Labor Day (19 page)

Not particularly.

But once things get started you’ll get into the swing of things. See all your friends again.

Yup.

Before you know it, you two boys will probably start going out on dates, she said. A couple of lady-killers like you. If I was still in seventh grade, I’d think you were the cutest.

Gross, Mom, said Richard. Anyway, if you were still in seventh grade, I wouldn’t be born. Or if I was, and you thought I was so cute, that would be incest.

Where do they learn these words? Marjorie said.

She had a whole other voice talking to my father than the one she used for Richard and Chloe and me, which was also a different voice from the one she used when the topic of my mother came up.

Marjorie’s got a point, my father said. You two are reaching that stage of life. The wild and wonderful world of puberty, so they say. The time is probably coming for us to have a little man-to-man talk about all of that.

I had that already, with my real dad, Richard said.

That just leaves you and me then, I guess, son, my father said.

It’s OK, I told him. I’m up to speed.

I’m sure your mother’s given you the basics, but there are some things a guy needs to find out from a man. It can be difficult if you don’t have a man around the house.

There is one
,
I yelled, but in my head. It can also be difficult if you do have a man around the house, if he’s banging the headboard of your mother’s bed up against the wall every night. If he’s in the shower with her. They were probably home at this very moment, doing it.

The waitress came over with the dessert menus and cleared away our plates.

Isn’t this great? Marjorie said. Getting the whole family around the table like this. You boys getting to spend time together.

Richard had his headphones on again. Chloe had her hand on my ear. She was pulling it.

So who’s got room for a sundae? my father said.

Only he and the baby did, though hers mostly ended up on her face. I was already thinking about how they would want me to kiss her good-bye when we got back to the house. I would have to find a spot where there wasn’t any chocolate sauce, like the back of her head or her elbow. And then get out of there as quickly as possible.

Frank was washing the dishes when I got back in the house. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table with her feet on a chair.

Your mother’s some kind of dancer, he said. I couldn’t keep up with her. Most people wouldn’t try the Lindy in this weather. But most people aren’t her.

Her shoes—her dancing shoes—lay on the floor under the table. Her hair looked damp—maybe from the dancing, maybe from living. She was drinking a glass of wine, but when I came in the room she set it down.

Come here. I want to talk to you.

I wondered if she’d been reading my thoughts. For so long it had been just the two of us, maybe she’d figured out what I’d
been thinking about, my plan. Maybe she knew what I’d been talking about with Eleanor, the call to the hotline. I would deny everything, but my mother would know the truth.

For a moment I imagined what would happen then. Frank tying me up. Not with scarves: with rope, or duct tape, or possibly a combination. I couldn’t really imagine my mother letting Frank do something like that, except that Eleanor said when sex entered into the picture, everything changed. Look at Patty Hearst, robbing that bank, even though her parents back home were rich. Look at those hippie women who got hooked up with Charles Manson and before you knew it they were slaughtering pigs and murdering people. It was sex that pushed them all over the edge.

Frank has asked me to marry him, she said.

I know it’s an unusual situation. There are some problems. It isn’t news to any of us that life is complicated.

I understand you haven’t known me long, Henry, Frank said. You could have the wrong impression. I wouldn’t blame you if you did.

After your father left, my mother said, I was thinking I’d be on my own forever. I didn’t think I’d ever care about anyone else again, she said. Anyone besides you. I wasn’t expecting I could ever feel hopeful about anything ever again.

I’d never get between you and your mother, Frank said. But I think we could be a family.

I wanted to ask how that was supposed to happen, with them off on Prince Edward Island and me having dinner every night with my father and Marjorie and her precious cargo who were too good to ride in any car unless it was white? I wanted to say, Maybe you’d better think about what happened, the last time this guy had a family, Mom. Seems like his record’s not so great in the family department.

But even then, mad as I was, as well as scared, I knew that
wasn’t fair. Frank wasn’t a murderer. I just didn’t want him to take my mother away and leave me.

We have to go away, my mother said. We’d have to live under a different identity. Start over with different names.

Him and her, in other words. The two of them. Disappearing.

The truth was, I’d dreamed about doing that. Sometimes, sitting at the Siberia table at school, I had imagined how it would be if NASA asked for volunteers to go live on some whole different planet, or we’d join the Peace Corps, or go work with Mother Teresa in India, or we joined the Witness Protection Program where we’d get plastic surgery to change our faces and identity cards with all new names on them. They’d tell my father I died in a tragic fire. He’d be sad but he’d get over it. Marjorie would be happy. No more child support.

We’re thinking Canada would be good, she said. They speak English, and we don’t need passports to get across the border. I have a little money. Actually, Frank does too, from his grandmother’s property, only if he tried to get at it they’d find him so we can’t touch that.

All this time, I hadn’t said anything. I was looking at her hands. Remembering how she used to rub the top of my head when we sat on the couch together. She reached out to touch my hair now too, but I pushed her away.

That’s great, I said. Have a wonderful trip. I guess I’ll see you around. Sometime in the future, huh?

What are you talking about? she said. We’re all going away, you big dope. How could I ever live without you?

So I’d been wrong that they were leaving me. To hear her talk, we were going on this big adventure together, the three of us. Eleanor had put a bunch of crazy ideas in my head. I should have known better.

Unless this was a trick. Maybe my mother didn’t even know, herself, if it was. This could be Frank’s way of getting her to
come with him—saying I’d be coming later, only I never would. All of a sudden, I didn’t know what to believe anymore. I didn’t know what was real. Though this much was for sure: my mother’s hands weren’t shaking like usual.

You’d have to leave your school, my mother said, as if this would be hard for me. You can’t tell anyone where you were going. We’d just pack the car and head out on the road.

What about the roadblocks? The highway patrol? The photographs in the paper, and on the news?

They’re looking for a man traveling alone, she said. They won’t expect to see a family.

There was the word again that got me every time. I studied her face, to see if I could detect any sign of a lie. I looked at Frank then, still washing dishes.

Until this moment, I hadn’t noticed, but he looked different. He had the same face, of course, and the same tall, lean, muscled body. But his hair, that had been brown and gray, was all black now. Dyed. Even his eyebrows. He looked a little like Johnny Cash. I knew his records from back when Evelyn and Barry used to come over. For some reason, Barry loved
Live from Folsom Prison,
so we had played it all the time.

Now I pictured the three of us on an island somewhere—Prince Edward Island, come to think of it. My mother would have a flower garden and play her cello. Frank would paint people’s houses and fix things. At night, he’d cook for us, and after dinner, in our little farmhouse, we’d sit around and play cards. It would be all right that the two of them slept together. I would be older. I’d have a girlfriend of my own, and go off in the woods with her, or out on some bluff by the ocean, where the Gulf Stream flowed by. When she came out of the water, naked, I’d hold the towel for her and dry her off.

I need to ask your permission, Frank said. You are your mother’s whole family. We’d need your OK on this.

She was holding his hand as he spoke. But she was holding mine also, and for that moment at least, it seemed possible, seemed to make sense even, that a person could love her son and love her lover, and nobody would come up short. We’d all be happy. Her being happy was only a good thing for me. Our finding each other—not just him finding her, but all three of us—was the first true piece of good luck in any of our lives in a long time.

Yes, I said. It’s OK with me. Canada.

CHAPTER 18

Y
OU WOULDN’T HAVE THOUGHT IT COULD
get any hotter, but it did. That night was so hot, I didn’t even put a sheet on top of myself, I just lay on top of the bed in my boxers, with a wet rag on my stomach and a glass of ice water next to the bed. I would have thought my mother and Frank would take a night off from their usual activities, but if anything, the heat just seemed to make them more crazed than ever.

The other nights, they had seemed to have waited until they thought I was asleep before they started, but maybe because they’d talked to me about getting married and all of us going to Canada together—because I’d given them my blessing, you might say—they started in before I even had my light turned off.

Adele. Adele. Adele.

Frank.

His low growling Johnny Cash voice. Hers, soft and breathless. First soft, then louder. Then the headboard against the wall. Her bird cry. His, like a dog that was having a dream about a bone someone gave him once, reliving how it felt, sucking out the juice.

Lying there in the damp heat, the air so still the curtains didn’t move, I thought about Eleanor, to get my mind off things. Except for how skinny she was, she was pretty. Or maybe not pretty, but there was a kind of energy field around her. You could imagine getting an electric shock just from touching her, but not necessarily in a bad way. When she kissed me, she tasted like Vicks VapoRub. Eucalyptus. She had put her tongue in my ear.

She was also a little crazy, but this might have been good news. If she was a regular girl she’d understand—or if she didn’t yet she’d find out soon—that being friends with me would be a poor strategic move for establishing her own social standing at our school. I had pointed this out to her already at the library, but she just looked at me.

You might not want to be seen talking to me once school starts, I told her. The popular kids will think you’re a loser.

She said, Why would I want to be friends with those people?

Now I imagined the two of us kissing some more, only not standing up this time. Lying down. She had her hands on my head and her fingers were raking through my hair. She was like a stray cat, underfed and skittish, with a kind of forest wildness. She might run away. Or she could pounce. You never knew if she would lick your face or run her claws over your skin and draw blood.

I pictured her pulling her shirt off. She didn’t even wear a bra. No need. But her breasts, which I had assumed were totally
flat, actually curved up slightly off her chest, and she had small pink nipples that stood out more than you’d think, like push pins.

You can kiss them, she said.

In the next room, that was what Frank and my mother were doing, probably, but I didn’t want to think about it, so I tuned back in to the Eleanor channel.

Where would you like me to put my mouth? she said.

In the morning, the coffee smell. Frank had found some wild blueberries in the scrub at the end of our yard, that he used for pancakes. Too bad we don’t have maple syrup, he said. Back on the farm with his grandparents, they had tapped their trees and boiled it in a sap house every March. Some they boiled down for maple cream that they spread on the biscuits.

I’ll work so hard once we get to Canada, he said. I want you to have everything. A nice kitchen. A porch. A high bed with a window looking out to some rolling fields. Next summer, I’ll plant a garden.

You and me, buddy, he said. We can get some serious baseball time in. Come spring, I’ll have you so you could field a bullet if it landed in your glove.

T
HERE IS A CERTAIN KIND OF
scene they have in movies, to show people falling in love.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
would be a good example, but there are plenty more. Instead of going through all the particulars, they just play some catchy romantic song and while it’s going, you’re seeing the two people having all this fun together: riding bicycles and running through a field holding hands, or eating ice cream, or going around on a carousel. They’re in a restaurant and he’s feeding her spaghetti off his fork.
They’re in a rowboat, and it tips over, but when their heads come up out of the water they’re laughing. Nobody drowns. Everything’s perfect, and even when things get messed up like the boat tipping over, there’s something perfect about that too.

That day, you could have made one of those movie segments about us, only instead of two people falling in love it would be three people, turning into a family. Corny but true, starting with the pancakes and going on from there.

After we cleared the dishes, Frank and I played catch again for a while, and he told me how much better I was getting, which was true. Then my mother came out, and we washed the car together, and just as we were finishing up, she turned the hose on Frank and me, so we got soaked, but because of how hot it was, that just felt good. Then Frank took the hose from my mother and squirted water onto her, which got her so wet she had to go in and change, and she told us to come in and wait downstairs, and she put on this fashion show. Really the fashion show was for Frank, but I liked seeing it too—the way she sashayed around the room in one outfit after another, like a model on a runway, or a girl in the Miss America pageant.