My Life Next Door (6 page)

He’s just finished putting Mrs. Noah and a camel into a compromising and anatomically difficult position when Nan hangs up.

“I kept meaning to call you,” she says. “When do you start lifeguarding? I’ll be at the gift shop starting next week.”

“Me too.”

Tim yawns loudly, scratches his chest, and places a couple of monkeys and a rhino in an unlikely threesome. I can smell him from where I sit—weed and beer.

“You could at least say hi to Samantha, Timmy.”

“Heyyyyy kid. I feel as if we spoke only a few brief moments ago. Oh,
that’s
right. We did. Sorry. Don’t know where the fuck my manners are. They haven’t been the same since they shrunk at the dry cleaner. Want some?” He pulls a vial of Visine from his back pocket and offers it to me.

“Thanks, no, I’m trying to cut down,” I say. Tim’s gray eyes are in need of the Visine. I hate it, watching someone smart and perceptive spend all their time getting blurry and stupid. He collapses on his back on the couch with a groan, draping one hand over his eyes. It’s hard to remember what he was like before he started auditioning for Betty Ford.

When we were little, our families spent a lot of summer
weekends together at Stony Bay Beach. Back then, I was actually closer to Tim than Nan. Nan and Tracy would read and sunbathe, dabble their toes in the water, but Tim was never afraid to wade out and pull me with him into the biggest waves. He was also the one who discovered the riptide in the creek, the one that zoomed you down and whipped you out to sea.

“So, babe—gettin’ any these days?” He wiggles his eyebrows at me from his supine position. “Charley was going nuts because you wouldn’t go for
his
nuts, if ya know what I mean.”

“Hilarious, Timmy. You can stop talking now,” Nan says.

“No, really—it’s a good thing you broke up with Charley, Samantha. He was an asshole. I’m not friends with him anymore either because, strangely enough, he thought
I
was the asshole.”

“Hard to imagine,” Nan says. “Timmy—just go to bed. Mommy will be home soon and she’s not going to keep buying that you took too much Benadryl because of your allergies. She knows you don’t have allergies.”

“I do so,” Tim says loudly, all out-of-proportion indignant. He pulls a joint out of the front pocket of his shirt and waves it at her triumphantly. “I’m allergic to
weeds
.” Then he bursts out laughing. Nan and I exchange a look. Tim is usually stoned and drunk. But there’s a nervous, jacked-up energy about him now that hints at harder stuff.

“Let’s get out of here,” I say. “Walk downtown.”

She nods. “How about Doane’s? I need some chocolate malt ice cream.” She grabs her purse from a puffy flowered chair and leans over, giving Tim, who is still chuckling, a shake. “Go upstairs,” she says. “Now. Before you fall asleep.”

“I’m not gonna fall asleep, sis. I’m just restin’ my eyes,” Tim mumbles.

Nan nudges his shoulder again. As she moves away, he grabs her purse so she jerks to a stop.

“Nano. Sis. Nan, kid, I need something,” he says urgently, his face all desperate.

She raises a pale eyebrow at him.

“A shitload of jelly beans from Doane’s, okay? But no green ones. They scare me.”

Chapter Seven

On the porch, I grab Nan’s hand, squeeze it.

“I know!” she says. “It’s so much worse since he got kicked out of Ellery. He spends all day like this, and God knows what he does at night. My parents are completely and totally without a clue. Mommy buys all his lies—‘Oh, that’s catnip in that bag, Ma. Oh,
those
pills? Aspirin. That white stuff? Just salt.’ Then she busts him for swearing—by making him put money in the swear box. He just swipes more from my purse. And Daddy? Well.” She shrugs.

Mrs. Mason is the most relentlessly cheerful person I’ve ever met. All her sentences begin with exclamations: So! My! Well! Goodness! By contrast, Mr. Mason rarely says anything at all. When we were little, I had this windup toy, a plastic chick from an Easter basket—and I thought of him sort of like that. He remained virtually unmoving in a plaid armchair from the moment he got home till dinner, then resumed his position after dinner until bedtime, wound up only long enough to get to and from work and to and from the table.

“He’s even got Tim’s pot plant in with his own plants, giving it Miracle-Gro. What kind of man was young in the
eighties and doesn’t recognize marijuana?” She’s laughing, but her voice has a hysterical note. “It’s like Tim’s drowning and they’re worried about the color of his swimsuit.”

“And you can’t tell them?” I ask, not for the first or second or hundredth time. Although who am I to talk? I didn’t exactly ’fess up to Mom about Tim either.

Nan laughs but doesn’t really answer. “This morning when I came down to breakfast, Daddy was saying maybe Tim needed military school to make a man out of him. Or a stint in the army. Can you imagine? You just know he’d be that soldier who got his superior officers so angry they’d stick him in some horrible underground cave and forget he existed. Or ticked off the campus bully and got himself beaten to death. Or got into trouble with some drill sergeant’s wife and then shot in the back by her enraged husband.”

“Good thing you haven’t spent much time worrying about the possibilities,” I say.

Nan loops an arm around my shoulder. “I’ve missed you, Samantha. I’m sorry. I’ve been all caught up in Daniel—going to his graduation parties—just staying away from home, really.”

“What’s going on there?” I can tell she’s dying to get into it, get away from the Tim drama.

“Daniel.…” She sighs. “Maybe I should stick to crushing on Macho Mitch and Steve McQueen. I can’t figure out what’s going on with him. He’s all tense and wigged out about going to MIT, but you know how brilliant he is—and school doesn’t start for three months anyway. I mean, it’s June. Can’t he just relax?”

“Right.” I nudge her with my shoulder. “Because you know
all about that, girl who orders college catalogs the millisecond after junior year ends.”

“That’s why he and I are a perfect match, right?” she says with a little grimace. A breeze comes up as we turn down Main Street, shaking the leaves in the maples that line the road so they make a soft, sighing sound. The air smells lush and green, briny from the sound. As we near the Dark and Stormy, the local dive bar/hamburger joint, two figures emerge from the door, blinking a little in the bright sun. Clay. And a very pretty brunette woman in a designer suit. I stop, my attention caught, as he gives her a big smile, then leans forward to kiss her. On the lips. With a little back-rubbing thrown in.

I’d expected to see more of Clay Tucker, but not like this.

“What is it, Samantha?” Nan asks, pulling at my arm.

What’s going on?
It wasn’t a French kiss, but it was definitely not a she’s-my-sister kiss.

“That’s my mom’s new boyfriend.” Now Clay squeezes the woman’s shoulder and winks, still smiling.

“Your mom has a boyfriend? You’re kidding. When did
that
happen?”

The woman laughs and brushes Clay’s sleeve.

Nan glances at me, wincing.

“I don’t know when they met. It seems sort of serious. I mean, it looked like it. On my mom’s end.”

Now the brunette, whom I notice is at least a decade younger than Mom, opens up a briefcase and hands Clay a manila folder. He tilts his head at her in a you’re-the-best way.

“Is he married, do you know?” Nan asks in a hushed voice. It suddenly occurs to me that we’re standing still on
the sidewalk, quite obviously staring. Just then, Clay looks over and sights us. He waves at me, seemingly unabashed.
If you cheat on my mother,
I think, then let the thought trail off, because, in all honesty, what’ll I do?

“She’s probably just a friend,” Nan offers, unconvincingly. “C’mon, let’s get that ice cream.” I give Clay one last look, hopefully conveying imminent harm to treasured body parts if he’s cheating on my mom. Then I follow Nan. What else can I do?

I try to erase Clay from my mind, at least until I can get home and think. Nan doesn’t bring it up again, thank God.

I’m relieved when we get to Doane’s. It’s in this little salt box building near the pier, which divides the mouth of the river from the ocean. Doane’s was the penny candy store back when there was such a thing as penny candy. Now its big draw is Vargas, the candy-corn-pecking chicken—a moth-eaten fake chicken with real feathers for which you have to pay a quarter to activate his frantic OCD pecking of ancient candy corn. For some reason, this is a big tourist draw, along with Doane’s soft ice cream, taffy, and good view of the lighthouse.

Nan scrounges through her wallet. “Samantha! I had twenty dollars. Now I’ve got nothing! I’m going to kill my brother.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I tell her, leafing a few bills from my pocket.

“I’ll pay you back,” Nan tells me, taking the cash.

“It’s no problem, Nanny. So, you want the ice cream?”

“Eventually. So anyway, Daniel took me to New Haven to see a movie last night. I thought we had a great time, but he’s only
texted once today and all he said was ‘LVYA’ instead of spelling it all the way out. What do you think that means?”

Daniel’s always been inscrutable to me. He’s the kind of smart that makes you feel stupid.

“Maybe he was in a hurry?”

“With me? If you’re going to take time, shouldn’t it be with your girlfriend?” Nan’s filling her plastic bag with root beer barrels and gummy bears and chocolate-covered malt balls. Sugar rush retail therapy.

I don’t know quite what to say. Finally, without looking at her, I just blurt out what I’ve thought for a while. “Daniel seems like he always makes you nervous. Is that okay?”

Nan’s now contemplating Vargas, who seems to be in the midst of an epileptic fit. He’s no longer pecking the candy corn, just kind of throbbing back and forth. “I wouldn’t know,” she says finally. “Daniel’s my first real boyfriend. You had Charley and Michael. And even Taylor Oliveira back in eighth grade.”

“Taylor doesn’t count. We kissed once.”

“And he told everyone you’d gone all the way!” Nan says, as if this proves her point.

“Right, I’d forgotten that. What a prince. He was the love of my life, it’s true. How was the movie with Daniel?”

Vargas twitches more and more slowly, then shudders to a stop. “The movie?” Nan says vaguely. “Oh, right—
The Sorrow and the Pity
. Well, it was fine—for a three-hour black-and-white movie about Nazis, but then afterward we went to this coffeehouse and there were some Yale grad students there. Daniel suddenly got completely pretentious and started using words like ‘tautological’ and ‘subtext.’”

I laugh. Although it was Daniel’s brains that drew Nan, his pompous streak is a recurring theme.

“I finally had to haul him out to the car and get him kissing me so he’d stop talking.”

Before the word “kissing” is out of her mouth, I’m picturing Jase Garrett’s lips. Nice lips. Full lower lip, but not pouty or sulky. I turn to look at Nan. She’s bent over the jelly beans, her fine strawberry hair tucked behind one ear, a ragged fingernail in her mouth. Her nose is a little sunburned, peeling, her freckles darker than they were last week. I open my mouth to tell her
I met this boy
but can’t quite say the words. Even Nan never knew I watched the Garretts. It isn’t exactly that I kept it from her. I just never brought it up. Besides…
I met this boy?
That story could go anywhere. Or nowhere at all. I turn back to the candy.

“What do you think?” Nan asks. “Do we get Tim his jelly beans? You’re the one with the cash.”

“Yes, let’s get ’em. But only the scary green ones.”

Nan closes the top of her bag with a loud crumple. “Samantha? What are we going to do about him?”

I scoop a clattering cascade of green apple Jelly Bellys into the white paper bag and remember when we were seven. I got stung by a jellyfish. Tim cried because his mother, and mine, wouldn’t let him pee on my leg, which he’d heard was an antidote to the sting. “But Ma, I have the power to save her!” he’d sobbed. That was a joke between us for years:
Don’t forget I have the power to save you!
Now he can’t even seem to save himself.

“Beyond hoping these are magic beans,” I say, “I have no idea.”

Chapter Eight

The next afternoon, I’m kicking off my work shoes on our porch, preparing to go in to change, when I hear Mrs. Garrett. “Samantha! Samantha, could you come here for a second?”

She’s standing at the end of our driveway, holding Patsy. George is next to her, in only boxers. Farther up the driveway, Harry’s lurking behind a wagon with one of those nozzles that attach to a garden hose in his hand, evidently playing sniper.

As I get up close, I see that she’s again breast-feeding Patsy. She gives me her wide-open smile, and says, “Oh Samantha…I was just wondering. Jase was telling me how great you were with George…and I wondered if you ever—” She stops suddenly, looking more closely at me, her eyes widening.

I look down.
Oh. The uniform
. “It’s my work outfit. My boss designed it.” I don’t know why I always add this, except to establish that otherwise there’s no way in hell I’d be caught dead in a blue miniskirt and a middy shirt.

“A man, I assume,” Mrs. Garrett says dryly.

I nod.

“Naturally. Anyway…” She begins talking in a rush. “I wondered if you might ever be interested in doing some
babysitting? Jase didn’t want me to ask you. He was afraid you’d think that he lured unsuspecting girls into our house so that I could exploit them for my own needs. Like some desperate mom version of white slavery.”

I laugh. “I didn’t think that.”

“Of course you wouldn’t.” She grins at me again. “I know everyone must believe I do that, ask every girl I see if they baby sit, but I don’t. Very few people are good with George straight off, and Jase said you
got
him right away. I can use the older children, of course, but I hate making them feel as though I expect it. Alice, for example, always acts as though it’s a huge burden.” She’s talking fast, as though she’s nervous. “Jase never minds, but his job at the hardware store and his training take most of his time, so he’s gone a lot, except one afternoon a week, and of course part of the weekend. Anyway, I only need a few hours here and there.”