.

“Everybody's inside?” Mid asked me.

“Delton's not here yet,” I said.

“She called. She and Captain America are running late. She said we should start without them.”

“The kid's coming, too?”

“Should be a show,” he said. “Fun for all ages.” He looked at me. “You seem off.”

“Alice and I were into it some.” I held the door for Sophie and Jane. “But we're good.”

“You need some fire department pancakes, is what you need,” he said.

I said, “I need something,” and followed him into the cool of the room.

There were long tables running the length of the space, red and green tablecloths alternating down the rows. Alice and Carolyn had staked out some space along the far wall. There were snowmen and reindeer and Santas posed in various scenes at each table, cotton balls spilled around them to look like snow. A banner hanging on the far wall said
XMAS IN J.U.L.Y.
There was no immediate explanation for what
J.U.L.Y.
might stand for. Mid tried to pay at the door—there was a huge jar with about five hundred dollars in ones and fives—but the woman sitting there said, “They already paid.” She thrust an arm out at Alice and Carolyn. Then she sucked on a massive asthma inhaler she had strung around her neck on a pink cord. The twins stared. I couldn't blame them. The woman's mouth was huge, like a puppet's mouth. It took up half her face. She pointed at two fat rolls of tickets on the table in front of her. “The pink ones are for the kids. Yellow for the adults. Everybody get one, now. We're running a raffle every ten minutes.” She pulled hard on the inhaler again. “Keep good track,” she told Sophie and Jane. “We've got coloring books.”

“We're too old for that,” Jane said.

The lady appraised them. “You may be right,” she said. “Well, we've got certificates to the go-carts, too. Do you like the go-carts?”

“We've never been,” Sophie said.

“Never been? Get one or another of these grown-ups to take you.”

“We'll do that,” I said, and the twins lit up.

“Can we really, Dad?” they asked.

“We need to discuss it with your mom first,” he said. I saw I might have crossed some boundary.

“But she'll say no,” Jane said.

“Don't let that boy who got his hand crushed worry you,” the woman said. “They added bars to the sides of the carts. I've got a girlfriend who works out there. It's safer than it used to be.”

“Who got his hand crushed?” Jane asked, clearly excited.

“They say to keep your hands inside at all times,” the woman said. “But do people listen?”

“We should go eat,” said Mid. “Thanks for the tickets.”

“Tell Vera up there to give these girls two sausages each,” the woman said. “They're too skinny. They need to eat.”

We went through the line, and Vera gave the twins extra sausage without anybody having to ask her about it. They were polite, said please and thank you, loaded up their plates with two or three flavors of syrup. We sat down, and it seemed clear Alice had caught Carolyn up on my most recent swing-and-miss. Carolyn wasn't exactly cool toward me—more pitying than anything. Like I'd received some kind of medium-grim diagnosis. I said, “The girls say they've never been to the go-carts. I didn't even know there were go-carts around here.”

“There are,” Carolyn said. “But they're death traps.”

“No they're not,” Sophie said. “They're cool. They're from like the eighties or something.”

“Maybe we could take them one night,” I said. “Alice and I could.”

“I don't know about that,” Carolyn said.

“Mom,” they were both saying now, “Please? Can we? Come on.”

“I said I don't know,” Carolyn said, her voice harder-edged.

“Maybe we could talk about it another time,” Alice said, kicking me a little under the table. “Maybe if we planned it. But surely we don't have to plan it right now, Walter, right?”

The twins kept after Carolyn, trying out various lines of bargaining—they were older now; we would make sure nothing happened to them. Wasn't that right, they asked me. Sure it was, I said, regretting the whole thing, feeling the too-lateness of it grow. I'd buy Carolyn a card to apologize. Surely they had a section for this particular indiscretion at the store—next to Baby's First Halloween, maybe. The raffle woman stood up at the end of the room, sucked on her inhaler, held up a small box. She said, “Let's do some prizes. What we've got first up is a mug that says,
W
HEN I AM WITH MY FRIENDS, I AM IN HOG HEAVEN.
It's got these adorable pigs on it drinking tea.” She reached into a basket, came out with a yellow ticket, read off the number. A woman at a table near the door stood up, clapped for herself, went to claim her prize. The raffle woman said, “Now how about we do one for the kids?”

I checked the room: There was Maggie, there were the twins, there was an infant in a car seat two tables over. No question about what was coming. The woman dug into another basket, read out a number from a pink ticket. No winner. Another. Still no winner. She spilled the basket out on the table, squinted at the room, sorted through the pile until she had the one she wanted, and read it out. Jane's ticket. Jane walked to the front, the room clapping, watching her, so grown up, so pretty, and she got the prize we knew was coming—$25.00 at First Coast Speedways—then made her way back to our table. Carolyn did not look at her, did not look at me. Sophie wanted to see it, and at first Jane wouldn't let her, exacting revenge for the flip-flop affair, but Mid got Sophie to ask nicely, and then she was showing everybody. It was a home job, just something Xeroxed onto colored paper, but still: She'd won. It was over. There was no way we weren't going death-trap racing now.